Dave & Liz (originally posted 9/11/18)

(This is sort of a continuation of my last entry here, so if you haven’t read “Auggie Doggy”, check that out first).

 Dave and Liz were sort of like second parents to my sister Cheryl and I, and maybe to a lesser degree, a few other of the neighborhood kids who came to know them and Auggie through us. In particular, Dave was a really interesting guy.

 It’s hard for me to guess how old Dave was back in the early 90s but I’d say late 30s. He had a bit of a Ben Franklin look to him – bald in the middle with longer reddish hair on the sides and in the back. He rarely ever wore pants, but instead opted to wear shorts, even in cooler weather. His gait and shoe condition suggested he walked flat-footed. He spoke with a weak yet distinct Chicago accent. He drove this huge older truck with over-sized wheels & tires – it was loud and smelled like diesel fuel when it chugged down the alley. The truck didn’t seem to match up with his soft-spoken and private nature.

 Dave had a lot of hobbies to keep him busy, hobbies that I became intrigued with. For starters, he loved model railroads and half of his entire attic was a miniature village with HO-scale train tracks looping around the perimeter of the room. To enter the room, you had to unlatch and lift a section of tracks. He had built the whole thing himself. There were lots of trees, houses, stores, even mountains built up in a corner of the room. Once, he showed me how he hammered every little “railroad spike” with a tap hammer, and even let me nail a few in myself under close supervision. I would spend hours up there, running the trains with Dave and just exploring all the little details of the operation. It inspired me to want to set up my own train set; for Christmas one year I received one of those complete boxed loop sets. I built a plywood table for it and set it up in my basement. It was nothing like Dave’s, but it satisfied my craving for trains when I couldn’t hang out in Dave’s attic.

 Across from the big train room, was one smaller room. It was carpeted in old shag carpeting and contained old chairs and bookshelves and little secret storage compartments in the walls, which was pretty cool. But what really transfixed me was Dave’s ham radio setup.

 Dave explained to me what a ham radio was and what he used it for. Using this matte silver radio, he could twist a knob and push a few buttons and magically communicate with people in other parts of the world.

 “Even Australia?” I asked.

 “Oh yeah. Here.”

 And he’d carefully calibrate his radio before clutching the microphone and call out to someone in Australia. After a few distorted exchanges and some fine-tuning of the frequencies, we were clearly communicating with a ham radio operator in Australia. That put a huge smile on my face!

 Sometimes I’d stay in Dave’s attic late, and my mom would call them and have me come home. It was one of those “Awww c’mon mom!!!” moments. I was becoming addicted to the ham radio. But I knew deep down that Dave and Liz had things to do and that I couldn’t live there. So I’d head down the dark, narrow, and heavily carpeted stairway (which smelled like nutmeg) to inform my mom via telephone I’d be home soon. Dave and Liz had one of those retro candlestick telephones, like the ones Shemp Howard used in the Three Stooges films.

 One time, I was at my house, and I picked up the phone to call someone. But as I placed the phone to my ear, I realized I was picking up a conversation between Dave and Liz. I cannot explain the circumstances of how this occurred, but all I knew was that Dave was talking to Liz, yet I only heard Dave, and not Liz’s contributions. And remarkably, they happened to be talking about US. Dave was talking about how he enjoyed us being around, and not so much Kris (a kid across the street from me that tagged along at times). I only listened for a minute before I hung up out of fear of being arrested by the phone police for trespassing…or something.

 Dave also liked scuba diving and had a small closet in his basement with all of his scuba gear. He talked about his adventures exploring wrecks in the Great Lakes. I could have listened to his stories for hours…and sometimes did. And when he brought out his old shoe boxes of baseball cards from the 1960s, I may as well have died and gone to heaven. Micky Mantle, Willie Mays, Bob Gibson, Ernie Banks, Hank Aaron…I felt like I was handling museum artifacts. I ran home to grab my Beckett baseball card price guide to excitedly ramble off the value of each card, to Dave’s seemingly placid and unsurprised demeanor. 

 Dave and Liz were gracious and warm people, and I miss them.