Golden Flake dumped its clown many years ago

 

    

    A very close friend of my younger brother, Major, commented under The Golden Flake Clown's Tale post at my Facebook page yesterday.

Jack
Deep !!!
Thank you for sharing this!

Sloan Bashinsky
De nada, old friend, who’d have thunk or imagined when you and me lived across the street from each other, what all adventures, intrigue and often hilarious as well as grotesque and mystifying adventures lay ahead?

Jack
I remember. You were always good to me. The Nash Rambler [my first car, which my father bought]. Flying in GF plane. Florida Keys. Bryant Field. Going to Nasau with your Dad as copilot. Him buying the whole tray of daiquiris at landing. Grumps. As we referred to him. Nelle best in the world. Thomas. Cha [the two black servants]. Thanks for all the good! Our divers found Major at Highlands. FBI talked at length ...

Sloan Bashinsky
I didn't know it was your divers, I figured it was part of Birmingham PD or FBI. I offered myself to BPD and FBI, if they wished to speak with me, but no reply. The chapter about Major, around the middle of the book, The Golden Flake Clown's Younger Brother, R.I.P, contains extensive recount of what I found in the FBI report, which was never reported by the new media, which left zero doubt Major took his own life. At first, the FBI was reluctant to provide its report to me, but after I told them I was the oldest member of my father's family and the family still had questions, they got a redacted report to me pretty quickly. There also is a good bit in that chapter about the Legal Schnauzer blog/blogger, who had his own views of what happened, including suggesting I might have been in on having Major killed. The chapter begins with how I learned of Major going missing from Birmingham friends, and within an hour of learning of it, I "heard" what had happened, but of course could not prove it. A Birmingham News journalist called me to do an interview about Golden Flake and Major. The journalist told me cold chills were running up and down his spine after I told him my premonition, and then he told me his same premonition, which had occurred around the same time, nearly 1,000 miles apart.

Jack
I was president of the Hoover City Council, it was our divers. My wife's father was kidnapped and killed at hospital. For drugs. Major came and flew with me. My father was missing 3 months. Major died exactly 40 years latter to the date. Gun in pond was your Dad's from WW2? He was not gunny. Highland Pond was where first murder in Bham was.
Your family was Great to me. Thank you!!

Sloan Bashinsky

Major met both of his wives at the Highland Racquet Club, when they were the tennis pro in residence. 

Someone who married one of my first cousins just emailed me about the Clown's Tale:

"I am about 3/4 finished reading this book that I literally started as soon as I got it and am totally enamored. My son is on his way over here now, so I have to stop reading for awhile, but there are three things I must tell you. I, too, was molested, by my father at a young age (my parents divorced twice/he was an alcoholic) and my mother would spank ME with a hairbrush, but it was a sterling silver one that hurt like hell. Lastly, I took a one semester typing course from Mr. Hamilton my frosh year of HIGH SCHOOL, and told him years later it was the most beneficial course I ever had other than a phonetics course in college. Just some fyi's. More later." 

 

I replied to her: 

 

"Totally enamored? Perhaps they should reopen Bryce in Tuscaloosa? The fellow who does The Redneck Mystic Lawyer podcasts with me is putting the clown book into an internet library, archive.org, which already has several of my digitized books. The Clown Tale will be easier to read and bookmark there. Toward the end of the book, perhaps the 4th to last chapter, is a hilarious explanation of why we decided not to submit the book to a book agent or book publisher and get Bryce reopened just for me. [Bryce was the Alabama State Mental Hospital in Tuscaloosa.]

Jack
I got an insurance appt with your Dad. Suggested Bashinsky School of Buis. At Samford and Alabama!!

Sloan Bashinsky
The gun in the pond was a Browning .32 automatic, rare piece. In the FBI report, which I never saw reported in the Bham news media, there was a pistol just like it in a plastic display in the den of my father and mother's home- my stepmother Joann's home after my father passed in 2005. I thought it was just like Major to see that pistol at his father's home and want one just like it. I don't know where the gun in my father's home came from. I never knew him to have a gun other than a Browning 16-gauge shotgun he used when he sometimes went on a dove or quail hunt with me. The fellow who does The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast with me, and who created it for me, started reading my blog after Major went missing in early 2010. The fellow would not contact me until 2017. He knew guns, and he told me that he thought he knew the gun dealer in Birmingham, who sold Major the gun found under his body in the Highland Golf Course pond. He drove a ways to Birmingham and spoke with that gun dealer and the dealer said, yes, Major had wanted that gun really bad, and he found it for him, and changed him a lot for it.

Jack 
Now Leo Bashinsky Field House. And Bashinsky School of B at Al

Sloan Bashinsky
I knew nothing of your dealings with my father.
Perhaps from your vantage, that at Samford and Alabama is important, but not from my side of it. The reason it was named Samford University, and not Bashinsky University, is Frank Samford gave Howard Collage, it then was called, more money that Leo Bashinsky gave it. Frank and Leo were childhood friends in Troy, and they both moved to Birmingham, and they were in a competition to get the school named after them. Samford won. My father, who never graduated from college, later gave a lot of money to Alabama, Auburn and Samford. He dropped out of Princeton to marry my mother, because she threatened, if he didn't do it, she would marry the first man who would have her and save her from her Puritan parents. My father came to view Princeton as run by eggheads, even though his father had graduated from there and it was the crowning moment of his life, based on all I knew about him. He tried to persuade all of his grandsons to go to Princeton on his dime, and none of us took him up on it.

Jack
Don't expect you to. Just family lore. Green Turtle Inn was fun. Sylvia Hichcock Miss USA. Boston Whaler at Fish House [my father's 2nd home on Lower Matecumbe Key]. Caught 50 Grunts. Found a painting of Bashinsky Mansion at Art display in Troy. Got it for Major. Was over the mantle on Country Club Road [Major's home]. Lot of fantastic Bashinsky memories

Sloan Bashinsky
I know you do, and I am glad you do. Alas, you did not grow up in my family, which Major and I and our sister did, and you may have heard things, but you were not living it, and that's so very different, as was what it became like after my mother died and my father remarried. One chapter in the book is "ALL That Glitter Is Not Gold." While that chapter is about the awful litigation early this decade, the title applies generally as well. I loved the Florida Keys so much that I wanted to live there, and finally I did live there, and oh what an adventure that was, which I never would have imagined beforehand. Some of that's in the book, too.

Jack
Never knew!
Well could have been Bashinsky U. But now Leo Bashinsky Field House.
Bash, I love you and family thru thick and thin!!

Sloan Bashinsky
The fieldhouse was named after my grandfather because of money my father gave Samford. Tell you something Samford will not likely say publicly. Howard College brought Cumberland Law School with it to Birmingham. Cumberland was a private law school and its tuition was a lot more than University of Alabama Law School's tuition. U of A Law School funked out 2/3s of each freshman class by graduation time. Nearly all Cumberland Law School students graduated. The Baptists liked getting the tuitions. 95 percent of U of A Law grads passed the Alabama Bar exam, about 50 percent of Cumberland Law grads passed. I don't know if that changed, or not. That was a long, long time ago, in a universe far away.

Jack
I'm on your side!

Sloan Bashinsky
You haven't finished the book yet, so keep reading

Jack
Yes sir, correct
My wife had a premonition Major was in water

Sloan Bashinsky
There you go, three premonitions kinda locks it up, don't it? Keep reading. I have a problem maybe I inherited from my father's older brother, Leo, who called a spade a spade.

Jack today
Very Heavy. Not done yet. Front one side. Back. Best things about The Clown. Might be Best Seller. The Bashinsky Family did a Ton of Good! Too

Sloan Bashinsky
My father and his father's money gifts helped a lot of college students. My father helped initially fund Big Oak Ranch, and continued to fund it, and it became very important to Joann, who kept funding it. I heard a couple of years ago that Big Oak was accepting boys and girls, whose parents didn't like their sexual orientation, and Big Oak was doing conversion therapy on those children. Don't know if that was rumor or fact. I think conversion therapy is a product of religious fanaticism totally out of touch with reality and God. My father and his father gave their churches a good bit of money. I leave for God to say if that did any good. My father and his father destroyed their families, and so were they giving money away to try to buy their way into heaven? I leave for God to answer that, as well.

Jack
?? Don't know
Clown Tale, best seller?

Sloan Bashinsky
Maybe you haven’t gotten to the Breaking News chapter?

Jack


Sloan Bashinsky
Golden Flake dumped the clown many years ago. The clown never gave money to colleges, Big Oak. He gave to people and places my father and his father would have nothing to do with. He gave his life to humanity many times, and he’s still at it, and very few people grokked it.

Jack

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com