Roz Larman, in Memoriam

This column is really from farmboy's creator, originally published (or posted, or whatever) on facebook)


My friend Roz Larman passed away a few days ago, and I'm still processing it. I first got to know Roz and her husband Howard during the first year of their KPFK show Folkscene. It was 1970 and I was in the process of wasting four years of my life in high school. For me, Folkscene was the real education. Through their show, Howard and Roz introduced me to a world of music that was so rich it was decadent. It's amazing to be a teenage songwriter and hear in-depth interviews with artists like Utah Phillips, Kate Wolf, Jim Ringer, Mary McCaslin, Tom Waits, and my true favorite, Randy Newman.

What was truly amazing was getting to know them personally. I wrote them a fan letter at age 14; amazingly, they wrote me back and we started having long-distance phone conversations and writing back and forth and I even got to hang out at their house when I got a little older. They also took me to hear my first live music, a bluegrass band out in Calabasas, California.

What Roz and Howard didn't know was that they were giving me meaning and direction in a life that had none. I went to a inferior high school with appallingly low standards; my mother was in and out of hospitals and slowly dying; I had almost no friends; and I had serious problems with severe depression and anxiety. Worst of all, adults refused to speak to me. I was a well-behaved Mexican-American -- nobody had to notice me.

What Howard and Roz never knew was that they were literally (and I know how to use that word correctly) the only adults who had actual conversations with me when I was a teenager. The only ones.

And what little lesson can we learn from this?

It's the quality, not the quantity, that matters.

Roz, I can never thank you enough. I love you. I will miss you. Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.