In Memory

John Edward Vance



 
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06/16/13 11:18 PM #1    

Mark Wieting

John has been gone for 45 years but I still think of him often. We first met in Little League baseball, and then in school at Lombard Junior High. The GEHS yearbook says we were both in S.P.Q.R., but given our mutual disdain for Latin, this surprises me and I can’t remember anything about club meetings—what would you do? John played basketball for four years, blending enthusiasm and a great sense of humor; it might have been John who named our second string as freshmen the “Keystones,” after the Keystone Cops. If not John, then it was Brynjolfsson. Anyway, the Keystones were known for running “plays” that didn’t always look on the floor the way they were drawn on the coach’s clip board. Liz Astroth often steamed in frustration, leading to his need to “reach out and touch someone,” usually with an open hand rather than a fist. But the Keystones were an important part of the team and they worked as hard as anyone else, maybe harder.

John was charming as well as funny. Mothers loved him. Handsome and polite, well spoken, he was not exactly Eddie Haskell, but came close. He also led his gullible friend [uh, me] into trouble on a number of occasions. In junior high he noted one winter that it was fun to throw snowballs at trains leaving the Lombard station, especially if the conductor still had the door open as the train left the station. So he talked me into accompanying him once, and as we waited for the next train, we made paper airplanes of the time tables on the counter, there being no ticket agent on duty. We hardly made note of the older man sleeping in the corner of the station’s waiting room. The next train came, we unloaded our ammunition, and we saw the conductor duck and swear at us as a snowball reached the vestibule where he was standing. A great time. Until the old guy from the station showed us his railroad police badge and we were under arrest. At least it didn’t go on “our permanent records.”

John went to Beloit College and did well, majoring in international relations. He spent his junior year in Sweden, which he enjoyed immensely, praising the Swedes for their openness [about sex and drugs] and their liberal politics. He wrote me once that there was a party in the student union to celebrate the anniversary of the installation of condom machine in the building. He was good with languages [remember that S.P.Q.R.] and learned enough Swedish to get by, although many students were better at English than he was in Swedish. Back at Beloit his senior year, he met his wife-to-be and I remember him inviting me and my date to attend a concert there with a band with an odd name: Jefferson Airplane. The concert/dance was held in the gym, which was a Quonset hut [really], half of the gym floor filled with rows of seats and the other half free for dancing. So, we could wander up to the front of the stage and take a close look at Grace Slick. The music was so loud that insulation from the ceiling fell to the stage during a song.

John developed colon cancer that same year. Although he enrolled in graduate school, he was not well enough to attend. Throughout his illness, he put forth a very positive message of hope, despite an increasingly dire prognosis. I called him from Urbana while he was at Elmhurst Hospital and he seemed a little groggy but assured me that “we’re working on the right combination of drugs to get me well.” I was shocked to learn that he died the next day.

He was a great guy who could have done great things in this world if he had had more time. 


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