by James McCarty Yeager

This is a memoir of some of my time with Paul Yeager. Both psychically and chronologically Paul was my closest cousin on my father's side. Since we were both 1948 firstborn babies after our fathers had gotten home from the Pacific war and found and married their girls, we had intuitive ties right from the beginning. Even before Paul's family moved back to Houston from New Orleans in 1962 I had visited him there and seen him as Puck in his 8th grade play, Midsummer Nights Dream, looking like just about the only kid up there who knew what he was doing.

We didn't know each other much in high school but, when we would see each other at family gatherings, we would talk to each other about music, leaving unsaid how horrid family gatherings are as being so obvious as not to require discussion. We both listened to the radio constantly and had strong opinions we could exchange on rock & roll, rhythm & blues, even jazz. Also he was on the famous and feared Jesuit High debate team; when I tried debating for my high school during senior year I remember seeing him at a speech tournament impressively reciting Rudyard Kipling's Gunga Din in full, ripe Cockney accent. He was Caliban in The Tempest, his junior play; he stole the show with menacing firmness.

In the fall of 1966 we started riding to the University of St. Thomas together every morning. Radio blasting, we'd whip down San Felipe in Paul's six-cylinder green three-on-the-floor Mustang. (He sure had wanted an eight!) We rode together every day for two years, trying to make it in time for 8AM classes, and usually riding together back home around 2PM. We would occasionally stay on campus until evening if we had play rehearsals or there was a dance or a party; but our fathers liked us home for dinner (i.e. demanded we be there) so such long days at St. Thomas were not frequent.

We liked being mistaken for brothers at the university so we could say, “No, our fathers are brothers, we're not.” I remember his being introduced to photography in the student publication darkroom by Steve LaCroix, now a Basilian priest in Canada. There is a great photo of Paul taken by Steve in the 1967 yearbook, the one the rednecks at St. Thomas subsequently burned because they said it had too many pictures and not enough words. It shows Paul in the light of the enlarger peering into where the photo was about to be. Paul has the hugest grin on his face like he has just discovered magic; as, in fact, he had. That was his very first time in a darkroom anywhere.

Paul hung out with the film folks in Mrs DeMenil's new Media Department whereas I was an unreconstructed English and History guy. Paul did do better than I in Fr. Lee's “Universal Themes in Literature” class, however. Lee credited Paul with working out the appropriateness of Odysseus' turning down the gift of immortality from a goddess. Death was too natural a part of life for Odysseus to reject it, Paul believed. Paul said Odysseus thought it right to be human and limited rather than join the gods in living forever in their arbitrary and capricious manner.

So I was with him as he was turning into a photographer and an apprentice filmmaker at St. Thomas. He also continued to act in plays, having the great good fortune to be directed by Charles Krohn. Much later Charles and Chesley's children and Paul and Janice's were high school friends. Catholic Houston isn't too big, even when you're post-Catholic. I remember Paul best as Filch the pickpocket in Brecht & Weill's Threepenny Opera in the spring of 1968. Few lines, one song, good stage presence.

Paul was relentlessly curious and conversation with him would include not only music but also acting, painting, film, photography, philosophy, literature, poetry, psychology, politics, architecture, sociology and history. We had a large circle of friends that overlapped and then larger ones that did not, with remarkably little jealousy that I recall. We weren't together all the time but more times than not we were.

Then I went off to Toronto for my last two years of college while he stayed at St. Thomas. In the summer of 1969 I first met Janice when Paul, Janice, Alice Kelley and I went in Papa's red GTO convertible to see the 4th of July fireworks at Hermann Park. We parked on the esplanade on Fannin Street and had a great view.

After college (class of 1970) we both volunteered at KPFT-FM, the Pacifica station that was being founded that summer much to the dismay of the Houston establishment. It was never clear whether the Klan twice blew up the KPFT transmitter at the order of the FBI and the Houston Police or merely with their connivance. There I saw Paul teach himself the meticulous and detailed craft of sound technician: recording, editing and overlaying taped sounds to create the ambience of real radio, which is so hideously labor-intensive that hardly anybody does it anymore.

In 1971 while I was in graduate school in Austin I came home many a weekend to join him doing the overnight Saturday night radio show on KPFT. We loved playing music that crossed periods and genres in a way that would come to be called “multiculti” but to us was based on musical principles. We would go from an Irish folk ballad to a Britten symphony to a rock & roll tune and have them tied together either by lyrics or modulations or tempo, something you could hear that told you there were similarities here you might not have noticed.

For the first half of 1972 I lived with Paul and Janice on Pinedale between Main and Montrose in a house built in the 1930s (Hollywood Spanish my father would have called the style.) We had no proof but Paul and I believed it lay on one of the parcels of real estate which our grandfather would have sold from a tent he erected every weekend way out on the edge of town almost to Rice Institute, with a flagpole in front to attract the punters, before and during the Depression. It tickled both of us to think of grandfather (whom neither of us knew because he had died when Paul was 8 months old) having seen those huge overarching trees on Pinedale when they were saplings, and that house when it was unassembled boards, brick and tile. The media center in that house consisted of an ancient, used black and white TV stacked on top of an ancient, used color TV; you could get a picture on one, and sound on the other, but not very well on either...

Everyone who knew Paul a long time, and quite a few who only met him briefly, soon discovered that forbearance did not come naturally to him. Yet over time he invested a great deal of intellect, effort and practice in callings requiring that tolerance for organic development which goes by the name of patience. Whether it was interviewing or script-writing or animation or cooking or long-distance motorcycling, he would keep banging away it at, no matter what setbacks occurred, until he got somewhere with it. I consider this persistence a triumph for one whose instinctive setting was hair-trigger.

So he built several careers out of craftsmanship and tamed part of his spirit in the process. This is not just not bad work, it is very good work and I honor it in him. His stubborn public loyalty to Janice was admirable and steadfast. He had particularly strong relations with all three of his children, special intimacies in different areas with each of them and almost a distinct language. I suspect their attitude to him was like mine to my father (and my children's to me): he was a formidable and admirable man on some levels and could infuriate you on others; and many a day you didn't know whether to shoot him or hug him.

In the last year of his life he was interviewed about the federal trial and appeal process my brother Scott underwent as a consequence of pioneering commercial broadband internet access while at Enron. Paul's narrative of the context, events and malfeasances of the Enron Task Force's prosecutorial practice is clear, logical and compelling. In all the audio documentaries he had made at KPFT-FM and in his long film career at Houston's PBS outlet KUHT-TV, Paul had always shown an ability to keep a story on point and moving ahead. His theatrical movie scripts did the same but never saw the light of day, alas. His animations showing how networks work were so powerful that one time Scott was looking at one of them on his laptop waiting for a plane to take off and a man came over from two rows away to say, “What is that? It's fascinating.” His use of imagery had, not for the first or last time, attracted a complete stranger.

But in his Enron trial analysis he is truly judicious and restrained. His explanation is clearer than the books or newspaper reporting that grew out of the Enron Broadband trials, and is worth seeing. It is at ungagged.net. The rest of the website seems to take the tack that everyone else in Enron was also unfairly targeted, but my sense is that innocence has only been established for Broadband participants and that the rest of the non-Broadband Enronistas are kind of hiding behind Scott.

I would have liked to have discussed that with Paul along with a lot else. He and I sent emails at least once a month for years, on politics, arts, jokes, and especially music. By the time he died I was probably about as deep into the blues as he was when he was 40, so I never really caught up. But we had fun listening and discussing. I have a little stack of books I had been hoarding for the last year to send to him; a book on Houston railways, with photos; a history of how Wyatt Earp came to be a legend; and a Spanish mystery novelist. And I feel blunted and incomplete that I didn't get it done in time and now will never be able to offer him gifts of the mind again, at least not in this life. Sure, it's some consolation that I at least had the intention; but not much.

Once I left Texas for good on May 5, 1972, there was never a time I returned when I did not see Paul, often staying with him and Janice especially in the decade and a half since my parents died. He made the best BBQ I have ever eaten in my life in his back yard for a party after the reunion of the Class of 1967 of the University of St Thomas during Memorial Day of 2007. (That wasn't our class but they were the actors, writers, philosophers, painters, musicians and art historians we looked up to in freshman and sophomore years and so, to some extent, were more congenial than many of our contemporaries.) Took him 24 hours to get it just right, and he did. That was the last time I saw him.

I vividly remember spending time over the years in his various offices at Channel 8, on West Alabama and then at Marquardt either reviewing scripts or looking at parts of films and animations and being asked to critique or make suggestions. It was always challenging and worthwhile to put the work in because the easy answer was almost never what he was looking for, so it called upon my resources to discern what parts of his narrative it would be most effective to prolong or accentuate. Paul always made it feel like he was pushing his best into being just a little bit better, and so maybe you could try to keep up with him. I didn't see that as arrogant or condescending in him, or even competitive; but as an invitation. If I could get a laugh or a “that's funny!” out of him for a remark, or a “that's good!” for a suggestion, it felt like our collaboration had improved us both. And that's the hardest feeling to let go of.

Paul and I both learned John Donne's famous “No man is an island” sermon in high school, though I don't know that he performed it and I do know that I didn't. It says something about if a promontory be washed away in a storm, then Europe is the less. So am I the less for Paul's transit. For forty-four years whenever I wrote something Paul was always in the back of my mind as a prominent portion of the audience I hoped to entertain. I shall have to do so not just at a distance now, not just around the curvature of the earth, but out beyond the known universe into “that bourn from which no traveler returns.” I join with all of us he left behind in saluting him.