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Volume
14, Number 18 |
Also
in this section:  Photo by José F. Ponce John Carlson by Eric Jackson John
Carlson was born an American, came to Panama with his canal pilot
father as a toddler, and naturalized as a Panamanian after he came of
age. He straddled the US and Panamanian canal eras and was a human
bridge between those times in many ways.
In his childhood, the Canal Zone had this insular Little League baseball system that may have had a few Panamanian kids whose well-to-do parents could afford to pay tuition to send them to Canal Zone schools, but was as separate from the Panamanian baseball scene as Zonians of that time were from Panama in general. As an adult coach and leader in Little League --- having played college ball in the states, briefly cherished some professional aspirations and become a baseball writer accredited by the Major Leagues --- he got teams from the canal area leagues playing with teams from leagues elsewhere in Panama. As the Panama Canal's reversion to Panamanian sovereignty inexorably progressed in the wake of the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties, it became clear that, although many of the English-speaking peoples of the old Canal Zone had left or planned to leave, there would remain a substantial English-speaking community in Panama. What was unclear was whether any of this community's institutions, and which of these, would survive the transition. As a thespian --- acting, serving on the board of directors and performing countless tasks, going into and coming out of "retirement" as the situations allowed or demanded --- John was, along with a very few other people, instrumental in the survival of the Theatre Guild of Ancon, Panama's English-language theater group. As an historian, John was the founder and president of the Panama Historical Society, a predominantly English-speaking organization that brought some sense of the Anglo-American world's academic rigor to a Panama with highly politicized and scholastically deficient educational institutions, not enough people who read for the pleasure and edification of it, and a woefully negligent attitude toward its historical sites and archives. From time to time in his adult life, John Carlson worked for someone else --- for IBM, for the Panama Canal Commission, on the drydocks --- but mostly he was an independent businessman. Depending on how one measures, he wasn't a particularly successful capitalist. He made money and lost money, and not all of it his own. His most noteworthy business setback, the failure of the Outback restaurant on Tumba Muerto, owed not to his lack of skill or effort, but mainly to mechanistic franchise rules designed for North American social and geographic realities that in hindsight proved inappropriate for Panama. John was a conservative with a small "c" --- a capitalist by conviction and vocation but not only not one of these "greed is good" guys but an outspoken foe of the hustlers who have infested Panama in our times and particularly those who have used the English-speaking community as social cover; somebody who bascially accepted the existing social and economic order but who held and spread no illusions of grandeur about Panama's rabiblanco aristocracy and venal political class; a man not much given to experimentation with the unknown but with a vast knowledge of the rich diversity of things that humanity has tried; someone with distinct values and attitudes but not one of those people whose conservatism is driven by hatred. Carlson's untimely passing came in one of the weirdest possible ways. One day he was healthy, the next he and his wife were suffering from serious bouts with the flu --- she sicker than he --- and in a coughing fit he suffered a household fall in which he sustained a severe head injury. A few weeks later, on September 19 while he was slowly and uncertainly recovering from that knockout, his body couldn't take the strain anymore and his heart went out. John's September 23 funeral at the Balboa Union Church attracted a standing room only crowd from the various spheres of his and his family's life but most notably it had to be the biggest gathering of Zonians that the isthmus has seen in many years. John Carlson, a member of the Balboa High School class of 1963, is survived by his wife Jackie and sons Captain Jon Elliott Carlson and James Patrick Carlson, by his parents Captain and Mrs. John G. Carlson, and by his sister Johanna Elliott Carlson. 
The community turns out to mourn for John Carlson. Photo by José F. Ponce Also
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