Storytellers Tackle Self-Image, Death

A widow found that the process of watching a loved one die can have moments of beauty. And an amateur bodybuilder’s quest for an idealized outward manifestation of masculinity led him down a destructive path of disordered eating and exercising.

Two New Haveners took an audience through those journeys at the last gathering of the New Haven Storyteller series.

The storytellers of the hour were Jolyn Walker, a longtime staffer for The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, and amateur bodybuilder Alexander Bogle.

One story was told from the wisdom of making love last for 22 years, especially in the final months of a spouse’s life. The other was told from the perspective of youth being made wiser by trial and error. Both invited friends and strangers to have an intimate look into a neighbor, co-worker, church member, or stranger’s life.

For Kevin and Karen Walton, who started the series a year ago on the premise of using storytelling as a community building tool, the stories told this past Monday night are the continued manifestation of the vision they created as part of the Community Leadership Program. And the number of people who continue to volunteer their stories and come to hear stories told once a month a confirmation of that vision.

Honorable Judge

Jolyn was married to Judge Herbert Walker, who was not a judge but a retired firefighter. She explained to the crowd that people often assumed he was the former.

“We would get mail all the time addressed to the Honorable Judge and Mrs. Walker,” she said with a laugh.

As Jolyn sat in a high chair in the front of a crowd at The Orchid Cafe at ConnCAT in Science Park, she talked about ​“something inevitable.”

In June of last year, on his 90th birthday, Judge Herbert Walker died. But not before his living far longer than the two weeks that his doctor had predicted. And not before the couple had made the nearly last year that he lived count.

Though Jolyn Walker works here in New Haven, she and her husband made their home in Milford. He had been a Connecticut resident since the late 1950s. The Walkers were members of First Baptist of Milford where Judge served as a deacon for 55 years.

“He cherished civic life and deeply believed in civil rights and human rights,” she said. ​“But most important Judge was a man full of faith.”

After three years of dating, he proposed to her on a beautiful October evening the autumn foliage ablaze much like it is right now. Judge proposed on her front porch. He didn’t get down on one knee and he didn’t have a ring. But she still remembers the three things he said to her.

He told her that he’d been watching her and he didn’t think he could live without her before finally asking, ​“Will you marry me?”

Walker recalled being composed in her response but she said inside the proposal had set off fireworks. She also recalled telling him, ​“If you’re really serious then we need to go shopping for a ring.”

Fast forward 22 years later to October 2017. Judge is in his late 80s. He can’t get upstairs to bed. His condition lands him in the hospital and though he’s looking remarkably like himself, the Walkers get stunning news. He and Jolyn are told that he has just two weeks left to live. They’re told they should get his affairs in order.

“She was like, ​‘You must call family,’’ Jolyn said. ​“I really took it to heart. Judge: What did he say? ​‘They don’t know how strong I am.’”

Judge was right. He lived for seven more months. Their son tricked out the family room and made it a man cave where he could see outside. He and Jolyn developed a routine that allowed them to spend as much time as they could together while simultaneously preparing for his funeral service.

The Walkers had always gone to others for Thanksgiving. But everyone came to their house. And on his last trip to the hospital, which he had to make because he had started refusing food. He was ultimately transferred to a hospice where he stayed for 11 days. There were gardenias — just like at their wedding and anniversaries — from the garden Jolyn had planted in those last seven months.

“They were so fragrant because they were just so new,” she said. ​“We smiled at each other because we knew at that time he was on a journey. I would go to work, go home and then go there. The nurses placed one of the gardenias in his hand. And it was just so precious and I knew.”

She reminded Judge that his 90th birthday was coming in just a few days.

“He took a deep breath like, ​‘OK, I’ll stick around for that,” she said. So on the evening of his 90th birthday, the nurses and family members sang happy birthday. Everyone had cupcakes. Judge had a cupcake balloon. Jolyn recalled that his breath was stronger than it had been.

She got home that evening around 8:30 p.m. and went to her computer to work on his funeral program.

“About two hours later, I got the call that Judge had passed,” Jolyn said.

She reminded the crowd, as she sat before them, still wearing her wedding ring, to remember the gardenias and roses in their life and hold them close.

“Thing about the people in your lives,” she said. ​“If you get the opportunity to treasure it with all your heart and your soul.”

Manning Up

Alexander Bogle has known that he wanted to be what he once thought was the ultimate definition of a man since he was 3 years old. He wanted to be just like the muscled man he saw on the cover of a bodybuilding magazine. He wanted to be big and strong, by any means necessary.

And for the first time on Monday, he told the story publically of how his obsession with transforming his body into a chiseled physique led him on a destructive cycle of bingeing, purging, and restricting food, working out and injecting steroids that began as early as middle school and lasted until about three years ago.

“I played sports — soccer, basketball, football, and one really crazy year of wrestling,” he recalled. But he said his interest in those things waned his sophomore year in high school when puberty hit.

“I remember looking in the mirror and crying,” he said.

Bogle said he cried because he didn’t look like the man that he wanted to be. He didn’t look like the man from the bodybuilding magazine.

“I was kind of potbellied,” he said. ​“My breasts drooped. I didn’t dare call them pecs because they didn’t deserve to be called pectorals. I was very hard on myself.”

That crying jag led him to purchase his first diet pill, Zantrex 3. He bought it with his allowance and started taking it the summer of his junior year.

“It was the first day of summer,” he recalled. ​“I ran around my neighborhood amped up on diet pill, had a yogurt, did 50 sit-ups went back to sleep hoping I would wake up a god.

He didn’t wake up a god be he did start to see some results which only fueled his desire to see if he could get better results if he further controlled what he put in his body.

Every time I ate something I wasn’t supposed to, I would throw it up,” Bogle said. ​“And then I would have an Ensure, or a protein shake, or cottage cheese and tuna fish.

“Yeah, it was pretty bad,” he added. ​“I don’t recommend eating that ever.”

But these secret habits and his dedication to building a physique that his peers admired garnered him affection, he said. He noted that affection was different from attention, which wasn’t hard to get as one of the only black people in the New Jersey neighborhood he grew up in.

“I felt like I was the star of my own show,” he said.

But he realized, thanks to WebMD, that he was probably damaging his body. So he stopped purging, instead adopting a very restrictive diet and continuing to hit the gym. But in the face of all that praise and adoration, a bus driver noticed and cautioned him to be careful. The driver had lost a grandson to an obsession with bodybuilding.

“All I could think was about how much he got me messed up,” he said. ​“See that wasn’t me. I had it under control.”

But he didn’t have it under control. He never did.

And he didn’t realize it until three years ago, at 26, when he won his first amateur bodybuilding competition. Though he had won, he’d gotten there by restricting food, putting workouts above everything, and by abusing steroids to the point that his testosterone levels were dangerously high and he was hospitalized.

He still works out pretty religiously but he’s kinder to himself and is building a better relationship with himself

“I am currently on a journey to finding who I am without that goal of being someone else,” he said. ​“I’m rediscovering who I am, and what I want to be and how I want to move through the world.”

But Bogle does worry. Not about himself. He’s worried about the kids today who are growing up in the age of digital and social media like Instagram, where images of perfect selfies of altered bodies abound. If a magazine cover once influenced him so greatly, how much more is that true of a device that provides a barrage of images every second?

“It is something that we must be cognizant of in this new digital age,” he said.

Click below to see Facebook live videos of each story.

Previous coverage of the New Haven Storyteller series.

•2 Childhoods, 2 Challenges
•
Love Changed Their Plans
•
​“We’re All In This Together”