Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

By The Erudite Redneck

It's about 12:30 p.m. At 1 p.m., an old friend of mine will be memorialized at an Episcopal church in Houston, too far away for me to attend. The widow is the only person I would know at the service. I did send a funeral spray.

His name was Knott -- his last name anyway, which I don't mind divulging, although there is no need to reveal his full name here. I hadn't seen him but one time in 15 years, a few years ago when he and his wife and their toddlers came through -- out of their way, in fact -- on a trip up here to see his parents.

He died last Friday of complications from pancreatitus, less than 48 hours after stomach pains bad enough to send him to the emergency room. He was a few years older than me. I'm guessing he was 44 to 46.

Back at Oklahoma State, we were sort of running buddies -- although the nature of our friendship was not unlike the kinds of relationships I've had with many girls and women: Shaky, argumentative, mutually self-destructive.

But I liked the guy, and I will miss him.

He was a student journalist when I was a student journalist, then he was a working journalist for a while, before it became clear that he really was not cut out for the job. It was apparent in college, too, but hey -- it was college.

I was his editor when he was the lead reporter on a double homicide. A teen offed her parents in cold blood. He covered the story from the arrest to the beginnings of a trial, when she confessed. He was present in the courtroom.

He MISSED THE CONFESSION. The only reason we got it before deadline was because it was the lead story on the campus radio station, which had a reporter sitting next to Knott in the courtroom.

"What the hell were you doing?" I asked. "Looking at (Beautiful Woman Attorney's) legs," he replied, as if that let him him off the hook. Which it did, because it was college and he was who he was.

One night when I was in charge of laying out the front page of the college paper, I designed the page around a hole -- a blank space -- left for the start of a nothing story he was supposed to be working on all day.

Deadline loomed. He finally turned his story in. I was the copy editor as well as the layout editor. I whipped through his story, slicing and dicing and chopping and rearranging and rewriting, as usual, and when I was done, there wasn't enough left to fill the space on 1A, let alone the jump page!

Made me nuts. It was feature story! On the autumnal equinox! Nothing! He quoted "a geography professor who did not want to be named"! I dang near had a stroke. Had to tear up the page and start over.

Another time, in a story over a controversial asbestos removal project in the Student Union, he quoted a graduate student, which was a no-no. Grad students are NOT experts, not even for a college paper. I wanted to kill him.

Dressed him down over it, in fact, at the entry of the Student Union, in front a jillion students, God and everybody -- and that is precisely when we started to become friends, for some reason.

After we became friends, we started working together more, rather than him just turning in a story and me ripping it to shreds. Working with him made me the editor I am today -- and I'm a pretty good one. Not just with the copy editing, but with working with reporters, as we say, "on the front end" of stories.

I owe it to Knott.

With a name like that, I told him one day, "You should have a column! Think of the names for it!"

Hunting column: Knott By a Long Shot.

General column: Knott Again, or Knott Today.

Advice column: Knott My Problem.

You get the idea. It was a running joke for 20-plus years.

During the 1988 elections, he and I split a fifth of Old Granddad and tried to call Ted Koppel one night. It was about the first time the media reported on itself and its role in electing a president, and Koppel was taking calls!

We made it through about five layers of telephone screeners until some assistant producer realized we just a couple s---faced college kids from Oklahoma.

He used to always "forget" where he'd parked his pickup, after he'd had a few. As he was harmless, and knew not to drive, cops often drove him around to look for his wheels the morning after.

He regularly broke into a chapel on campus, always sober, to play the piano. The cops got to where they treated him like Otis on the Andy Griffith Show: Just calmly led him out of the chapel and scolded him.

During a huge street party the summer I was editor of the student paper, 12 of my staff got busted for public drunkenness, loaded into a paddy wagon and hauled to jail. He was not among them.

He got a great picture of some of them sitting in the back of the paddy wagon, taking just as the back doors were opened at the jail. That was my boy. He knew how to drink -- but more importantly, he knew when not to -- when "Knott" to.

After college, I headed for Texas, and he headed to a stirng of short-term newspaper jobs. The last one, I think, was at the paper I was working at in Texas. He was hired on my personal recommendation, despite my doubts, but he was my friend.

He got fired after not too long for accidentally swapping the attribution on controversial comments from a prominent local accountant with controversial comments from a prominent local attorney, in a controversial story about a suspicious fire at a historic downtown watering hole where all the downtown movers and shakers headed after work.

He and Captain Morgan had it out and then he moved on, eventually to Houston, where he became a paralegal.

E-mail, as it has done for so many people, allowed us to maintain our friendship in a way we couldn't have otherwise. Just last week, he e-mailed and said I should write a blog in the form of a lawsuit against God -- over Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita.

He recalled that I had written a newspaper column in the form of a lawsuit against God during a drought in the mid-1990s in Texas. He remembered that.

The headline has couple of meaning. "Knott another one" means he was unique. And it also is my personal exclamation: "Knott another one!" As in a friend dying. This makes three in just a few years.

I remember him today, and always. It's 1 p.m. To (my friend) Knott.

END