Dale Hardman could talk the hind legs off a dead donkey. Don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise.
He wouldn’t mind me using that analogy as his lack of legs and my lack of sight (I’m blind, deaf and Scottish – a triple threat) were something we joked about. I looked up a text I had from him last year when we were meeting at Barcade for a beer. It went like this:
Me: “Hey Cripple Creek, where are you? Yer late!”
Him: “I’m sitting outside you blind Scottish bastid. You walked right past me!”
Dale was often the loudest voice in the room and at some point in a previous existence it was obvious he had kissed the blarney stone. "Gift-of-the-gab" doesn't cover it. If you walked into a bar and Dale was there, often you would hear him before you saw him. A booming warm Georgia drawl punching its way out of the background noise to welcome you and immediately make you feel at home.
I loved sitting and listening to Dale's stories and I used to think "Shit, I really should write some of these down" but I always knew I would be wasting my time as I would never be able to tell the story as well as Dale did himself.
We talked about how we both grew up in the Catholic faith but had since joined what Dale considered to be the biggest religion on the planet - "The Lapsedlics". People who had walked away from the Church. Dale was an altar boy, I had tried out for the altar boys and failed to get in.
"You probably weren't pretty enough" was the consensus.
My religious upbringing left me bitter towards all religions, his religious upbringing was filed away in his brain as another learning experience to be drawn on when needed. Dale might have thought it was nonsense but he didn't really do bitter, hence he was known to a lot of us as "Brightmoments".
We talked about music a lot. The very first time I met him. 10 years or so ago, was because a few of us who knew each other online through a local community website, got together to talk about Captain Beefheart. Dale instigated the night out and a lot more non-Beefheart fans showed up. Most of the people who were there that night are still my core group of Jersey City friends and two of them have even since married. I’ll be forever grateful for his ability to bring people together.
He loved jazz. I knew the big names in jazz (Miles, Monk, Billie, Ella, etc) before I met Dale. By the time he was done I was checking out Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler and Sun Ra. He taught me that the good stuff was often just below the surface and the effort involved in finding it and understanding it was well worth it.
Poetry was another love. I had read a lot of the Beats like Kerouac and Ginsberg when I was younger and thought most of it was rubbish. We argued about this a lot and eventually he persuaded me that if I wanted to understand them I had to go back further. He gave me a book on Lord Buckley, who many see as a forerunner to the beats, and told me to read it.
I fell in love with Lord Buckley so I returned to read Kerouac, and, sorry Dale, I still think he is rubbish.
I guess we will never resolve that argument now.
Arguing was something else that Dale was also very good at. Thankfully he put it to good use.
Growing up in the South during the civil rights era had a lasting effect on him as he never lost his taste for fighting the good fight and raising hell when he perceived something was unjust. I think a lot of people reading this will know him from his omnipresent involvement in local politics so I don’t really need to explain this part.
If there was a cause he was often in the thick of it, if he wasn’t in the thick of it, he was the first to give encouragement to those who were.
The last thing he really spearheaded was the “No Gas Pipeline” fight against Spectra Energy. This was a natural gas pipeline expansion to New York City that runs through the heart of Jersey City. As far as Dale was concerned it had no benefit to anyone other than Spectra shareholders and had an incredible amount of risk to life involved.
He educated himself on everything in the natural gas industry, all the way from the fracking process to the government regulators to the uses and abuses of natural gas.
I remember talking to him at a couple of fundraisers for this group and being quite bamboozled at the amount of different things Dale could talk about at the same time.
It was a classic big guy vs little guy situation and although the big guy ultimately got his way, the little guy raised some serious hell and as far as I know (someone can correct me on this), there are still cases working their way through the courts.
I remember thinking at the time that he had no chance and it was a losing fight so why bother. Thankfully Dale never thought that way. He probably knew he was going to lose but he also knew he was
right.
The amount of people who have written on facebook that he was their biggest supporter in their political and artistic endeavors speaks for itself. I'm going to finish with the hope that this will be his legacy and we will all continue to hear that booming Georgia drawl in our heads for the rest of our lives offering us more "Brightmoments" when we need them.
Rest in Peace Dale
“The flowers, the gorgeous, mystic multi-coloured flowers are not the flowers of life, but people, yes people are the true flowers of life, and it has been a most precious pleasure to have temporarily strolled in your garden”.
- Lord Buckley
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