Well, hell, my uncle, David McElroy died. This world won’t be the same without him. Like my mom, dad and grandparents, he was a constant presence in my life, but at my age you find constant isn’t forever.
See my uncle’s picture above. It was taken at Cessna Aircraft where he worked for more than 40 years. To all his buddies out at the plant and all the guys he fished, hunted and rode motorcycles with, he was “Mac.” But to me and my siblings, he was always Uncle Dave.
My earliest memories of him was when I was 3-years-old and he had just returned home from the service. He would lie on the living room floor at Grandma and Grandpa Mac’s house, lift my sister and me in the air, tilt us around and say, “You’re an airplane.
Uncle Dave’s story began - well actually all of our stories begin well before we’re born. “All our ancestors and all future generations are present in us,” wrote the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thic Nhat Hanh, the kind of spiritual philosopher my uncle got into when he was stationed in Southeast Asia. Interestingly, in Uncle Dave’s final days, his hospice nurse shaved off his beard. I thought I was seeing a ghost. “He looks like Jack,” I said.
He was born February 29, 1948 - a leap year baby - in Larned, Kansas. His parents, Jack and Ruby McElroy, had been married for nearly 20 years when they had him so there’s that history. My mom, Vickie, was born first, and David followed a couple of years later. His mother named him after King David, probably the most morally complex character in The Bible.
When he was a baby, the family moved to Colorado, but two years later, they moved back to Kansas. At his funeral, his cousin, Barbara recalled when she was 7-years-old and her mom told her and her siblings, they were going to meet their cousins for the first time. “They came out of the car and Vickie was this shy little blonde girl and David was this loud, dark-haired boy running around,” she said
He played baseball, mostly as catcher. In high school, he belonged to the Industrial Arts Club, was in some plays with the drama department and played football. After graduating in 1966, he took some college classes and got a good job at Cessna. But work and school were interrupted for a few years when he enlisted in the Air Force.
As a kid, I knew Uncle Dave as this man who lived across the street from my grandparents with his wife and son - cousin Fred - traded tools with my grandpa, worked on cars with him, smoked Camels and went to “school” on Tuesday and Thursday nights. I can still hear Grandma Mac telling Mom, “David got another A.” It seemed to always be for an art project. I remember being 7-years-old and wondering if I would ever be that smart and that tough. It seemed I was far from it.
And when I use the word “tough”, I mean what I say. When I was a kid, I was scared to death of Uncle Dave. When I was around 8-years-old, I did something he didn’t like and he gave me a huge balling out. Here was this guy, 6-feet-tall, dark beard, dressing me down. I was shaken up.
Ten years later, I heard him telling people in the family, “Jeff’s afraid of me.” I later went up and talked to him about that time years ago. “I was a little hard on you,” he said. “And we’ve been kind of distant ever since.” At that moment, I decided it was time to be a man and stop being scared. I’d always respected Uncle Dave, but from now on, I’d like him too. I’d go a step further and make him a friend.
Over the years, I talked to him more. As I got older and went through rough times, I remembered when I was a kid and Cessna would go on strike. Sure, when you’re a kid you hear adults talk about tough times, but you figure they’re adults; they’ll figure it out. Then you become an adult, yourself, and you’re not so sure. That’s when I could relate and empathize, not just with Uncle Dave, but the other adults in my life. They weathered some storms.
One day, I visited Uncle Dave and he and I were sitting in lawn chairs, chatting in his front lawn. Obviously, I went there, needing someone to talk to. “I just feel like - where am I going? I should be somewhere else by now. Is this all there is?”
“Oh,” he said. “You’re going through a midlife crisis. I went through a midlife crisis when I was about 33.”
Probably, Uncle Dave’s biggest accomplishment was that he stopped drinking. That had been a long battle for him. When I was a kid I thought it was funny when the music would come on - Jeremiah was a bullfrog - and Uncle Dave would start dancing with a lampshade on his head, but the things that went on in his personal life turned out not to be so funny. He and his first wife, Kathy, divorced. I thought he and his second wife, Jackie, didn't stand a chance of staying together. He had a more tumultuous relationship with her than he’d had with his first wife.
“For a lot of years, it wasn’t a good marriage,” Jackie said. “It was a drinking marriage.”
But somehow he and Jackie made it. They managed to give each other good lives in the end. The Air Force personnel presented her with the U.S. flag at his funeral at the First Baptist Church in Augusta.
It was a good service. Uncle Dave was a founding member of the Cessna Motorcycle Club in 1986 and members of the club were sitting in the church, wearing their leather vests. I walked up to one of these gentlemen outside after it was over and said, “It was so good of you guys to come.”
“He was our buddy,” the man said.
"Spirit in the Sky" - Norman Greenbaum