Musings
and History
Quote
of the day:
“So
long as there is breath in me, that long I will persist. For now I
know one of the greatest principles of success; if I persist long
enough I will win.”
Ho
Chi Minh
Until
my attitude improves, I will be sending out some of my biographies
instead of remarks about the terrorists and political quicksands of
present day. This bio is about Hunter S. Thompson (nicknamed Gonzo),
who is one of my favorite authors. He reminds me of myself. Gonzo
is no longer with us.
A
Biography of Gonzo
On
July 28, 1937, just two weeks before me, Hunter S. Thompson is born
in the Cherokee Triangle area of Louisville, Kentucky. He was the
eldest of three sons born to Jack and Virginia Thompson. His father
was an insurance adjuster and a veteran of WWI while his mother was a
reference librarian and secretary. When Hunter was 14 his father
died of Myasthenia Gravis leaving the three boys for his mother to
raise alone. It was reported but never confirmed that his mother
got heavy into the sauce because of the stress. Hunter was a good
athlete, especially in baseball but he never played organized ball.
He went to high school at the Louisville Male High School which was
normally for the upper crust in Louisville society. While there he
joined a Literary Group and wrote pieces for the high school
newspaper and helped edit the school album. He was kicked off the
Literary Group because of his legal problems. He was almost
continuously in trouble in school and on one occasion he was caught
in a car with others that had performed an armed robbery and he
served 60 days in the local jail. It was never proven that Hunter
was a participant in the robbery. After being released, he joined
the US Air Force and went to Lackland Air Force Base for basic
training (me too). After basic training he went to school in
Illinois to study aircraft electronics but eventually ended up at
Eglin Air Force Base near Fort Walton Beach, Florida. The base
commander there discovered Hunter’s writing skills and made him a
major contributor to the base newspaper, especially sports. The base
had a football team that fielded some pretty good players like Max
McGee and Zeke Bratkowski. Hunter would travel with the team and
send back essays of the games they played on the road along with the
home games. Hunter’s enlistment ended with him being the rank of
Airman 1st
class (three stripes) and was discharged with an Honorable Discharge
but was not offered a chance for reenlistment. His commanding
officer stated that Hunter was good at what he did but he resented
authority and would pass that attitude to others in contact with him
(me too). While at Eglin he would also write anonymous articles for
the local newspaper in Fort Walton. After the Air Force he became
the sports editor of a newspaper in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania before
moving to New York and attending Columbia University and took a
course on short-story writing under the G.I. Bill. During this time
he was working for Time magazine as a copy boy for $51 a week. He
used a typewriter in the office to copy Hemingway’s
A
Farewell to
Arms
and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby in
order to get a grasp on different writing styles. He was fired from
Time for insubordination. Later that year he went to work as a
reporter for a newspaper in Middletown, New York. He was soon fired
from that job because he destroyed a candy machine in the office that
took his money and did not give up any candy. (Been there, as most
of us have) and then went down the street and got into a cuss fight
with the owner of a restaurant who was an advertiser in the paper.
After a series of jobs including one or two in Puerto Rico, he ended
up as a caretaker in a resort in Big Sur, California that eventually
became a virtual commune of artists and Bohemians. Hunter chose to
write an uncomplimentary article about the artists and Bohemians in
Big Sur for Rogue
magazine that was distributed nationwide. Needles to say, he was
fired as caretaker. He then went to Brazil and became an editor for
the only English speaking newspaper, National
Review,
which was owned by Dow-Jones. While there he was joined by his
longtime girlfriend Sandra Conklin and upon returning to the United
States they were married. They had issue of five pregnancies which
resulted in only one survivor. She had three miscarriages and one
child died soon after birth. The survivor they named Juan
Fitzgerald. He continued to write for the National
Review about
a variety of subjects including an essay on his visit to Ketchum,
Idaho to determine the reason for the suicide of Ernest Hemingway.
While there he stole a rack of elk antlers that were hanging over the
doorway of the Hemingway
cabin.
He had a falling out with National
Review
when they refused to publish his critique of Tom Wolfe’s new book
The
Kandy-Colored
Tangerine-Flake
Streamline Body and
he moved to San Francisco and dived head-first into the drug-hippie
culture that was just beginning. Hunter got an opportunity to live
with Sonny Barger and the San Bernardino branch of the Hell’s
Angels. Sonny is the acknowledge founder of the Hell’s Angel’s
phenomenon. After a while the Sonny figured out that Hunter was
doing research for a book and demanded that the Hell’s Angels get a
piece of the action and when Hunter hesitated, he received a
“stomping” as the Angels called it, but it really was a severe
beating. In spite of the beating, Hunter wrote of his experiences
and a book titled Hell’s
Angels: The Strange and Terrible Story of Outlaw
Motorcycle
Clubs.
The book was a runaway best seller and Hunter got a lot of money and
many offers to write books. He chose to write about his past
experiences with the hippies in San Francisco and what is up with
them. He gave the Hippies hell because he felt they had sold out
their political agenda and was just interested in the drugs. In 1972
he delivered what is considered his masterpiece titled Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas.
It proved to be crisp and to the point yet it treaded lightly on the
factual side over to the imagined and back again to the factual.
This writing style was confusing to those that were not familiar with
Hunter. Not only that, Hunter himself was a central character but
using a pseudonym. This style of writing was named “Gonzo style”
by another writer and the name stuck. The Thompson family moved to
an Aspen, Colorado suburb called Woody Creek after receiving $15,000
for “Hell’s” plus 2/3 of the price of his house in Woody Creek.
Thompson named his house “The Owl Farm”. Hunter ran for sheriff
of Pitkin County, Colorado under the “Freak Power” banner. He
came in a very close second to the winner. Hunter had always been
talking about “The American Dream” and in “Fear and Loathing”
he finally told us how to find it. He said the American Dream is
found in
“Two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets
of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker full of cocaine, a whole
galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, a quart
of Tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether
and two dozen ampules of amyl nitrate.” Hunter
enjoyed much success throughout the remainder of his life. He had
many friends in the movie industry including Johnny Depp, Bill Murray
and Sean Penn among many others. Several of his books were made into
movies. On
February 20, 2005 Hunter Thompson, aged 67, blew his brains out while
sitting at his typewriter talking to his wife who was at a gym in
Aspen. He left a note on his computer what ended up being a suicide
note to his wife. It read:
“No
More Games, No More bombs. No More Walking, No More Fun, No More
Swimming, 67, That is 17 years past fifty, 17 years more than I
wanted or needed, boring, I am always bitchy, No Fun-For Anybody, 67,
You are getting greedy, Act your old age—Relax—This won’t
hurt.”
Gonzo’s
funeral was a spectacular one financed by his close friend Johnny
Depp. Gonzo had designed a tower with a cannon on top and in August
of 2005 about 250 people saw Hunter’s ashes loaded into the cannon
and blasted into the breeze. When asked why, Johnny Depp said “I
was just trying to grant the last wish of an old friend.”
Thanks
for listening I can hardy wait until tomorrow
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