Document text
Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Brother has tragic fall from grace By HANK HENRY Let me tell you about my brother. Lee was almost three years my junior, which meant he was three years behind me in school. We had little in common when I left home, back in December 1941. Lee was just entering high school when I took off. I always knew he was very smart. He was also very stable emotionally, while I was anything but stable. And he looked like an All-American Boy, with his small nose, high forehead and strong chin. In those days, our home state of Texas had statewide high school competition in the arts as well as sports. Students would stage one-act plays, and there was competition in debate, math and the sciences, to name a few. When Lee was a senior, one of his teachers talked him into entering the state declamation contest. Declamation has pretty well disappeared as a competitive event today, but back then students would memorize a speech and recite it with dramatic flourishes. Students had to give the same speech time and again as they advanced through the competition, and the ones who had made it to the finals probably gave their speech a dozen times. Lee did all that, and he won the state declamation crown. In 1942, when Lee was a junior in high school, he heard about tryouts for the part of a teenage actor in a play at the University of Texas. At the auditions, he stood out as a natural, even though the only plays he had ever seen were high school productions. Lee read the lines they gave him with authority and got the part. The director of this play was a visitor from Dallas, Margo Jones. Not only was she a professor of drama -- she had actually directed plays on Broadway. She made Lee her protege, and arranged for him to receive a scholarship to the famous Cleveland Playhouse. Lee spent the summer and fall of 1943 in Cleveland, until he was called up by the U.S. Army Air Corps. After the war, he went into summer stock acting companies and appeared in dozens of plays. The actors often had to have several parts memorized at the same time. They would spend afternoons learning their lines for next week's play, and performing another play during the evening. The drudgery of memorizing dozens of pages of dialogue every week would have been impossible for me, but not for Lee. He received further training at the famed Pasadena Playhouse, near Hollywood, and began to specialize in Shakespearean productions. One year he and his wife organized a season of Shakespeare's plays in a tent on the wharf in San Francisco. After about 20 years of acting in stage plays and television dramas, Lee began to burn out. He no longer enjoyed the dozens of auditions that every actor (except top stars) endures to obtain a part. His wife of 10 years was a successful actress and singer who could get work on both coasts, and they slowly drifted apart. Lee went into the business of teaching bridge. All through his acting days, Lee had also loved contract bridge, and he proceeded to make a career of it. He opened a bridge club in Beverly Hills, a place with a couple of dozen tables where anyone could drop in to fill out a bridge foursome or learn bridge in special classes. For variety, he occasionally worked for cruise-ship lines, teaching passengers to play bridge. I have written all of this in the past tense, even though Lee is still alive because the man I knew has all but disappeared. Eight or nine years ago Lee began having momentary lapses while teaching. He would pause for several seconds, as if he had lost his train of thought, and then he would continue as if nothing had happened. Then the pauses got longer and longer, and finally he was unable to teach anymore. Five years ago Lee began to have periods of paranoia. There were times when he was sure that the people who loved him most were out to destroy him. Three years ago, doctors at the Department of Veterans Affairs gave him a dual diagnosis -- he had both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. It's ironic that I had a mental illness as a child, an illness from which I have fairly well recovered, while Lee developed a an entirely different sort of psychosis in his old age. I grieve for him daily. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA