{"id":33498,"date":"2025-02-03T10:25:17","date_gmt":"2025-02-03T16:25:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=33498"},"modified":"2025-02-03T10:25:17","modified_gmt":"2025-02-03T16:25:17","slug":"about-todd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/03\/about-todd\/","title":{"rendered":"About Todd"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, a…. friend? Fellow I know? died of cancer. He was 51.<\/p>\n

Todd was a year behind me in high school, and he was pretty close with Mike<\/a> if I recall. To be honest, I knew of him more than I knew him. Was more on the jockly spectrum than I was–he was a cross-country runner and wrestler, and I was National Honor Society and writer’s group. I guess he was pretty smart, too, so they tell me, but, again, I didn’t know him in high school that much.<\/p>\n

When I was out of college, he was in a gap year between high school and the Navy, and he was in a couple of local performances, including one with the Goldenrod Showboat in St. Charles. I took my girlfriend at the time to go see the performance and the small nonspeaking part he had. I also rooked him into doing a staged reading of The Courtship of Barbara Holt<\/em><\/a> which meant that a bunch of people read the scripts to each other to a mostly empty coffee house on Sunday afternoons. One of the open mic hosts had an actors group called Stages St. Louis which did this whenever it could shanghai a play and enough actors to do it, and in my younger, energetic days, I gathered a group of my friends (plus Todd plus one Stages St. Louis actress) and even got another couple of people to come see it. Todd was a little disappointed that it was only that, but he was a trouper and made it to three of the four performances.<\/p>\n

I didn’t really hear from him for a long time after that. He went into the Navy, got into the SEAL program but did not make it completely through and became a search and rescue swimmer. After the service, he went Hollywood. We became Facebook friends sometime this century; I sent him a copy of The Courtship of Barbara Holt<\/em> when he was in Hollywood–partly because he was in it and partly because, hey, maybe he would tell his friends about it.<\/p>\n

A couple years ago, he moved back to his parents’ house in Missouri, up in Jefferson County, and he asked me to call him. I spoke with him a couple of times over the phone, hoping to become, I dunno, friends<\/em>, but….<\/p>\n

Ultimately, he wanted me to write his biography with his stories about his time in S&R and as a stuntman in Hollywood. He told me “stories” on the phone which were basically just “I met so and so when I was bartending in L.A.” with no details. To be honest, I don’t remember many of them. You can see him, what, jump over a fence as Steven Van Zant’s stunt double in some film (the one where Van Zant climbs over a fence). <\/p>\n

So I set up a Google doc and a process where he could start telling\/writing his stories about his tae kwon do classes and his military stories and his Hollywood stories. I made a number of sections and a couple of prompts, and I hoped he’d start telling\/typing those stories and that I would maybe ask questions based on some of them to flesh them out and then eventually organize them into an autobiography. But he didn’t touch hit, although he started posting on Facebook that the story of his life was being written. I think he wanted me to interview him a couple of times with a steno pad and turn that into a book.<\/p>\n

After some time, when he hadn’t even looked at the framework I set up, so I told him that I could put him in touch with a couple of former journalists who might better be what he was looking for via text, and our contact fell off after that.<\/p>\n

He was sick the whole time, of course, although he never mentioned it.<\/p>\n

He was a nice guy, and I’m sorry we couldn’t find a way to work together on his book. I’m also sorry that I did not get to be a better friend, but he seemed to be looking more for something from me than to be my friend. Unfortunately, I feel that way about a lot of people whom I eventually try to become better friends with.<\/p>\n

His death has left me shaken for the whole weekend just because of my remorse–couldn’t I have written his book or at least left him the illusion that I would–and a bit of anger that that’s all the good I was to him. And guilt at making it all about me.<\/p>\n

Whatever the lesson is to be learned here, I will continue to not learn it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, a…. friend? Fellow I know? died of cancer. He was 51. Todd was a year behind me in high school, and he was pretty close with Mike if I recall. To be honest, I knew of him more than I knew him. Was more on the jockly spectrum than I was–he was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33498"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33499,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33498\/revisions\/33499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}