- Will you consider this?

He spent more than 50 years reporting and writing the facts as he witnessed them.

Nothing really personal, but a family tragedy changed all that.

I'm Christine Zak-Edmonds.

Stay here for this week's "Consider This".

(upbeat music) World sporting events had David Kindred travel the world over.

He reported on and knew all the greats, but the love for one of his grandsons, who had a wild and a kindred spirit, snapped this grandpa into a reality he couldn't fathom.

This sports hall of fame writer and author joins me now with Joan Krupa, one of his many, many fans.

Welcome to you both.

- Thank you.

- Happy to be here, thank you.

- Well, let's go a little summary of you, you're a sports writer for ever and ever and ever for Sporting News, Golf Digest, all sorts of newspapers, everything.

- Began at the Bloomington Pantagraph.

Went to school at Illinois Wesleyan on a scholarship provided by the Pantagraph, they paid half the tuition, I worked at the newspaper for the other half, did that for six years, and then left Illinois in 1965.

Came back in 2010, had been in Kentucky at the Louisville Courier Journal, then Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, sounds like a guy who can't keep a job.

But I was just 10 years I decided it was about my limit on everything.

To discover, mature in it, tire of it, move on.

And it got to be time for us to come back to Illinois.

Been very happy here now, 12 years.

- Good for you.

And then when you came back, your wife was ill and you were visiting her quite often, and you were covering Morton Lady Potters basketball, which is how you met your number one Central Illinois fan.

- Yes.

Yeah.

I did that kind of as a lark.

Had a friend whose daughter played on the Morton High School team.

Went to watch her play one time, and being an old sports writer, I wanted to write something about it.

So I found a man running a website for the team, told him I'd like to write something.

He looked at me and I've said before that he looked at me and he assessed my experience and my talent and my good looks and said "I'll pay you a box of Milk Duds every game".

So I wrote for Milk Duds for 10 years.

- And then, so you just noticed him at the games, Joan, is that it?

And you were curious to see what was going on or you read the articles that he was writing?

- All of the above.

My daughter-in-law and son-in-law told me about Dave and my granddaughter was playing basketball at the time.

And so I was one of his many fans that would read after he would see the game, then he'd go home and tell the truth as it came.

And then us old grandmothers would stay up until 1:00 in the morning sometimes just waiting to hear what Dave Kindred wrote.

- One of the pleasures of doing the Lady Potters was that I had no deadline.

Until one time Joan told me I was keeping her up too late.

So then I started writing, I'd go home immediately and write instead of waiting for the next morning.

- Okay, well good for you.

And now Joan is the one who brought your latest book to me.

It's not a pleasant read, although it is very enlightening, and it is the story of one of your twin grandsons.

So I guess we need to launch into that.

- Yeah, I think probably like most men, when I was young and had a child myself, I was working, I was gone all the time.

Had the grandsons when I was 47 and it was like having a second chance to be a father.

So I knew that the twins, week after they were born, I held them on both arms, went from here to here, weighed five pounds, six pounds.

So I grew up kind of loving them in ways I hadn't really loved my own son because they were with me all the time.

And then Jared, the one that I wrote about in the book after high school, goes on the road, lost track of him, didn't really know what he was doing.

Would hear from him once in a while, hear from his mother once in a while.

It was a divorce situation.

And in the end, he's an alcoholic who drank himself to death.

I'd only seen him once in that period from the time he was 18 until he was 23.

I'd only seen him once, but I talked to him a lot.

So I knew what was going on.

And when he died, I went to the funeral.

At the funeral I met many of his traveling friends.

They called themselves traveling kids.

- And these were modern day hobos, really.

- Exactly.

They traveled by train or hitchhiking.

However they could get wherever they wanted to go, they did it.

I learned the lifestyle after he had passed.

I knew nothing really about the life.

So I wanted to recreate the life and I wanted to do something.

I don't know if it was cathartic or not, but again, writers write.

I had been keeping notes during the time I talked to him on the phone.

I knew I would write something someday.

I hoped it would be a happy story.

It never was.

And then I just, not catharsis, but more that I wanted to find out who he was.

From the time he was 18 until he was 23, I didn't know who he was.

And I would never have written the book if I had found out that he was a different kid than the kid that I loved.

But everybody that I talked to, all of his friends, all had the same kind of story.

That he was just always fun.

He was happy go lucky kid there.

Everybody wanted to be with him.

So I was very proud to know that.

And I wanted to write a story that...

I think the last line of the book is, you know, my wife said it's a love story, and it is.

- It truly is.

And Joan, you have read it maybe three or four times now, and you have a lot of questions.

You invited me to a book club where Dave appeared and that was the first time he'd been invited to a book club.

- I can't believe it because this is a very tough book to read, but it is so full of truth, helped me understand some of the things that happened to people that I love and have loved in the past.

I had a better idea of what addiction meant.

I think I personally am much less judgmental of people that are suffering from a disease rather than just lack of willpower.

And Dave helped me understand that.

And so I wanted to share it with some of my friends.

And the book is available on Amazon to anyone that wants to read it.

And I don't know if I should have said that.

- No, absolutely, absolutely.

It's called "Leave Out the Tragic Parts".

It couldn't have a better title because you can't leave out the tragic parts.

It is a story of a kid with so much life and so much energy.

- And so much community love.

And that was another lesson.

It taught me that people can have family outside of the family who truly love and care for one another.

And so that was important too.

- And one of the lines in your book, I didn't bring my glasses, so I hope I can get this.

You said, it was right in the beginning, "I wanted to fill the loss with a story about the love that comes before loss and lives in me yet".

And that is what this book is.

- That's what I wanted to do.

It's the only reason I wanted to write the book.

I wanted people to know, I wanted people to know him.

I wanted people to know that he was not a bum.

He had a disease that he probably was an alcoholic when he was 13.

He one time told my wife and I "grandma, I'm an alcoholic".

He was 13.

We paid no attention.

And I think if there's a lesson in this book, it's when you hear that, do something about it.

Don't let that pass.

Because once he becomes 15, 16, 17, there's no talking to him then.

You hope early intervention.

And the terrible part of it, the horror for parents, grandparents, is that it's easy for us to say "quit it, just stop drinking".

Well, the brain demands to be fed.

I did a lot of study about how the brain reacts to addiction.

- And that was, as you were writing this book?

- I knew nothing about it.

I was one of those people who would say "well just quit drinking".

Well, they can't quit drinking.

You know, what happens if they quit drinking is seizures.

The brain demands to be fed.

The brain thinks that the alcohol or the drug of substance, the drug of choice is a nutrient.

The brain needs it.

The brain demands it.

If the brain doesn't get it, the brain seizes.

That's why he passed out, he was passing out all the time.

He'd pass out on moving trains, fall off a park bench.

Not because he was drinking, but at those moments, because he was not drinking.

And by then it was much too late to do anything about it.

And the idea that you have enough willpower to overcome that is not very true.

You know, you can go to rehab.

We've all heard those stories.

Go to rehab four, five, six, 10 times and relapse every time because it's a terrible thing to go through.

The withdrawal pain of no alcohol is terrible.

And so they'd rather think they can live with it than fight it because the fight is too painful.

- And Joan, when we were at the book club, you had a lot of questions that you didn't get a chance to ask.

So now's your chance.

What do you wanna ask him?

- Well, one of the things that you said, Dave, that impacted me was do something while the person owns the substance rather than waiting until the substance owns the person.

That's what I meant when I said an early intervention.

When you recognize it, deal with it, be painful to deal with even then, but you have to do it then before this.

What I've said in the book, I think, is that he didn't choose addiction.

Addiction chose him.

Because the brain reacts differently, different people's brains.

Even science can't explain why one person will become addicted and another won't.

The twin brother is not addicted.

The twin brother, probably an alcoholic, but certainly not an alcoholic to the depth that Jared was.

So you don't know what causes it or even really how to fix it.

The person has to decide himself, herself.

They have to make the decision to do it.

- And go ahead.

You had something.

He would call you and you learned how to use Western Union and you said at one point in the book, I just felt like maybe I was an enabler, but your thought process behind that was you were trying to enable him to come back to what we know as life, correct?

- Of course, that's what you want.

It's what you try to do.

I had no idea, I'd send him $25, $20.

I need $20 grandpa to go take the bus from Albany, New York to the city.

So I'd send him $20.

I don't know what he did with the $20, and I didn't really care what he did with it because by then it was too late for me to change it.

And I was not going to abandon him, but the choice is cut him off entirely or enable him.

- And you couldn't.

- I couldn't, maybe other people can, other people can be harder about it, but this is a boy that when he's six or seven years old, he's sleeping with me.

I'm reading him bedtime stories.

I'm telling him bedtime stories about professional athletes.

I'm telling him sports writers stories, anything that he'll go to sleep.

No way that I was going to cut him off.

- And that's unconditional love.

- Another part of the book that I loved was looking into characters that actually wrote stories about him.

And as Dave says, they're the truth as far as he knows it.

And he was very upfront in saying who knows for sure exactly what day it happened or where things happened.

But the spirits that are spoken out in this book are tremendous and gave me a much better understanding of other people that might have children that have gone a different direction than what they had hoped.

So my question to you, Dave, is if you had a chance to talk to your grandson today, what would you share with him?

Or what would you say?

Or would it make any difference?

- Well, I wish I had that chance.

I don't know.

He'd be 30.

He died when he was 25.

He'd be 33 now.

I had hoped, and I say it in the book, I think probably all grandparents wish the same thing.

You hope that they grow up and trust you and love you enough to talk to you and tell you everything, tell you their problems that you think you can help.

He never did that with us.

And that was a painful thing for me to recognize.

I'd ask him why that was.

I think all of this is a reaction.

Every time I see like a person on a street with a sign, hungry.

- You learned the whole language that they use too.

- Yeah, and I stopped and give them money.

Probably shouldn't, people tell me I shouldn't, but I do, because I think that sign is a symptom of their pain.

It's not begging you to help them.

It's a symptom of their pain.

And I wanna help them relieve that pain somehow.

I think there was some kind of pain in Jared that went unresolved.

Whether it was a family dysfunction, school failures, athletic failures, who knows what the pain was.

But alcohol is one of the administrators that I talked to in the book says people become alcoholics to change the way they feel.

- It kills that pain.

- Feel bad.

I'm gonna change the way I feel.

Doesn't know it's gonna make him feel worse eventually, but for the moment, they're running from some kind of pain.

If you can pinpoint the pain, find out what the pain was, and somehow resolve that, that's what I wish I could have done with Jared.

- And you worked on this, well you kept notes with everything because that's the reporter in you and the writer in you and you kept notes.

How long did you work on this book?

And then were you surprised?

So you met his friends, his traveling family.

You met them at his funeral and were you surprised to hear their stories and try to relate to them?

- Well it's a world that none of us really know.

None of us, I mean, even people who have lived on the road don't know this kind of story.

Because all these kids, every one of them had a home that they could have gone to.

They weren't homeless people.

They just chose to be on the road.

It was fascinating to me to find out how they had made those choices.

I saw them all at maybe two dozen of them at the funeral.

Couple months later, they had a memorial for Jared in Asheville, North Carolina, met more of them there, and they all had the same story.

They all, not that they would articulate it, but they all were running from something and they found this common ground in that they could live on the road.

Not easy to do.

- It was the thrill of they were on the trains.

I had no idea.

Anytime I hear a train whistle now or see a train, which isn't very often, but the train whistles I hear, but I think, I wonder if there's any of those traveling kids on that train right now.

- Not a train goes by that I don't look, the railroad cars called grainers, they're kind of a V shape at the end.

And there's a hole in the end.

And that's where Jared would ride.

And so I'm always looking, my wife and I stopped at a railroad crossing, one train going by and I said "that's the kind of train that Jared would write on".

And my wife said "my God".

Because it's scary.

- It is.

It really is.

And Joan, in the book, you traveled to the places where Jared was and you saw some of the places where he actually lived, or not lived, but stayed, hung out, and temporarily occupied some of these places.

- Went to New Orleans, his favorite town was New Orleans.

I mean, I get back to one of your questions.

You talked about how long I did this book.

I started keeping notes in the phone calls because I wanted to write a happy story, at some point, I figured that this is gonna end okay.

So I kept notes for two or three years actually.

And then my wife had a stroke and I didn't do anything for a couple years.

Then I got back to it when it was apparent that she was not gonna recover well.

I got back to doing the book, worked on it another two years.

So it was seven years in total.

But I went to New Orleans, went to Mount Airy, North Carolina, where he had a girlfriend where he lived there.

Went to Myrtle Beach where his mother lived.

And I met enough people in enough places and enough situations to be able to reconstruct the kind of life that he led, including sitting on a wharf by the Mississippi in New Orleans where they would gather every night.

He slept by the railroad tracks behind Jack's Brewery in New Orleans.

If there's a universal kind of appeal to this book, it's that it's a lifestyle that nobody knows.

It's a lifestyle that you don't wanna know really, but it exists.

And there's a million reasons for it.

- How many do you think are out there now?

- Well, one of them, Aggro, a woman, looked like a football linebacker when I knew her.

They called her Aggro, short for aggressive and aggravating.

So she said that there were maybe a couple thousand.

She didn't know, but she said that she could find 2,000 people in five minutes on her phone.

Because almost all of them carried phones, almost all of them connected by Facebook.

So it was kind of hiding in plain sight.

People knew where they were.

- So Joan, how did you find out that he was writing this book?

- Well, fortunately for the Morton Potters, Dave wrote a book from the time he started, and this time they started getting state wins.

And so I read four of his books before I even knew him, except from across the gym.

And then of course we all wanted his book because we know the kind of writing he does, it's always truthful.

There's no varnishing, but it's very entertaining reading.

And I think, Dave, that you probably don't know the impact you've had on national television with that and with local PBS.

But also, I was in Trasker's last week, and I saw our Daily Bread and there's an article about Dave in that, and the theme is from someone who didn't know him at all, but could see the community aspect that we all need people, we all can do something, even if we don't have a paid job, we accepted Milk Duds, you can still have a great impact.

And on September 22nd, there was a story written about Dave.

- Incredible.

The lives you've touched in in ways that you never knew.

- And now I'm trying to write a book now as a kind of a memoir.

It's supposed to be about when I was somebody, and then when I was doing the Lady Potters, kind of half and half.

And in that book I talk about we came back here, what, after 45 years gone and we have more friends here and built a community better here through the Lady Potters than we had at any time on the road.

And I blame myself for a lot of that because I was a workaholic, wandering, traveling sports writer.

So I was never at home.

I mean, I've said before, I think I said at your book club in fact, that we never really had friends as neighbors because I spoke a different language.

I spoke English, they spoke gardening.

- Big difference.

Very big difference.

Well, you said you were workaholic.

So what's the difference between that and alcoholism, basically?

- Well you hope you don't kill yourself with workaholic.

But it's a disease.

I recognized it but there wasn't anything I could do about it because I loved the job.

I still love to write, but the job came first all the time.

- Well, hopefully your agent, because you you've written nine, now 10 books, and you have number 11 in the works I guess, hopefully your agent will publish this one.

- Same people that did the Jared book will do it.

Public Affairs.

It'll be another year before that book is in our hands.

But it's what I do.

And if I had my life to live over, I would work less probably.

I mean, nobody ever retires and or says in their deathbed "I wish I had worked more".

- Wish you would've spent more time at the office.

- Yeah, yeah.

Nobody ever says that.

And I'm one of those people who would not say that, but it was the only way that I could do what I wanted to do.

I was just a super earnest little kid from a little town in Illinois, who wanted to be as good as he could be.

- And you were, and you showed the world.

So thank you for sharing this tragic story, heartfelt as it is.

And thanks for being here, Joan.

Thank you for bringing the book to me.

I'd already met you because of Mr. fights like a butterfly or stings like a bee.

So thank you both for being here, and thank you for being with us too.

Have a good evening, stay safe and healthy, and hold happiness.

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