We were great friends!. We had a lot of laughs. One would often wonder what he was thinking behind that smile of his. I have not seen him since the first reunion. Good bye friend.
William "Marc" Ginn William "Marc" Ginn, 57, of Amarillo died Sunday, May 24, 2009.
Memorial services will be at 3 p.m. Wednesday in Boxwell Brothers Funeral Directors Ivy Chapel, 2800 Paramount Blvd.
William "Marc" Ginn was born Oct. 10, 1951, in Pampa to Bruce A. and Zena Belle Ginn. He left home at an early age to pursue his dream of being a musician, but returned to work in the family farming and oil business.
He continued to play bass guitar with various bands throughout his life and also worked as a truck driver.
Survivors include his daughter, Ashly Nicole Ginn; a brother, Bruce A. Ginn and wife Jennifer; three nephews, Bruce A. Ginn III and Ryan and Christopher Ginn; and an uncle, Leo Caiafa.
He is beloved of Susan Ginn, Andria and Shawn Garrett, Brittany and Matt Arambula and many friends of Bill W.
In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made for the college fund of his daughter, Ashly Ginn, in care of Amarillo National Bank, P.O. Box 1, Amarillo, TX 79105.
My sister sent me news of Marc's passing by emailing his obit in the Amarillo paper. While reading the standard items obits take stock in as being the complete summary of one's life, memories I hadn't thought about in years, flooded past me.
I remember the time we ran in to each other there in Pampa in the summer of 1972. I had been working up in Montana on a pipeline and he had been doing some cross-country trucking. Both of us had our pockets full of dinero and we were in the mood to take a journey. We settled on driving to the interior of Mexico. I sold the deal by telling him I had taken two years of Spanish at dear ole Pampa High and I could get us around in the world of Espanol, no problem. Did I fail to mention to him that both Mrs. Hahn and Mrs. Wright had voted me the most likely to fail to correctly speak or interpret Spanish? May have gotten lost in translation.
We took off from Pampa and headed to Roswell, New Mexico and toured N.M.M.I. and then headed to El Paso. We stopped to get our tourista visa and it was hotter than Hades in El Paso/ Cuidad Juarez. There was even evidence of Global Warming way back then. Everything was going ok except for the long lines and the typical lack of concern and inefficiency of a government bureaucracy, when the one of the inspectors approached us and claimed my car was stolen. He said the vin number on the title didn't match the vin number on the car. I insisted in my best Espanol that the inspector come back to car and take another look. So, here we are, sweating bullets, all three of us leaned over the car door looking at the vin number. The number was exactly what my title said it supposed to be but the inspector continued to maintain that it’s stolen. I go ballistic and tell him he is blind, but we are literally in a Mexican standoff. Marc, without saying a thing, gets a $10 bill out and gives it to the inspector and we are on our way. I would have been there all day standing on principal, but Marc knew what had to be done and did it. He was smart in that way and had a remarkable ability to read people.
We stayed close to Juarez that night and headed out to Chihuahua City. We got to a little village on a river and went in to a cantina to get a cold drink. An old sheriff with a white walrus-like mustache who was having a drink laughed at us for being in a cantina and only having a coke. I asked him in my best Espanol what was the name of the river and he laughed and had me repeate por favor about three times, each time inviting more people to come around and each time really getting a belly laugh. After the second round of belly laughs, Marc said something to the effect of, your Spanish is lousy. The old sheriff bought us several rounds of a mescal-type liquor that he told us was only made in that area.
We drove to Durango, had breakfast, and started to cross the mountains into Mazatlan. Half way through, we pulled over to stretch. From our vantage point at the ridge of the range looking down into a valley we could see a lush forest that was so emerald green it hurt your eyes. In the area where we pulled over there were some huge yucca-like cactus we were curious about and in the course of looking and touching found that the plants had given off some type of toxin which acted like itching powder. Both of us were miserable from the itching within minutes. I had some talcum powder in my bag and suggested we put the powder on the point of contact to draw out the poison. That helped and the itching subsided. So there we are enjoying the views with white powder, which was applied in a hurry pretty much all over us.
All of a sudden and as though right on que, a taxicab comes speeding up the narrow mountain road. Yea, a taxicab. I had never seen a yellow taxicab on a dirt mountain road before nor have I ever seen one since. We were really mystified by the cab coming down this mountain path, but a little more than a little alarmed when the cab slide to a stop right along side our car.
When the six men with carbine rifles and 45’s got out of the cab and approached us, my alarm meter went off the scale.One of the men was well dressed and had a straw hat with a drawstring and a small brass horseshoe in the middle of the crown.Marc and I referred to him as the High Sheriff because he seemed to be in charge.The others were not at all dressed well and looked like they were going to a killing.They told us to step away from the car and while two held guns on us, the other four went through the car.
My heart was about to jump out of my mouth. I told Marc that there is nothing to keep these guys from shooting us and throwing our bodies down into the valley below, taking our stuff and selling the car since they don’t need any title, we saw that VIN numbers are meaningless.They are talking to us and I don’t understand anything they are saying.Had my Espanol talents left me or was I so scared there wasn’t anything going on in my brain but panic?Just as I was about to explode, Marc said in so many words, “Man-up you little sissy, or you’ll get us killed. Open the trunk and show them the container the powder came in.”I got hold of myself and realized he was right.They wanted to know what the powder was all about, the white powder that was all over us.Once they saw the container, they loaded their rifles, pistols, and selves back into the cab and were gone in a flash.Once again, Marc was cool and thinking rationally under pressure.
We found out later from a hitchhiker we picked up in Mazatlan that two hippies were smuggling drugs and one had been in the trunk of the car with an ak47.When the Federalies opened the trunk, he killed several of them.So they were pretty sensitive at the time.
We crossed the mountains into Mazatlan and stayed there on the ocean till our money was gone and all we had were credit cards to get home.We drove up the coast of the Bay of California through Guimass and Hermisillo and crossed back into the US at Nogales where we spent 6 hours with everything that had been in the car out of the car.I never did get all the stuff back in the car right for as long as I owned it.With raging cases of“the revenge”, all the way back to Pampa, whenever we stopped for gas, Marc and I each got a bottle of pepto.I just haven’t been able to look a bottle of the pink in the eyes since.
I hadn’t seen Marc in years and was moving my family down to Pearsall from Midland in 1996 where we had lived.We stopped in a rest area just outside of Kerrville.Standing in a patio area, I heard someone say, Scotty King.Knowing it was someone from a long time ago, I turned to see Marc.He was heading south with a load of cattle.We talked for almost an hour.Do you know what the possibility of that kind of a meeting at a rest stop is?He was in my thoughts and prayers for many years after that.
There is one kind of a “cool” that is announced with flashy cloths, fancy cars, being around the “right people”, listening to and playing the right music….. I’ll never forget the time Marc Ginn was cool in Mexico when it counted.
