Boy Seven

The news today from my high school mailing list is that another of my classmates passed away after a lengthy illness. I see messages like that with increasing frequency.

This particular classmate was one of the “core” gang – the group that palled around together throughout the entire high school experience. Find one of us hanging out and you usually found us all. Band, ball games, classes, annual staff...and drama.

We all talked about becoming famous movie stars. He was, to my knowledge, the only one of us who actually tried. I don't know the details – I didn't even know about his acting career until recently; someone on the mailing list mentioned seeing the Twilight Zone episode that he was in. I looked it up, and sure enough, there he is – listed in the credits as “Boy Seven.” He even has a speaking line: “Rice, Sir, Third Form, Class of 1917...You taught me about courage.” As far as I can tell, this is the total body of his work. I found his name listed in the Internet Movie Database, but there is only one credit: Twilight Zone, 1962; Boy Seven.

Out of that core group, he was the one who adamantly swore he would not stay. We all went our separate ways, and we all ended up living in towns and cities other than our home town. He is the only one that came back, and for the last many years he was a lawyer in Breckenridge – a town he said he would never live in after High School. I guess that out of everyone's allotted fifteen minutes of fame, he got maybe five minutes.

But I am reminded of when Ray Kinsela, in “Field of Dreams,” told Doc Graham that his five-minute professional baseball career would be considered a tragedy by many. Graham replied, “Son, if I'd only got to be a doctor for five minutes, now that would be a tragedy.”

Perhaps that's how Jimmy felt.