Terry Mosher

bigmosher@msn.com

   So many questions, but so little time

   It’s a conflicted time for me. I have so many issues racing through my mind. It’s almost like thousands of movies blended all together and being shown all in one piece. It’s as difficult as you might imagine making sense of it all.
   Why is it, for example, I feel there’s a rightward shift in our country? Is it because, as I believe, that President Obama is a highly intelligent man not prone to make quick decisions and that makes it appear he is not a capable leader?
   Then, he puts health care as his number one priority and is not tackling the problems that everybody in America is talking about: the lack of jobs, the continuing crash of the housing market, and the poor economy.
    It amused me to watch Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat go to a Republican in a heavily Democratic state, until I realize that stunning upset signifies the shift to the right that frightens me.
   Changes are always continuing and whatever action we have in politics there is always an opposite reaction waiting around the corner to shift the pendulum.
   But that’s life.
   And death.
   As for death, we have had that recently among athletes and a coach. Matt Ryan and Duane Piercy of South Kitsap, and Sam Luke at North Kitsap. Then former Central Kitsap football and wrestling coach Art Ellis loses his 22-month battle with pancreatic cancer.
   My thought has always been that the good die young and guys like me hang around and hang around.
   So it goes.
   Then we have guys out there like Osama bin Laden who would love to kill as many of us – all of us really – and we send all the equipment of modern warfare and all the human resources we can muster to find him and he still is out there plotting to kill. What is wrong with this picture?
    All the weapons that exist are not powerful enough to stop a person who purposely intends to die and take as many others with him as possible? The fallacy of this war in Afghanistan is that no matter how much destruction we can muster with our modern weapons, we can’t stop some idiot from blowing himself up along with everybody else.
   How does our modern army, with help from Western allies, stop infiltration of those idiots from Pakistan when the border between it and Afghanistan is 1,600 miles?
   C’mon, give me a break.
   We should not be in Afghanistan. Leave it to the idiots. Leave it to the drug lords. Leave it to Osama bin Laden.
   Just leave it.
   What we should worry about, though, is Pakistan.
   Pakistan has nuclear bombs to blow up big parts of the world and cause nuclear fallout that would destroy much more. I don’t have any idea of how to stop the bin Laden idiot and his idiot followers from capturing that country and those bombs. Maybe we should wait for him to take over and then blow the country out of the water.
   I feel better already. It’s good to get things off your mind. Mine was rattled late last night when I heard a friend of the family lost her brother when he got into a dispute with his wife, said he was going to spend a couple days at his folks’ home, and then drove off. They found him several hours later, dead in his car alongside the highway. Apparently he shot himself.
   Not good.
   Which reminds me I have finally reached a satisfactory conclusion in my mind over the death of legendary Bremerton basketball coach Ken Wills. It was in November of 1962 that Wills killed himself with a single shot from a pistol he just had purchased. The theories why such a popular and good coach would kill himself would fill a large container. Nobody will ever know for sure no matter what, but after many years of thinking about it and asking questions, I’ve arrived at the answer that eases my mind.
   The solution for me came several weeks ago when I talked to a person who does not want to be identified who spoke to Wills the day after it was announced he would be the next basketball coach at Olympic College.
    Wills did not want the OC job. Wills did not want to leave his position at Bremerton. He was forced to apply for the OC job and was given it over three other applicants.
   The family of the person I talked to was close to Wills. After school on Friday – the day after the announcement by Bremerton School Superintendent Armin Jahr – Wills stopped by this person’s house. He was distraught. This person had never seen Wills this troubled. He said that he wasn’t wanted at Bremerton (West High School) and was not wanted at OC (players there wanted Phil Pesco’s assistant to be the coach) and he was crushed, this person said.
   Here’s a man who was on top of the world when it comes to high school coaching in this state. He would eventually be inducted into the state basketball coaches hall of fame, is in the Kitsap Hall of Fame, and recently the school district put his name on the gym floor at the high school.
    In his mind, he had everything he wanted. But because he had become too powerful – his basketball budget was three times the football budget at West – some educators at West were jealous and just plain did not like him. When Pesco died of a heart attack earlier that month, that gave those who did not like him an out – they could push to force him out.
    It worked.
   Then Wills discovered he was not wanted at OC. He didn’t want to be there, either, but the double-whammy was just too much on him. He was used to being loved.
   It’s been difficult for me to accept that somebody would kill himself or herself over a job not wanted. But this was an exception.
    Wills was a perfectionist who just could not accept something like this happening to him. So he did what he did, and now I accept it just as that and nothing more.
   But there now is another unanswered question.
   The problem is that Wills and his wife Ta normally would have lunch together at their house. On this particular day, she did not go home for lunch. She told me before she died that the reason she didn’t go was because the weather was bad and friends at the office talked her out of walking from her downtown office across the Manette Bridge to her home. Instead she had lunch with them.
   Wills had often told Ta that if he ever did anything to embarrass her he would shoot himself. She told me that she told him if he ever thought of doing such a thing that she wanted to be there with him.
   The person I talked to about this raised an important question. Wills talked to his person on a Friday so he had all weekend to discuss this with Ta, who had to realize his shaky mental state. And if he threatened in those conversations to shoot himself, then Ta had the chance to either talk him out of it or to tell him she wanted to be there with him, presumably to then talk him out of it.
   “So she had to know,” this person told me.
    The weather that day – I looked it up – was windy and rainy. This person pointed out Ta had walked home under similar weather conditions all the time. In fact, Ta walked across the Manette Bridge almost every day for the rest of her life, sometimes in weather conditions that were even worse.
   On this fatal day though, she didn’t.
    Why?
   “Maybe she was afraid he would harm her,” this person said.
   Maybe.
   But if I’m looking to write a novel or a script for a movie, I could think of at least one other motive. I’ll let you think that one through.
   Have a great month.
   You are loved.