When I met Ed Fields in 1971 at Wilmington College in Ohio, I instantly knew I had never seen the likes of him. He was funny, a tall, fast-talking supercharged Scarsdale  cherub with a wild imagination and an Afro to match. He burned with energy, omnivorous for movies, books, music, and food, to name a few things. He was an evangelist for the films of George Cukor, John Ford, Orson Wells, Howard Hawks, Peter Bogdanovich, and anything starring WC Fields. He could quote almost any line from any movie. He was a jazz fan, loved Coltrane and Dizzy and Miles. He later became a bluegrass fan. He was fanatical about Indian food.

He had a terrific sense of humor, a sunburst smile, and a manic and infectious giggle. The impression I got from Ed was that he was not only bursting with culture, but that his mind simply moved faster than the rest of us. He had been gloriously blessed with a porous intellect in the hothouse culture of New York in the 1960’s. It goes without saying that although he was from the suburbs, he was very much of the city and the times. The other thing that was noteworthy about Ed was that he was not only Jewish, but very Jewish, manifestly conspicuous in Southern Ohio at an Agriculture and Liberal Arts school founded by Quakers.

One of the first things he did on campus was to establish the Sardine Screen film klatch, in which he screened films and talked about their directors. Everyone who attended got a sardine on a cracker, and so much more from Ed’s commentary.

I knew I wanted him for a friend. We did indeed become friends, two Jews in a in the hog raising capital of Ohio where farmers at noon stood on the steps of the bank in their overalls, and the local bar served Mountain Oysters during gelding time . Ed and some other East Coast kids had come to God’s country to enjoy the intimacy of small college life and the pleasures of cheap dope. On the other hand, there were Quakers who were right where they belonged, as did the Aggies from neighboring Ohio towns like Dayton, Xenia, Columbus, and Washington Courthouse.

We had a unique group that year, Corky, Peach, Ed, Michael, occasionally Jon, and a few others; it was an intellectual and cultural apotheosis I would never again experience. Maybe that’s what college is supposed to be about, but for me it was more than that. I think it was more of a lightning strike in the heartlands of Ohio. And as far as I was concerned, Ed was the grounding anchor.

Peach, Ed’s best friend, was a Bluegrass mandolin player from Atlanta, and a student of literature and philosophy, Corky, a New Yorker, was a writer, moody, disheveled, and occasionally hysterically funny. I thought of him as a young Normal Mailer. Michael was also from New York, a Bluegrass rhythm guitar player whose fondest wish---he has probably achieved it---was to become a levitating mystic. Jon was from Columbus. He would become a powerhouse literary agent in Manhattan.

We attended classes together, sneaked Schoenling Little Kings into the town movie theater, and played on a softball team. Ed and I played squash at the college courts. Ed had many other friends---there was nobody that didn’t like him---and other interests. He played in a recorder ensemble. He may or may not have played chess. He drove an old Volvo.

In summer I was offered an opportunity to join the grounds crew at the college, a job which I declined, and he accepted as I recall. I remember helping Ed set up his room in a rented house. He had a fan I convinced him to set in the second floor bedroom window to exhaust the heat. The nearest outlet was a ways away from the window. The cord was slightly taut. I remember instructing him to turn the fan so it was blowing outside. He opened the window and shut it tight on the fan.

“Ready?” I called.

I plugged in the cord and Ed turned on the fan. That’s when I saw the cord pop out of the outlet and serpentine rapidly across the wood floor. I looked over to the window, to the now gaping space where the fan had defenestrated, just as the cord followed it out the window. After several seconds we heard the crash. We looked out the window at the fan now lying in-state in the yard. And we laughed until our bellies cramped.

I should have taken that job. I would have enjoyed it. I might have gotten to drive a tractor. But it would be the last chance I got to spend much time with Ed. I left Wilmington after an extended work study program on the Navajo Indian Reservation.

I visited Ed In New York several times in the next couple of years. He married a British girl and had a daughter. He divorced. He had become an award-winning freelance script and documentary writer for The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, and National Geographic. We went upstate to the house he called The Willows, a grand manor in Croton on the Hudson.

Then we lost touch for decades, maybe four of them, in fact. When Jonathon Lazear died we exchanged some emails. When I wrote to Ed I always had an email back in 24 hours or less. As recently as last year we were corresponding almost daily. He related to me that he had tried to spend some time on the West Coast to make it big as a screenwriter but that things hadn’t worked out. He mentioned that he felt at times that he was a failed screen writer, mentioned that Ed Fields, who had traveled extensively to write about Polar Bears and Tigers in the wild, was a failure. I told him I could not accept that. Writing had once been a dream of mine which I never pursued.

During a lull in our correspondence, I got a sudden note from Peach. It was terse, the way shocking news often is. Ed was found dead at his home, at his very desk at the age of 69. I never found out the cause of death. I don’t want to know. The funeral was quickly planned. I could have driven, but I would have spent some 16 hours in the car. All of my college friends, that golden group, were there. I was sad not to be there, sadder still I had not maintained the friendship with Ed. Perhaps I was too much in awe of him, intimidated by his achievement, ashamed by my lack thereof.  It was I who then felt like a failure.

An obituary by Phil Fairclough, the managing director of Two Monkeys Entertainment was a fond farewell and a glowing tribute to him. After reading it I thought there could be no better eulogy. Still, I’ve tried to write my own. I had to do it for Ed. I had to do him justice.

But I can’t.