Obituaries

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Posted by wnfcghsi on December 16, 2019

JOHN MCCARTNEY -- COLLEGE YEARS John McCartney was my "college boyfriend" in the mid-70's. We met at Skagit Valley Community College in Mt. Vernon, WA at the beginning of Fall Quarter in 1972. My first quarter in college, I took a Radio and Television Production class. John and his friend "JimDodd" were also in the class. They were second year students. Working on projects together, I enjoyed talking with John and JimDodd. One day John called me and asked me for a date....wow, my first date! Being a small town farm girl, I had led a very sheltered life. Being around John exposed me to many, many things I had never even realized existed -- a world of food and people and places and experiences that were, I'm sure, slightly skewed from the norm, as John had a very quirky, eccentric, contrarian way about him. As part of the Radio and TV Production class, John and I made a half hour video together about the sheltered workshop that my Dad was Executive Director of, New Leaf. We used the brand new technology, a portable Video Recorder, which was portable only in the sense that you could lift it, being the size of a suitcase. We also did a half hour 8mm movie about the same subject. The Skagit Valley Herald did a feature story which included photos of us. The Seattle NBC TV station send a reporter up and she did a news story on New Leaf, but that did not include us. During the class we met the PR Director for the college. John somehow convinced her to give him the job of school photographer. The day came when he got the keys to the school photographers private workspace, which consisted for a workroom and a large, well-equipped darkroom. We walked in, wandered around and John said, "Well, I think this is the enlarger. I guess I will have to figure out how to use all this stuff. The camera looks like a good one...and here is the flash unit, I wonder how it attaches?". So began our adventure with photography. I was very busy with classes and working at the school, so John figured out how it all worked and then he taught me. When John graduated that June, I "inherited" the job and had great fun doing it during my second year at the school. He was always chasing me around with the camera and taking my picture. I hated having my picture taken. He told me that the moment he pointed a camera at me I got this weird look on my face. I think part of his motivation in taking pictures was to surprise me and take a picture before I had time to put that look on my face. I want to thank him for all the photos he took of me and my family during that time, documenting that time of our lives. My science professor offered me a Summer job in Boulder, Colorado, as a typist for the national BSCS (Biological Sciences Curriculum Study). John decided to go with me. My mother and sister drove us over to Boulder and dropped us off there. John got a job at a Jolly King restaurant as a cook. When we started planning our return, John decided to buy an old car which worked great, but the body had rusted out because of the salt used in the Winter. In order to get it licensed and such it needed a certificate from a mechanic. So he got a job at a service station and obtained the needed certificate, fixed the brakes, etc. We drove back to Washington in late August in the heat....the car got us as far as my parents house in Edison and then expired in their driveway. It sat there for months and months until we could figure out a way to get it removed. We lost touch the next school year. John spent the year in Bellingham attending Western Washington College (now University). I finished my second year at Skagit and spent the summer in Anchorage during the pipeline boom. My parents had just moved up there. When I returned to Washington in the Fall, I needed a dorm room at Western, but they appeared to be full. So, I appealed to John, who was working for, what I think was Security, at the college. He figured out that the Western student dorms were full, but Fairhaven College dorms had just been built. They had just opened them up to the Western students to handle the overflow. He found me a private room in one of Fairhaven's dorms. Fairhaven College is adjacent to and part of Western. It was very new and was known as kind of the "hippie college" as they were trying new and innovative classes and the type of student who went there was very, how shall I say, what I guess we would now call "counterculture". Long haired, pot smoking, do my own thing type of people. A Fairhaven student usually looked and acted totally different from a Western student at that time. That was a great experience. John Watkins had a room in the same dorm. So we were a trio, Big John (McCartney), Little John (Watkins) and me. There was the episode of the halvah... Watkins had a block of halvah which we all sat around and admired it and sipped Peach Brandy and carved pieces off to eat. The halvah ended up being a sculpture piece of a certain part of the male anatomy. There was the episode of being stopped at the border...I drove a little blue Datsun 510 sedan, which I had used for years to haul hay in for the horses. The back seat and the trunk each held one bale. I drove the three of us up to Vancouver, Canada for the day. When we returned and tried to cross the border, we were detained. At the time John had collar length brown scruffy hair with a big untamed beard and was wearing an old army jacket. Watkins had long blond straight hair falling to his shoulders and a beard and had on a long gray coat kind of resembling a trench coat. I'm sure the border officers thought we looked suspicious and when they searched the car they found bits of hay that they must have assumed was "grass", which it was, just not the kind they thought. After about a half hour they finally let us go. The next summer I returned to my parents home in Anchorage. John went with me. He volunteered for an unpaid internship at one of the three local TV stations. At that time, there were only the three stations, CBS, NBC and ABC, in Anchorage. All programming was either locally produced or flown in and broadcast at least 24 hours after the rest of the country saw it. Information came in via a teletype machine. Reporters had to tear off the individual pages after the machine stopped typing. One evening my father was watching the evening news on the station where John worked. The sports newscaster was reading the scores of the football games that had been played that day. When the sportscaster read one of the games as South Dakota beat Dallas by a score of .... ...my father started to wonder how and when South Dakota got a football team. When John arrived home that evening my Dad asked him about it and John said...oh, yeah, when he tore the list of scores off the teletype the names were kind of in code...and he had interpreted SD to be South Dakota. He said the sportscaster had come in at the last minute, grabbed the copy John had written and gone immediately to air without reviewing it. John said he kind of wondered why the guy was hanging around his desk after the broadcast, looking over his shoulder.... Another big adventure involving the TV station was during the annual military games north of Anchorage, out in the tundra near Fairbanks. John got assigned to go on the military's press junket. He asked me to go with him as his "sound man". He gave me his camera bag with a little tape recorder in it and the microphone on a short cord hanging out of the bag. All I had to do was step up and hold the microphone close to whomever was speaking at the appropriate moment. We went to the Army's Fort Richardson early on the appointed morning. The general briefed the approximately 15 journalists who were going on the press junket about the 10,000 troops and their equipment and the "war games" they were going to enact. We then boarded the humungous and VERY LOUD Chinook helicopter that was to be our transportation.... you know, the helicopter with the two very large rotors on it, one in front and one in the back. We flew north to literally the middle of nowhere where there was a large collection of tents and lots of smaller Huey helicopters buzzing to and fro and soldiers and artillery, etc. We followed our guide down a path outlined in white painted rocks to another tent for another briefing. Then we were flown out to a hilltop emplacement further out in the tundra. Not a level step was to be had on that tundra. The days wore on and we went from place to place and were finally returned to Fort Richardson in Anchorage. The next day John's story was shown on TV. In typical John fashion, he called the piece "Operation Port-a-Potty" and made much of the incredibly long line of port-a-potties that he had filmed at the first big encampment. John hated, hated, hated fish. But he gamely went with my family on a charter fishing boat and actually caught a fish. I have somewhere a picture of John proudly holding up a very nice-sized black bass. I was with John when he smoked his first cigarette in the basement of Fairhaven College. He was curious what the fuss was all about with cigarettes. He was just going to smoke one and he wouldn't get hooked....I told him he was insane to think he could be different than everyone else. But he went ahead and had one and cough, cough, cough, hmmm, interesting, just one more and so on and so on.... A little history about John when he was younger.....he was a very hyperactive child and it was the 50's, so the doctors put him on Ritalin. It definitely slowed him down, to the point of him just sitting in the library reading and reading and reading. He didn't go out for any sports, just sat. I'm sure it affected his development and things would have been done differently today. John was still hyperactive as an adult. It's just part of who he was. Other words I would use to describe him are extremely intelligent, idiosyncratic, unpredictable, kind, giving, helpful, unconventional, vibrant, always looking for the little oddities and ironies of life. I only saw him occasionally as an adult. For the last twenty or so years he always told me about his plan for retirement. He was proud of the fact that he was on track to retire with enough money that he wouldn't have to change his lifestyle. It's a real shame and one of those ironies of life that he scrimped and saved and planned and didn't get to enjoy a retirement. My parents both died within 8 days of each other this Spring. Feeling overwhelmed by the need to write their obituaries, I had lunch with John and asked if he or someone he knew could help me write them. He and Jackie were real lifesavers and took my rough "typing through tears" writings and turned them into wonderful obituaries. After lunch we went to visit Watkins at his bookstore. That was the last time I saw Big John and Little John. We were in heavy traffic after visiting with Little John and I stopped to let John out and he leapt out of the car so quickly I didn't get a chance to say goodbye. Unfortunately for Jackie, her assistance with my parents obituaries turned out to be practice runs for having to "type through tears" when writing John's obituary. So, now we're having to say goodbye to a wonderful person who didn't deserve to go so early. He shoulda had at least 10 more years. Life is Good, but it isn't always Fair. I'm thinking he's up there with his parents and with his sister, my best friend, Leone. He's looking down on us and watching with that bright, observational way of his, looking at the irony of it all. Edona Anderson Palm Desert CA

Posted by Edona Anderson on October 19, 2018

John and I had a wierd but great friendship during his years at school. Motorcycles was our main thing. We rode quit a bit together. We both got cyles in 1969 and became could but after graduation, different branches of military separated us. Years went by until I saw him on facebook. I am glad we got to agree and disagree politicallly but stayed friend. You will be missed. Ray

Posted by Ray Nida on October 18, 2018

John often worked nights and I worked days. We both loved playing darts and shared midnight bar and beer time after he put The Herald to bed. He was a fine gentleman, the kind who truly cared when he asked what was new. I miss his kindness and friendship.

Posted by Kristi O’Harran on October 17, 2018