02/06/2025
I'm so sorry to tell you, if you hadn't already heard, that Chuck Hathaway passed away last month. Here is my remembrance of him that's printed in the February issue of Real Estate Magazine - Mendocino Coast Property Lifestyle Community.
Chuck started REM 38 years ago and I'm forever grateful to him for talking me into buying it when he and his wife Camille Ranker wanted to retire fifteen years ago.
CHUCK
I mean, I always knew Chuck had to die at some point. He was ten years older than I, and he had been looking more and more frail and like it was harder to go out and get wood for his stove. He didn’t tell me he’d taken a horrible fall in front of the post office a month ago, nor that his daughter Jeanie had taken him to the ER so they could “put him back together,” which is what he’d emailed our mutual friend Robbie Drury in Pheonix, along with a photo of his banged-up face. He didn’t send that to me. Robbie did. He didn’t tell me he’d returned home from the hospital with a poor prognosis and that all he wanted do was go home. To die. Jeanie did.
He didn't even tell me that time in late December when I took him a loaf of the braided Christmas bread I make every year. I think he came out of his house in his bathrobe with Hoss and Thea, his two big, black dogs right next to him. Hoss has all his muzzle going grayer and grayer. He used to bark at me with his great, loud bark, but he took to me, in time, and now he just comes lunging over for some petting. He is kind of a big, scary gent, but a sweetheart in reality, like his…I was going to say his “master,” but it was more like his brother or his dad or his good old friend. They were a team.
So, Chuck roused himself to come out and take the loaf of bread, with many exclamations of pleased surprise, and I left, and that was the last time I saw him. He looked pretty rough, but I didn’t remark on his still-banged-up face. I guess I should have asked but I was so full of Xmas spirit, giving him the Xmas bread and all, and petting Hoss and telling Chuck I loved him, giving him a copy of the new issue of REM because he’d recently quit replenishing my Mendocino boxes, like he’d been doing for ages, and he wasn’t getting his usual supply of the latest issues. I had to scram anyway, so I turned back to my car then, calling, “Love You, Chuck!” And I think he called back that he loved me too, and I know he did. I know we had that in our many, many reference points along the fifty or so years we’ve been sporadically interacting.
I mean, Chuck Hathaway and I met when I was still in my twenties. That guy was born an artist. He could draw anything. The dinosaur at the top here is one of his pieces. We both worked upstairs at Al Moise’s printshop in the mid-seventies, he designing and illustrating, and I typesetting the old A&E Magazine (Arts and Entertainment), the monthly publication of the Mendocino Art Center. I remember when he fell in mad love with Camille Ranker and they eventually got married and started their graphic design business, and because I had my print shop at the same time, we would have jobs to talk about and whatnot. After a while, they decided—this was thirty-eight years ago—that they needed to publish a real estate magazine because the state of real estate publicity was extremely terrible at the time, with a few blurry little black and white photographs in the local papers.
So, they did that. They wanted their magazine to be a space where Realtors could advertise their properties, with some artistry and space enough for descriptions, but they also wanted it to carry local stories and photographs, to support and promote local writers and artists, too. Back in the ’eighties, real estate was going crazy and they were printing forty-eight pages crammed with ads, and publishing every two weeks. A raging success story.
When Chuck and Camille decided they wanted to retire, fifteen years ago, they called me up to see if I wanted to buy the magazine. No…I said No, in no uncertain terms. “What do I know about publishing a magazine, Chuck? I couldn’t possibly!” So, REM kept being for sale and I kept being like, “No, no I couldn’t.” Finally, they were ready to throw in the towel and Chuck called me one last time to see if I’d changed my mind. I just couldn’t stand the idea of not having it in the world anymore, so I gave in. Holy cow.
So, he and Camille changed my life, in truth, by selling me the magazine and turning me into a publisher. I went ahead and bought Real Estate Magazine, and I stumbled my way to figuring out how to run it. I hired my brother Joe Neves to do billing and ad layout, and Lisa Norman, who had already been working as editor with Chuck and Camille for a decade, also came in to keep working with the advertisers and the production she knew so well. I took on the stories and graphic design, remodeled the logo a little bit, and…here we are, fifteen years on, still at it.
Our interactions got more frequent, of course, after I decided to buy REM. He had to train me and Joe in all the things that needed to happen, how to use his page templates that were so good and precise. He wanted to keep delivering for me after I bought it, which was a total godsend.
I anyway didn’t know what I was doing and just went at it like I do most things, just started in, trusting that things would figure themselves out and fall into place, and they kind of did. I went out on a bunch of delivery runs with Chuck so I’d know what happened after I “put the paper to bed,” and got it out there in the world. He took me in his rickety pickup, and we’d talk the whole time, though it was hard because of his being almost deaf, and his hearing aids were crap. But we’d talk anyway, or yell, really, or I’d have to repeat myself all the time as we drove along and stopped, drove along and stopped, and then started up our conversations again—Where was I?—until the next place showed up and I’d jump out with however many magazines he said this place or that would go through in the month. Sometimes fifty, sometimes more, and sometimes three…he’d even stop and leave three copies at some little place. One time it was insanely hot in the Anderson Valley, and I was almost fainting from the heat, and he didn’t say anything about it, but he knew, and kept stopping to let me have a break or bring me some water.
He was worried about me, but he didn’t say it. During those chopped-up treks all over the county, he told me about his life. That, interspersed with passing on what he knew about each stop—the Philo Post Office, or some little Realty® office, or Hamburger Ranch & Spaghetti Farm—that’s where we would stop for lunch and he’d buy me lunch or I’d buy him lunch, and Chuck would order a rack of ribs to go, so he could take them home to Camille for dinner. She was still alive then, but ailing, and he never failed to think of her.
After the Xmas bread delivery episode, he sent me a text: “You can never know how many times that I read your writings and what a privilege and how much enjoyment I get! You are such a great talent for sharing that talent with so many.” I knew he was proud of me, and it meant more to me than anything. I texted back that I’d taken on his legacy as a sacred trust, and it made me so happy to think I’d succeeded in his eyes. He had that effect on me. That was a true, unusual friendship, all tied together with a business he and his marvelous Camille had started and loved, and that I’d had the nerve to take up in their wake. I still didn’t know he was home dying.
In early January, I’d sent him several texts that he hadn’t answered, and I said to myself, hmm hmm, I’m worried about Chuck. I sent him a note saying that I had published a book of my poetry, and I was going to bring it over there, OK? And no reply. So, I had to go pick up my granddaughter from the K-8, and I drove on out Little Lake to his place after I picked her up, to give him the late Christmas present. But as I came into sight of his house, I saw that his black pickup wasn’t there and I kind of suspected something was up. Then Jeanie came out on the porch with Hoss and Thea beside her.
I said, “Are you Jeanie?” Yes. And I said, “I’m Zida,” and she came up to me. “Did you hear about my dad?” No. Our eyes locked then. “He’s gone.” And I felt my face collapsing and I just bent over right there and bawled, right in front of her, then put my arms around her shoulders and absolutely sobbed in shock. All those years and I only knew him. But he always talked about her and about Craig, his son, so lovingly and proudly, so I knew them a little bit, through him. I could fall apart and cry on her like she was an old friend who could take my falling apart on her like that. And her sorrow. And mine.
My little granddaughter was in the car with the door open, petting the dogs and I finally pulled myself together enough to get back in the car. I said, “Ele, Chuck died,” and her green eyes widened. I was crying and driving, and she said, about Jeanie’s new little terrier-poodle five-month-old bouncy puppy, “That doggie was cute.” And I had to agree. I had to quit crying so I could see to drive and remember that little floppy baby doggy bouncing around Chuck's yard with the two grizzled, massive, gray-muzzled Hoss and Thea in her wake, the huge stacks of firewood Chuck had cut and split and stacked up for the winter a backdrop to their frolic, those meticulous-looking rows cribbed up against future cold.
There are all kinds of friendship. Sometimes you take it for granted. You just go along, just take it as it comes and don’t give it too much thought. And then somebody dies, and you realize what you had, what a gift it was. Sometimes you do get to say goodbye, in whatever way—a loaf of bread, an expression of mutual appreciation.
Yes…that is friendship. That is—you might as well call it what it is, call it love.
