The Open Man

Young's father, Scott, a sportswriter famous in Canada, died last year, in his eighties, after a period of dementia. As a child, Young would watch his father writing. On those occasions when he pointed out to his father that he appeared to be doing nothing, his father would say, "That's when I get my best ideas." Waiting for an idea is a hallmark of Young's method. His father's death was not unexpected, but it haunted Young, especially in light of his own mortality. He felt blessed to have escaped any lasting consequences and fortunate to have discovered his problem by means of an MRI and not as the result of having a stroke in a backstage hallway of a stadium.

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Young lives in Northern California, south of San Francisco, on property he calls the Broken Arrow Ranch. On the Rand McNally Road Atlas, a small fir tree appears more or less where the ranch is. He bought the place thirty-five years ago. Before moving to it, he lived in Los Angeles, in Topanga Canyon. Leaving L.A., he drove through a brush fire. "The freeway was in the middle of it," he told me. "Both sides of the road were in flames. It was very dramatic. I was driving out of town, and the place was burning up."

Young said this a few weeks ago, in Northern California, while we were riding in an old Plymouth he owns and more or less widely circling the borders of the ranch. He has a fleet of cars from the era of his childhood -- he is sixty. His fascination with cars has its genesis in an early misfortune. When he was six, he went swimming with his father in the Pigeon River and woke that night with his shoulder hurting. Before the morning was through, he was so stiff that his father described him as moving like "a mechanical man." In Shakey, Young's biography, written by Jimmy McDonough, there is a description of his being taken to the hospital and how the polio he'd contracted in the river nearly killed him. When his parents came to take him home, he said, "I didn't die, did I?" The nurses sang "Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes" to him, and he wept. He had lost so much weight, his mother told McDonough, that "he looked like hell on the highway. Skin and bones." He had been a fat baby, as wide as he was tall, she said. When she played "Boogie-Woogie," by Pinetop Smith, he would stand up in his playpen and hold on to the rails and dance. A family friend described him as "a sullen, fat, dark-eyed little baby. Not a happy baby, not a smiler, not a joiner." Young has an older brother, Bob, who is a former club golf pro in Florida. Their parents, absorbed with the difficulties of a failing marriage, sometimes overlooked them, so Neil "became a little watcher," the friend said. He liked turtles and fishing. He liked to draw trains, and he could do so with either hand. His mother predicted that he would become an architect or a musician. His father used to take him and his brother for rides in the car and sing "Bury Me on the Lone Prairie." A relative said he was "a droll little boy."