Benton Courier - DOUGHERTY: Long-time friendships have natural valleys

James Clark Fair has been one of my best friends since I lived across the street from him when I was 5. He was 4.
He is the best pianist I know and the funniest person I have ever met. Though we’ve spent hours together over the course of the past 50 years, I have very few pictures of him. One of the two I have, though, has him playing a toy guitar with a set of maracas coming out of each side of his mouth.
His dad, J.A. “Gus” Fair, was the longtime principal of Fuller High School, including when my parents graduated from there in 1953. It is now a junior high school in the Pulaski County School District. My first football game was bound to have been a Fuller Panthers game in 1958, when my uncle, Bob Moore, was a sophomore there. I don’t know who the opponent was, but I know they played Bryant and Bauxite back in the late 1950s. Mr. Fair, who seemed to mumble until you grew accustomed to the way he spoke, handed me my high school diploma when I graduated from McClellan High School in 1972. He was a member of the Pulaski County School Board by then. The district later named J.A. Fair High School after him.
He goes by James now. He has since he started school, actually, but his mother called him James Clark around the house, so my brother and I did, too. We still do.

James Clark Fair

James was adopted, a fact that my mother told me when I was 6 or 7. I was amazed. I asked if he knew. She said yes, that his parents had told him when he was old enough to understand it. She explained that Mr. and Mrs. Fair had wanted a child for a long time and finally adopted James. She said they were at a Fuller basketball game when they received a call that they were getting James. The three of them were so crazy about each other that they were a testament to the joys of adoption. His dad died in1987. His mother lives at Good Shepherd Retirement Center on Aldersgate Road in Little Rock.
We’d spend the night at each other’s houses regularly. James is one day short of being a year younger than me. My brother Pat is a year younger than James. Few children lived out near Sweet Home, so we did almost everything together.
When we played “Johnny Ringo,” a western TV series of 1959-60, I claimed seniority and was the gunfighter-turned-sheriff, Johnny Ringo; James Clark was Cully, the deputy; and Pat always “got to be” the bad guy. When I started to school the next year, everybody moved up one spot, but they said it wasn’t as much fun with an imaginary bad guy.
James Clark bears a spot of gray on one palm where he suffered a pencil lead wound from me during a fight over a play during an electric baseball game in the early 1960s.
We moved away and came back twice. Later, his folks rented an apartment in the McClellan attendance zone so he could go to high school there.
Our friendship has survived many fights and arguments, including me making a play for his girlfriend in 1972 – he’s married to her now. We haven’t seen each other often since high school, though we talk on the phone for a couple of hours every few months.
The last call was the toughest to make. I put it off for a few weeks. I had heard from a fifth-hand source that he had received a bad diagnosis concerning cancer.
James lives in Houston with Vicki now. I left a message and told him I had something to ask him.
Vicki told him that he needed to call me because my voice sounded like I “knew something.” He put it off for a few days, he said, before calling me back.
Doctors at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center tell him he’s dying of lung cancer. He’s on medical disability from UPS. He just had six rounds of chemotherapy. He’s also taking an experimental drug that seems to be helping. The tumor has diminished 48 percent.
Yes, he was a smoker. He had smoked since his early 20s until he quit a few weeks before being diagnosed.
James Clark said he decided that he could give up or he could be positive and decide to beat it. He chose the latter. He said he is hoping that the drug works and buys him time until the tumor disappears or goes into remission — or until doctors at M.D. Anderson find a cure.
I am joining him in that choice. I even throw in an occasional prayer.

Mike Dougherty is city editor of the Courier. His column appears Sunday and Thursday.
doughertywriter @yahoo.com

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