Jackie Fassette

Jackie Fassette

          The real friend I made during my nine months at the University of Delaware in 1963-64 was Jackie Fassett. Then he pronounced it FASSit; years later he shifted it to fasSETT, spelled Fassette. Anyway, we were both freshmen, but he was four years older, having had a hiatus from formal education for some reason. He was an African-American (then called black) guy from Wilmington’s old East Side ghetto, certainly a better student than I was, and an outstanding athlete. He got me to challenge some of my assumptions about Art and Music and things like that. He knew some neighbour of mine from Green Acres through being in the Civil Air Patrol.

          I should point out that in 1963, the U of D had only recently been desegregated, smart black kids having traditionally been directed to all-black Delaware State College. Even in 1963, it seemed that most of the black kids at the U of D were football players.

          Jackie’s specialty, athletically, was the decathlon (his best decathlon event was the hurdles), but he was at U of D on a football scholarship. He was a running back. Now, Delaware was very much a football school. Its team, called (get this) the Blue Hens, had been undefeated for some absurd number of years, and was more often than not ranked the number-one small-college team in the whole USA, so a football scholarship to Delaware carried a lot of baggage.

          Delaware’s head football coach, Dave Nelson — known as The Admiral — had invented an offensive system called the Wing-T, a cross between the old single and double wing formations and the old T formation. I mean, he’d written books about it. Had it copyrighted, I think. He was also something of a tough, my-way-or-the-highway sort of coach (The Admiral). After all, his way had won an awful lot of football games.

          Anyway, during a scrimmage in Spring Practice, toward the end of the school year, Jackie was called to carry the ball on the Admiral’s famous ‘Criss-Cross Counter’ play — sort of a double-reverse with pulling guards and blocking wingbacks and all sorts of intricate bells and whistles. And some blocker had missed his assignment, or had just been overpowered, and standing in the opening that Jackie was supposed to run through was Herbie Slattery, an all-something-or-other defensive tackle. Now, Herbie lived on my floor at the dormitory, and he may have been a gentle neighbour with an almost child-like fondness for sweet baked goods, but I can testify that he was also undeniably enormous. Much larger than my old friend Crazy John.

          So Jackie did a sidestep, reversed his direction, found an opening, and ran 70-some yards for a touchdown. The Admiral, Jackie told me that evening, was more than a little pissed off. He had invented the system, which was a team system, and members of his team, if they wanted to be on his team, ran his plays the way he had designed them, as team plays. Jackie pointed out that if he’d run in the required direction he would have lost yardage, and — not a minor concern — been seriously splattered.

          That, according to Jackie, was it. The Admiral was not about to be talked back to by any player, and certainly not by some uppity nigger. Jackie was off the team, and within a week or two had had his football scholarship revoked, and, because it was toward the end of the school year, was told that without football he could forget about returning to the U of D the next year, and that arrangements had been made to see to it that he would be drafted and sent to Vietnam as soon as possible after his last class was over. Jackie quickly used his connections with the Civil Air Patrol to join the Air Force and quit school. This wasn’t the last time that being uppity would get Jackie in trouble.

          We kept in touch for a fairly long time. I received letters of Jackie’s exploits in the military, most of them sexual. He was an extremely handsome man with plenty of charm.

          In 1971 I was living in Los Angeles, and drove East to visit family in Delaware. While I was there I went to Jackie’s wedding. It was Catholic. Jackie’s bride, Mary, was a pleasant, blonde Irish-American woman. After the wedding they had a fairly big do in what I think was a Knights of Columbus hall. A standard-issue plastic bride-and-groom stood on top of the wedding cake, only the groom’s face had been somewhat crudely blacked in. It struck me as both tacky and touching. Jackie, clearly in no mood for negatives, treated it as a joke.

          A month or so later I moved from L.A. to live for a short while with a young woman in Oxford, Pennsylvania. Jackie was living just across the state line in Newark, only about a 20-minute drive away, working on a Masters degree in economics at Delaware. He was living in a little box of an apartment in a newish building not far from campus, where he kept his bottles of spirits in the fridge, which was something I’d never done but seemed like a good idea. I remember going to one or two parties there, which were okay, but just parties. “Maggie May” was popular, and somebody played Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, which I thought was pompous and dumb. It was obvious to me that the Revolution, if it ever came, would most certainly be televised. With taped highlights at 11.

          I moved back to California just after New Year’s, and, after a couple more dislocations, back to Wilmington in the Spring of 1973. Jackie by then was living in a 1950s-era tract house outside Newark and had a big job at one of the big banks in Wilmington. I went to see him at his office once. There he was in his pinstripe power suit, talking into two telephones at the same time, speaking multimillion-dollar deal stuff into both of them, giving me a smile and a bit of a wink as he did so. A year or so later, right after I’d left Delaware for the last time, Jackie got busted big time — front-page news stuff in Delaware, apparently.

          What I know of it comes from letters Jackie wrote me. The bank had been left exposed by the economic turmoil following out from the oil shocks. The bank’s senior management had all quit or got fired or fled or something, and it had fallen to Jackie, 31 years old and barely out of graduate school, to save the bank. And he had. But in doing so he had employed some creative financial footwork involving setting up dummy accounts, and moving large clots of money too rapidly for it to be located, and other practices that would have probably earned him a knighthood in New Zealand in the 1980s but be considered too timid by the banksters of the 21st century. But when the shit had settled and the bank had been saved, and the auditors had settled onto it like flies, he’d been busted for playing too fast and loose with the banking laws. There was never any suggestion that he had misdirected any money for his own personal financial benefit.

          And the judge had given him six months. Jackie was outraged. He wrote me that he had stood up and challenged the judge over whether race had had anything to do with the sentence — whether he was actually getting six months for being an uppity nigger with a white wife. And the judge had said that he had committed a technical violation of the banking law. And Jackie had said something like, “Kiting a check is a technical violation of the banking laws, your honour! Are you going to tell me that you’ve never kited a check?”

          For those unfamiliar with the term, ‘kiting a check’ refers to the practice of paying for something by cheque the evening before the funds to cover it, such as a paycheque, are due to be deposited.

          For those unfamiliar with the US justice system, to the best of my knowledge no banker with all-European ancestry has ever gone to jail, no matter how egregious the crime or how much they personally were able to stash in the Cayman Islands.

          So he’d done six months at Lewisberg, a minimum security place. He came out, he told me, in better physical condition (he still did Masters 400-metre hurdles well into old age), and with having learned from his mafia fellow-inmates (1) how to cook some excellent Sicilian dishes and (2) a considerable amount about the nuances of crime and money-laundering. He didn’t go back into banking when he got out. I heard that he’d gone to work for the Delaware state welfare department. Then we lost touch.

          In 2001 I tracked him down via the internet. He told me he’d been with the State of Delaware since 1978 running a computer network and had a son and a daughter, one granddaughter, and a couple of cats. Mellowing comfortably into old age.