By R.C. Harvey
If the forthcoming election pans
out in the way it portends to with regard to your correspondent, I’ll be trying
to fill gumboots too large for even my ego—namely, those of one Virginius
Cullum Rogers.
I might be able to add and subtract
and come up with the same unvarying results as our retiring (but scarcely
bashful) Secretary-Treasurer, but his numbers always had more flair than mere
math.
I might, given a sharp enough
pencil, be able to take notes and write up minutes eventually, but I’ll never
be able to deliver a pedestrian truth with the same ponderous pontification
Cullum can muster for the most mundane of utterances—punctuating said
utterances with loftily raised eyebrow and widened orb, both of which bespeak a
comedically irritated disbelief as well as astonishment that anyone could
actually countenance what he was saying.
Would that I could.
Think of the continents I could
conquer.
This is, after all, the gentleman
who once practically put the entire Association membership on the floor
laughing as he read off the tally from an unpaid bar tab from the previous
evening. He is frequently able — and just as often called upon — to regale an
audience with a historic tidbit or a salient quote without consulting his
notes, and his 12-year tenure as Secretary-Treasurer is an AAEC record (a fact
which I had to go to Cullum himself to confirm, as no one seems to remember a
time when he didn’t hold the post.)
That would be enough for us to
rejoice in his honor and memory. But there’s more.
No one will match his mastery of
the history of our medium and of our club. No one can pluck from the shadows of
the ancient past such plums as both entertain and inform our derelict
modernity. And like everything he has done—from reading minutes to summarizing
our lack of financial status—Cullum so obviously found pleasure in it, in the
sheer verbal dexterity of it all.
Fortunately
for us, he’ll still be in the audience: even if he’s not in command at the head
table, he’ll be in command at the back of the room. And we’ll delight in it, as
always.
