In terms of years of acquaintance rather than age, I lost my oldest friend this passing year. I first remember Clayton Davis from our fourth grade at Sacred Heart School, when after Christmas we suddenly had a teacher who for the first time wasn’t a nun, but a tall blond young woman named Miss White.
For awhile we and some other classmates escorted her on her walk home after school—the girls walking with her while the bedazzled and confused boys shambled behind, until the point where Miss White sent us back.
Once on our return walk I recall I accompanied Clayton to his house, and I met his mother and the first group of what would eventually be his nine siblings. They would be a part of my life for a long time.
His family moved away but Clayton and I became reacquainted at Greensburg Central Catholic High School. We were in the same year and we had most of the same classes. We shared the jubilation of the Pittsburgh Pirates winning the 1960 World Series with what has been called the greatest game ever.
That first fall we both volunteered for the local John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, and were rewarded a few years later by being named “ushers” so we could attend the only speech President Kennedy made in Pittsburgh—in the fall of 1962, just a week or so before the Cuban Missile Crisis.
On November 22, 1963 we heard at the same time the news of Kennedy being shot in Dallas, and then of his death. We walked together after school as we usually did that year—I lived just across the weedy fields and Clayton walked to his former home, now his grandmother’s, to await a ride back to his new home in the country.
Mostly that year it was the two of us, talking about school and the endless iteration of who was the “toughest” girl in each class.
But on that day I had prearranged to bring my debate partner home so we could work on our case. He was Michael Krempasky. We all knew that the conditions of our lives and futures had just changed dramatically. The three of us would become lifelong friends.
In the next few years we would form a kind of comedy group, starting with taped skits in the manner of That Was the Week That Was, Beyond the Fringe, Steve Allen and Stan Freberg, then adding music and performance. The folk music boom dominated our senior year, and we became a Kingston-like trio, complete with matching striped shirts: the Crosscurrents.
I started writing songs, then Clayton—a serious musician—began writing as well. Then I went off to college some 800 miles away. One day I sat in the college library writing lyrics on a yellow pad. I sent them off to Clayton, and he wrote the music. The song turned out well and so we did it again, as we would off and on for the next 20 years.
When I got home on vacations, the Crosscurrents would put these songs together, along with songs that all three of us wrote on our own. We soon discovered the magic of the Beatles together, returning from a double bill of Help! and A Hard Day’s Night to learn and instantly sing the songs in Clayton’s basement. Our own songs changed as well.
I’m writing about this in some small detail because I know now, as I sort of did then, that communicating through the making of music, through the sharing and shaping and indeed the creating of our songs, made these friendships unique in ways I can’t explain, except to say that there were many intuited levels of what we shared.
That was especially true of my relationship with Clayton, particularly as the years went on, and he pursued music professionally in a series of groups, often including some of our songs. We would play together informally, and collaborated in a public way as late as the mid-1980s. The three of us had a last hurrah at an open stage in the late 90s or perhaps early 2000s.
It wasn't all music, of course. The three of us generally had a good time together. Clayton had a quick wit, a way with a pun. Once when we were on an epic road trip in Ohio in Mike's yellow VW bug, Mike felt something on the back of his neck, like an insect bite. "Is there a red spot there?" he asked. "No," Clayton said. "It's a pigment of your imagination."
Through the years I attended both of Clayton’s weddings, and spent time with his daughter Nora when she was small. He visited me in Boston and Connecticut. He was there for the funerals of each of my parents. After I moved here to California I never returned to western PA without seeing him, though our lives diverged and we talked less.
More than a year ago, he was found unconscious on his kitchen floor in Pittsburgh, with a stroke or something like it. He was unconscious for weeks in the hospital, so long that the puzzled doctors were losing hope. Then one day his son Ian said something that made him laugh. Slowly he came back to full consciousness.
He had other episodes and never fully recovered, but eventually he was well enough to leave the rehab facility and live happily with Ian and Ian’s wife Stephanie in Pittsburgh, where Clayton was also reunited with his beloved dog Nelson. His daughter Nora and sister Mary were frequent visitors. In September he faded and then slipped away.
Mike, who lives in central PA, visited him several times, but I was always 3000 miles away. I tried to communicate with him in the way we used to—through music. I sent him several mixes of songs from our past (including the Brubeck jazz we first listened to early in high school) plus some of our own songs we recorded in one basement or another over the years, and once in a real studio.
I also wrote to him a few times. I learned he was having memory problems, and it seemed he was clearer on the far past, and sometimes felt he was living in it. So in my last letter I recounted some of the same memories from our early days as I have here—the Kennedy experiences in high school, and fourth grade with Miss White.
His sister Mary told me she’d read him that letter, and he responded: “Miss White! She was hot!”
A more complete obituary appears here. May he rest in peace. He lives on in those he left behind, and in the music.
