Wednesday, February 21, 2024
We're asked to share a memory of the world's greatest uncle, my Uncle Dick. Where to begin? My oldest friend in life whom I met when we were about six years old still asks about Uncle Dick because when we were little kids Uncle Dick played with us. There was a crowd of neighborhood kids hanging around and Dick organized us into playing "Bumbaroo" which was a hide and seek type game that involved lots of running around and such. My friends were all thinking "who’se this big kid?"
Growing up it was always fun to see Uncle Dick. One time he took us three Cavalari brothers to the fire house for an up close visit of the fire trucks and the station. Lol, I still remember it well. So cool. Once I was standing in front of Grandma’s house at 72 Wickham Ave and watched him in his class A fireman’s uniform marching by in formation in the firemen’s parade. To a little kid he seemed like a guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; so stately and formal.
Dick was a remarkable story teller too. He had loads of them. They could be about hunting or working at the phone company or, in the early days before that, on the rail road – anything at all and they were always compelling to listen to. And loads of family history stories going back to the early days of him and my mother Agnes growing up on the farm. We all often heard him say that he never had a fight with his sister.
In the 70s Dick and I put in a downstairs bathroom at Grandma Carroll’s house so that she could turn her dining room into a bedroom and stay off the stairs. I was living there at the time going to OCCC and was the laborer of course. I was always impressed by the stuff he knew and could do. I still think about the cool trick he used to keep a trickle of water from coming down a pipe he needed to have dry so he could solder it. He packed the pipe with bread which kept the water out long enough to do the work but would just dissolve after the pipes had been soldered together. When the toilet was installed and we had not yet built the walls around it, it looked kind of funny. He said, “I wonder what Grandpa would think about having a toilet in his dining room.”
Uncle Dick was just one of the best guys anyone could meet. A very reasonable, generous, kind, solid guy who could get along with anyone. Those are skills and traits that made him a great supervisor at work, a great neighbor, a great family member and the world’s greatest uncle.
