Memorial Lex A. Passman ’66

Jim Seymore ’65 Says:

2013-01-15 09:54:05

I still find it hard to accept that Lex is gone. At Princeton and for many years after, we were good friends. I particularly remember the cross-country road trip which we embarked upon immediately after submitting our Princeton senior theses. As usual, my work was late. That I finished my thesis (on Faulkner) at all I owe to my Colonial Club pals, including Lex, who figuratively tied me to a chair and made me write. Thanks to massive amounts of coffee and other stimulants, I wrote the whole thing in 10 days with almost no sleep. Then Lex, three other guys, and I piled into the beat-up Pontiac convertible Lex had bought for $50. We headed west, destination: San Francisco. I sat on the left in the rear seat, directly under a large rip in the convertible's soft top. Due to my lack of sleep, I immediately fell into something resembling a coma. I awoke in western Pennsylvania, covered in two inches of snow, which amused Lex and our companions — those heartless reprobates — to no end. We dropped off our fellow Colonialite John Kretzmann in his hometown of Valparaiso, Ind. He was eager to see his girlfriend. In fact, in those all-male Princeton days, all the guys were eager to see girlfriends, though I think only Kretzmann's reunion went well. (I still remember the intelligence, wit, and goodness of John's father, qualities which his son inherited.) We drove on. Shortly after reaching Lex's hometown of Kansas City, however, the Pontiac expired of old age. What to do now? One of our group, John Boslough, pressed on to Denver by bus . . . train . . . air? I can't remember. Then Lex had an inspiration. He searched the newspaper classifieds and found an airline stewardess who had been transferred to San Francisco. She needed someone to drive her car, a Mustang, out to the coast for her. We were accepted for the job, but we couldn't leave for a few days. So we went to visit Lex's grandmother, a delightful, feisty old woman (as she seemed to us then), at her large farm/ranch southwest of the city. Lex said that this was land once frequented by Jesse James and his gang — and that the Clutter family, whose infamous murders inspired "In Cold Blood," had lived just a few miles away. If he meant to impress me, he succeeded. (I also remember how avidly Lex had anticipated Truman Capote's appearance on Johnny Carson's "The Tonight Show," which I watched with him at Colonial Club, and how utterly shocked Lex was to discover Capote's surpassingly fey manner. But that's another story.) Eventually, we picked up the Mustang and determined to share the driving and go straight through to SF. I caused the first glitch. I was behind the wheel when we discovered a brand-new stretch of interstate, rare and empty at that time, and I throttled up to 100 mph. As we reached the end of the interstate section, I failed to notice a line of Kansas State Police cars idling on the last entryway. One peeled off, pulled me over, and escorted me to the nearest town, where I was required to mail $80 to the judge or go to jail. That was more than I had; Lex made me the first of several loans. Irritated, Lex then insisted on driving. Now penniless — a condition with which I was familiar — I was idly toying with the car and opened the glove compartment. To my delight, inside I found $1.27 in change, which I put in my pocket. Lex looked at me askance. "What?" I asked. "I didn't know you were a thief," he said. The rebuke stung, especially because, in this one instance, it was true. (To my undying shame, I kept the money.) We drove on, in testy silence. Late that night we were in the deserted high plains of Colorado and running out of gas. We exchanged sharp words. Lex blamed me for pushing 30 miles past the last gas station we had seen. I blamed him for his lousy directions. Finally, running on fumes, we drove up a dirt road to a tiny settlement where the map said there was a gas station. Yep. Closed and dark, like the other five structures huddling along the dirt streets of the "town." We spent a cold, windswept, sleepless night shivering in the car. The next morning we bought gas and candy bars and, thus refreshed, made it to Denver. We picked up Boslough and drove to Boulder where John wanted to see his inamorata, a student at the University of Colorado. Alas, the girl had found a new boyfriend. Boslough was inconsolable. I don't remember how he got back to Denver, but Lex and I drove on. To make a long story longer, when we finally got to the Left Coast, we drove straight to Stanford, so excited was Lex at the prospect of again seeing his girlfriend, who I believe had been his prep school sweetheart. I'll never forget walking onto Stanford's central quad. The day was bright and sunny, the school was beautiful, the warm air scented with flowers. And all around us were beautiful, happy, approachable girls ambling along the walkways! Lex and I looked at each other, astounded and dismayed. We had just spent four lonely, girl-less winters in damp, chilly, grey New Jersey instead of this paradise? I nearly wept. Anyway, Lex hustled off to find his girlfriend while I wandered around. It was a monosyllabic, hangdog Lex who returned. Not only did "his" girl have a new boyfriend, but he was the captain of the football team! To make matters worse, having anticipated finding a room at Stanford, we now had no place to stay. This time I was able to help out. I found the address of a young woman I had met years ago during a summer job in Maine. An artist, she lived in Berkeley, and Lex and I crashed in her apartment for a couple of days. Quickly recovering from his disappointment, Lex took off for Kansas City, but not before loaning me the money for a bus ticket to the same destination . . . But that's yet another story. Somehow we both made it back to Princeton for the resumption of our lame-duck classes and graduated that spring. Long ago and far away now — can it be nearly a half-century? — but I'll never forget that trip with my great, good, true friend Lex Passman. We had a helluva lot of fun. Goodbye, my old pal.