Remembering Mark Segura

"Coach" Was A Man Of Many Talents And Interests

originally published April 7, 2004

It's certainly never a cinch to write "in memory of" columns. Obituaries are easier, if a writer works for a regular newspaper, because they involve straight news writing - and a-thousand-to-one that writer won't know any of the people; a detachment as one writes, then, is par for the course.
In this case, the people-knowing part makes the difference.

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Bigtime. How do I tell y'all how much I'll miss a guy I rarely saw except to "howdy-do," but whom I had known and cared about for over 30 years? That's longer than many of you reading this will have been alive. Amazing, when you stop and think of it, isn't it?
And "amazing" was a good word for Mark Austin Segura. His vast range of interests and abilities are legendary among his friends and acquaintances, even those whose lives he barely had the opportunity to touch. I knew him well beyond that merely epidermic, "outer layer" level.
We now set the controls on The Wayback Machine to 1972. The FM station that is now 104.7 "The Fish" was then located in Athens; it operated from studios on the second floor of the building next to The Georgia Theatre as WDOL-FM. The manager of the station was the late Herschel M. Rivers; the format was oldies - it was one of the first such stations in the South, and one of the most pivotal employees was Mark Segura.
His air name was Easy Mark. Many times I heard him play his theme song, "The Clouds" by The Spacemen, and sign off by saying "Do as I do - take it easy." I ran across a duplicate copy of that on the original Alton label 45 and presented it to Mark. He was overjoyed; he'd been having to play it off a compilation album. That 45 is probably still somewhere in his stuff. He continued to use the same theme during his several years on WUOG, doing the show that was the predecessor to "Who Put The Bomp."
Now, folks - if you think I have a mind like a steel trap for odd record trivia, I play second fiddle to Mark's first violin. He could reel off the personnel of all-but-forgotten Rhythm & Blues groups (West Coast artists from 1950–1958 were a specialty with him), revealing where each one went after the group broke up - that kind of thing. Once we had quite a talk about the late Jesse Belvin. "He died in a car wreck," I informed Mark. "Car wreck, yes, but he was murdered," he replied. "I know for a fact that he was murdered." Upon researching this possibility, I discovered that Belvin died in an auto accident - not on an L.A. freeway, as I had thought, but on U.S. 79 near Hope, Arkansas, after playing a sold-out show in Little Rock the night before. Mark would have been five-years-old at the time, so evidently he did some research on the subject after the fact and before I ever did. That is only one tiny instance of his prowess. (I'm still working on the Jesse Belvin story, by the way.)
Mark referred to our long-suffering chief engineer at WDOL, Wade Boland, as "Herschel's 'Shabbos Goy,'" meaning pejoratively (but not at all anti-Semitically) that Herschel stuck Wade with all the dirty work around the station. That Yiddish/ Hebrew expression is not commonly known among us of the Goyim; I had to ask my father, a Presbyterian deacon, what it meant. "Truly Orthodox Jews must do no work from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday," my dad replied. "They hire someone to come in and answer the telephone, take out the trash, do incidental cleaning, cooking and so forth." He paused for a moment. "Sounds like your friend Mark has constructed a fine parallel usage for the term, except that it sounds like Wade has to fulfill that role oftener than one day a week." My dad was no slouch at making such comparisons; he got a huge kick out of Mark's usage.
Only once did I ever throw Mark a curve he failed to catch. "There's a tiny hamlet in Louisiana on U.S. 90 near New Iberia - I don't think it even has a post office - named Segura," I informed him. He was amazed. I produced a map and showed him the flyspeckish dot. "Well, I'll be," he allowed. "It's certainly not named after my relatives, though."
There was a part of Mark's ability I unfortunately never tuned in to: I never managed to taste any of his "Coach's Soup." (Nor did I ever discover where his nickname came from; I never used it anyway.) His interest in cooking may have come about in part due to a short stint he spent in Fayette, Iowa, where his mother was teaching in some teeny little college. "There was only one restaurant in the town," he recalled. "Its name was Lucy's Garden Of Eatin'. It was terrible. I mean, here we were, out in the middle of the prairie, with farmlands all around, and they had the audacity to serve instant mashed potatoes - and not very good ones at that."
I'd never doubt that his time there germinated a seed within: "Hey, I could do better than that - blindfolded," he might have thought, and from the looks of it, he would have been right! All I know is that I've heard people rave about his soups for years and I never once got around to sampling any myself. Shame on me. Bigtime.
The saddest aspect of his passing, to me on a personal level, is that I have recently begun developing more of an interest in music from the period he preferred: the earliest days of the beginnings of rock and roll. Just recently I acquired a small group of discs that I meant to tell him about; now that opportunity is gone. The only suitable thing for me to do, then, is to volunteer for Break Radio at WUOG at the earliest possibility and bring those records and more - tossing my copy of "The Clouds" by The Spacemen in with them, then play them all just as he would have enjoyed hearing me do - or done himself. It's the very least I can do for a guy who meant a lot to me, whom I knew for 30+ years, who always was a gentleman to me, who always had something interesting to say, something witty, something intelligent.
I will sorely miss his presence and his intellect and ability, and I know I am nowhere near alone in that department. Let me tip my nonexistent hat to you, Mark. Thank you for being a friend.

William Orten Carlton