You'll hear and see plenty about Jack Kemp the quarterback and Jack Kemp the politician today. You'll see him called all sorts of things by fans and foes alike. My favorite description of him was his own: he liked to call himself "a bleeding heart conservative."
I can testify to that. When I was 16, I was a scared and unwilling waterboy for the Buffalo Bills. I can't say I knew or understood the man back then. I was 16. Inept. I couldn't pour water out of a shoe if the directions were printed on the heel. But I knew a friendly, supportive voice when I heard one, a voice that bothered to take me even more seriously than I took myself.
Kemp and I both got our jobs through my father, Jack Horrigan. As a sportswriter for The Buffalo Evening News in the early '60s, Dad had been instrumental in seeing that Kemp was picked up off waivers from the San Diego Chargers. A few years later, as the Bills' pr guy, Dad appointed me, in an act of benign nepotism, training camp waterboy for the team.
A cramped, makeshift locker room during a typically humid Buffalo summer is no place for political discourse -- for discourse of any sort. But there was Jack Kemp, peeling off his socks and expostulating about the world outside the locker room, a world that was as mysterious to me as it was uninteresting to most of Kemp's fellow jocks.
I remember him talking about having campaigned in the off-season in California for Ronald Reagan, a man I knew mostly as the fill-in for The Old Ranger, who hosted the TV show "Death Valley Days."
I didn't get it. But that didn't stop Kemp from sometimes talking to me in the same serious tone of voice as he used when arguing with safety George Saimes, who had a stall near his and was the only other player in the room who seemed the least bit interested in Kemp's political theories.
And so I listened attentivelywhenever he spoke, which was often. He was always cheerful in his declarations, never lost his temper in an argument. I don't remember the substance of any of the things he said. He spoke a lot about Reagan. He quizzed me about how I felt about the war and the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, questions to which I could only shrug my shoulders. Though I was too naive to understand at the time, I think Kemp was trying to save me from what he saw as the ravages of the radical student left.
In this effort, he was wildly unsuccessful.
Looking back on it, I wish everything could have stayed as simple and mysterious and confusing as things then. It was more than 40 years ago and it was, by my lights, the summer before the fall -- before American troop escalations in Vietnam and the assassinations and the riots and the demonstrations and the misunderstandings between fathers and sons, between people and their government.
His political triumphs and failures are for others to assess. This is all I want to say just now: Jack Kemp was man enough to reach out to a scared, skinny kid and treat him like a grown-up. Said another way, Jack Kemp's heart bled a little for me back when I needed it, and I'm forever grateful.
Kemp and I both got our jobs through my father, Jack Horrigan. As a sportswriter for The Buffalo Evening News in the early '60s, Dad had been instrumental in seeing that Kemp was picked up off waivers from the San Diego Chargers. A few years later, as the Bills' pr guy, Dad appointed me, in an act of benign nepotism, training camp waterboy for the team.
A cramped, makeshift locker room during a typically humid Buffalo summer is no place for political discourse -- for discourse of any sort. But there was Jack Kemp, peeling off his socks and expostulating about the world outside the locker room, a world that was as mysterious to me as it was uninteresting to most of Kemp's fellow jocks.
I remember him talking about having campaigned in the off-season in California for Ronald Reagan, a man I knew mostly as the fill-in for The Old Ranger, who hosted the TV show "Death Valley Days."
I didn't get it. But that didn't stop Kemp from sometimes talking to me in the same serious tone of voice as he used when arguing with safety George Saimes, who had a stall near his and was the only other player in the room who seemed the least bit interested in Kemp's political theories.
And so I listened attentivelywhenever he spoke, which was often. He was always cheerful in his declarations, never lost his temper in an argument. I don't remember the substance of any of the things he said. He spoke a lot about Reagan. He quizzed me about how I felt about the war and the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, questions to which I could only shrug my shoulders. Though I was too naive to understand at the time, I think Kemp was trying to save me from what he saw as the ravages of the radical student left.
In this effort, he was wildly unsuccessful.
Looking back on it, I wish everything could have stayed as simple and mysterious and confusing as things then. It was more than 40 years ago and it was, by my lights, the summer before the fall -- before American troop escalations in Vietnam and the assassinations and the riots and the demonstrations and the misunderstandings between fathers and sons, between people and their government.
His political triumphs and failures are for others to assess. This is all I want to say just now: Jack Kemp was man enough to reach out to a scared, skinny kid and treat him like a grown-up. Said another way, Jack Kemp's heart bled a little for me back when I needed it, and I'm forever grateful.
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Erica K
Patty Kane Horrigan
Alan Milner
Christine Bollerud
Christina Simon
Ann Bancroft
Salon.com
Comments
The Buffalo connection was the first thing that my wife mentioned upon hearing that he had passed on. She is originally from Buffalo and I imagine that her relatives who still live there would have been faithful readers of your father's sports articles as they have been avid sports fans of the Buffalo Bills since the team was founded in 1960.
I can understand easily how he would stand out in your memory as a good person.
Des: (don't know if I can use your real name). It's dawning on me that the qualities I saw in the locker room are exactly the ones that made him a memorable figure to others who knew him -- even ones who opposed his politics.
This always seems like a risky question but I ask it any way when I discover someone with roots in Buffalo: What parish did your wife grow up in?
James: His HUD years were damned enlightened ones, especially given the times. I think someone should take another run at that housing plan.
Libertarius: Think Kemp. Then think Limbaugh. Gingrich. Bush, ad nauseum. Enough said.
Thanks everyone
As a man, I usually didn't agree with his politics, but he always seemed to carry himself with dignity and reserve and to be someone I could disagree with politely. I'm sorry to hear of his passing.
Don: In story after story, that's what people said about him -- whatever you thought of his politics, he was ever the gentleman. That's a word that not too many people associate with the Republican Party anymore, nor even with public political discourse of any sort, and that's a shame.
Thank you both for contributing
Kemp had a lot of personal charisma. I miss moderate Republicans. Dems need them. They weren't cynics, like this Neo-Con fungus among us.