The picture of David and I was taken April 24, 2011, in Lordsburg, NM, while on the first Relay. I had first met him in person a few hours before, when Shawn and I picked him up in Wilcox, AZ, on our way to pick up the lizard. He rode shotgun and played navigator from Wilcox to Lordsburg and back to Wilcox, where we shared a snack at a fast food joint, where he teased me by telling the cashier to be sure to give me the senior discount! He then drove his ex-cop car back to Sierra Vista, AZ, where he lived at the time. IIRC, his work may have been related to the military base near there?
Sometime after that, he moved back to Tennessee, maybe after his father died, and then he happily returned to AZ; I don't recall the time-frame...
The last time I saw him in person was 11-7-2020. A few weeks before, he had asked me to pick up an RC plane for him in a nearby town, and hold it for him until he could pick it up on his way back from an upcoming trip to CA. While there, he had a trailer hitch mounted on his Mini, and picked up a nice motorcycle trailer. He called me en-route the day before, and while we were talking I kept hearing a banging clunking noise, which he said was coming from the new hitch, thinking the ball was the wrong size or something? When he got to my shop the next day, it turned out they had installed the nut on the ball with a nylon washer, which had smashed down, allowing the nut to back off, and the ball was shifting back and forth and up and down. Luckily, there was a hole in the shaft on the ball with a cotter pin in it that kept the nut from completely falling off.
After getting the hitch sorted, we went to a local place for pizza and conversation (including politics
) before David headed back home to Tucson.
For those that don't know, RAF stands for Roof As Floor, a sort of nickname he got when he used patches made from the roof of one car to repair the rusted floor of a Volvo.
