J David Moeller's "The Daily Blather"
Buffalo George Toomer, R.I.P. my friend.
Buffalo George (L) and the author taking
Buffalo George Toomer Goes to Mars!
Buffalo George Goes to Mars!
"Take a leg, an eye, a lung or wrist...but give me back my friend. What good are bones or veins or toes when gone is one who led me, taught me, cared. Please, give me back my friend. The Sun is black, the moon reversed...please give me back my friend. What good is food or wine or bits of mint? What matter jokes or tunes? The footprints have stopped and laughter's waned...please...give me back my friend."
Buffalo George R. Toomer was a Dallas illustrator, raconteur, humorist, fast food critic, bon vivant, cigar smoking, ear staubing, giant of a man who treated everyone he met as if they were his very best friend. He mentored young and old alike in the art business and did so freely and with compassion and gusto. He did everything with gusto.
In my life I have never been closer to any one human being as I was to George.
We met in military school over 50 years ago and have been best friends ever since.
I looked up to him and respected his selfless wisdom and bled him of it regularlyto guide me on my path. I always marveled at his sagacity and lightening ready wit.
I’d quote his morsels of inspiration to my friends when I felt his words would servethem as they had assuaged my problems.
Over and over he’d admonish me to avoid getting “the thinkies”…referring to my habitof over thinking a problem in my life and agrandizing it out of proportion. I’m sureothers of his friends received the same prescription.
Over the years George allowed me to pester him mercilessly while he worked over his drafting/art table -like a puppy underfoot, never turning me away; always kind and patient.
In 1970 we co-published Claxon Magazine, a “ground-level” alternative magazine, in Dallas.
The four issues we produced were all sell-outs and featured the work of such photograpers as Jack Caspary, Phil Hollenbeck, Shel Hershorn, Moses Olmos, and others.
George designed and produced the entire publication. I edited and wrote. He was not the best speller and I’d remind him when he turned in copy that “You’re pictures, I’m words”…a phrase I heard him say to others in later years…and it made me proud that he’d adopted something of mine into his vernacular; I had so often done so of his.
In November of that year we founded the “Giant Thanksgiving SuperFeast”, a free Thanksgiving dinner for anyone needing a place to go, regardless of their ability to pay for it. A history of those SuperFeasts can be found at http://thanksgivingsuperfeast.blogspot.com/
Over the years it became a goal of mine to make him laugh at my humor. He was the master humorist. He could, if given the stage and his bent for performance, most assuredly, hold his own with the best comics of our time.
I never met a soul that wasn’t convulsed by him time and again. And so, I’d try to make him laugh…and succeeded, perhaps, five times.
And those five times were the highest moments of my life. Surely, he’d tell me I was funny…and I knew I was…but to hear him laugh spontaneously at a joke or witticism from my lips was as if I’d found the Holy Grail itself.
These last years, and more so this last, we’d talk on the phone perhaps every 10-15 days or so: I in Chicago, he in Dallas. It may have been two old farts checking in, unsaid but underneath, “You still alive?” “Yeah, you?” but it was always two old friends reminiscing and sharing.
It had been about two weeks since our last chat so I called my friend Saturday afternoon at 5:13 pm. We talked for forty-four minutes and 50 seconds according to my cell phone’s log.
We bemoaned our age, our aches and pains, the fact that we’d not enjoy the close company of women any more. He offered advice about my current spate of problems and “thinkies” and I tried tocomfort him by understanding the pain he was suffering.
And then, as do all calls, it was time to sign off.
I spoke first, “I love you, man!”
George replied, “Yeah, me too.”
Please Click here to read what his friends have to say about this great man.
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