Well, the big one was definitely Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, on a couple of occasions. The first time was as an undergraduate, when he spent several days on campus at Hendrix College doing readings, lectures, etc. He spent a couple of days with our creative writing workshop, so I was able to talk in a small group setting with him as well as hearing him read. A few years later, he delivered the first Richard Ellman Memorial Lectures at Emory University. I had dropped out of grad school at Emory by then, but was still friendly with a lot of the other grad students, and the readings and such were public events. I showed up for the first public event and got into a conversation with him afterward. He remembered me and his visit to Hendrix and invited me to a couple of other parties being given for him, including one hosted by a professor who didn’t much care for me, which gave me a special sense of having put one over. Great party (I may not have liked the host, but he did throw good parties), including a roast pig, a champagne fountain spewing margaritas, a mariachi band, etc., and a surprising number of opportunities for casual conversation with Heaney, Jon Stallworthy, and Michael A. Harper, who showed up later in the evening fresh from a reading at Agnes Scott College. Seamus Heaney is the one person I can think of I’d want to be if I had to be someone else: brilliant, one of the best poets in the English language in the last half-century, and an extremely kind, friendly, and humane man.
Second, then-Governor Bill Clinton, on the steps up to the governor’s office in the Arkansas State Capitol in 1980. I was with a church youth group and we bumped into him, alone, walking up the steps. He stopped and spent several minutes shaking hands and talking. While his administration as president has been profound disappointment to me almost since his taking office, as a sixteen-year-old at the time I admired him (and I still believe that Arkansas would be a far worse place even than it is if he hadn’t been governor for twelve of the fourteen years from 1978 to 1992).
The third probably won’t mean much to anyone else, but it was a significant event for me at the time, and makes a decent story. On my college radio show, I frequently played tracks from the first Swimming Pool Qs album Off the Deep End. After college, I moved to Atlanta, and sometime later ended up working as a proofreader for an advertising agency. The agency also owned a design firm, and one of the staff designers was Swimming Pool Qs’ keyboardist and vocalist Anne Richmond Boston. I noticed her name on the phone list right away, but since the design firm was three floors down from the agency office, I didn’t have a chance to bump into her for a while. Finally, it happened that the design firm needed a large brochure proofed, so I went down, picked it up and reviewed it. It had been through lots of copy revisions by this point, as well as a couple of redesigns, so that the the sheaf of 11x17 paper I had to take back down was fairly substantial. As I walked into the elevator area of the lobby, I noticed that one of the elevators was starting to close. I dashed over, and relying on my experience with other elevators (I was still new at this job, and hence to this building), I stuck the brochure into the rapidly closing elevator doors, expecting the physical resistance to cause the doors to re-open. However, these doors had only a light sensor, positioned about one third of the way up. My bundle of papers was inserted almost halfway up, and failed to break the light beam, with the result that both the inner and outer set of doors closed on the papers. I’d just had time to digest this fact when the elevator car began to move downward, taking my bundle with it. I managed to hold onto the papers tightly enough that while they did slip downward almost to the ground, they eventually pulled free of the elevator car itself. One small victory, at least, but I was still left hunched over, clinging to the bundle of papers, now just above the level of the floor, so that I must have made a somewhat curious spectacle for Anne Richmond Boston as she rounded the corner and came over to press the down button for the elevator. I recognized her immediately, and realized that whatever I might say would inevitably be colored by her first impression of me. I did manage to express an appreciation for her work as we rode down together after the elevator doors finally released the brochure, but I don’t think I ever ran into her again that she didn’t have a sort of smirk on her face.
“Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.” –Satchel Paige
