John Freeman By Joe Russo
We were just two scruffy college freshmen and our dorm was a beat up trailer in a park adjacent to the main entrance to the campus. You might have thought that we were enrolled at Oregon and had been gone for months, when in fact we were just up the road at Cumberland County College in Vineland and had only been away from home for four days.
It was a bright, sunny Friday morning. Neither of us felt like going to class. We found a scrap of cardboard, spelled out ‘Wildwood’ in block print with a magic marker, and took our position along the shoulder of Route 47 South. The little car with the Atlantic City Press logo on the door was travelling in the opposite direction when the driver spotted us. His head spun around and he made a hasty Uturn. He took our picture and asked us all of the questions that pertained to our being on Delsea Drive with our thumbs hanging out and the photograph appeared in that Sunday’s edition of the paper.
John Freeman and I had known each other since our middle school days at Philip Baker. We were always friendly but we travelled in different circles. Going into our junior year at Wildwood High I realized that I needed to make some changes and one of them was to try and lose weight. We were both members of the track team so I asked John, a railthin distance runner with big feet and a bright playful smile, to run with me before practice. He gladly agreed. Each day right after class we would head down to Maxwell Field and jog on the sidewalks around the perimeter. As I huffed along, he barely broke a sweat and we talked about all subjects under the sun. A friendship was quickly forged (from that day on I fondly referred to him as “the skinny man”). I started to hang around with his gang and when our senior year was coming to a close we decided to enroll at Cumberland together. That is how we wound up on Delsea Drive thumbing our way back home.
When I look back on what his friendship meant to me, I take into account the fact that John always had the ability to make me laugh, a gift which I hold in high regard. He was smart, he had a sharp wit, and he was a champion “stone breaker.” Some of his ripostes even had messages behind them: he made you stop and think. I never even minded being the butt of his jokes and I purposely left myself wide open sometimes just to hear what he would come up with. And he always delivered. Every time, he would.
Over time we drifted apart, pulled in different directions by life the way all of us are, and our interactions became few and far between. When they did occur I always savored them because they presented us with a chance once again to be the kids jogging before track practice, or the homesick roommates preserved by a photograph that made us famous in Wildwood for about fifteen minutes.
And I would always let John take a shot.