Eulogy to Dr. Abe B. Baker.

The After dinner speech given at the American Academy of neurology on April 18^th, 1988 by Dr. Robert Joynt. (Reprinted with permission given by Dr. Joynt to Dr. William Kennedy

The other day I was walking down the street and there was Earl’s wrecker coming toward me. He had a brand-new car all tilted up behind it and there sitting in the front seat next to Earl was a fellow with a kind of funny grin on his face. It was the kind of grin you get when you’re not quite in command of the situation, especially when your brand new car is being towed behind this old tow truck of Earl’s. It seemed the kind of grin you give to your friend when they drive by and wave and you’re parked by the side of the rode with a state trooper walking around your car writing down your license plate, but maybe you’ve never been in that situation.

Well anyway I stopped by Earl’s and thought I’d talk to the stranger. You always learn a lot talking to strangers except if they’re from Chicago. Well anyway this stranger seemed a nice enough guy. When Earl said the car would take about two hours, the stranger asked Earl how much that would be and Earl kind of mumbled that he didn’t know yet. The stranger kind of blanched and we walked off together down the street.

First we stopped for a couple cool ones from the land of sky blue waters as Freddie’s Bar and Grill. I never figured out why they called it a grill because I never say a piece of food in there other than some droopy potato chips. The boys were in the back booth playing Pinochle. It takes a lot of work to play Pinochle. You just don’t throw the cards down but you got to bring them up above your head and slam them down on the table, usually accompanied by some word or other.

Well, we polished those brewskis off and walked down the street past the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. Father Emil has a great voice. Wednesday night you can hear him call out the Bingo numbers across the street. Then we went up the hill past the Crazy Cat Café. The stranger asked if he was ever going through the town could he get a good meal there. I told him that their special at night for $1.98 was just as close to heaven as you could get this side of dying. Maude and Lars Olson ran that place. Maude would give you a bowl of her special chicken soup to start and then give you a big plate of meat loaf and potatoes and then put brown gravy all over that. The potatoes were mashed and they put them on with an ice cream scooper and make a little hollow in the top so the gravy kind of nestled in there and it looked like an inactive Volcano. Then on the side they had some of them nice shiny green peas, off on a little plate they had a square of Jello, usually lime on a little piece of lettuce, and on top they take some of the carrots and grate them and sprinkle them all over there, and for dessert you’d have some of Maude’s famous bread pudding. That was all for $1.98. Last week I was in there and we had a ball. There was a new waitress and Earl and Jean Ryder came in and both ordered specials. The waitress brought them, Jean dived right in there. Earl just sat looking at that plate. Pretty soon the waitress came over and said. “Mr. Ryder, don’t you like that food.” He said, “Don’t you fret now; I’m just waiting for the teeth.” Well that was kind of the high spot of the week in Lake Waybeyond. We passed the park where the sons of Norway hold their annual contest seeing how many barrels of lake fish they can jump over in their pickups. So we walked a little further up the street and there was a big building, shiny and new. There was a bunch of cars parked in the parking lot, some as far away as from Mankato and Rochester, Minnesota. Now this is a new club. There was an older club down by the water. In that older club they had old guys sitting around in easy chairs and eating salt water taffy and pulling out their fillings, if they still had teeth enough to have filling, and I think they call themselves Neurologists. They were kind of a snooty club and they wouldn’t let just everybody in. So one of them who belonged to that club who didn’t think that was right came over here to this land right here. And it wasn’t very good land and he said he was going to build a new club and let just about everybody in. So he got a bunch of his friends and they started to build this club. Well some of the guys came over from the old club and just stood there and they’d hoot and holler and say you can’t build a club here. The ground isn’t firm enough those bricks will sink down. But this guy, and he wasn’t very big, just kind of a little guy, just nodded and he kept on. He and a few of his friends, guys named Russ, Ady, couple of Joes, Frank and some others all work hard and sometimes they argued, but mostly they laughed, and brick by brick they started to build this little club. At first it was pretty small, and you could see this little guy out there at night hauling bricks back and forth, kind of hunched over, putting one brick on top of the other. It got bigger and bigger. Now you can see it is a great big club. Used to walk by there and some of these guys who were these Neurologists would run out and talk to you and hit you with a little hammer and give you advice and go back in. Most of them still do that, but some of them run out now and they have big machines. They don’t say anything they just hook you up to those big machines. One day one of those guys was working away with me and I said what you are doing. He said well I’m evoking potentials. I said “Well don’t you want to talk to me” and he said “No I just want to evoke your potentials.” I said what’s that, and he said, “Wells that’s measuring your electricity.” Well, I told him if you want to measure electricity, you ought to go down to the Crazy cat Café early in the morning when Earl from the car repair shop, and George and Bill Johnson from the Chevrolet dealer who sells all their cars to the Lutherans and Tom O’Connor from the Ford shop who sells all his Fords to the Catholics, and a couple of the other boys sit around having coffee early in the morning. They’re all waiting for Widow Svenson who works in there to lean over and empty the garbage and I tell you when she leans over, there’s electricity in the air. One famous day two years ago, July 12, she had to take the garbage out three times. We thought we were going to have to take Earl to the hospital. She could cause a cardiac arrest in a moose. Well anyway, the stranger and I went inside the big building and there were a lot of guys in button down collars. They were all carrying portfolios- A lot with their name son them- Funny, six or seven were from the Cassini Family. Some of them were looking at these machines out in the courtyard there. It looked like a sale at Radio Shack to me, and there were these salesmen as far away as Des Moines, Iowa there. These machines must be able to measure just about anything. I wonder how some of these poor Neurologist guys could work if there were a power failure. Then we went along and some guys were talking and they talked pretty good sense. A few of them seemed to kind of ramble on and this stranger leaned over to me and he said the only law of science that one guy didn’t break was that of gravity. You notice he didn’t float away while he was talking. There was also a statue there of the “Unknown Neurologist”- and the plaque said “We don’t know who you are or what you do, but it you don’t pay your dues we’ll find you.” So anyway it was a real interesting place but I kind of noticed that people seemed kind of distracted. I asked one of the fellows and he said well you know the little guy that built this place, he died a while ago and we all kind of remember him and feel bad about it. Anyway we left and walked out. The stranger said he had to go back to Earl’s to pick up his car. I imagine Earl was really going to put it on him. That bill would probably be $17.00 or$18.00. So I turned and walked down the hill and it started to rain a little bit. I tired to look at things and it seemed like one of those foreign films I saw once in Minneapolis. The kind you know where they get a prize if the camera is way out of focus. And the day was kind of soft. Days like that all remind me of when I was a kid on Sunday afternoon and all the other kids were out playing and we had to get in the old Hudson Essex and go visit my aunt and uncle. I used to stand in that front room, look out and see the kids playing barefoot and I looked down at the shoes on my feet that were kind of tight. So I looked out that window and the wind was kind of blowing in and I was regretting my position in life but my aunt had some of these soft blue velvet drapes, and the wind kind of blew those drapes against my cheek and it felt kind of good: so I stood there with that cloth against my cheek. This was kind of the day it was today for the wind was kind of soft against your cheeks. It was hazy and I turned around and looked back at this building. I couldn’t quite see the outlines. I looked down at the end and I looked kind of hard cause I thought there was something moving down there and I could barely see what it was. There seemed to be a little guy carrying bricks. He was kind of hunched over and was piling one brink on top of the other. And I thought now that’s your imagination going wild but then I looked again and he kind of straightened up like you do when your back hurts a little bit after carrying something and he must have seen me. He smiled, raised up his arm and waved.

Well that’s the week at Lake Waybeyond where all the men are strong and all the women are beautiful and all the Neurologist are above average.