BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

My life-long friend Hal died on September 26. So I looked up "friend" in a few books of quotations. Some fit, some don't.

"Friend: a single soul dwelling in two bodies." Aristotle -- not Hal and me, no we were certainly not a single soul.

"A friend is, as it were, a second self." Cicero -- could be. Hal had some attributes that I would have liked to have had. His quick wit. His ebullient self-confidence. (Well, he really wasn't self-confident, but rather, he knew how to act with confidence.

"A friend is a present you give yourself." Robert Louis Stevenson...could fit. He was someone whom I always enjoyed being with. Lots of laughs.

Well, none of those ideas about friends exactly fit my relationship with Hal. Ever since I knew him when we were 13 or 14 he was angry and had a hostile wit...I never figured out his source of anger but it was deep and inbred. I knew both his parents--is mother was warm and very beautiful brunette, and been a B-Movie actress in the thirties; his father was a very wealthy man, but a little distant.

Hal had been adopted by his father. Hal was actually the son of what used to be called a "butter and egg man," who is buried in Washington Cemetery in Brooklyn, off Ocean Parkway. I never learned his name. Something in me remembers Hal referring to Breakstone Cottage Cheese, but I don't know whether that's my faulty memory or Hal's imagination. Who knows? It might even be my own imagination's eagerness to build a story.

As a boy Hal valiantly went out for football and warmed the bench with me, rarely, if ever getting into a game. He was afflicted with the flattest feet his doctor had ever seen; but that did not dissuade him from going out. Coach Quinn kept him on the team mainly because Hal was an inspiration to us all, running laps with his guts falling out, but persevering when others quit, and always finishing the required number of laps, even as night fell on the track.

He told us that he went out for football at Michigan. Of course, he never expected to make the team, at least I think he never expected to make the team, but with Hal one never knew what his expectations of himself actually were. He didn't make the team, but he went out.

After college his father offered him the family business. Hal turned it down. He wanted to be in show business and so he took an usher's job at the Ed Sullivan Show on CBS. Imagine, turning down a fifty-thousand dollar job that was guaranteed to lead to the ownership of a huge company--but Hal was true to his heart. Show business it would be and he took an ushers job.

Somehow, that lead to advertising where Hal eventually was responsible for directing and producing many of the Procter & Gamble and Timex television ads for Grey.

Later he opened his own production company, Randelman Productions, and Grey continued to use him because of his extraordinary abilities. He was proud of being a "producer," and being able to pull thnigs together when other people couldn't. He won a Cleo or two, but never bragged about it.

Hal was proud of knowing the "right places." Whether it was travel or dining, I could count on Hal to tell me where to go...