Living Legends
Jeff Bowden
Largemouth
Bass I went to have
a quick lunch with Dick Bass. Little did I know he’s the most
talkative man in town.the adventurer:
|
Dick Bass rests a minute at his sprawling ranch
near Waco—a place he’d love to tell you about sometime.
| Years ago, at a
party, I heard a Dick Bass story. Bass, who is no relation to
the Basses of Fort Worth, is a Dallas oilman, adventurer, and
developer of the Snowbird Ski Resort in Utah. In the story,
Bass gets on a transcontinental flight. As he sits down in
first-class, his seatmate recognizes him.
“I just read your book, Seven
Summits,” the plain-looking man gushes. “I loved it.” An
unlikely flatlander, Dick Bass was the first person to climb
the tallest mountain on each of the seven continents. He
cooked up the feat with the late Frank Wells, the former
president of Walt Disney Productions.
Bass proceeds to hypnotize his
admirer for the next three hours. He talks him up Mount
McKinley, up Aconcagua in South America, and up Mount Vinson
in Antarctica, where Bass’ group was only the third party in
history to climb the most remote of the seven summits. Bass
leads the rapt passenger up Elbrus in Europe and Kilimanjaro
in Africa. They hike to the top of Kosciusko in Australia.
Eventually Bass has the man teetering on a knife-edged ridge
on Mount Everest at very nearly the same altitude as the
airliner.
During the course of the flight, Bass
tells tales of other adventures: a climb of the Matterhorn
with his children, a swim across the Hellespont, a retracing
of Phidippides’ run from Marathon to Athens that inspires the
modern marathon.
At the point at which the captain
informs the passengers to raise tray tables and seatbacks,
Bass abruptly stops talking. “I just realized,” he says,
horrified. “I’ve been talking about myself the entire flight.
I haven’t asked anything about you.” Surely the man had a
favorite outdoor story. Perhaps a bear carrying off an ice
chest. “I haven’t even asked your name,” Bass says.
“Oh, that’s okay,” responds his
good-natured companion, offering his hand. “I’m Neil
Armstrong.”
I started
calling Bass because I had an idea to climb the seven summits
of Dallas with him. No one has ever climbed them all, not the
least of which is because there aren’t seven summits in
Dallas, but I thought we’d walk up Flagpole Hill and the
stairs of BankAmerica Tower together. Some friends were
determined to see us climb the new bleachers at SMU. I thought
we’d share a few laughs and Bass would tell me about his life.
I’m here to report that Dick Bass needs no such scheme to
loosen up. But you do have to track him down—and that’s not
easy.
Years ago, Bass purchased a
first-class air pass from American Airlines entitling him and
a companion to unlimited travel anywhere the company flies.
For life. Consequently, it’s nothing for Bass to spend a week
in Spain followed by a week in China. When I finally caught
him at his house in University Park, Lorraine Fry answered.
Lorraine is Bass’ “Girl Friday,” a title he uses but she does
not. “He’s right here,” she said. “Do you want to talk to
him?”
Lorraine’s hand covered the receiver.
She knew what I wanted. I’d been calling for months. “Hello,
Jeff,” Bass boomed. “Look, I don’t know when we can get
together. I’m supposed to be down at the ranch today, and I’m
going out of town tomorrow.” Bass has a 6,000-acre place
straddling the Bosque River near Waco. He briefly considered
hauling me off to the ranch. During the pause, I repeat the
Neil Armstrong story to him. He laughs out loud. “Herbert
Hunt’s been telling people that story for years,” Bass said.
“I’ve heard it all over the world. He improves on it every
time he tells it. Not long ago I told him, ‘Dammit, Herbert,
that’s my story. I know what really happened. I knew exactly
who he was. I was on the plane.’”
The trip to the ranch was
postponed. “Why don’t we get a quick bite to eat?” he said.
“Meet me over at my house at noon and we’ll run and get
something.”
When I got to Bass’ house he greeted
me dressed for South Florida: golf shirt, khakis, Teva
sandals. We chatted for a few minutes and then moved into the
study to watch a video made for him for his 70th birthday by
son-in-law Jim Moroney. The video featured birthday jibes from
Martha Stewart, Ray Romano, and Dale Hansen. Romano said
something about having twins himself (Bass has grown twin
daughters) and that Bass should quit using them as an excuse
to talk twice as much. Before we left, we watched a
computer-animated video of a planned expansion at Snowbird.
Lorraine and Alice Bass, Dick’s wife,
whom he calls “Sweet Alice from Dallas,” and I piled into a
new Dodge Durango. His children gave him the Durango to go
along with the video. Apparently it came with a Snowbird
bumper sticker. “What do you like?” he asked me. “Mexican
food? A sandwich?”
We settled on a seafood place in
Snider Plaza, near SMU. Bass dropped us off at the curb and
pulled around to park. As soon as he walked into the
restaurant, he made his way, not to our table, but to the
table of a Chinese grad student eating alone. It turns out
that she lives in a house he owns nearby. When she came to
Dallas, she spoke halting English. I felt sorry for her.
Learning English, even a little of it, from Dick Bass must
have been like learning to drive in a rocketcar.
When Bass finally sat down at our
table, the conversation started in earnest. Between oysters on
the half shell and crab cake sandwiches, he picked up his life
story in elementary school, in the classroom of Miss Coleman,
a big woman who never married. “She made poetry and literature
come so alive, that even the rough-and-tumble boys loved it,”
Bass said. She taught him that poetry is the distilled essence
of feeling and thought. “I like rhyme and meter,” he told me
between swigs of iced tea. “It makes poetry easier to
remember.” Throughout our day together, Bass repeated
aphorisms: “If you never stop—you can’t get stuck,” and “It’s
good to have a lot of problems—they can’t get out of
proportion.” He recited poetry, too. Bass is partial to
Rudyard Kipling and Robert Service. “Can I recite one of
Service’s poems to you?” he asked. Whereupon he launched into
a performance of “The Men that Don’t Fit In.”
I kept my eye on Sweet Alice
from Dallas. She sometimes wears the glaze of a policeman who
has heard it all before. Bass is not unaware of her drift.
“Before we met,” he said, touching her on the elbow, “Alice
had been praying that she would meet someone who liked to talk
and travel. So she got a guy who has a lifetime air pass and
who’s called ‘Largemouth Bass’ by his friends. Remember,” he
grinned, “we don’t have to be as careful of what we ask for so
much as the amount.”
I can’t remember if any of us had
dessert, but I do remember Bass telling me of his leaving
Dallas for Yale at 16, in a lapelless sport coat. When he
reached New Haven, he fell under the spell of Professor
Hillis. “I learned the first day of Professor Hillis’
literature class that humor is the juxtaposition of
incongruous elements.” Professor Hillis’ voice has proven
valuable to Bass at difficult moments, not the least of which
was on Mount Everest. “I got up Everest because of this
awareness, of seeing the incongruity. On summit day I was with
David Breashears. We were high, walking along a ridge, unroped
to each other.”
Their situation was truly perilous.
“If we slipped off one side, it was 7,000 feet down to Camp
3,” Bass remembered. “If we fell off the other, it was 9,000
feet down to Tibet. The snow was so hard that our crampons
wouldn’t bite. I was so scared that I started
hyperventilating. I’d already gone through all my poems and
aphorisms. I was upbraiding myself for having done almost no
conditioning, for spending only 12 days above base camp, for
being 55 years old, for having a blown-out heel. And all the
sudden I started laughing like hell. At the incongruity of it
all. The laughter broke up the hyperventilation.” They made it
to the top.
Breashears, a four-time Everest
summiteer and director and expedition leader of the celebrated
IMAX film on Everest, told me, “It would be easy to think that
Dick does well at high altitude because he talks so much at
low altitude. But the truth is that he was born with a rare
gift to perform well in thin air. We weren’t clipped to some
fixed line when we climbed Everest.’”
After
lunch, we drove back to Bass’ house. For the next
three-and-a-half hours, phase two of our quick lunch together,
he and I sat in his living room. I listened mostly. By five
o’clock, we were both beginning to slump a little, him on the
couch, me in a side chair. Lorraine had long since disappeared
into the caverns of the house. Eventually Bass and I started
talking about religion. “I went on a religious retreat once,”
he told me. “A silent religious retreat.” It is impossible to
imagine for him a mountain so high or airless. “I found out
later that the others were placing bets on how long I could
go,” he said.
As he talked about the retreat, I
debated which way I would’ve bet. I started out thinking I’d
bet against him. By the time he was through, I was glad I
didn’t have the chance.
“At the retreat, the only person you
could talk to was the priest, Father Rocky Crandall. Every
night I sat outside his office on a bench. Sometimes I had to
wait until 1 a.m. to see him. In the very last session, he
gathered us in the chapel and gave the most dramatic talk. He
said that God made us because he loved us. He said that if we
appreciated that love, we would become the person that God
wanted us to be.” Bass paused, looked toward his backyard. It
is lush, private, and overhung with trees—Eden with a swimming
pool. “I do think I try,” he said.
He shouldn’t worry: It would be
impos-sible for Dick Bass to be anyone else.
A few weeks after my day with Dick
Bass, I called Herbert Hunt. In the course of our
conversation, I told him that Bass had objected to the Neil
Armstrong story. That’s okay with Hunt because he’s got more
Dick Bass stories. Hunt and Bass have been buddies ever since
they met at the Dallas Country Day School in 1937. Recently,
he and Bass met a businessman for lunch at the Tower Club to
discuss an Alaskan coal mine. Hunt’s description of the lunch
was so similar to my own with Dick Bass that I may take Hunt’s
side of the matter on Armstrong.
“It was supposed to be a quick lunch
to discuss business,” Hunt says. “It lasted two-and-a-half
hours. First of all, it takes Dick about 15 or 20 minutes to
get to the table because he’s got to say hello to everybody in
the room. When he finally sits down with us, he starts telling
this guy everything about his financial condition. The ups and
the downs. I bet he told you,” Hunt said.
He had. In and around mountain
climbing and poetry, Bass had told me about past indebtedness,
current indebtedness, about not being able to sleep at night
for almost 30 years. He told me that he once came within an
hour of losing everything he owned. But all that’s behind him
now.
“Anyway,” Hunt continued, “Dick then
points at me and starts telling the guy about my financial ups
and downs and how I was still his hero.” Although Hunt didn’t
say so, it is easy to imagine his face slowly turning the
color of stone. “So when Dick and I get up, I said to him,
‘Dick, I don’t mind if you want to tell everybody your
financial secrets, but don’t feel like you need to tell ’em
mine!’ That’s the thing about Dick Bass,” Hunt laughs. “He
talks about himself, and then he talks about you.”
Dick Bass knows that his friends
sometimes laugh at his compulsive curiosity and enthusiasm. In
a sense, his life is their tonic. “If I have played well my
part in the comedy of life,” he is often heard repeating,
“your laughter will be my applause.”
|