I’ve been thinking about my old friend Simon DeSoto who died earlier this year.
I met Simon not long after I arrived in Bay City in 1997.
He was someone who was easy to talk with, especially when I was still new in town.
When I was going through the cancer treatment ordeal – I was at the other paper back then – Simon would come and visit me.
He’d been through the medical wringer himself, so it was easy to talk to him.
Good or bad, things kept us talking to each other about those things until the very end for him.
Simon and Tommy Griffin
from Sugar Land and I traveled throughout this part of Texas continually over the years.
They would do radio play-by-play coverage of the Blackcats in the sports booth and I would walk the Bay City sidelines for the Sentinel.
Simon did the driving for us.
I’d meet him here in Bay City and typically he drove to Wharton to pick Tommy up – kind of a halfway drive from Sugar Land for him.
We talked mostly about sports.
We’d all played different sports from high school years.
Tommy and I played football in high school and Simon and I shared a history of adult-league softball.
Simon made all of the arrangements for us to cover the Blackcats on away trips.
It was something that he excelled at – planning out details in advance.
To show you what kind of friend Simon was, he made the press card years ago that I still use today.
Simon and I both loved listening to the old hits from the 1950s and 1960s.
Even though I was older than he was by a few years, we both knew and loved that music that took us back to long-forgotten people and places.
When I was at the other place, I ran a regular column about gospel music that Simon wrote, in addition to putting on gospel music events.
I’ve been writing this column for most of the time I’ve been in Bay City.
And Simon was a regular reader.
There were weeks when I didn’t write a column, for one reason or another.
Simon encouraged me to write every week.
While some of my columns are politically charged – and certainly not in concert with his leanings – he still wanted me to write.
And I do – part of the reason I’m writing this.
I think of his encouragement as a gift he left me and I’m certainly going to honor it every column I write.
