Friday, September 11, 2020
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Paul, you will be really missed. I'm really sorry we never ended up getting that chance this spring/summer to connect up again and go over old memories growing up next door. You were a really nice guy.
I'll always remember the crazy Hollywood drama, excitement and laughs you brought to all of us kids on street.
A neighbor would get a new refrigerator and leave the giant cardboard box out and all the kids on the street, we'd all climb in and sometimes maybe not too much would be going on and then suddenly, out of the blue, you'd always do something like start wildly rocking it back and forth and screaming at the top of your lungs "Towering inferno!!!!!!!! Towering inferno!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" and whip everyone into a total hysterical panic as we'd rock back and forth wildly and the box would eventually topple and roll around the lawn.
Or how you'd go all Robin Leach and see to it that we had the most incredible tree forts and little car villages the world has probably ever seen. For the tree houses, you'd make sure we had wall to wall carpeting, multiple levels, glass paneled windows, wood paneling, even full electric supply and lighting fixtures. And this wasn't one of those modern day tree fort kits for sale that parents build, this was all 100% kid built, designed and scrounged from local piles out for recycling and construction site debris. And then the little car village....
When they cut into the hillside across the street from you, we turned the entire dirt hillside into an elaborate little car mountainside village. Carefully constructed roads going all over, homes, hotels, everything. You'd collect white groundskeeping stones to help make fancy front yards, have us put in inground pools, collect flower petals to make elaborate groundskeeping for each place. It was off the charts. Never seen or heard of anything like it anywhere.
Getting back to laughs, I remember you couldn't seem to pass a pay phone, especially at the clubhouse, without picking it up and trying to call collect to Beverly Hills and telling the operator that you were placing a collect call to Barbara Streisand haha. I think you were so dramatic and persuasive you almost were put through once!
Or the time we hiked all the way down the giant power lines hills out back, all the way across the flats and the lower swamp to the little evergreen patch and we each cut a little 1 or 2 foot tall Christmas tree and dragged them all the way back home and how shocked and happy moms were.
And then the crazy times we all had together when we'd cut those giant 2" diameter grape vines in the woods and swing way out up into the air through the forest like Tarzan and ride the "elevator tree" down the far end of one of them.
And the go carts and bikes and on and on....
always puts a smile on my face thinking of those times.
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We had such fun times. It's so sad that he is gone.
My sincerest condolences to Teressa and her family.
