My Friend, Don

As we go through life, we meet any number of personalities who change us. My friend, Don, has made an impact on me in ways that he will never know. And always for the better.

I first got to know Don as the editor of The Mountain Messenger while I was the county sheriff, and my first reaction was, great, here’s someone else I’m going to have to try to explain why we do what we do. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think Don and I would become the buddies we did.

Whether it be Monday night poker games, motorcycle rides in the back country of Sierra County, or more distant motorcycle rides to places like Alturas and Sonora, Don has always been one of a kind, fiercely unique, and unbelievably fair and loyal.

On motorcycle rides, we had a different standard – Me: gun, GPS, cell phone, satellite device, first-aid kit, all-weather gear. Don: a six-pack of beer, flannel shirt, and a garbage bag as all-weather gear. On one trip across the Sierra Valley, his garbage-bag raincoat was yellow, and he looked like a giant lemon drop driving in Sierraville.

Don always suggested that I was the best designated driver, both because I don’t drink alcohol and I had a badge. On a road trip with two others through rural Nevada in a 1965 Cadillac Sedan de Ville, we ended up in Hawthorne, Nevada, on a Sunday morning with two flat tires and stuck in a motel parking lot. With no available tire shop within 120 miles, we pondered what to do. Don announced that he was going to go have breakfast and walked to a greasy spoon a couple blocks away. An hour later, he came back with two locals, who looked at the car and announced: “I think I have two rims and tires in my front yard that will do, and you can have them for $10 each.” That was Don, never meeting a stranger.

A sense of humor that knows no bounds, a fierce resistance to political correctness, Don makes friends with most that he meets. The only personality I know that he dislikes is that of a bully.

One would never expect a newspaper editor and a county sheriff to necessarily share a great deal of trust. And on more than one occasion, I was warned in my professional life to be careful with the media. On the contrary, I could share much more than normal with Don so that he could fully understand where this public agency was coming from. And not once did he ever burn me.

At some point during our friendship, I asked and brought him as a civilian to a meeting of rural law enforcement administrators in Salt Lake City. As we drove across Nevada together, Don pointed out any number of off-ramps on Interstate 80 where he spent the night hitchhiking across that rural state. Arriving at the conference, I suspect Don was a bit nervous in a room as the only non cop there. At the conference, Don worked the room much better than I, and both he and my colleagues learned a lot from each other. At a follow-up meeting a year later in Colorado Springs, that same organization now required that each of us bring a civilian from our community to share in the experience. Little did Don or I know that we were trendsetters.

Upon meeting Don’s mom, Eleanor, for the first time, I asked her jokingly what did she have to say for herself. She, Don, and I were walking into the Oriental mine site at the time. Without missing a beat, her reply was “I did the best I could with what I had to work with.”

I mentioned earlier Don’s sense of humor and lack of political correctness. He and I continued a running point-counterpoint on the lynching of the Spanish woman, Josefa, commonly referred to as Juanita. Murdered by a lynch mob in Downieville, Yuba County, in July 1851, Don argued that she was, in fact, an early example of the equal rights amendment, as while she was a woman, she was treated in the same manner as many men so lynched. That was classic Don. Never mind she had no judicial trial, no judicial review, no appeal process. His response to me putting a sympathetic remembrance ad in his Mountain Messenger on the anniversary of her death one year while he was out of town: he came home and billed me $50,000 for the ad. His response another year when I left flowers on the courthouse bridge in her memory, was to change the label on the flowers to acknowledging the poor white miner she “allegedly” killed.

Don has challenged me to think beyond my insulated world, to give others grace, and to try not to take life too seriously. While I have a long way to go, he has made me a more thoughtful person, a teeny tiny bit more patient, and has always done it in his unique Don Russell way.

To his Mom, Eleanor, who made it to 101 years of age, I would say thank you for Don, and you did good.