WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?

Blog number seventy-two                                 28 Jan. 2007

I used to watch the Friday night fights religiously back in the fifties.  One of my favorite fighters was a guy named "Bobo Olson."  He was a young guy of course, but his hair was so short that under the lights he looked bald.  The announcers always commented upon it.  He became world middleweight champion.

IN 2002, I was walking to my favorite coffeehouse in Sacramento and a bum sitting on the sidewalk leaning against a building stopped me.  We talked a while and he told me that he was once the middleweight champion of the world.  I didn't pay the announcement any mind - he was a bum after all, and they do tell stories, but as I walked on I began to think that maybe he had been.  Champions have to be somewhere, why not where this guy was?  But I didn't go back and check.  I could have asked his name at least.  I wish now I had.  A few months later it was reported that a frequent patron of the Torch Club had died.  Yep, it was Bobo, my hero.