Worth More Dead

smile.
    Larry had a good, solid Scandinavian-American face and a head of thick brown hair. He was very nearsighted and usually wore horn-rimmed glasses. He was a friendly guy, and most Seattleites spoke about him as a favorite acquaintance, even if they didn’t know him personally.
    Back in the late fifties and early sixties, Larry Sturholm went to high school in Sweet Home, Oregon, an idyllic American town with a population of about 8,000. My brother, Luke Fiorante, taught at Sweet Home High School and was the football coach, too. It was a small school in a small town, and most of the citizens were enthusiastic supporters of the games and track meets.
    During the summers of 1961 and 1962, Luke worked as director of parks and recreation and ran Sweet Home’s recreation program in the fields in back of the high school. His assistant was Larry Sturholm, who was then 17 or 18. It was a good summer job for both of them. Far from any large cities, kids in Sweet Home depend on the town’s park department to provide sports and activities during the long, sleepy summer months.
    Together, Luke and Larry invented a device that was really an early version of what is used today for T-ball, fashioning the apparatus from a brake drum, a metal pole, and a thick rope to hold the ball while the little boys swung at it. Larry was in charge of midget league baseball. Never much of an athlete in high school, he was always patient and cheerful with the kids in his charge.
    Soon, his adventures took him far away from Sweet Home. In the late sixties, Larry Sturholm was in the United States Air Force, and his duty assignment with a TUSLOG unit sent him to one of the most isolated bases of all, near Samsun, Turkey, on the Black Sea. Although the troops’ accommodations were spartan, the weather was relentlessly challenging, and the food was often iffy at best, the men there were grateful that they hadn’t been sent to Vietnam. TUSLOG was a surveillance post, a spy base, and the duties and assignments of the army and air force servicemen stationed there were kept secret from most of the world. The personnel stationed at Samsun weren’t particularly popular with most Turkish citizens, but they did form solid friendships with one another. Their entertainment consisted mainly of watching yet another replay of movies they had seen a dozen times before or wrestling with one of their camp’s two pet bears. (The whole base mourned when an overeager MP fatally shot the smaller bear, unaware that the bears were so tame they were allowed out of their cages at will.)
     
    Larry Sturholm’s wild sense of humor saved his buddies from depression and sheer boredom from the tedium that marked TUSLOG. He joined several other servicemen to run AFRTS, the camp’s radio station. Larry wrote scripts for two hilarious satires of radio dramas. “As the Stomach Turns” and “Down Our Street and UP Your Alley” kept the camp laughing. “Most of the writing for these was done by Larry,” an old buddy recalls, “with some totally crazy brainstorming sessions including the whole team. Larry’s unique sense of humor simply fed the insanity of the other men.”
    The radio staff airmen had “a conspiratorial mind set,” the long-ago buddy says, “that may have been because we were stationed on a spy base. We even questioned the ‘reality’ of the moon landing, wondering if it had been staged in a studio somewhere. A favorite pastime was starting insane rumors and then sitting back as they spread like wildfire around the base.”
    It was there on a lonely base in Turkey where Sturholm first experimented with combining humor and news, and it became his forte.
    When he was finally back in the United States, Larry married his girlfriend, Judy, and moved into professional radio and television jobs.
    Sturholm was an entrepreneur and a visionary; he always had some creative project going, usually having to do with writing or producing in television or radio.
     
    In 1979, a former college friend of mine was preparing to publish a book written by Larry Sturholm, and he asked me if I would edit it. It was titled All for Nothing, and it was a remarkably well-researched true story of Ray and Roy D’Autremont, twin brothers born in Oregon as the twentieth century dawned. On October 11, 1923, they made headline news all across America, although not in the way they envisioned.
    The twins, 23, enlisted their younger brother, Hugh, in their meticulously