This one is going to be tough...
First of all, cancer sucks. Over the last year, cancer has taken friends, relatives and people I do business with. Some of them didn't get the chance to live a full life. And with others, cancer snuffed out the last bit of a long and accomplished life. This week, I was shocked to hear that a good friend, Craig Evert, had cancer and passed away on Tuesday. Today is his funeral.
I'd known Craig for nearly 15 years. I first met him when his wife, Kathy, worked for Davenport One (now the Quad Cities Chamber) as the Vice-President for economic development. My first recollection of Craig occurred when we were working the annual Davenport Street Fest - I was running the band stage and he was helping out running refreshments to the beer tents. The guy was a hard worker. In fact, he worked so hard one year that he got heat exhaustion. I remember that we sat him down in a tent, put ice on his neck, and eventually sent him home. He didn't want to let everyone down, but we insisted that he go home and rest.
Craig and I soon found out that we had a few things in common - beer, primarily. Craig loved eclectic beers and would run over to John's Grocery in Iowa City to buy pony kegs of beer for consumption at home. He also grew up in Nebraska and was a big Nebraska football fan. I told him that I used to go to a number of games when my cousin went to school in Lincoln years ago. Then when I showed him a bunch of the programs that I'd kept over the years from those games, he was amazed that someone in Eastern Iowa had a tie to his beloved Cornhuskers. Sometime later when I found out that he went to college at Kearney State (now the University of Nebraska - Kearney), I related stories of many nights I spent in bars in Kearney years ago when I used to call on a dealer out there. We immediately bonded.
(Pictured right - Craig on his 47th birthday toward the end of December. He looked pretty good in this picture. Absolutely no inkling of any illness, if you ask me. And no indication that he would pass away six weeks later.)
Craig was an electrician by trade and when we moved into our house over 10 years ago, he came over and rewired all the outlets as none of them were grounded. He hung a ceiling fan in the spare bedroom for us, and he switched out a couple wall switches in our kitchen that controlled a light above the sink and our garbage disposal. But one thing he couldn't figure out was the wiring for a wall switch on our hallway. It was set up so that the switch at the end of the hall near our kitchen had to be on for the switch at the other end of the hall near the bedrooms would be able to control the lights in the hall. He was completely perplexed by it, working on it for hours and finally giving up. We lived with it that way for about 4 years before our neighbor, who is also an electrician - and who also happens to be gay - came over and rewired the switches so that they'd both control the lights. Our neighbor was used to working with wiring in older homes and knew exactly what the problem was. I gave Craig a hard time for a long time after that. "It took a gay electrician to figure out our wiring," I'd tease him.
"Yeah, I guess I gotta go gay if I wanna be a good electrician," he'd laugh.
As I said, Craig was a hard worker. We built a berm along the back fence on our property and I had five tons of dirt delivered and dumped on our driveway. I asked four friends - Craig was one - to help wheel the dirt to the back berm, dump it and spread it out. We started at 9:00 a.m. and we were over halfway down by about 10:30. I suggested we stop and take a beer break, but Craig said, "Naw, let's keep going. We'll have more time to drink later." And it was a good thing - almost as soon as the last wheelbarrow load was dumped on the berm and smoothed out by one of the guys, it started to rain. As we all stood in the garage watching it rain and enjoying the first of multiple beers that late morning, Craig said, "Now aren't you glad that we didn't take a break earlier?"
Craig had a quick and infectious smile. That great smile seemed to be perpetually turned on.
He was always so fun to be around. Craig also had a great attitude. Even when things were shitty he'd still joke about the situation and laugh through it. I never saw him angry, and if he did bitch about something he'd be laughing as he recounted some story of something that had gone to hell on him. Never taking himself too seriously, Craig was a master of self-deprecating humor. It was very endearing to those of us who knew him.
We used to have "play days", many of them involved our friend Randy Adams (who lost his wife to cancer about nine months ago). Sometimes we'd go over to Craig's and hang out in his backyard, or we'd pick him up and go to the bar. But many times he'd just come over to our house and hang out on the deck. We'd drink beer, cook steaks on the grill, sit on the deck and laugh. I think Kathy was happy to have him out of the house and out playing with his friends giving her a little "me time".
Craig decided that he was going to build a garage in his backyard. He recruited a number of friends to come over to help him. I'm not too handy with a hammer and being on the road quite a bit, I wasn't able to help much through the week. But one weekend, Craig needed "all hands on deck" to help raise trusses to support the roof. I went over and helped lift the trusses up to the guys on either side of garage who would secure them in place. When we had about three trusses left to put up, we discovered that we were short by one. We went back and tried to figure out if we'd measured wrong and didn't space them out far enough. Nope, that wasn't the case. He was just one truss short. He sat there and began to laugh. "Well, that sucks," he said laughingly. "I must have miscounted." We decided that if he ever opened a construction company, it would have to be called "One Truss Short."
Years later, we got an e-mail from Craig and it had an attached picture of a single truss sitting on a junk pile behind a building site. He said in the e-mail, "Doesn't it just piss you off when you have one too many trusses?" I could hear the laughter in his words.
Craig had an innate sense of humor that allowed him to see funny things in all different types of situations. At right is a picture of Craig and family members that he sent to me a few years ago. If I remember right, this is his cousin, his mom and his dad. He set the camera up for a timed-shutter photo and ran back to stand with the group. He told me, "I ran back and we took the picture. When I got home and downloaded the pictures onto the computer, I had dog porn!" They were concentrating on smiling for the camera and not on the two dogs frolicking in front of them.
One evening about 8 years ago, Cindy and I were driving along Locust Street in Davenport and looked down Arlington toward Craig and Kathy's house. We noticed they had a "For Sale" sign in the front yard. I immediately called Kathy and said, "Hey, is your house really for sale?"
She said, "Yeah, we're thinking about getting out of the neighborhood." And understandably so - some of their neighbors were a little sketchy. But it turned out that Kathy had taken a job as President of the Iowa Lakes Corridor Development Corporation - the regional economic agency for four counties in Northwest Iowa. We were very sad when they moved, but they wanted to get closer to their families out in Nebraska. I remember asking Craig what he was going to do and he said with a laugh, "Hell, I don't know. I'll just have to live off K.J., I guess!"
It turned out that Craig used his electricians background to become an associate professor of wind turbine energy at Iowa Lakes Community College. He got a kick out of me calling him "Professor Evert" when we'd talk on the phone. Craig told me last summer that he absolutely loved working at the community college.
We stayed in contact via e-mail and phone - primarily during Nebraska football games, and especially when they were getting smoked. In the Big Ten Championship game last December, Nebraska was getting blown out by Wisconsin in a game in which the Cornhuskers were heavily favored. I called him up in the third quarter and asked, "What the hell is going on with these guys?"
He laughed that laugh of his and he simply said, "They suck..."
We spent part of our vacation last summer up in Lake Okoboji (click here to see our entries on restaurants around the Lake Okoboji region) and one of the big reasons was to go up and see Craig and Kathy. They'd been up in Spirit Lake for nearly 7 years and were entrenched in the community. I'd been there to see them on trips through the area on a couple occasions, but Cindy hadn't seen Kathy since they moved. We spent a night with them at their house having a great dinner, some fine wine, and Craig and I shared some great Scotch. It was like we had just seen each other the week before and picked up the conversation. Craig said toward the end of the evening, "Man, you told me that you could live anywhere. Why don't you move up here? K.J. could help Cindy get a job somewhere." The only problem is that Lake Okoboji isn't too centrally located in my 11-state territory as the Quad Cities are.
A couple nights later, we went out with them for an enjoyable and memorable evening around the Lake Okoboji area. They took us to a biker bar in the small town of Superior, then to a lakeside bar for drinks before ending up for a great pizza and great burgers at The Ritz (click here to see the entry on The Ritz). It was really tough to say good-bye to Craig and Kathy when they dropped us off at our little resort later that evening and we immediately made plans to come back up the next summer.
Last Monday, I got an e-mail from Kathy that she sent out to seven people telling us that Craig had been hospitalized a couple days prior and that doctors suspected his body was ravaged by cancer. It was a shock to Cindy and me. Kathy said in her e-mail that Craig didn't want anyone to know that he was ill, that he didn't want anyone to make a fuss over him. That was typical of Craig, of course.
I sent Kathy an e-mail on Tuesday to see if I could give Craig a call to hopefully brighten his spirits. She e-mailed me back later in the evening and said, "Sorry, but he is probably not going to make it through the night." Well, that completely floored me. Sure enough, the little bastard died on us about an hour and a half later.
We haven't talked to Kathy directly to see what transpired through all of this. We certainly didn't see any signs of any ailments in Craig when we were up there in late August of last year. He was talking about how he was digging riding his bike on the bike trails surrounding the lakes region. He looked like he was in good shape and was in his always great spirits. I talked to him in early December and there wasn't any inkling of any problems then, either. As soon as the dust settles for Kathy, we'll give her a call and find out the back story. Cindy already wants to go up to Lake Okoboji and spend a couple three days with Kathy when the weather turns nice in the spring.
I'm seriously conflicted and very guilty today as Craig's "celebration of life" service is at 3 p.m. today. But I got home from the road late last night. It's a six hour drive one-way to Spirit Lake and I have to leave again on Monday. I get so burned out from driving that it's nice not getting in a car for a couple days. I e-mailed Kathy and told her that we would love to come back up when the weather was nice to spend some time with her. She wrote back and said, "Yes, I would really like that."
So, at 3 p.m. this afternoon, I'm getting together with my buddy, Randy, and we're going to hoist a couple beers in Craig's memory. As I was driving home yesterday and seeing the dozens of large wind turbines that dot the Midwestern countryside, I thought of Craig. From here on, each time I see a large wind turbine I'll always think of Craig and probably laugh. I missed him when he moved and I'm gonna miss him more now that he's gone.