Although we’ll be talking a little about Ron Tammen, this post isn’t really about him. Instead, I’ll be using my research into Tammen as a way to tell you about someone else who was important to this project but who has since moved on. It’s also a short lesson about the discovery process and how, even after someone is no longer within reach—whether they moved far away or disappeared or died—there are signs they leave behind that may be even more telling about who they were than what they said or did in front of us. This post is about the art of reading the signs to arrive at never-before-known insights about them—their hidden loves, their unvoiced yearnings, and how they secretly spent their time while they were here with us.
I’m not sure of the exact moment when it finally dawned on me that Ron Tammen had been living a secret life before he disappeared. I’d been spending hours on the phone talking to his classmates and hearing surprisingly little about him—only how nice, smart, good looking, and polite he was. That was usually after they’d gotten through telling me that he was a wrestler, Campus Owl, residence hall counselor, and member of the fraternity Delta Tau Delta. When I’d ask why they thought he was nice, very few could come up with a reason. Most admitted that they didn’t know him very well. Even his roommates from both his freshman and sophomore years had little they could offer to the character profile I was attempting to build. I was wondering how anyone could leave such a blurrily benign impression on so many people. Not a single person I’d spoken with had anything critical to say about him. By all appearances, he was the most stand-up, upright, buttoned-down, squeaky clean male ever to stroll the corridors of Fisher Hall.
Eventually, after paying attention to the signs, I figured things out. I learned that Ron Tammen spent time with his peers only occasionally on an ad hoc, goal-oriented basis, such as for a walk back to the dorms or to hitchhike to Dayton to donate blood. Otherwise, when he wasn’t in class or playing a gig with the Owls or counseling a freshman resident of Fisher Hall, he appeared to be off the grid. People in the fraternity or his dorm would say that he really didn’t hang out with them much. Many told me that he was always studying, although if he was, his grades weren’t showing it. He didn’t date much. Didn’t have a best friend. When he asked a girl to a dance scheduled for the spring of 1953, she was a weird choice—his estranged brother’s sister-in-law, who attended a university 130 miles away—and he asked her way too far in advance to be considered normal.
As far as what Ron’s secret life was, I can only hazard a theory. As I’ve shared with you before, I think Ron was gay and possibly seeing one or more men, which, in the 1950s, required the utmost in secrecy the likes of which most people can’t fathom today. Put another way, Ron Tammen didn’t choose to live a secret life; a secret life was the only way he could possibly survive.
I’d now like to tell you about someone else who was leading a secret life, this one more recent.
If you follow me on Facebook, you learned that my cat Herbie passed away this past January, about a week shy of his 18th birthday. Herbie was named after my grandfather on my mother’s side, and it suited him well. His name reminded some people of that old movie The Love Bug, and maybe because of that, maybe not, I called him nicknames like Lovey, Buggy, Bug, and later My Sweet Bear, because he would plod loudly through the house like a bear cub sometimes.
Herbie was my first real pet, and I’ve noticed that I laugh a lot less now that he’s gone. He was my daily dose of dopamine. He could cheer me up and calm me down. I was cooler when I was with him. Smarter too. Matching wits with him, especially when trying to coax him into his carrier, was our favorite parlor game. I’m still learning how to function without his watchful gaze, which could make me feel guilty and goofy and fascinating all at once. (Mostly the former.)
Herbie had been with me since Day 1 of my research into Ron Tammen. You could say that he was the OG of the Good Man posse. (Do you remember when we called ourselves that? We were so much younger then!) He would sleep in the office window of our DC home while I made my phone calls to sources. If it was dinner time and I was still on the phone, he’d sit at my feet and stare up at me, meowing loudly. “Oops! My cat’s telling me that we’d better wind things up,” I’d say to whomever was on the other end.
If I was sitting on the bed with books and papers strewn all over, Herbie would hop up on the bed, walk over to whatever was most inviting to his eye, and plop himself on top. Among the items that he’s parked himself on was an open book of Clark Hull’s Hypnosis and Suggestibility; a large 1950s map to businesses in Wellsville, NY; a 1975 FBI phone directory; and a folder full of news clippings about Ron Tammen. He enjoyed them all equally well.
Herbie had two stand-out traits that I’ve tried to emulate, both in my research and in life in general. First was his emotional intelligence. He didn’t let anyone else’s emotions affect his own. If someone wanted him to do anything that he had no intention of doing, he’d assume his loaf position and stare at them. He could stare someone down all day if he had to. I’ve tried the stare-down method when talking to someone who is angry or highly agitated, and it does work in defusing tension. I find it works when I suspect someone of lying as well. If I stare at someone after they say something I find questionable, I’ve found that they’ll fill the void with words and behaviors that can sometimes get us closer to the truth.
His second emulative trait was his ability to stand up for himself, which I grew to admire so much, I made a point of never apologizing for him. “Herbie does stand up for himself,” I would say with a note of pride at the vet’s office, as he was screeching and clawing his way out of some poor assistant’s grasp. But it was at the groomer’s where he really set the rules. No one, I repeat no one, could speak when Herbie was having his nails trimmed. If you did, he’d have a total hissy fit. He didn’t bite, just hissed like crazy. His groomer, Lisa, who was also the owner, understood him. She’d gently pull him up out of his carrier, wrap him in a hold so tight that he felt safe and secure, and then give all the other groomers dirty looks if they said so much as a word during his trim, which he viewed as a major medical procedure. The other groomers had a nickname for him, “Silent Cat,” and they welcomed him by name as soon as we walked through the door. “Lisa! Silent Cat is here.” (After he passed, I told Lisa that, when it came to her, his hisses were kisses.)
If anyone has witnessed my badass side when I’m conducting my Tammen research, I guess you know where I got it from.
About a week or so ago, as I was watching TV, I heard a cat in our backyard, crying. I think caterwauling may be the correct term, or maybe it was more of a yowl. Whatever the word, this cat was distraught. I’d never heard that sound coming from our backyard before, and so late at night.
Herbie had been an indoor cat. He never knew the feeling of grass or brick or pavement on his paws like this cat obviously did. But he liked to look at the backyard from a warm rug inside his backdoor. In DC, he used to sit by the kitchen door and wait for his friend Albie, an albino squirrel, to show up. When Albie arrived, Herbie would put his paw to the window as his way of saying hi. After we moved to Ohio, we installed a door with lots of windows so he could look at birds and squirrels at cat-eye level, just like in DC.
And that’s exactly where I saw her that night. When I walked into the kitchen, I saw her gray form and her pointed ears. She was sitting in the grass directly outside our backdoor. She’d stopped yowling by then. She just sat there in a loaf pose, quietly staring at me. I put my hand on one of the window panes, like Herbie used to do, to say hi, and are you all right?
After a few minutes, she bolted.
The cat looked a lot like a feral gray tabby who’d had a litter of kittens in our neighborhood last summer. Our neighbor had taken it upon herself to see that the mother was spayed and the babies were adopted by new forever homes. It had been advised that the mother remain feral, since that was the life she’d been accustomed to.
I was emotional. I got all teary at the sight of another cat. I wondered if it was a sign. I wondered if Herbie had sent this cat to say goodbye.
Then, a couple days later, it came to me. I think I was witnessing a sign all right, but I don’t think Herbie had sent it. I think I was seeing evidence that Herbie had developed a late-night friendship after everyone else had gone to bed. I began putting two and two together, remembering that I’d recently seen pawprints, unmistakably made by a cat, in the snow shortly before Herbie passed away. Those pawprints led straight to the backdoor.
When Herbie died, he was an old man of roughly 88 human years with kidney disease. The fact that he was living a secret life with a good friend who cared for him right to the end was exactly the news that this girl needed to hear.
Now, please take a look at some of Herbie’s baby photos:
