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Roger McDonald
The news of Jim Wenner's death will affect most of all those of us who knew him from Wilson Junior High, but he moved to Newark High shortly after we did, so perhaps this note will have a wider audience. Ron Larason wrote to me earlier of his illness; I just learned of his death from Dave Richards.
It is hard to describe the effect Jim had on my life. He was a kind of guru, friend, advisor, a conduit of the larger world into a kid who only knew the neighborhood. I thought of him as a great teacher, though I never had him formally as a teacher. He probably would be in some trouble in today's environment: I remember, when in junior high, spending idle afternoons at his place on Buckingham Street, leafing through his Playboy collection before reading the smutty parts of Mary McCarthy's "The Group." Portaging a canoe around the Mohawk Dam, frigid evening movies at the Granville Opera House, a raucous debauched infield at the Mansfield sports car races, lugging a refrigerator up his stairway on Maholm Avenue, sneaking sips of his beer at the old Manor House on Church Street, listening to Sergeant Pepper for the first time with Dave at his place on Claren Drive in Heath, a trip or two down to Athens. This is not a commonly approved list of extracurricular activities. In later years, after he had married and I had moved away, he and his wife Jackie were touchstones to what was going on in the schools and community. Newark lost great contributors to its life when they departed. Indeed, with Jim's departure, many of us just lost a great and good contributor to our lives.
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