Anthony-

You, I believe, are among the few who will appreciate the significance of what I am about to relate to you. You have to be of a certain age, or you have to KNOW about these things... and you may qualify on both counts. In any case, here goes.

DONALD TURNUPSEED has died ! Last Thursday, the 13th, of lung cancer.

Yes, I know it is a shock. It was to me too. Sixty three years old; from Tulare, California. He was a real invisible man, a very-nearly Nowhere Man; an electrical contractor who was once involved in an automobile accident. There was nothing in his life to mark it as a normal, sometimes (except for a trip to Disneyland or the Grand Canyon) day-to-day one. A simple Central Valley kind of of existence. Lots of farms. Freezing in the winter; a furnace in the summer. He was a quiet man, known for the fact that he, in all his life, gave only one press conference. One! He didn't want to talk about it and he almost never did.

And now he's dead. As the great stainless-steel and concrete monument put up under that big, lone Fresno tree in Cholame by some Japanese fans proclaims; TOMORROW = INFINITY.

On September 30, 1955 he was driving his 1950 Ford from school in San Luis Obispo to his home in Tulare. He didn't get there that day. A mile east of Cholame on Highway 46, heading east toward Cottonwood Pass, he stopped at the three-way stop. (It's still there, the three-way stop. Nothing much ever changes in Cholame.) The highway was deserted. The land is flat and treeless and the road is arrow-straight, so there's no real reason to stop. What are the chances of someone being at the intersection? One in a million? Naw. So perhaps he never stopped? The westbound silver-gray Porsche Spyder, some say was doing 150 mph, but better evidence indicates it was within the speed limit; about 55 mph. Well, for one brief instant in his life, Donald Turnupseed was a one-in-a-million guy, and the 24-year old driver of the Porsche found out what infinity was made of. And for those of us of a certain age, we too, for a brief instant, shared that glimpse. It was the kind of thing that marks your life, that seems to change the world, the kind of thing that happens so rarely -- we would not see the likes of it again until that awful day in Dallas seven years later.

On September 30, 1955, James Dean was killed in an automobile accident near Cholame, California. Donald Turnupseed, who survived, always claimed he never saw a thing.

I don't know why that bothers me.

Bill-