Last Friday afternoon we celebrated the life of our founder, David Lee Nuffer at the Hall of Champions. Some 600 family and friends gathered in a phenomenal tribute to Nuf.

I shared his Declaration for the Family from his first novel “Defeat is a Natural Habit” and several people asked for a copy. To me it’s the best reflection of who David Nuffer is and will always be.

Thanks to all who came.

A Declaration for the Family

RESOLVED, that all members give of themselves, meaning their sympathy, empathy, insight, judgment and judgments, warmth, gentleness, hates and loves, unreservedly to those who deserve it.

RESOLVED, that all members fight hard to take both proper and improper risks to make damned sure that each does what he wants to do in this life in his own way and to hell with the critics.

RESOLVED, that all members do their inspired best to step down hard on arrogance and all the misery it creates and, as a corollary, ignore what the mirror daily and slyly seems to be telling them.

RESOLVED, that all members live a feeling life that proclaims the eternal importance of sunrises and sunsets with people they love or alone; of Wrong Way Corrigan, Garo Ypremian, Clifford Irving and all the others who help remind us of our pimples and warts and how they aren’t really so bad anyway; of old movies and great moments like, “Louis, it looks like this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” – there are hundreds of those; of Stan Kenton and screaming Maynard Ferguson on Balboa Island; of Kid Ory, Big Jim Robinson, the Turk and Satch before television made him a personality with trademarks other than genius in his lips; of Nat Cole singing about how we weren’t too young when we sure as hell were; of Edith Piaf singing anything; of the good drinking times and who you were with; of Ingrid Bergman listening, just listening, to Dooley Wilson sing “As Time Goes By,” and saying it all, just listening.

RESOLVED, that all members help the poor no-chance bastards of this world and not forget how to laugh and cry in the process.

RESOLVED, that all members have the guts to sidestep the crippling, back-sneaking, mind-skewing alchemy of pressure when that is necessary.

RESOLVED, that all words like “resolved,” “party-of-the-first-part,” “whereas,” and gratuitous credos like this one be banished from the English language and any other language.

— David Nuffer
“Defeat Is a Natural Habit”