A Curious Junction

It has been nearly 40 years since the rocker Jim Morrison died. But this week - the day after Morrison would have turned 65 - he appeared in The New York Times in two obituaries: his father's and that of the owner of the Los Angeles club, Whisky A Go Go, where Morrison's band, the Doors, got its big break.

George S. Morrison died at 89 on Nov. 17; Elmer Valentine died at 85 on Dec. 3. Jim Morrison, known to these men in such different ways, died at 27 on July 3, 1971.

A convergence like this is best rendered in strobelike flashes. Valentine was a former police detective from Chicago, once indicted for extortion. His club was the epicenter of Los Angeles rock 'n' roll and the place where the go-go dancer - booted, fringed and in a cage - was invented. Valentine also fired the Doors for singing Morrison's Oedipal - and in Valentine's judgment, obscene - song "The End."

The elder Morrison had his own central role in a parallel history: present at Pearl Harbor; the youngest admiral in the Navy; fleet commander during the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, an event almost as shadowy as the death of the son who dwarfs him in history. In the patterns of these three lives, you would think, you could learn most of what you need to know about getting into and out of the '60s.

But life is too elusive for the record. The point of an obituary is to gather what we've noticed about the people around us, not what they noticed about themselves. I find myself wondering how Elmer Valentine would tell his story to himself, or what George Morrison might have said to his son's employer.

Better yet, I imagine them meeting long before the famous son came along, perhaps during World War II when Valentine was an Army Air Forces mechanic and Morrison was a young naval ensign. Could either have imagined Jim Morrison's arc?

You can play this kind of moral sudoku - finding the patterns - with the obituaries every day. Look at those summary lives. See how they fit together - or not. How far into their backgrounds do you have to go before they start to converge? How far before you find yourself in a world of utterly different expectations? The answer is usually not very far. The only difference in this case is that the links lie right on the surface.