Review of Hero's Journey by Rita Kohn, Nuvo
I met Jeff Rasley, who respectfully backed away to the steps. He left a bag with four books. I said, “I’ll read soonest, or then again I might stay up half the night compelled to read.” We laughed.
It was four a.m. when I limped to bed, wrung out from front to back cover of the compelled-to-read “Hero’s Journey: John Ritter, the Chip Hilton of Goshen, Indiana.” The title brought several strands of my memory into play. What was this about the long forgotten Chip Hilton, the hero of the benignly imperative’ ‘50s, ’60s, 70’s Boys Sports Series written by Clair Bee, the winning Long Island University basketball coach, and game play innovator? What possibly could be the connection with the incoming 1969 freshman IU Basketball trinity of Indiana High School All-Stars: John Ritter, George McGinnis, Steve Downing, somehow doomed by The Fates in a tumultuous turnover of coaches leading to the Bob Knight era?
The pages turned. Rasley tags this story “A Memoir.” In the wee hours of Easter Monday 2020, I was in his parable of small-town hero-worship, a mortal hoisted atop a pedestal wrought by tight-fisted hands. Rasley’s prose is infused with the deftness of his law training and the seeing-eye of a mystic. This is his memory, looking back on the unfolding ingratitude of citizens within the confines of Goshen, Indiana —the city proper with its delineated socio-economic strata of neighborhoods and its suspect outskirts, when—in the waning 20th Century— their hero stepped off their mandated pedestal and asked for human-inspired help.Rasley builds his case so readers become the jury, compelled to search within and admit, as he does, ‘I am complicit in the denial of helping when asked. I am stiff-necked in my personal and community righteous meting out of hero worship without committing to give as much as I/we took.’
Shouldering the community-conferred-upon hero-status, sports hero John Ritter walked aloof from what we determine as a normal growing up curve. Gift-endowed in athletics and scholarship, he had the adult-fixated attributes of the fictional Chip Hilton, but with an essential missing component—camaraderie with a “gang.” Coach/author Clair Bee endowed his fictional perfect protagonist with the very human quality of empathy. Chip, amazingly, had no chip on his shoulder. He got along, went along, acting out the role of absent father. Chip always found a way to win the game, bring glory and pride to his hometown. The very human John Ritter did not/could not pull that off. He won, yet he disappointed. He made adult choices in a teen-age body; it just didn’t square with being a kid. Reading into the dawn, it seemed as though John Ritter made people cheer but not smile. My heart ached for him.
The child Jeff Rasley grew up in Goshen, Indiana, in the era of the real-life John Ritter luster, abetted by worshipful reading of book after book of the fictional Chip Hilton’s heroics on and off the court or field, depending on the topic of the story. One fed upon the other in Rasley’s push to teen-hood. “Hero’s Journey” really is Rasley’s latent coming-of-age memoir. Interestingly, in his looking back, the fictional Chip is described with more dimensionality than is the real-life John. It is late in the narrative that the very human life of John Ritter unfolds within Rasley’s Homeric complexity of what truly marks ascendancy to epic hero status, and why it is ‘we the people’ who stumble through life with feet of clay, our smallish smugness withholding a helping hand because we feel betrayed.
Rasley takes us through Ritter’s post-IU basketball era, with its immediate disappointments of not getting a professional basketball bid, and ensuing decades of misfortune tied to downright bad choices, leading to a fall from hometown grace. Then Rasley turns the woeful tide to confront us with John Ritter as a rightful hero, pulling himself up from depths of doom, with no help from those who doled out ‘worship’ while withholding caring embrace. Rasley unfolds a community of people who, in looking up, failed to look within a multi-gifted child/teen/young adult to learn his human needs, to welcome him into a hug, to ask, ‘hey, kid, are you o.k.’
“As Joseph Campbell, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and other scholars and sages have shown, the Hero fulfills a psychic need for individuals and a cultural need of communities,” summarizes Rasley. “Heroes are needed to push us and pull us toward our better selves and stronger communities—we need our heroes to serve as guides who point us in the right way.”
Odysseys/Ulysses found his way home, cites Rasley, as a hero who had undergone fall and ultimately rise, by dint of his strength of character. “John Ritter has made a hero’s journey,” concludes Rasley, to gain a different kind of success after decades of wanderings and tests to his inherent character, not unlike what Odysseys/Ulysses went through. “I hope the community leaders of Goshen will act with wisdom, courage, and compassion and recognize that John Ritter still has value to offer us as a local hero. And, I hope John will accept the honors that are due him. John Ritter has made a hero’s journey.”
Skimming through the other books in the bag, it’s clear they feed into Rasley’s own quest of personhood through his own journeys across continents, most fortunately afforded the embrace of people who cared to ask ‘are you o.k.’ and offer a helping hand. In due time, I’ll report on them.
It was four a.m. when I limped to bed, wrung out from front to back cover of the compelled-to-read “Hero’s Journey: John Ritter, the Chip Hilton of Goshen, Indiana.” The title brought several strands of my memory into play. What was this about the long forgotten Chip Hilton, the hero of the benignly imperative’ ‘50s, ’60s, 70’s Boys Sports Series written by Clair Bee, the winning Long Island University basketball coach, and game play innovator? What possibly could be the connection with the incoming 1969 freshman IU Basketball trinity of Indiana High School All-Stars: John Ritter, George McGinnis, Steve Downing, somehow doomed by The Fates in a tumultuous turnover of coaches leading to the Bob Knight era?
The pages turned. Rasley tags this story “A Memoir.” In the wee hours of Easter Monday 2020, I was in his parable of small-town hero-worship, a mortal hoisted atop a pedestal wrought by tight-fisted hands. Rasley’s prose is infused with the deftness of his law training and the seeing-eye of a mystic. This is his memory, looking back on the unfolding ingratitude of citizens within the confines of Goshen, Indiana —the city proper with its delineated socio-economic strata of neighborhoods and its suspect outskirts, when—in the waning 20th Century— their hero stepped off their mandated pedestal and asked for human-inspired help.Rasley builds his case so readers become the jury, compelled to search within and admit, as he does, ‘I am complicit in the denial of helping when asked. I am stiff-necked in my personal and community righteous meting out of hero worship without committing to give as much as I/we took.’
Shouldering the community-conferred-upon hero-status, sports hero John Ritter walked aloof from what we determine as a normal growing up curve. Gift-endowed in athletics and scholarship, he had the adult-fixated attributes of the fictional Chip Hilton, but with an essential missing component—camaraderie with a “gang.” Coach/author Clair Bee endowed his fictional perfect protagonist with the very human quality of empathy. Chip, amazingly, had no chip on his shoulder. He got along, went along, acting out the role of absent father. Chip always found a way to win the game, bring glory and pride to his hometown. The very human John Ritter did not/could not pull that off. He won, yet he disappointed. He made adult choices in a teen-age body; it just didn’t square with being a kid. Reading into the dawn, it seemed as though John Ritter made people cheer but not smile. My heart ached for him.
The child Jeff Rasley grew up in Goshen, Indiana, in the era of the real-life John Ritter luster, abetted by worshipful reading of book after book of the fictional Chip Hilton’s heroics on and off the court or field, depending on the topic of the story. One fed upon the other in Rasley’s push to teen-hood. “Hero’s Journey” really is Rasley’s latent coming-of-age memoir. Interestingly, in his looking back, the fictional Chip is described with more dimensionality than is the real-life John. It is late in the narrative that the very human life of John Ritter unfolds within Rasley’s Homeric complexity of what truly marks ascendancy to epic hero status, and why it is ‘we the people’ who stumble through life with feet of clay, our smallish smugness withholding a helping hand because we feel betrayed.
Rasley takes us through Ritter’s post-IU basketball era, with its immediate disappointments of not getting a professional basketball bid, and ensuing decades of misfortune tied to downright bad choices, leading to a fall from hometown grace. Then Rasley turns the woeful tide to confront us with John Ritter as a rightful hero, pulling himself up from depths of doom, with no help from those who doled out ‘worship’ while withholding caring embrace. Rasley unfolds a community of people who, in looking up, failed to look within a multi-gifted child/teen/young adult to learn his human needs, to welcome him into a hug, to ask, ‘hey, kid, are you o.k.’
“As Joseph Campbell, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and other scholars and sages have shown, the Hero fulfills a psychic need for individuals and a cultural need of communities,” summarizes Rasley. “Heroes are needed to push us and pull us toward our better selves and stronger communities—we need our heroes to serve as guides who point us in the right way.”
Odysseys/Ulysses found his way home, cites Rasley, as a hero who had undergone fall and ultimately rise, by dint of his strength of character. “John Ritter has made a hero’s journey,” concludes Rasley, to gain a different kind of success after decades of wanderings and tests to his inherent character, not unlike what Odysseys/Ulysses went through. “I hope the community leaders of Goshen will act with wisdom, courage, and compassion and recognize that John Ritter still has value to offer us as a local hero. And, I hope John will accept the honors that are due him. John Ritter has made a hero’s journey.”
Skimming through the other books in the bag, it’s clear they feed into Rasley’s own quest of personhood through his own journeys across continents, most fortunately afforded the embrace of people who cared to ask ‘are you o.k.’ and offer a helping hand. In due time, I’ll report on them.
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