Inspiration
I appeared on-screen last Thursday in a Zoom meeting at the weekly get-together of the Oroville Association of Realtors. My appointed mission was to say a few inspirational words to the group. I am assigned the same mission annually for the Chico Association of Realtors at their last meeting of every year. The Oroville appearance was a first, and I didn’t know what words of inspiration I might come up with. It’s a lot easier at Christmastime, being the end of the year and the time for sentimentality. April is a different matter.
I inherited the year-end assignment for the Chico Association eight years ago from my wily old Real Estate mentor, the great Ken DuVall, or KDV, who filled that spot for the previous thirty years or so. KDV’s year-end speech was always a touching Christmas story of some kind. He touched our hearts every time, but also threw in some jokes to keep our spirits up. KDV was, after all, a walking encyclopedia of jokes. Every encounter with KDV involved a joke-fest. He was also a brilliant, eccentric, endearing, and unapologetically irreverent guy, so his jokes tended toward the colorful side. But he told even the raunchier jokes with such apparent innocence and lack of malice, that people generally shook their heads saying something like, “Only KDV could get away with that.”
It was one of his more colorful jokes that he told when I first met him back in the mid-eighties, that convinced me KDV was my guy. I had told my Canyon neighbor, Mike, I was going into Real Estate. Mike leaned on his shovel. “You should look up this guy, Ken DuVall,” he said. “He sells Real Estate and teaches the Real Estate License classes.” Mike looked into the distance and said with reverence, “That DuVall guy is amazing. Funny as all get-out, but knows his stuff. I mean really knows his stuff. I sat through the classes just to watch him. Never did get my Real Estate license.”
I went to Butte College and I sat in the upper row of one of the large rotunda classrooms and checked out this guy, Ken Duvall. He infused the technical and drab Real Estate licensing material with stories of his motorcycle racing in the southern California deserts and stuntman roles in Hollywood B-movies, like “Hot Rod Girls”. The colorful joke I refer to above wasn’t just colorful, it was a real hair-curler. And funny. The class responded with mainly uncomfortable laughter, with a few guffaws mixed in. I will certainly not repeat it here, and I won’t even tell it to you in person, unless I perceive you to be in the same class of miscreants as KDV and me. KDV rolled on with his dialogue as if that foul joke were a standard part of his course platform. That’s when I knew KDV was my guy.
What to say to the Oroville Association? Well, I told them about my inheritance of the speech role from good old KDV, and I flipped a few of his cleaner jokes their way. Then I quoted KDV from a memoir he wrote and sent to me shortly before his death, which contained his own words of inspiration:
“Attitude equals success. Don’t be hostile. Just do the bet you can, and like cattle truck going down the highway, let the chips fall where they may.” And: “The best way to cheer yourself up is to cheer somebody else up.” And: “We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.” And:
“Love conquers all.”