Greg Lakebrink is perhaps my oldest continuous friend in this world. I met him at St. Louis University in the fall of 1968. We were both in the honors program there, as freshmen. Later we were both involved with publishing a kind of bohemian newspaper called The Aardwolf. Greg was essentially the art director. He also contributed the name of the piece. Later on, after I had moved to Springfield in 1972 and then split with my wife, Becky McGovern, and ended up living with Pat on Scarritt Street in 1974, Greg called me up from Iowa City where he had just quit the Graduate Painting Program at U. of Iowa, three hours short of his MFA, and asked if he could come look for work in Springfield.
Greg then lived at Scarritt until 1977, when he moved out and took an apartment in the Iles House (the oldest house in Springfield) when it was down on South Fifth Street. They moved it over to Seventh Street a few years ago. Greg lived in a large one room on the top floor.
The entire time I have known Greg he has painted, mainly water colors, but many oils. In my living room right now there are three of Greg's oils, one of my son when he was six (1976), one of me painted in 1981 that I didn't even know about that he gave to Kimb when we moved away in 1999, and a third one that I seem to have always had, known as The Red Lady, painted in 1969. There are many photos that have the Red Lady in the background. The irony is that the figure is actually a guy wearing a red apron.
Anyway, Greg eventually married a beautiful strange woman, Evan Kurrasch, who was taller than him, and looked like Vanessa Redgrave. She had, however, been in a camp stove accident and had much scarring over her body. I always thought that Greg really liked that, as an artist it appealed to him visually. In any case, he was married to Evan for five or six years, but she was very highly sexed, and he was not. I performed the marriage ceremony for them, in the nature preserve south of Springfield. My one marriage and it failed, ultimately.
Evan is married to someone elsenow. And Greg eventually married this funny, sweet woman, Sybil, who is also a visual artist. They live over on Fayette, near Washington Park, in a charming little Victorian place. Greg and Evan had a house on that street right across from the med school parking lot down at the end of Bond there. The med school scarfed it up and he had to move to Fayette somewhere along there. He had this really long backyard that stuck out behind houses on Bond and he and Evan let the grass grow like the tall grass prairie. Eventually the city made them cut it all down. They were always big Sierra Club people. Greg did the Sierra Club newsletter for many years. Also the Springfield Bicycle Club newsletter. Greg is to this day one of the true liberals I know. He's the kind of guy who's been giving money to NOW and the abortion rights people for many years now. He's a true person, if you know what I mean. No lies, no dissembling. Not much tact, either.
I used to always call on Greg when I needed artwork for a project. He did many drawings for The Writers BarBQ. He did most of the art in The Village Magazine 1979, for the Vachel Lindsay centennial. For that one, it was a rush job, he required me to be a Cardinals fan for a year. I was always a big Cubs fan. Greg grew up in St. Anne, the suburb of St. Louis out by the airport. He went to St. Louis University High School, the Jesuit high school. I went to the Jesuit high school in Wichita, Chaplain Kapaun Memorial High School, and had many teachers who had gone to SLU High and to SLU. And eventually I went to St. Louis University. My sister's Phd in literature is from SLU.
As a matter of fact, my sister going to St. Louis U. for grad school is how I got involved in this whole thing. My sister, Kathy, was great friends with Sandy and John Knoll in St. Louis. She and Sandy shared an office both at the grad lit dept. at SLU and then at Forest Park Community College. Then Sandy and John moved to Springfield. so John could run the Communications Department at Sangamon State University. Larry Smith was John's colleague there, and the four of them, the Smiths and the Knolls, became friends and eventually lived across the street from each other.
That fact facilitated the affair that Pat had with John for the two years before I moved to Springfield with my wife, Becky McGovern, in January of 1972. I met Jane Morrel in the fall of 72 when Knoepfle had his first poetry seminar. I had taken Knoepfle's novel writing class at St. Louis university, where he was the poet in residence. John Knoll had gotten him to move to SSU. (Knoll also brought Norman Hinton to Springfield. Norman was on my sister's Phd board.) Anyway, Sandy Martin and Pat were best friends, so my relationship with Pat Smith comes from my sister's friendship with the Knolls in St. Louis. Sandy's brother was a priest, Harry Martin, and Harry performed my first marriage to Becky McGovern in February of 1970. We were pregnant, of course. Stupid catholic kids. Harry also performed the funeral service for my friends' Nora and Jack's four month old baby, Emil Zapata Jones two years later. We called him Harry the Pot Smoking Priest. He was a good guy and was a protege of Knoepfle's in St. Louis.
Complex histories of a personal nature. I do know where most of these people are today. I saw Greg about four years ago in Springfield. He and his wife both have fairly serious health problems. I know he is working somewhere, but I don't know where.
I have a collection of his water colors. He came to writing group for many, many years. Of course he lived at Scarritt when the first group was meeting there. Greg has also come to pretty much every group I had in Springfield. He would come and sit in the corner and paint people and small scenes. So there are perhaps a couple of hundred of these watercolors that catalog the many years of my writing groups. And many of these watercolors are so beautiful. He really is a great artist.
Hey, you know, I love Greg. He's a really weird guy. He has what is called flatness of effect and often he seems removed, but at heart he has a beautiful passionate soul. I have a little book of his poems on my shelf that I still pull out from time to time and read through. He has always been a true friend to me. He has put me up when I was thrown out, he has sheltered me when Bill Panichi beat me up. He has given me money when I needed to get back to Springfield from Wichita in 1983.
May he live in the Lady's mercy and know Her great love.
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