By Katherine Corcoran, Mercury News, Posted on Sat, Nov. 22, 2003
Read the original article here: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/7326034.htm
ESL970G Advanced Grammar and Editing task: Identify each phrase or clause in red.
Today marks a moment that shattered Red Fay.
Forty years ago, shortly after 10:30 a.m. PST, the undersecretary of the U.S. Navy was set to address shipyard workers in Bremerton, Wash., when the commander approached and said, ``Mr. Fay, I want you to know that the president has been shot.''
John F. Kennedy and Paul B. ``Red'' Fay Jr. were tight friends. It was a relationship soldered in the South Pacific that flourished for 21 years. It gave the charismatic young politician many up-close encounters with the Bay Area, where he and Fay, a longtime San Franciscan, dined at the Mark Hopkins and once sneaked some late-afternoon touch football on the first fairway at Pebble Beach.
Fay, a proud Stanford graduate who grew up in Woodside, finished his Navy speech. He figured the president was OK: The commander said the wounded Texas Gov. John Connally was in surgery, but Kennedy was not. Then he walked into the Admirals' Quarters and saw others crowding the television set.
``It broke me up,'' Fay said this week in the third-story office of his Presidio Terrace home, where, at 85, he still works every day. ``I don't think you ever really recover when you lose someone who's such a classic friend. . . . I don't think I'll ever recover.''There is a spark in his clear blue eyes and his mouth curls into a nostalgic smile when Fay remembers Kennedy, a man he says never lost his sense of humor.
In 1966, Fay wrote ``The Pleasure of His Company,'' a personal account of his friendship with Kennedy that initially angered the president's widow, Jackie, though Fay says she later came around.
Fay's friendship with the man who came to call him ``Grand Old Lovable'' had an inauspicious start. It was 1942. Fay and some Navy buddies were playing touch football in Melville, R.I., where he was stationed for torpedo-boat training, when a ``skinny kid'' asked to join in. Fay thought he was a high school student. The other officers in training thought he was a recruit. Much to their irritation, the kid took over the game.
When they showed up for class the next morning, ``the skinny kid'' was their instructor, Lt. John Kennedy. Fay's first encounter with the young Navy officer was in his Quonset hut after a disastrous training exercise.
``If everybody did what you did today, Fay,'' Kennedy barked, ``the Japanese would be marching in Times Square by Christmas.''
But the bond took hold in 1943, when Fay, a PT boat captain, pulled in for repairs at Tulagi in the Solomon Islands, where Kennedy landed after the attack on PT-109 that left him and his crew stranded in the Pacific for days.
When Kennedy was sent home for medical care, they began exchanging the first of many letters that showed both their mutual admiration and their love of a good gag.
In 1944, Kennedy wrote to Fay, still in the South Pacific, about making it out to the Bay Area so he could check out Burlingame, which Fay told him was the apex of San Francisco society, though Kennedy wrote ``Burlingham'' by mistake. And Kennedy, the Harvard grad, loved to poke fun at Fay's alma mater, where the future president audited graduate courses in 1940:
``I sincerely hope to see you boys soon back here, or back here soon (which is better English? Ever since I went to Stanford I've had trouble with my English).''One night in 1945, when Kennedy was covering the United Nations conference in San Francisco as a reporter, Fay met him in the Peacock Court of the Mark Hopkins Hotel, along with a lovely young British reporter Kennedy had met. The president of Wells Fargo Bank spotted the up-and-coming ambassador's son, walked over and ran his hand through Kennedy's famous thicket of hair.
``Jack was livid, and I said, `Jack, let me take care of it,' '' said Fay, who approached the bank president's table and ran his hands through his hair four times. ``I was waiting for the guy to stand up and take me on, and he didn't do a damn thing. I would have beaten the hell out of him.''
As the years progressed, Fay was summoned on a number of occasions, for everything from helping with Kennedy's political campaigns to the time in 1955 when the Kennedys feared he would finally succumb to his poor health.
But there was nothing more exciting -- or dumbfounding -- than when Kennedy was elected president.
``There we are at Paul Young's Restaurant'' at a pre-inaugural party, Fay recalled. ``It's 5 in the morning and I say, `Do you realize you're going to be sworn in this morning as president of the United States?' He said, `Red, I've got the whole thing practically memorized, all that I have to say. I've got notes in front of me if I need them. And I wouldn't sleep anyway.' ''
Kennedy was looking forward to his 1964 campaign, Fay said, figuring he would face Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater and be easily re-elected.
But as Fay and much of the world remembers today, it never happened.
Fay returned immediately from Bremerton to the Capitol, where the slain president lay in state. He joined the enormous receiving line to pay his respects.
``I put my arms around Jackie, and there was absolutely nothing I could say,'' Fay recalled this week. ``Then I went behind the curtain and cried my eyes out.''
The passage of time has changed little, Fay said. He is no more surprised at the commemorations now than he was at the public outpouring at the time. He draws little distinction between the strangers who mourned the youth and optimism of the lost president and his own personal grief for a fallen friend.
Fay doesn't mark the anniversary himself, however. Today he will cheer his beloved Stanford at the Big Game, something he's sure his old pal Jack would understand.
Only later tonight will he kneel to consider the personal and historical weight of the day. This time of year, every year, ``I say my prayers for the evening, and I always thank God for Jack.''
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