Charles G. Hill, Doyen of Dustbury, RIP

From Charles's daughter Becky: "The Last Hurrah, aka Dad's Memorial Service will be held, in his home, Sunday, October, 20, from noon till 4ish. Please feel free to stop in, listen to some music and tell stories of the good old days. While we may shed tears, I'm sure there will be laughter to follow." Dan Lovejoy has the address of the palatial Surlywood estate.

Charles G. Hill, a prolific writer who commented on matters ranging from pop music to urban planning to women's shoes to state politics to NBA basketball at his blog Dustbury for over 23 years, died Sunday, September 8, 2019, of injuries suffered in a car accident.

Charles began a weekly online column, "The Vent," on April 9, 1996, and continued it without interruption, four columns a month, until his final column on September 1, 2019. His site in early days featured a variety of pages on various subjects, updated irregularly, but he began daily blogging on June 23, 2000; his final entry was published early on the morning of September 3, 2019. While he joined the rest of the world on social media, he never left behind his own platform, typically adding several new entries every day.

Way back in 2003, Geitner Simmons, an editorial writer for the Omaha World-Herald, wrote:

When I heard about Johnny Cash's death, I knew the first blog I wanted to go to for reaction: Dustbury. His post didn't disappoint. C.G. Hill does send-off posts for pop culture figures better than any other blogger I know.

It was true then, and it continued to be true for the sixteen years subsequent. In a few short paragraphs, he could get to the significance of someone's life -- for example, this brief tribute to legendary record producer Sam Phillips.

If Charles wrote his own send-off post, it hasn't surfaced yet, and I wouldn't expect it to. Charles was not one to toot his own horn, as the Oklahoman's Steve Lackmeyer notes in a moving tribute to the Oklahoma City blogger:

Prepare to read the sort of column that absolutely would not have any approval from Charles Hill.

To be sure, he was always duly appreciative of the kind words others spoke in his honor, maintaining a collection of them (along with a few backhanded compliments) on his backdrop page.

As I wrote in honor of his site's 15th anniversary:

Charles's interests are wide-ranging -- pop culture and pop music (ancient and modern), politics (local, state, and national), Thunder basketball, urban planning, cars, exotic female footwear, to name but a few. The combination of interests produces enough strange search engine queries to justify a weekly feature highlighting the select strangest. Somehow he manages to write intelligently and amusingly about each topic he takes up. (I envy his brevity; as faithful BatesLine readers are no doubt aware, concision is not my gift.)

On his 20th anniversary, he explained the origins of his site:

In the spring of 1996, I got the ridiculous idea that I ought to have a Web site of my very own. I'm not entirely sure what the tipping point was. My workplace had sent me and the corporate IT guy to an HTML class for no reason I could determine, and I came away from the experience wondering why anyone would bother. But hey, I was in my early forties, and I figured it wouldn't hurt to have one more skill in case I had to move on; all else being equal, I reasoned, employers would rather have someone younger, or at least with lower expectations. I was a member of Prodigy in those days, and Prodigy was pleased to offer me a full megabyte of Web space at no extra cost. In a couple of hours, I had hacked up seven pages of stuff, installed links across the lot, and uploaded them through something that only vaguely resembled FTP. "Chez Chaz," the least-lame name I could think up on short notice, was hung on top.

The web, then in its infancy, was not his first venture online. In 2011, he wrote, "I was doing BBS stuff in '85, FidoNet shortly thereafter, and CompuServe on the side. (I even had an MCI Mail account. Well, two of them, actually.) And I ran chat rooms on QuantumLink before its transmogrification into AOL." He spoke in more detail about BBS stuff on this pre-blog page, recounting a Commodore 64-based system called Midnight at the Oasis, run by a certain non-existent Jessica Stults, and on his Occassionally-Asked Questions page, he provided a few more details about his non-blog online activity and the evolution of his website. The Chaz Index, his personal version of the Harper's Magazine feature and last updated in 2014, hints that his online involvement wasn't the best thing for his personal life:

Years since I discovered the modem: 30
Years since I discovered divorce lawyers: 27

Charles found me before I found him. Charles, along with Kevin Latham, who created the Blog Oklahoma webring, and Mike Hermes of Okiedoke, who hosted the Okie Blogger awards, together built a community of Oklahoma bloggers back in the first decade of the 21st Century.

Charles's contribution to building the blogospheric community was deceptively simple but crucial -- he provided his own inimitable insights into a linked story while providing just a taste of what the linked writer had to say, but leaving you hungry to click the link to read more. At one point, he provided a template for his blog entries, a syntax that I labeled "Dustbury Normal Form." He was as pithy as I am logorrheic.

My first trackback from Charles was four months after I began writing, in September 2003, right after the passage of Vision 2025, linking to my election-eve post about "no" voters who felt compelled to remain silent. I first linked to Dustbury later the same month, to his comments about a freelance writer living in his truck; Charles recounted his own brief experience living out of his car in California in the mid-80s before doing "a reverse Tom Joad, rationalizing that if I'm gonna be broke, it's less painful, or at least less expensive, to be broke in Oklahoma."

I'm honored to have received a few testimonials from Charles over the years, back when I put a great deal more energy and time into this blog. In 2004, he noted my election night liveblogging for The Command Post, calling BatesLine "arguably -- at least I've so argued -- the best (mostly) political blog in Oklahoma.... We are indeed fortunate to have coverage of this quality for our little red territory." In July 2005, Charles congratulated me for making the cover of Urban Tulsa Weekly, referring to BatesLine as "the state's most influential blog." In 2006, he included BatesLine in his list of "Four Blogs You Visit Daily," alongside James Lileks' Bleat, The Dawn Patrol, and Donnaville. On the fifth anniversary of BatesLine in May 2008, Charles wrote, "you know where he stands, and he has a pretty good idea where the bodies are buried." I note these compliments here not to toot my own horn, but to give you a sample of the sort of highly motivating encouragement he regularly offered to nouveaux members of the blogeoisie (a term he coined).

Charles, of course, did not limit his linkage to Oklahoma bloggers. He made connections with bloggers across the country and around the world, and his sidebar blogroll grew long enough that he moved it off to its own page. He met many of his blogpals in person as he drove thousands of miles across the country for eight annual "World Tours", the last in 2008.

It was through one of Charles's items that I found Dawn Eden's blog in March 2004, which led to meeting her in real life when I went to New York City for the Republican National Convention that summer, where she introduced me to a number of center-right New York bloggers and media folks. Dawn had gotten to know Charles in early online days (via Prodigy, if I recall correctly) over their shared love for '60s pop music, and she had become acquainted with a number of other faith-friendly Oklahoma bloggers whom, I suspect, she had found through Dustbury, and that led to her visit in January 2005, which prompted the first Okie Blogger Bash at the Will Rogers Theater in Oklahoma City, and ultimately led to a couple of more Okie Blogger Round-Ups in 2006 and 2007. All those connections traced back to Charles G. Hill.

The photo pool from the 2006 Okie Blogger Round-Up has several good photos of Charles, some of which I've used to illustrate this entry. Many thanks to Don Danz for permission to use his photos.

I could have filled BatesLine with nothing but links to all the interesting content Charles produced; this blog entry from September 2004 was my feeble attempt to present some highlights as a reminder to my readers to make dustbury.com a regular read.

A Dustbury highlight reel is impossible to compile, but here are just a handful of articles I enjoyed again as I put together this article:

• "A Sunday drive," 18 May 2003" Notes from a ramble around northeastern Oklahoma County (this link and the two following were greatest hits nominated by Steve Lackmeyer)
• "A remembrance," 10 September 2003: A visit to the memorial fence at the Oklahoma City National Memorial
• "The changing face of Capitol Hill, 15 January 2005: The history of the neighborhood, once a city in its own right, south of the North Canadian River.
• "Alas, poor bloggers," 6 September 2004: A brilliant parody of Hamlet's soliloquy, in toto, as blogger's lament.
• "Taking the wrinkles out of the robe," 21 January 2005: His double-entendre-filled take on the arraignment of former Creek County judge Donald Thompson.
• "The roads not taken," 26 January 2005: A meditation on regrets. I was haunted then, and still am, by his phrase, "A rut is a grave that extends to the horizon."
• "Stranger on the shore sleepwalks through wonderland by night", 8 August 2007: This is a BatesLine entry linking to three compilation CDs of instrumental hits from the late 1950s and early 1960s on Charles's Wendex site, a separate blog for posting the themed playlists he burned for his personal use. Charles described Wendex as a non-distributed custom CD imprint.
• Vent #718, 24 March 2011: Charles reveals the tragedy hidden in the lyrics of the 1968 Bobby Goldsboro hit, "Honey."
• "What have I done?", 20 August 2013: A meditation on life's accomplishments, or lack thereof. "I suspect there are people who could do what I do just as well, once we figured out what the hell it is that I do."
• "Strange search engine queries (709)," 2 September 2019: The last edition of his long-running weekly series, highlighting the odd quests that brought readers to his site. (That link is broken as of 2022/12/07, and Internet Archive inexplicably missed it, but you can see it on the archive of the homepage by scrolling down.)
• His "Legalese" page, addressing matters of copyright and FTC disclosure, is comprehensive.

Charles had numerous medical problems in recent years, which he occasionally discussed in his Ease and Disease category or, more often, in his Vent columns, often with a slighting reference to his company's insurance provider under the pseudonym CFI Care. In 2009, he reported increasing trouble with peripheral neuropathy. In 2017, a blogpal organized a fundraiser to help him with bills related to spinal stenosis.

His final "Vent" column ("One hundred hours of despair") recounted a miserable week without power, following a storm that left over 100,000 OG+E customers in the dark. In his usual dry tone, Charles relays the extreme physical and emotional distress he experienced, displaying the light hand with which he would address heavy subjects, the kind of subtlety that prompts a delayed "wait, what?!?" as the full weight hits the reader. The column also displays his admirable willingness to reach out to friends, of whom he had many. (Appalingly, the Internet Archive failed to capture this vent and Vent 1016, linked above.)

That inaugural blog post, from June 2000, concluded:

I am quite aware that most people who happen onto this site aren't here because they're fans of my particular brand of bilge. They've come by way of your favorite portal in search of links to their favorite tunes, or to find out if there's anything to that World Currency Cartel stuff, or to catch a glimpse of that which can't be seen. Fair enough. I never believed for more than a New York minute that my own story was any different from, or any more enlightening than, the 7,999,999 others in the Naked City. But dammit, this is my site, and my X number of dollars a year; it ought to reflect at least as much of me as it does Lesley Gore or Sue Storm. And if this means I have to move my heart farther along my sleeve, so be it.

As Charles moved his heart very far along his sleeve indeed, he created a legion of fans of his "particular brand of bilge," many of whom became dear friends. I was privileged to have connected with Charles back in my early days of blogging, when he'd been writing online for nearly a decade already and to have spent time with him person on several occasions. He was kind to call wider attention to my work and offered many encouraging words over the years. May his 23 years of writing continue to stand as a monument to his creativity and insight. Requiescat in pace.

Other tributes on the web:

• Roger O. Green: "Charles was the person most likely to comment on a piece I wrote about music. He would add an anecdote or an obscure detail. Or write about it himself."
• Rob O'Hara, who was a member of that Midnight at the Oasis BBS: "The guy was prolific, tireless, and smart as a whip..., transparent as a pane of glass."
• Andrea, one of the bloggers he visited on one of his World Tours.
• Bob Belvedere, another blogger who received encouragement and early linkage from Charles.
• Jake Fisher downloaded the entirety of Dustbury.com and reports, "The site is 2.43GB in size. Keeping in mind that the site isn't graphics or video-heavy, he wrote a lot.
• Matt Drachenberg: "This is heartbreaking. Charles was one of the first to befriend me when I started blogging in 2001. He'd been in poor health for years, but never stopped working, or writing. A good man I'm glad to have shared a few meals with."
• Shannon Poe: "He added a well versed quirkiness to my Twitter feed, and it can never be duplicated.... There are many who can write; but do you enjoy their words, their style, their ability to command your attention? That was @dustbury. A comfortable read. To know these words are silenced stings."
• Phil Bacharach: "@dustbury was a phenomenal writer-- funny, insightful, warm &, above all, kind. He will be deeply missed."
• John Salmon: "He was the smartest, most interesting person on the Internet."

Updated December 7, 2022, with Internet Archive Wayback Machine links. A cybersquatter has grabbed the domain name. Dustbury was well-organized for search engine crawling, with static links, but incredibly, the Wayback Machine missed two of the vents I linked (even though I had a direct link here!) and one of the blog entries.