Life of Wry

I don’t want to trivialize memorial services by counting how many we’ve gone to in the last couple months.*

We attended a service yesterday for Maynard Skinner. To hear the stories, Maynard was a complicated guy with both a public persona (a very well known one, at that) and a private one. I don’t want or need to read between the lines of the family speakers, I’m sure everyone comes with their own set of complexities.

For my part, Maynard was a boss and a casual friend. He was the chair of the Davis Community Cable Coop board when we made our transition from the nation’s first urban cable cooperative to a nonprofit community television organization. I believe (I’d have to check my records and I’m loathe to go into that file cabinet) he was also Davis Community Televison’s first chair following that 3-year, very complicated transition. We worked together a lot during those years. I’ll remember how he finessed the politics and negotiated with the folks at Malarkey-Taylor and ultimately got a good deal for the city and the community. United Artists Cable took over the coop, the management company got out of their contracts, the bank loans were paid off, all the limited partners got their investments back, all the coop members got their investments back (what an ordeal), and we ended up with hundreds of thousands of dollars left over to buy an office building and build a studio. We negotiated with the city to commit the entire 5% of the new cable company’s franchise fee to support noncommercial locally produced community media which gave us an enviable budget for a town our size. And I got to be the founding executive director. I mean.

Thank you Maynard.

I will take plenty of credit for having the vision of what we could be and setting it all up, recruiting and training a founding board, hiring staff, outfitting the studio, etc. Maynard was all ears and eager to get a win out of the coop’s failure (its failure was def not our fault.. coops just turned out not to be viable business models for cable companies! A worthy attempt, however; A+ for effort, Davis!)

Anyway, back to Maynard.

Because we shared so many mutual friends, we saw a lot of Maynard over the years and ended up at big parties at his house, as well as informal hang outs in his backyard. And many random events here and there.

I liked Maynard a lot. He was funny. He was Cristy’s husband (and I love Cristy). He was wry (and I love wry). He was renaissance, traveled, well-read, globally minded. He was athletic. He was shrewd. He was understated. He was fun.

Mostly, for me, as I said last week… being together with community members, so many of whom we know, for services like this, is both important and affirming. Affirming of our place in our own community, our place in the circle of life. I see a lot of love and support in gatherings like this which is exactly why we choose to be in a community like Davis, to lay down roots. It’s why we don’t move. (Well, one of the reasons.) It’s why we watch as folks enter these sanctuaries and spaces, saying things like, “is that…” “what happened to …” The collective aging is not subtle, either.

Maynard: December 20, 1927 to August 23, 2023. RIP.

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(*) Maynard’s was our fifth service this summer-ish, following David’s, Jim’s, Jim’s, Cap’s. I believe we will be doing this a whole lot more as time goes on.