Word: gordon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Last year, while I was looking through old volumes of the Crimson researching something I was writing, I came across a story from the 1920s about an airplane crash on Soldiers' Field. I have forgotten the pilot's name, but his passenger was Gordon Cairnie. The only casualties were a few clarinets and an oboe or two, left scattered on the ground when the Harvard Band ran like hell to avoid premature meetings with their Maker. Later I asked Gordon about that story...
...believed every word Gordon said, then half the world was made up of damn fools. But no one who gave as much credit and did as many favors as Gordon did could have believed...
...biggest damn fool I ever heard of was the one who read the Crimson story last spring about Gordon's retirement plans and believed it. Gordon had been sick for a while--his foot was killing him--and started talking about going back to Canada, leaving Cambridge forever. This particular damn fool came to him with an offer to buy the shop. As Gordon told it, and I hope it wasn't true, this guy offered to buy out the shop, lock and stock--I don't think Gordon owned a barrel--for $600. Then, with the benefit...
...GORDON never succumbed to the greatest temptation of age, the urge to be venerated. The day before Commencement, last month, I watched him trade jokes with his friend, Bob Tonis, as earthy as ever. Last spring, at a Signet dinner, he matched his table companions, drink for drink, with that unpalatable vodka he used to like. And at a dinner a year ago, while James Tate was reading his poetry, Gordon sneezed, long and loud. Tate snapped "Shut up Gordon," and Gordon laughed as loud as he had sneezed...
...Gordon was a friend of Eliot, and Ginsberg, and Creeley, and Lowell, and Pound. He was, as Pound put it, "no capon priest, but a man o' men." Although Harvard, like any other college, has more than its fill of undergraduates who write sestinas, and think in Alexandrines, like Bunthorne in Patience or Fitzgerald's D'Invilliers, these were not Gordon's men and women. His were the honest, hard-working poets, who loved life, and loved their craft, and wrote, and thought, and lived, far from the ivory tower of academics...