Blue Scream of Jeff: A. Stacy Briggs III

Showing posts with label A. Stacy Briggs III. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Recent deaths remind us what to be thankful for

I suppose one of the worst things about getting older is that you begin to lose people who’ve been fixtures in your life.

Sometimes these people are friends, such as Stacy Briggs, who I wrote about last month; family, like my Uncle Jack, who passed away on Nov 10; or public figures you may have never met, but whose work influenced you in some way.

This Fall has driven that point home in a big way. First to go was my former colleague in October. Then came my uncle, just before Veteran’s Day. Only a few days later, came the deaths of comic book maven, Stan Lee on Nov 12 and filmmaker/writer William Goldman, who is known to geeks from Florence to Guilder for “The Princess Bride.” He died Nov. 16.

JOHN "JACK" WISHNICK:
Still teaching me things about being a good person.

I’ve already written how Stacy influenced me as a writer but, as you would expect, my uncle had an even bigger impact on me.

You see, my Uncle Jack, was another larger-than-life character in my life who did far more than get me my first car and teach me to drive stick-shift.

Through his wit and charm, he taught me about being a good person and how one should treat others.

Even at his funeral, he still managed to continue to teach me those lessons.

After the services we began telling “Uncle Jack Stories,” and a close family friend regaled me with the tale of the time the two of them were on a cruise right around Christmas. They had stopped off at some island and late in the afternoon decided to head out to visit the local synagogue.

It was close to dinner time and there were only two taxi/tour drivers left on the dock. My Uncle didn’t want to choose between them, because he thought they both deserved to earn some money. So in his inimitable style, he decided to hire BOTH of them; he had the one with the “better car” drive while the other whose English was better, did the talking.

During the trip, he noticed that the vehicle they were in had transmission issues. When my uncle asked the driver why he didn’t get it fixed, the driver told him it was expensive and he didn’t have the $200 to get it done.

So at the end of the night, my Uncle handed the guy $200 to get his car repaired, so “the next time they came back,” he wouldn’t have to schlep them around in a broken car.

Needless to say, the driver was floored and when the family friend asked my Uncle why he’d done that (they had no plans to return to the island), my uncle shrugged and reportedly said, “So I die with $200 less in my pocket.”

To my uncle, that wasn’t a lot of money, but to that driver, it was a fortune.

It’s an anecdote that will stick with me for the rest of my life. It’s an excellent reminder to be thankful for the blessings in our life because there are others who have less than we do. It’s now changed the way I tip, because the few extra bucks over what I’d used to leave amounts to very little for me, but for a waiter or waitresses at the restaurants I frequent, it can mean a world of difference.

Now you may think that this has very little to do with the stated nature of this blog. But I became a fan of science fiction mainly because of “Star Trek” and its positive, we-can-make-things-better world view. And Uncle Jack’s spirit of generosity certainly reflects that idea of making the world a better place.

STAN LEE: Tried to show the good in every person.

While I was never a huge fan of superhero comics growing up, I came to appreciate the work of Stan Lee for similar reasons.

While the Marvel Comics maven may have taken more of the credit than he deserved for the company’s success, there is no denying he had the same positive, make-things-better attitude my uncle had. It was reflected in his motto: “Excelsior” – Latin for “ever upward” – which became his own oft-cited personal tagline.

But Lee gave more than lip service to the idea. He and Jack Kirby devoted an entire comic series and new breed of superhero to the idea of diversity and social justice.

“The whole underlying principle of the X-Men was to try to be an anti-bigotry story to show there’s good in every person,” he once told an interviewer.

And in the midst of the civil rights moment, he couldn’t have made this opinion any clearer by writing the following column denouncing racism:

Let’s lay it right on the line. Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today. But, unlike a team of costumed super-villains, they can’t be halted with a punch in the snoot, or a zap from a ray gun. The only way to destroy them is to expose them — to reveal them for the insidious evils they really are. The bigot is an unreasoning hater — one who hates blindly, fanatically, indiscriminately. If his hang-up is black men, he hates ALL black men. If a redhead once offended him, he hates ALL redheads. If some foreigner beat him to a job, he’s down on ALL foreigners. He hates people he’s never seen — people he’s never known — with equal intensity — with equal venom.

Now, we’re not trying to say it’s unreasonable for one human being to bug another. But, although anyone has the right to dislike another individual, it’s totally irrational, patently insane to condemn an entire race — to despise an entire nation — to vilify an entire religion. Sooner or later, we must learn to judge each other on our own merits. Sooner or later, if man is ever to be worthy of his destiny, we must fill our hearts with tolerance. For then, and only then, will we be truly worthy of the concept that man was created in the image of God ― a God who calls us ALL ― His children.

— Pax et Justitia, Stan.

Unfortunately, these words are still as relevant today as they were back in 1968 when he first penned them.

WILLIAM GOLDMAN: His passing is In-con-ceiv-able!

While I was still trying to collect my thoughts on Lee’s passing, and figure out what I wanted to say about him, came the news about Goldman.

This one hit me hard.

William Goldman might not have been a household name, but just about every geek revered him as the creator of “The Princess Bride.”

Like many geeks, I quote from this movie almost constantly as it appeals to my quirky sense of humor.

But unlike others, I held Goldman in high esteem for another of his works: the screenplay for the Oscar-winning film, “All The President’s Men.”

It’s the movie which helped inspire me to become a journalist and writer.

So yes, it’s been a tough two months with so many personal heroes leaving me to continue my life’s journey without them. As a writer I can’t help but try to look for a theme as to why all these deaths happened now.

The only thing I can think of is that they were timed to come before Thanksgiving to remind me to give thanks for all the things they gave to me in my life as well as to remind me to be thankful for all the people still in my life who are doing the same.

And I can’t think of a better thing to be thankful for during this month of Thanksgiving.

Rest in peace, Stace, Uncle Jack, Stan and Bill. One day I hope to see you all on the other side.

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Goodbye, Mr. Briggs

A STACY BRIGGS III:
The guardian of meticulous

In the past, my in memoriam posts have been about the passing of some person who played a role in
the worlds of science, science fiction and fantasy, and whom many fans of the genre – if not the general public – knew.

This time that’s not the case.

Few people will know who A. Stacy Briggs III was, and why should they?

He wasn’t an actor in some genre TV show or movie – though he was quite the character. Nor was he a creator of a comic book, novel, film, or television series beloved by us geeks. He wasn’t even one the many behind-the-scenes talents who help produce one of those things. In fact, as far as I know, other than a love of reading, Stacy Briggs had nothing to do with the worlds of science fiction and fantasy.

So why, then, am I placing him up there with the likes of Ray Bradbury, Leonard Nimoy and Stephen Hawking and devoting my monthly column to him?

Because, as well as being a friend, colleague and sometimes mentor, Stacy Briggs was a true master of his craft: writing.

You see Stace – as those who knew him often called him – devoted his life to newspaper journalism and the telling of stories. He may not have been known by many outside the newsroom, but for the last 50 years, the citizens of Bucks County, Pa benefited from his work at The (Doylestown) Intelligencer and the Bucks County Courier Times.

As a fellow former colleague of ours said at his recent memorial service, “Stacy was the guardian of meticulous.” Nary was there ever a coma out of place in the stories he edited or the pages he proofed. And forget about a grammar or spelling errors. Nothing got past his infamous red pen.

Lord only knows how many times he used it on me and on the stories and pages we produced together. I always tried to produce clean copy, but no matter how many times I went over my own story or read over copy from another reporter, Stace would always find something I missed.

This could be annoying, especially when we were pushing deadline (or past it), but I always appreciated that desire to get everything right. While he would rib me from time-to-time (okay, it was more like constantly) about my less than perfect spelling, it never came from a mean place nor a desire to prove he was better than me or anyone else. He just wanted everything to be correct, and as Mrs. BlueScream often reminds me, Stacy and I did share one common trait. We were/are both CDO (which is similar to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, only the letters are in the correct order – the way they should be).

In fact, one of my fondest memories of working with him came one summer Saturday evening, when we were putting out the Sunday paper. Mrs. BlueScream had given me a new t-shirt for my birthday, on the front of which was the saying: “Is anal retentive hyphenated?”

I had worn the t-shirt just for him, and as soon as he saw me in it, I remember his brow furrowing and him casting me one of his disapproving looks and saying, “That’s NOT funny.”

But Stacy was more than just the newsroom’s grammar Nazi and punctuation police. He cared just as deeply about getting the facts of a story correct as he did about the way a story was told. Like most decent copy editors, Stacy could take the worst piece of writing and polish it until it shone. Yet unlike some other editors, he took time to coach the writers he worked with to produce better copy so he didn’t have to do that.

At his memorial service, person after person told stories of how Stacy influenced them: from the former sports editor who’d occasionally receive marked up copies of his section with Stacy’s comments on how to make the stories better to a reporter who said that when she first started at the paper, he recommended that she use the same “voice” she used in her columns in her news stories to make them more interesting and compelling.

All these stories started me thinking about all the ways Stacy influenced me and my writing. It took a while, but I suddenly realized that my often obsessive desire to find exactly the right words or phrase to get my point across comes from my time working with him. Yes, it often slows me down as I write and rewrite the same few lines struggling to get them just right. Yet I know in the end the time I take to do that is worth it, because it’s improved my writing ten-fold.

So for his contribution to the craft of story-telling and his influence on me to always strive to get it right (or write?), I think A. Stacy Briggs III does belong enthroned among the superstars of sci-fi/fantasy, that I’ve written about in the past. Because anyone so devoted to his craft and to helping other story-tellers deserves some recognition even if he shunned it during his life.

I just hope that he’d approve of this story and find no reason to red pen it.