Old men have lots of stories to tell

By Carl Heintze

I once interviewed a man who claimed he had seen the last grizzly bear in the Santa Cruz Mountains. If my memory serves me right--and sometimes these days it doesn't--this fellow saw the last grizzly loping up the railroad tracks which once led through the Santa Cruz Mountains from Los Gatos.

The tracks, the bear and any railway crossing on the mountains have long since passed into history or folklore, or both. I don't know what happened to the bear. The railroad was done in by various earthquakes which collapsed tunnels and wrecked track and my grizzly witness passed to his reward. (He was in his 80s when I interviewed him.)

I mention all this, not so much to bemoan the passing of the grizzly from California--grizzlies are unpleasant bears who tend to do harm to humans, mostly now in and around Yellowstone National Park--but to bring to mind that it was once the custom on the newspaper on which I worked to send young and eager reporters like me out to interview old men.

This led to some peculiar stories. I won't call them interesting, but they turned up some characters. One was a little old fellow whom I found lying on a couch in his living room attended by his two widowed daughters. He was 99 and going for 100. He also was stone deaf. He was wearing a cap, even though it was around noon, and was covered by a blanket. He had reached the age where he was never warm.

I communicated with him by yelling in his ear. His replies, which were few, were interpreted by his daughters. I asked him the question I always asked all these oldsters: "To what do you attribute your old age?"

He stared up at the ceiling for awhile (he could see, even if he couldn't hear) and then he said something I will always remember: "Oh, It'll all be over soon."

I talked to another old-timer once at the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital who also was nearly 100. He had been a soldier in the wars against some tribe of the Sioux, not with Custer, but somewhere in that vicinity. He enlisted (or maybe was drafted, it was hard to tell which) when he was 14, principally because he had a horse of his own.

The unit was mounted. I suppose it had to be to go chasing Sioux around Montana. Anyway, that was about all he could remember. The troop rode around a lot and eventually the Sioux gave up; he was mustered out and became a farmer, perhaps on land the Sioux once had thought was theirs.

His service could not have lasted more than a month or so, but it made him a veteran, eligible for veterans' benefits and also something of a latter-day hero. His nurses knew all his stories, having either learned them from him when he could still remember them or from relatives.

By the time I got to him, he couldn't recall much of any of them, even when prompted by his nurses. But he was always agreeable to what they said. So, in a way, his stories got retold again, although not by him.

Eventually, experiences such as this made me somewhat dubious about old men and their memories. It made me wonder if my witness to the last grizzly had really seen a bear, or maybe it was just a large dog. Of such, of course, are legends made.

The experience of interviewing old men about how they managed to live so long has been coming back to me because it has occurred to me of late that I am getting to be an old man.

It's also occurred to me that I have a lot of memories, some of which are growing a bit hazy with time. Former newspapermen always have lots of stories, but as the wife of a former fellow newsman said, "They're always the same."

And I suppose they are. We tend to remember the good stories, even to embellish them with the passage of time and to trot them out on social occasions. They're like war stories, another stock-in-trade I'm afraid I've acquired.

In time these kinds of memories get institutionalized. They're like playing a recorded audio tape. You just turn them on and they flow. No matter whether your audience has heard them before. With advancing years, they tend to indulge you (and also to tune you out).

In spite of all this, I don't think I have any memory so fascinating as seeing the last grizzly bear. The last prune tree in Santa Clara County, perhaps, or even a vague remembrance of the county without a freeway.

Or even Silicon Valley without a silicon.

But no one would believe that either, I suppose. So I'm hedging on my stories and hoarding them until that happy day when a reporter drops in on me in advance of my 100th birthday, and asks me how I got to be so old.

My answer: Damned, if I know.

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Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

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