“Now, think carefully, Father: Did any of the others ever give any indication they might have known about Hunsinger’s colorblindness?”
Koesler gave the question careful consideration. “No. There was a bit of what I considered to be just banter … the kind of thing you might expect from athletes. But no, nothing at all that had to do with color. There were some remarks about Bobby Cobb’s color-he was the only black in the group-but it seemed to be given and taken in good humor. I am rather sensitive to that sort of thing. But it didn’t trouble me. No, as far as I can recall, no one made any reference at all to colorblindness.”
“Well, there it is,” Harris noted.
The other two peered at the distance. The outline of the Silverdome was barely visible.
Ewing looked at Harris. “Well, where do we begin?”
Harris smiled. “My personal philosophy is, start at the top.”
“The top it is.”
In the remaining time, Ewing, consulting his notes, explained to Koesler all that Dr. Glowacki had told them about color deficiency and colorblindness.
One of the fringe benefits of these police investigations, thought Koesler, was that he always learned something.
At forty-four, Jay Galloway easily was the youngest owner of a professional football franchise. And he appeared even younger. Of moderate height and build, he had an oval, wrinkle-free face and a full head of dark brown hair untouched by gray, parted in the middle, and shaped in a mod cut covering the top tip of the ears and just touching the back of his shirt collar.
Galloway was a native of Minneapolis. His father had been a successful salesman, his mother a homemaker. He had a younger brother and sister.
Environment has its effect on the developing personality. But it is an unpredictable effect. Jay Galloway was a case in point.
Born James Randolph Galloway, he developed in a solid, typical WASP family. Security and stability were there. The family attended a nearby stylish Lutheran church nearly every Sunday. Galloway’s father, besides being a successful ad salesman for the Minneapolis Star, was active in the Boy Scouts of America. Mrs. Galloway kept an extremely neat home; loved, humored, and obeyed her husband; was active in the ladies’ society of Mt. Olivet Lutheran Church, and tried her very best to instill in her children the virtues of piety, reverence, honesty, truthfulness, diligence, and industriousness. In this, she was sustained by her husband.
Jay Galloway grew up in a state whose reputation for cold snowy winters was fabled. He grew up in a city that was famous as a municipality that had been carefully planned; had a well-monitored government cleaner than that of almost any other large urban area; was headquarters for many large corporations and businesses whose management demanded and got an attractive city in which their executives would be eager to live; was liberal in politics and conservative in almost everything else. The eleven lakes within the city were open to the public. No one privately owned property contiguous to any of the beautiful lakes. Taxes were high, but education took the top dollar.
While the downtowns of other cities decayed and gurgled in death throes, downtown Minneapolis with its mall and skyways remained vibrant long after Mary Tyler Moore was done throwing her cap up in the air outside Dayton’s. General Mills, 3M, Cargill, International Multifoods, and similar corporations were generous in community donations, providing an ideal atmosphere for raising families. No branch of city government had an excess of authority without having another segment of government there to provide checks and balances. One graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School who specialized in criminal law moved to another state after passing the bar, because he did not think there was enough crime in the Twin Cities to provide a lucrative legal career.
The Guthrie was among the very best and most famous of regional theaters. Chanhassen was among the most successful dinner theaters in the nation. Yet both theaters regularly staged classical, tried-and-true productions.
And that was pretty much the way Minneapolitans grew up-in relative safety, in good health, well educated, with a penchant for planning ahead carefully, proud of their city, programmed for white-collar jobs, and convinced the Ford assembly plant just outside St. Paul was an anomaly.
Like their theaters, Minneapolitans did not take many risks. They followed their ancestors in vocations, or carefully trained for established professions. They lived well and patiently waited their turn for membership in escalatingly prestigious country clubs.
That is how the Galloway family lived. That is how their three children developed. That is how young Jay Galloway grew. For a short time. Then he began to forge a lifestyle that was nearly the antithesis of his impressive environment.
Environment has its effect on the developing personality. But it is an unpredictable effect. So it was with Jay Galloway.
After graduation from the University of Minnesota, he was employed by the Minneapolis Tribune as an advertising salesman. Following in his father’s footsteps, but not along the identical path. His father was an ad salesman for the Star. But it was an understatement to call them sister publications. They were more like twins. Readers of both papers would have been hard pressed to discern a difference in their editorial policies. They were housed in the same building. They were both properties of the Cowles Publishing Company. And when one looked high enough into the management hierarchy of both papers, the personnel was identical.
So, young Jay began in the approved Minneapolitan fashion.
All his life, he’d heard his father run on about the sales game. Jay had studied sales and business management in college. He was, it was universally recognized, a natural. Some salespeople counted up to seven noes before they accepted a negative answer. Jay Galloway never gave a client an opportunity to turn him down. His standard method was to make an excellent sales presentation, usually by phone, then interrupt himself before reaching the point where the client would have to accept or decline. “Don’t make up your mind now,” Galloway would say, “Think about it. I’ll get back to you.”
Galloway had some sixth sales sense. Unerringly, he would perceive the moment the sale was made. And he would move in for the sales kill. Of course, his technique was not effective in every case. But his success ratio was extremely high. He made good money and his prospects were excellent.
He courted and married Marjorie Palmer. In this union, he attained the carousel’s brass ring. Marjorie had been the University of Minnesota’s dream girl, the campus beauty par excellence. Jay and Marj had attended the university at the same time, she a year behind him. He had made his play for her then and found only that she did not recognize his existence. Her tastes ran to whatever football player happened to be Big Man on Campus.
After graduation, Galloway finally caught her attention when he attained some considerable standing as a young man of means in the community. From that moment on, it was the full-court press. Dining at Charlie’s Cafe Exceptionale, the Blue Horse, Lord Fletcher’s, the Rosewood Room; dancing at the Orion Room and Chouette’s; evenings at the Guthrie or Chanhassen. Afterward, sometimes his place, sometimes hers.
It was a society wedding. St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. Honeymoon in Hawaii. They settled into the Minneapolis suburb of Edina. They decided not to have children. It promised to be a good life. Together they would tread the path to success and fulfillment as had so many other successful Twin Cities couples. They were Beautiful People.
But he grew restless. He found depressing the prospect of following forever in his father’s footsteps, even though Jay was certain to soar beyond his father’s achievements.
He began to find staff meetings a crashing bore. He fidgeted through what had been routine three-martini lunches. He became distracted during sales presentations. His acquisition of new accounts slowed, then stopped dead in the water. He began losing dependable old accounts. His employers were very concerned. They sent him off to a private, company-owned retreat on the north shore of Lake Superior. They hoped that in seclusion and peace he would find himself.