Remembering good friends

This day has been a real stinker as far as the weather for the first Wednesday of 2017 is concerned. It’s rainy and the wind is very strong.

I have not written a piece since before Christmas when I had to write three columns in about a week. I’m sure there are folks who wrote articles last August for January issues of periodicals, but it’s hard for me to think ahead to dates that far in the future.  A lot of what I write about is what is happening around me at the moment.

One thing that rings true when you enter your ninth decade is that your collections of octogenarians thin out with some rapidity.

I lost a number of long-term friends recently –Don Krieger, Dick Mumma, Ted Lavery, and Mayo Snyder. Bill Starr is slipping away as time goes on. Don and Ted were the ones universally known as longtime residents. Don was a big contributor to the sporting scene in Skaneateles. Ted was a familiar figure at the Bakery. Dick was an old-time friend from Columbia and Bill was a neighbor and friend from the 40s in Watertown, Connecticut. You’ve read about my adventures with Mayo from time to time in this column.

One of my early memories was an incident at a little creek that ran through a culvert under Beach Avenue, which was a street directly east in front of the old yellow brick farmhouse where I lived in Connecticut. Bill was trying to convince his younger brother to step into a pool of water that had formed where the water had tumbled out of the culvert and scooped out a 12 to 15 inch depression in the streambed.

He kept sticking his boot in about six or eight inches, indicating that that was the water depth. He was trying to convince Richard to step into a depth which was about halfway up to his knees. Richard never did step in, but I thought it was a sneaky thing to do to your little brother who was two years younger. Bill graduated from Yale and went to General Theological Seminary. He became an ordained minister and served on the chaplain’s staff at Columbia University. He was also a professor in the religion department. Bill is currently fighting some problems and is considered terminal. Hopefully I will be able to see him in January when Sue and I are planning a trip to Boston.

Don Krieger died in December. He was very much involved in hockey and lacrosse in our community. He’s one of the pioneers in getting lacrosse as a sport at our high school. My son Bill played on one of the original teams. Don was always working on stuff in the community for the high school students to do and I always tried to work on his projects. It was a real shock when he left us this fall.

Richard Mumma died last week in Larchmont, New York. Dick was in my fraternity on Riverside Drive my last two years at Columbia. Dick had been working as a draftsman and was scooped up for a stint in the Signal Corps and worked in graves registration, making sure the dead and wounded were not lost in the shuffle.

Not a great place to put your time in, but it allowed him to go to college on the G.I. Bill. After his discharge, he and many others joined our fraternity, as we certainly had the best dining room and a very good building. The average age of those in the house at that time was three years older than most of the other fraternities during this period. The vets were mostly enrolled in the School of General Studies and the mixture of vets and college students was a wonderful experience. Dick and I immediately hit it off. We stayed close and he was my best man at my wedding. Sue and I attended his funeral last week.

I wrote about Ted Lavery last May when he died. Linda still lives in town and we see her from time to time.

I wrote about Mayo Snyder last fall when he left us. Sue and I are close to Betsey and visit her in Cooperstown. The Snyders donated the Skaneateles-built eight-foot dinghy to the Boat Museum at the Creamery. I got the outside cleaned up, but the interior needs attention and it got too cold to work in my garage. I hope to put it on display by May when the spring zephyrs will warm the garage to a point where the paints will dry with reasonable haste.

It has to been hard to accept that so many men that I have been close to have passed on so quickly. The ninth decade seems to be a tough hurdle to get past. I feel great and I have avoided any major problems. I think I have finally learned to look where my feet are going so they don’t hurtle me to the ground. I seemed to crash down about every month or so for my 79th and 8oth years, primarily because I tangled up my feet or caught them on some small object. I have to be careful that the tootsies hit terra firma. I have been diligent and relatively vertical for the last six months.