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Remarks by John Warnock at Funeral of Oscar J. Holmes III
Grace Temple Emanuel Baptist Church
Tucson, Arizona, May 10, 2003.

Oscar Holmes was a funny man and a strong man. He was also a good man—and generous to me in ways I don't think I ever managed to convey to him. I'd like to try to convey it to you all this morning.

We met because we were on the Tucson High basketball team together. He was a year behind me. We played the same position. I was starting. I think he decided he might be able to move me on over and so he started a little psychological warfare, a little chat, a little of this and little of that. Most of the time it was pretty obvious because of the glint in his eye. I called him on it. "Who told you?" he said. I don't know if he was surprised I'd found him out or just pretending to be. But somehow that was the start of what was one of the most important friendships in my life.

That was 1957. I was a white boy who lived over by Peter Howell and I didn't know where Oscar lived. There was a whole lot I didn't know about what was going on—in Tucson, but of course not just here. Oscar knew what was going on.

I feel that he took me under his wing though I'm pretty sure he didn't see it like that. I do know that just about every time I spent an hour with him, I learned something, and that what he was teaching me was helping me grow up.

It wasn't just about race, it was about all kinds of social things, about the ladies, about fighting, about holding your own. And about language. He taught me a wonderful language (A whole lot of the words he taught me had to do with the ladies, now that I think of it). He taught me a bunch of stanzas of The Signifying Monkey and the dozens, though I never did have enough hair to try to actually play them with anyone. This was thirty years before Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates wrote a book called The Signifying Monkey and forty years before we started seeing people playing the dozens in TV ads.

One day he took me down to what he had taught me to call The Strip, the old section of Meyer Avenue that got flattened to make space for the Tucson Convention Center. I knew enough to know that it probably wasn't a great idea for a gray boy like myself (that's one of the terms he taught me) to go down there by myself. But I didn't have to. Oscar took me. As we walked in and out of places, it was obvious that everyone knew Oscar and it was also obvious that they didn't think much of his friend. In one place, he asked to be buzzed downstairs and was told that he could go but his friend couldn't. He was about to make an issue of it when he noticed me standing all big-eyed next to him, and decided that maybe we could let it slide.

After graduating from Tucson High, I left Tucson and stayed gone for thirty years. Wherever I went, I saw again and again the value of what Oscar had taught me.

When I came back to Tucson and starting getting together again with classmates from Tucson High, I found that a lot of them felt the way I did about education we got there. But some of us were luckier than others. Some of us got to be Oscar Holmes' friend.