Charlie didn’t write about White Oak. By the time this piece of heaven came into his life, he was too exhausted to continue his stories. White Oak was so amazing that the girls and I pretty much learned not to talk about it. The plantation was thirteen hundred acres of pine forest, at one time used to supply Howard’s paper company, a place that also bred million dollar race horses. 750 of those acres housed the Conservation Project. It was not open to the public in any way back then, but these days the program includes tours and internships studying and preserving species, 20 of them on the plantation in the special zoo, and home to about 200 animals.
I have very clearly in my mind’s eye a vision of watching Lena run back and forth on the path while a Siberian tiger ran just a chainlink fence away. You can research White Oak now–I got tired of telling people about it because eyes glazed over, or jealousy with a dash of ager and resentment sometimes arose. It was just a fluke for us. Hanging out with someone rich enough to save whole species Cheetahs at that time), sponsor Russian defectors (Barishnikov), and host movie stars was fairly amazing. Howard Gillman, the owner and Charlie’s boss, was so nice and hospitable–it was an unlikely slice of life. We were lucky to be guests there, to put it mildly and briefly. Charlie did tell us about being asked to sit in a lunch with the King and Queen of Spain to help Howard chat them up. Charlie said he asked himself how a kid from Eugene, Oregon, wound up dining with royalty. Good question. It was that he could talk and entertain that got him to such heights. And that he loved life closely, always looking for the irony and the best of reality.