This is the story of how my father became Digit.
By the time he died in 2016, Eric "Digit" McGaw was one of the named figures of the global Hash House Harriers community — a community of roughly 2,000 kennels across nearly every country in the world. He had founded the Hyderabad Hash House Harriers in 1990. He had chaired Interhash Goa 2002, the year India hosted the world. He had been Grand Master of the Dubai Creek Hash, Religious Advisor of the Original Nairobi Hash, and Grand Master of the Accra Hash. He had bid successfully for the 2013 Pan Africa Hash from Ghana. When he died, Harrier Magazine dedicated their entire next issue to him, with his photograph on the cover. Hashers around the world sent condolences. The Hyderabad H3 held a memorial run one month later in which his ashes were mixed with the marking powder and laid through his old stomping grounds in Jubilee Hills. The shirt for that run was titled H4's First Family and had caricatures of every member of our household, my mother and my father and the three of us children and our two dogs, around its border. The Hyderabad H3 still meets every Sunday. They still call him Digit.
The name came from a single night in December 1990. He was forty-two years old. He had only just founded H4 the previous February. He was not yet a globally recognized figure in the Hash. He went by a different hashname — one that didn't survive long enough to be remembered by his eldest son, who at the time was eight years old and on the train with him.
That night, on a journey from Hyderabad to a Bangalore Hash jungle run, my father stepped out into the open doorway of the train to breathe in the night air. The door slammed shut behind him. He fell from the train, landed on his head, and woke up on his back beside the tracks watching the tail lights of the train disappear into the distance. He chased the train to the next station. By the time he reached the run site at midnight the following night, after a station master had poured rum over the stump where most of one finger had been, after a taxi ride through 300 kilometers of South Indian night, after a stop in Bangalore for a surgeon to clean the wound, he was greeted by John "Hammo" Hamilton — founder and Grand Master of the Bangalore Hash — with a beer. The naming ceremony was held the following morning at the circle. From that moment forward, in every kennel he ran with on every continent, he was Digit.
The story that follows is Hammo's. It was originally published in the July–September 2005 edition of Asia-Pacific Harrier Magazine, fifteen years after the night it describes. Harrier Magazine reprinted it in their April 2016 tribute issue, dedicated to my father one month after his death. Hammo himself has since passed away. He carried the story for fifteen years before he wrote it down, and the global Hash community has carried it since.
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"Digit's Digest" by John S. "Hammo" Hamilton, originally published in the July–September 2005 edition of Asia-Pacific Harrier Magazine. Reprinted in Harrier Magazine, Volume 15, No. 4 (April 2016) — the issue dedicated to Eric "Digit" McGaw following his passing on March 3, 2016.
