(This article, reprinted with permission, written by Bob Greene, and featuring Jack Roth, both class of 1965, appeared in The Columbus Dispatch on May 16, 2006)  5/17/06

Bob Greene recalls days spent with dying friend
 
Tuesday, May 16, 2006

JOE BLUNDO

Maybe it’s true that guys don’t talk about their feelings. But maybe they have other ways of expressing them.

When Bexley native Bob Greene learned that his best friend, Jack Roth, was dying, he expressed his affection with visits, phone calls, long walks and now a book. And You Know You Should Be Glad: A True Story of Lifelong Friendship (HarperCollins, $24.95) tells the story of Roth’s final months and the friendships rekindled. Roth died in December 2004 at 57. He and Greene had been friends since kindergarten at Cassingham Elementary School. In high school, Roth, Greene and classmates Allen Schulman, Chuck Shenk and Danny Dick were an inseparable fivesome who called themselves ABCDJ. Their coming-of-age was chronicled by Greene in his earlier Be True to Your School.

Although they had remained friends in adulthood, Roth’s illness brought them back together in a series of reunions charged with urgency. They visited old haunts such as the Top Steak House and Rubino’s Pizza, and carried on as they did in high school — but with a sense of foreboding behind the jokes and put-downs.

"Here we were, alive after all these years," Greene tells himself during a get-together with the friends. "Don’t feel mournful about it, not now. There will be time for that later."

He didn’t say it aloud. Among lifelong friends, Greene said in an interview, words aren’t always necessary.

"I don’t know that the word love was ever spoken, because it didn’t have to be. There was never any need to thank each other for being there. You don’t get out of the car and say to your buddies, ‘Thanks for the evening.’ "

Roth, who owned the My Back Pages bookstore near the Ohio State University campus and later established a business selling closeout goods, tried to take care of his friends even as they took care of him.

One fall day near the end, as he lay bedridden and on oxygen, he insisted that Greene take his winter coat before leaving the house.

Greene, who lives in Chicago, said that deciding how much of his own troubles to include in the book was a judgment call. The book deals briefly with the death of Greene’s wife in 2003; it doesn’t mention the loss of his Chicago Tribune columnist position in 2002 after Greene acknowledged an affair with a woman in her late teens.

Roth’s wife, Janice, said she and her daughter, Maren, are pleased with the book. She said she was so focused on caring for her husband during his illness that they didn’t talk much about his impending death. She learned from Greene’s book that her husband had allowed himself to wonder whether she would remarry.

"I’d be happy for her," he tells Greene in a conversation near the end of the book.

Mrs. Roth said she was neither surprised nor threatened by the fact that Mr. Roth told his old friends about things he didn’t tell her.

"The bond he had with those guys was incredible."

And You Know You Should Be Glad has given Roth a prominence he didn’t have in life: Bexley has declared May to be Jack Roth Month; Greene has made public appearances; and a 5-mile run to raise money for cancer research and the Masorti Movement, an organization advocating religious tolerance, is planned for June.

Greene is happy he can draw attention to his best friend.

"The one thing I can do for him is let him live forever, at least in the pages of a book."

** The Jack Roth 5k Rock and Run will begin at 8:30 a.m. June 4 at Bexley High School, 326 S. Cassingham Rd. Registrations costs $20 at www.jackrothfund.org, $25 the day of the race. 

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