Celebrating A Friend
I am at an age where I’m losing friends.
Some of my friends are passing away. It is inevitable and some passings hurt a lot more than others. My fifty-year high school reunion is coming up this weekend and naturally I am hearing about old classmates that are no longer with us, and I can accept that. It’s a part of life.
I recently found out that a friend I didn’t go to school with passed. Gary Ferrington was a retired Professor as well as a wonderful writer and photographer, a tireless advocate for Music and the Arts, and an all around good guy. He had been having health issues for a while. He passed on July 21st.
I’ve known Gary for quite a few years and although we rarely saw each other we kept in touch via email and on social media. Gary was probably 15 years older than I but we had so much in common. It was through his writing and storytelling that I saw so many parallels in our lives.
We both grew up in Oregon, studied film/media at USC, loved foreign films, and both returned to Oregon to live.
The first time I met Gary he invited me to speak and teach a couple of workshops at the DIVA Center in Eugene during a film festival, twenty plus years ago. It was a great experience and he and I shared a couple of wonderful meals talking about growing up and our USC experiences.
A year later I got an email from Gary. He had received a letter from a Florida(?) filmmaker offering to speak and teach a few workshops at the DIVA Center. Gary looked at the guys information and realized he had plagiarized the content of his workshops from my website. Down to the exact wording. He sent me the guys information and a copy of the email.
I’d been doing guest lectures and workshops for quite a few years and this guy was just starting out. I checked his website and sure enough, under “Workshops” the wording was exact.
Needless to say after a couple of carefully worded correspondences the fellow pulled that material from his website. At first he denied copying my work, then he gave me all sorts of excuses, none of which added up.
If Gary hadn’t pointed this out to me who knows how long the guy would’ve been promoting himself using material I developed. I was certainly grateful to Gary.
I’m not sure when Gary started writing short memoir pieces about growing up in a small town in the Columbia Gorge during the 1940’s and early 50’s. His writing was so visual. Through his descriptions I can still see his family home, farm, and feel a lot of the things he experienced as a kid.
He would post these as PDF’s on FaceBook and send them to friends.
I encouraged him to give Substack a try. He posted over 40 pieces, both essays and fiction, in a pretty short time. I always read and commented on his work. He did the same with mine. Quite a few emails went back and forth between us comparing experiences in different stages of our lives.
Gary’s gift was being able to illustrate in words what it was like at a particular time in his life. He invited us into his world, a world that no longer exists as time moves forward. He made his past come to life and showed us where so many of his influences originated.
Gary never referred to any of this as “the good old days”. I believe Gary is/was one of those people who lived in the present. He mined the past for subject matter, but chose not to live there. Another thing we had in common.
His Substack account is still up at this moment, (https://substack.com/@garyferrington), as is his FaceBook profile, (https://www.facebook.com/gw.ferrington). Please go to these two sites and read his work. It’s wonderful stuff.
I wish he had posted to Substack more of his earlier work. To give us a bigger picture of who he was.
Maybe someone in his family, or perhaps a friend, will go through his writings and photographs and put them all together in a volume that could be published. It would be a great gift not just for people who knew him, but for people who appreciate good writing and photography.
Today, I’m raising a toast to Gary. A good friend, a wonderful writer and photographer, a tireless advocate for Music and the Arts, and an all around good guy.
Rest in Peace my friend. You are missed.
Thanks for reading. Have a great week.
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