Recalling Dick Francis

During my public radio days, a news reporter stopped by my office to ask my advice. It seems that she was scheduled to interview some writer named Dick Francis and didn't know a thing about him. Did I recognize the name?
But of course.

In the early 1970s, my father - who did not like horses - discovered Dick Francis's mystery novels, each of which was based on some aspect of life with horses. He had been a successful jockey, and upon his retirement began writing. It took him a while to turn his pen to mysteries, and he found his work almost immediately popular.

When the mysteries began to arrive in book shops, many of us found ourselves drawn into this unfamiliar world to the degree that we couldn't wait for the next one. The former jockey who, with his wife doing "research," and presumably providing the kind of critiques at which women excel, became widely admired in this new profession. The plots were clever, the characters sufficiently drawn, and the writing vigorous and direct. Each autumn in the UK a new Francis tale would arrive, to be followed by publication in the USA the following Spring.

Anyway, I filled in Linda P., the young reporter, and asked her to bring Mr Francis by the next day so that I could meet him. When they arrived in my office, I was surprised by the author's deep blue eyes and the softness of his handshake. He spoke quietly, and his manner was gentle.

Immediately I thought I could understand how skilled he must have been in managing a horse at full tilt.
His most recent book which I had acquired in London was on my desk top - I hoped for an autograph - he was intrigued that I would have what he called the "English" edition and pointed out with pride that his wife had designed the book's cover.

By a quirk of fate, I had gotten to know a former jockey in Minnesota who had won the Grand National on an American horse named Jay Trump. I mentioned this to Francis, and he lit up - turns out he was the only turf writer in England who had picked that horse to win. I hadn't known that after retiring from riding, he had become a writer for the Daily Express for a number of years, focussing on - surprise, surprise - horse racing.

Some years later when I was involved with a support group for the Veterinary College at the University of Minnesota, I wrote him to invite him to speak to our members during a forthcoming book tour. He wrote a long, thoughtful, chatty, and exceedingly gracious regret, and I treasure it to this day.

His wife died in 2000, but he carried on with his son Felix, and one surmises that Felix will now take on the burden of continuing what has become a most successful literary enterprise, but I fear that it probably won't be quite the same. The father experienced the joys and the pain of succeeding, falling, and failing in the highly competitive world of horse racing, but we can all hope that Felix can push the enterprise forward in his own special way.

Two interesting aspects of Dick Francis's life were his service as a bomber pilot in the British Air Force in World War II and his years spent as the jockey to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother. The former he never wrote about, so far as I know, and the second involved a great disappointment when his horse Devon Loch collapsed while in the lead near the end of the famed Grand National - and lost. That event will never been forgotten, but his novels will probably be read for decades to come.

His was a life of varied outcomes, and he seemed to manage it all with equanimity and grace - the kind of ride one would expect from a good jockey.

Conversation At The Concert

My father was at his happiest in a museum, at a ballet performance, song recital, symphony concert, opera performance, and the theatre - especially the theater. In a museum, he would wander happily by himself and find enormous refreshment in the process.

The other arts required him to sit amongst other people, and this circumstance was a challenge for him. People open cellophane wrapped candies, they cough, they stamp their feet, they arrive late, but worst of all, they talk....before the performance (often) and sometimes during the performance (less frequently).

He required some stillness, probably to allow him to focus on what he was about to watch, and that focus ran from the history of the piece, his knowledge of it (generally considerable), other performances he had seen over the years, and when he was done, he considered himself prepared.

God help you if you were a chatterbox. First you got the turn of the head, then the turn and stare, then the clear the throat, turn, and long stare, and that didn't shut you up, you got a succinct sentence. One night in Boston at the Shubert theatre, he and I, on a high school tour to look at colleges) saw a pre-Broadway performance of "The Most Happy Fella." Sitting behind us were three local dowagers, who chattered on through the overture, so my father went into his drill, finally finishing with the following statement: Will you old broads please shut the XXXX up, so that I can enjoy the performance?"

I sunk into my seat, but for the rest of the evening with Robert Goode and Jo Sullivan and the rest of the cast, we had absolute quiet in the row behind us.

Afterwards, I asked him about what I had witnessed, and he pointed out that he had paid good money for the seats and was entitled to enjoy all of the performance.

For the last several decades, I have employed the same behavior continuum in similar situations. Yesterday, at a morning concert of the Minnesota Orchestra (yeah, I'm that old) three Twin Cities dowagers chatted right up to the first note of the Sibelius, the Grieg, and the two Mozart pieces. I wanted to repeat verbatim what my father had said forty-five years ago on a night in Boston, but here in the midwest our niceness is based on a thick passive aggressive mode, and all I could manage was "And now, we'll all be quiet for Mozart."

OK, so it wasn't dramatic, but it worked, and it reminded me that though my father has been gone for many years, this apple didn't roll very far from that tree.