The last word

By NATE HUBBARD/Staff

Freddie Gabbert was never at a loss for words.
Even death couldn’t change that.
Gabbert, 63, died on Oct. 18 at his Main Street home in Bland.
The opinionated 1964 Bland High School graduate, the self-proclaimed “boy who wouldn’t grow up,” wrote his own epitaph a year before his death, thus giving himself the ultimate last word.
“In the larger scheme of things, he never amounted to more than a hill of beans, but he got much more than his 15 minutes,” Gabbert wrote about Gabbert. “… No great loss.”
This time, though, Gabbert couldn’t have been more wrong.
While far from universally loved, Gabbert’s death means Bland County just got markedly more, well, bland.
“He was a character his whole life,” said classmate Cathy Strock.
Gabbert could often be spotted around town wearing coveralls or his signature suspenders, which he sometimes uniquely coupled with a pair of khaki shorts.
On Saturday, the BHS Class of 1964 gathered for its 45th class reunion and those in attendance said Gabbert’s absence was glaring.
“[It was] the first one he has ever missed,” said another classmate, Elaine Dillow. “He’s always been our main speaker.”
Dillow said Gabbert’s reunion emcee skills were so revered that the Class of 1963 once recruited him to lead its gathering.
“We all agreed that Bland County lost one of her most colorful citizens with his passing,” Strock added.
James F. Gabbert Jr. was born in Aberdeen, Wash., to military parents, causing him to move frequently during the first few years of his life before his family settled in Bland in 1952.
While he later left the county to serve in the Vietnam War, get an education at Virginia Tech and work as a traveling salesman based in Texas, he returned in 1987 and reasserted himself as a love-him-or-hate-him-but-can’t-ignore-him fixture in the community.
“If he liked you, he liked you,” Dillow said, “and if he didn’t, he didn’t.”
According to his classmates, Gabbert’s irascible temperament was evident even during his elementary school days.
Neighbor and classmate Ava Green recalled that Gabbert had a sharp mind – and sharp scissors.
Green said she wore long pigtails as a youngster, until, that is, her pigtails fatefully swung a little too close to Gabbert one day.
“My pigtails kept hitting his desk,” she said. “All of a sudden, I didn’t have pigtails any more.”
Green, who called herself a lifelong friend of Gabbert’s, finished her story with a laugh, recalling that she was happy to be rid of the scalp-pulling braids. Her mother, on the other hand, wasn’t as pleased about Gabbert’s decision to play barber in the schoolhouse.
The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, though, kept figuratively pulling pigtails for the rest of his life.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gabbert wrote the weekly “Bland Bulletin” for the Messenger.
Gabbert turned the simple standard of a community news column – who’s visiting who, who just got out of the hospital, who has a birthday this week – into an outlet for his own often contrarian viewpoints.
“He had an opinion on just about everything,” said Ronnie Hall, Bland County’s former clerk of court and a childhood friend of Gabbert’s. “It was usually different from everybody else’s.”
Stephanie Porter-Nichols, the editor of the Messenger when Gabbert was writing his column, recalled that it was a near weekly struggle to keep Gabbert from printing something that was likely to lead to a lawsuit.
“He never could appreciate libel,” she said. “Almost every column of his had something I feared that broached that line.”
In a “Bland Bulletin” from October 1989, Gabbert detailed acts of vandalism that had been taking place around the county. He then went on to give the definition and origins of the word “vandal” before giving his own description of the (in this case) nameless perpetrator.
“Basically, a cowardly dog that doesn’t have the courage of a rat,” he wrote. “A low-life snake.”
While Porter-Nichols said she and Gabbert had their clashes, which eventually led to him quitting the column and developing his own personal Web site as a forum for his musings, she also said she found his muckraking admirable at times.
“I always admired his persistence in wanting to get the story out there,” she said.
“He had a real passion for the county – I think there’s no denying that.”
While Gabbert kept up a gruff exterior, his classmates said he had a big heart underneath it all.
“He was a joy to be around – if you could get past his nonsense,” Dillow said.
His cousin, Chuck Muncy, called Gabbert “a patriot in every sense of the word.”
He was known around the county for his dedication to veterans, especially his practice of making sure American flags adorned the graves of deceased local servicemen.
After Gabbert’s death, Muncy said he cleaned out his cousin’s car and found a box of gravestone flags waiting for placement.
“He kept up with things like that,” Muncy said.
Gabbert’s own words also showed his strong feelings about honoring veterans.
In another “Bland Bulletin” column, Gabbert wrote a tribute to “Uncle Cleve” Winesett, a Bland County veteran who turned 101 in November 1989.
“Winesett is the County’s oldest Mason and oldest veteran, and if he doesn’t get mentioned by Willard Scott on the Today Show (NBC) it’ll be time to burn Willard’s wig!” he wrote.
Green also recalled that her neighbor regularly arose at dawn and played a beautiful rendition of “Taps” out his window, loud enough to rouse those nearby that didn’t always want to be woken up so early.
The exterior of Gabbert’s Main Street home embodied his one-of-a-kind personality.
On one edge of his property he placed a street sign that reads, “Old Fart’s Alley.”
He also flew both the American and Texas flags, the latter serving as a marker of the nickname, the Texas Embassy, that he gave his abode in his column.
“The Texas Ambassador hosted the Viceroy and Viscount of Repass Lane and the Viscount of Virginia Beach to dinner on the 17th,” Gabbert wrote in a February 1990 “Bland Bulletin.”
While friends and family members spoke in awe of Gabbert’s intelligence, routinely describing him with the word “brilliant,” those that knew him well said his life was also marked by sadness, loneliness, and, in their views, heaps of unfulfilled potential.
Gabbert drank heavily and let his health slide in recent years, often, Muncy said, refusing his family’s pleas to go to the doctor. 
“Freddie was extremely intelligent,” Hall said. “I don’t think he could ever get a handle on it. … He just never could find his niche.”
Gabbert drove a truck for many years after his return to Bland County before taking an early retirement.
Hall said the community never got to see what Gabbert could have done with his life.
“I think they’ll be missing out on something that could have been, but never was,” Hall said.
“He could talk to you about anything,” Dillow added. “He could have done anything.”
In his “Bland Bulletin” columns, Gabbert’s smarts were evident through his use of the English language – and many foreign tongues as well.
He offered up a few sentences in French to welcome the school’s new French teacher. He gave a “mea culpa” for misspelling a name. He apologized for the “paucity of publicity” due to his being out of town.
But French, Latin and alliteration flourishes often took a backseat to the stereotypical dialect of the hills.
“We apologize for the dearth of nooze last week,” Gabbert wrote in March 1990. “W’uns wuz’nt h’year but certain reliable sources tried to pass on the nooze.”
Gabbert was also known as a devoted reader with his varied reading list being one of the few things that could match his eclectic opinions.
“He probably read a book a day,” Muncy said. “He read everything from comic books to Shakespeare.”
In going through Gabbert’s papers and things, Muncy said he’s realized that his cousin was well-known far beyond the borders of Bland.
“He had friends all over the country,” Muncy said.
But it will be Bland Countians – the ones who can remember little Freddie marching right out of school on his first day when he decided he didn’t like it, the ones who were able to look past his callousness, the ones who politely nodded through his verbose rantings – that will mourn the rabble-rouser the deepest.
“I respected Freddie’s ways because that was Freddie,” Green said.
“Freddie was Freddie.”
Nate Hubbard can be reached at 1-800-655-1406 or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).