Sleep Walk

In the summer of 1966 and I was a young man working in Seattle for the generous wage of two dollars, forty-nine and-a-half cents an hour. It was twice what I had been earning in my most recent construction job, and ten times that of my Air Force pay before that. One Friday, with the big check in my pocket I joined a few friends at a local honky-tonk. I don’t recall the name of the band, but as the evening wore on, I became more and more in awe of the guy playing lead guitar. He looked to be only a few years older than me, maybe thirty, but he played like a master.


I finally consumed enough beer to approach and talk to him during one of their breaks. I told him how much I enjoyed his skills with the guitar. He thanked me politely and we visited until it was time to play the next set. He was a friendly and pleasant conversationalist. During our short conversation he told me his name, though it meant nothing to me at the time, and he didn’t elaborate. I also learned he was a local guy from the town of Puyallup, a half-hour down the valley.


Later the next week, I was telling a friend about this fantastic guitarist playing at the tavern across the street from the airplane factory. He laughed when I told him the guy’s name, and he informed me that Nokie Edwards was the lead guitarist for the Ventures. Of course, I had heard of the group and loved their music, but the names of individual band members never really interested me enough to follow them, and the band he was playing with that night was not the Ventures. Nevertheless, the fact that I had spent a short time conversing with such a talented musician helped me appreciate his performances even more as the years passed.


Thirty-some years later I saw Nokie Edwards again…his name was embroidered on his somewhat gaudy Ventures jacket…but this time we were both having dinner at a Puyallup eatery and he didn’t have a guitar...and we didn't get to talk.


Yesterday, I read on the Internet that last fall he had died of complications following hip surgery in Yuma. He was 82, and the world lost yet another rare talent. It seems like only yesterday that we were both young men sharing long forgotten thoughts in a dumpy beer hall, by the airplane factory in Seattle.

RIP, Nokie. I’m just glad your music will live on.