School Story:
Here’s a wonderfully funny story about Brad. A story of how Brad made me, four or five other young guys and even Brad himself laugh longer and harder than we had ever laughed before … and, I’m quite sure, than any of us have ever laughed since.
Oh, I think at the time of this story we were 20 year olds. In fact, I looked it up and I found that it was July 1963, since this weekend-event coincided with a total eclipse of the sun and that one, they tell me, occurred on July 20, 1963.
Brad had contacted a bunch of us—in addition to me, there were Jerry Smith, John Hansen, Tom Mero and Tom Jennison and maybe John’s cousin, Woody Hawkyard—and he suggested that we all go up to his uncle’s lake cabin for a weekend of high summer frolicking on the water. That we all go up to his Uncle Bun’s lake cabin, I should say. With an uncle named Uncle Bun, how could anyone turn him down?
And so we all piled into a couple of cars with sleeping bags and some fishing gear that Friday after we had come home from our summer jobs and drove up to, I think, somewhere around Milaca to Uncle Bun’s cabin, which was situated on a small and almost private lake.
And as we started out late we got to the cabin just as dusk was falling and so after throwing the football around on the beach and probably having a beer, we decided it was time to hit the hay. Now Uncle Bun’s cabin was a modest one—as all old cabins used to be back then—and so it had one bedroom area and that contained one double bed. Since it was Uncle Bun’s cabin, Brad, of course, claimed one side of the bed but he offered the other side to whoever wanted it. Being a rowdy bunch of 20 year old guys, of course we joked about that as Brad quietly went outside and literally cut 6 blades of grass and came in with just the tops showing in his clenched fist. And the 6 of us literally drew—well—blades of grass, to see who would get—the honor of sharing the bed with Brad.
As it happened, I drew the short blade and so without too much fuss I got into bed while Brad waited at the light switch on the wall for the guys on the floor to climb into their sleeping bags. Saying something like “this is it, guys” Brad turned off the light and jumped into his side of the bed.
The bed had not quite stopped rocking when Brad cleared his throat—in the finest tradition of opera singers—and out came his own, very loopy, rendition of:
"I'm in the mood for love, simply because you're near me.
Funny but when you're near me, I'm in the mood for love."
Of course, Brad didn’t really get beyond the first line (if that) of lyrics before one after the other of us—quite possibly beginning with me—started laughing, cackling, roaring and howling our heads off with the craziness of it all. Complete, utter pandemonium broke out in that dark cabin. It was as if someone had sucked all the oxygen out of the cabin and replaced it with laughing gas.
And it went on and on and on. I do not exaggerate at all when I say that as a group we kept up this ear-splitting, gut-wrenching laughter for at least 20 minutes, during which time there were spells where it seemed to calm down to only a couple of guys laughing their fool heads off, but then others would re-catch the laughing bug again and off we would go.
Finally—I think it was Brad—found the strength to get up and turn on the light and—looking around his Uncle Bun’s cabin—saw what we all knew: that we were simply a mess. We had tears of laughter rolling down our faces and our t-shirts were soaking with sweat, since laughing that hard that long is actually pretty hard physical labor.
There was simply no hope for us getting to sleep in the condition we were in so we all went back outside and tossed Frisbees around in knee deep lake water until we had cooled down and calmed down.
Warning Brad to keep any more songs to himself, we managed to fall asleep, finally. But next morning we all got up and were standing around in the kitchen as if in a daze—each of us not quite able or willing to stand straight up, for that would have hurt our sorely-strained stomach muscles way too much.
—Gestur Brent Davidson
