Remembering Louis Wilson Jr.

At work yesterday, I told someone that I had been surprised recently to learn that her boss had worked for the State of North Carolina for thirty years. "I didn't think he could possibly be that old," I told her. She urged me to tell her boss that. "He'd be so glad to hear it!"
    Her saying that reminded me of an old friend who had told me one of those little things that you can never forget because you were so glad (or somehow struck) to hear it.
    The occasion was a writer-editor conference that Louis and I were having. I was conducting a two-week "new writer training" program for IBM, at a hotel in Carmel, California overlooking the Pacific Ocean. (This was in the early 1980's, during what my predecessor trainer referred to the other day with some longing as "Information Development's Golden Age.")
    Louis and the other eight or ten new writers had completed a writing assignment, and I had now edited all of the submissions and was conducting a conference with each student. The idea was to demonstrate the process they'd follow for each real writing assignment back at work.
    In one regard, Louis's work was distinctly superior to everyone else's in the program. He alone had designed the presentation as a series of two-page layouts, the content skillfully chunked to serve both the reader and the subject matter.
    But in another regard, the writing quality of individual sentences, he was clearly in need of instruction in grammar, usage, and style.
    And I told him both of these things.
    His first remark was the memorable utterance. He smiled in the disarming way he had (I seem to remember a gold front tooth, but after more than twenty-five years I'm not absolutely sure) and said, "Morris, you have the ability to tell a person he can go to hell so that he enjoys hearing it."
    I am sure that he used the phrase "go to hell" although of course there was nothing in what I'd told him remotely along that line, but writers are notoriously sensitive about criticism, so I had to assume that it must have seemed to Louis that that was what I was telling him by the grammar-usage-style part of my feedback.
    Anyway, as soon as I got back to my computer at work, I googled on "louis wilson chiropractor," and googlishly fast I found the following announcement, on the website of the Sedona Red Rock News:

Louis Wilson Jr.
March 29, 1934 — March 29, 2009

Louis Wilson Jr., Sedona, died Sunday, March 29, on his 75th birthday.
    After 20 years with IBM and 20 years as a chiropractor, Wilson retired to Sedona in 2005.
    Survivors are...and six grandchildren.
    Friends are invited to a memorial service at the Latter Day Saints church, Sedona, Thursday, April 16, at 11 a.m.

    I had had no idea that Louis was that much older than I, or older than I at all. I did the math: he must have joined IBM about the same year I did, or even a year earlier. If I was told this at the time, or told what he had done at IBM for the preceding sixteen years, I have no recollection of it.
    I of course knew that he left to become a chiropractor; he may have been taking courses in it already. I learned of this from a conversation in the parking lot where we worked. Louis was getting into his Mercedes Benz, dressed as usual in expensive-looking suit and tie. He told me that day what his philosophy was, something like "Drive the car now that you see yourself driving in the future, wear the clothes...." This seems to have been one of those New Age lessons to help make the future happen. And it seems to have worked for Louis.
    His office in the Santa Teresa Laboratory of IBM was a delight to visit. He had one or two vintage lamps, a colorful, thick wool area carpet, and several African artifacts, including a ceremonial mask and a stone sculptured head reminiscent of an image of Nefertiti. Louis had style!
    He was also fearless. I picture Louis, at an annual office holiday party, standing in a doorway underneath some mistletoe in order to bring about the opportunity of kissing our third-level manager, if she happened to come along. She did, and he took advantage. "Louis Wilson, you do not do that!" she commanded, too late. To Louis (and to me too), it was a wonderful lark.
    I visited him and his wife a few years later, on a trip back to California from North Carolina. I seem to recall that his office was in some rooms of their stately older home.
    It would have been nice to see or at least talk on the phone with Louis one more time before one of us died, but, like John E. Smith in the case of his being predeceased by his old friend Errol E. Harris, that was not to be.
    Louis and I had already had our last conversation.