JIM HENDRICKS: Memories stay bright even as lights fade

Walter Flint was a unique guy, no doubt about it.

I had chances to chat with him a number of times over the years, and that’s the sort of thing you’re always happy you got the opportunity to do when someone like Walter passes on. He was 93 when he died Friday.

Even so, reading his obituary when I returned from a trip out of town this past weekend, there were quite a few things that didn’t come up in our conversations, though I did manage to get the highly guarded details on the Great Santa Abduction of 1960.

For me, despite Walter’s many interests and vocations, I mostly associated him with Christmas. When I was growing up down the road in Newton, there were four things we were going to see every year before Christmas Day dawned: Jimmy Shiver’s Christmas displays in my hometown, Santa Claus at the octagonal or hexagonal (I never counted the sides) building in the parking lot at the Midtown Shopping Center, the marvelous downtown Albany Christmas lights that stretched across the streets, and Santa waving from the light-outlined sports car in front of Walter’s light-outlined house on Third Avenue.

What I didn’t know at the time was what the more than 10,000 lights were.

“What they are is they’re the lights that are used in radio dials,” he told me, something that held over with him from his Army days with the Armed Forces Radio Service. While serving in New Delhi during World War II, he tried to requisition 100 Christmas lights for a tree. Turned down by the Army, he went to Plan B — radio pilot lights. A lot of them.

“I got 1,000 lights, wired them to copper wire, put them on a scruffy old tree, because you couldn’t get a good cedar or anything in India, and everybody loved it …,” he said.

He brought that same type of light display — radio bulbs that were soldered to copper wire — to his home for 53 years, trying a few times along the way to “retire” because of the work involved in setting up the signature decorations. “I wish I was 10 years younger and my helpers, too,” he told me in 2010, when his house finally went dark for good at Christmastime. He had stopped for one year — 2007 — but squeezed in two more years in 2008 and 2009 after the 2007 Easter Seals ornament featured his display.

“I dearly love the lights, and I want them to be a happy memory,” Walter told me in that 2010 interview. “The lights were a big part of this town for over half a century. Even now, cars come up at night and slow down and then take off. I know they’re disappointed. When a grown man will tell you, ‘When I was his age,’ and point to his grandson, ‘my parents used to bring me by,’ you know it’s been a long time.”

I was one of those. My grandkids didn’t get a chance to see Walter’s Christmas lights, but my boys did.

That, of course, is not the only thing Walter Flint did with his long life. With his distinctive voice, he spent two decades waking Albany up with a morning radio program, making ends meet by selling tickets to minor league baseball games after arriving in Albany shortly after World War II. Besides his radio career and second career selling audio equipment, he also was a long-time Presbyterian minister who for many years drove a 200-mile weekend circuit from Albany to Fort Gaines, where he was pastor for 28 years until 2015, to Elmodel, where he was pastor for 59 years until 2013, and back to Albany. As he got older, he had to get a driver to drive him, but he made the trips at ages when most of us, if we lived that long, would have long been retired.

Certainly the work he did in his church was more important, but for me, I still remember those lights and that waving Santa, which disappeared from the car in 1960 when two young guys abducted him. They found the Santa figure in the back of a pickup at the Midtown Shopping Center, a beer in its hand. Walter finally told me their names — but only after I gave him my word that it was off the record.

And while we talked several times in the years since, one thing he mentioned, almost in passing, back in 2010 stuck with me.

“From the telephone calls I get, people … it’s almost as if they want to know, ‘Why can’t we do something about it?’” he said about his decision to pull the plug permanently on his Christmas lights. “But, of course, you can’t.”

No, you can’t stop change and you can’t stop time. All you can do is hold onto memories and appreciate the people who provided them, often time without realizing it — memories that continue on, even after the lights go out.

Email Jim Hendricks at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_JHendricks on Twitter.