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In Memory of
David Rado

 

December 12, 2004

 

By Robb Murray

ctoncall@aol.com

Today is a very sad day.  I have just learned that David Rado died last Thursday night after a six-month bout with brain cancer. 

 

The shock is still in process.  Dave held the information of his illness back from some of his friends, looking forward to a day when he could call and tell them he had beaten his adversary.   So the news has been sudden.

He had had a seizure, out of nowhere, while working at an airport as a private plane mechanic, on last June 23.  Subsequent exams revealed a brain tumor.  He had gamma knife surgery and other care, but the cancer was too virulent.  He declined rapidly during his final month when the cancer spread throughout the brain. 

He died at his home in Laguna Niguel, near L.A., in the company of his wife, and her daughter, his mother, Laura, and his sister, Sally.  He was in no pain and, though cognitively a bit reduced from his prime, was able to converse.  During his last week, many friends in the area visited and enjoyed company with him.  He departed quietly at 10:15 PM, December. 9, when he stopped breathing. 

This coming Friday, December 17, a tribute party will be held in his honor, which fits his wishes of a celebratory passing.  He has been cremated and his wife, who teaches art, has prepared a setting for his urn in an elegant style that she knows he would like.

Dave was active with experimental aircraft, and a memorial fund will be set up in his honor that helps young pilots to have their first flying experience, through the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA).   About ten years ago, I attended a Flight Trade Show Expo with Dave, and he made it a delight with all he explained and shared.

Dave's mom, Laura, and sister, Sally, still live in the Lima area.  Sister Sandy lives in Cairo, Egypt and sister Nancy is still a professional harpist and, lives in Branson, Missouri. 

        Starting Up as Dave's Friend

 

Dave was a dear pal, and an ingenious man, with flying and mechanical interests and sporting accomplishments since grade school.  I met him at Lowell Elementary when he came to join our class in fifth grade.  Here was another “science kid”, of which there always seemed to be woefully few.  We shared an admiration of Thomas Edison and of the Wright Brothers.  We both liked to fly kites and gliders, and to make hydrogen balloons.  Dave was one of a number of friends with whom I enjoyed chemistry experiments, conducted in various attics, cellars and garages throughout our neighborhood.  I remember one day in sixth grade when he wanted some sodium silicate solution to take home, for making waterproof matches.  I poured and labeled him some, and I can still see him departing happily with his bottle.

 

When he got into the lab, Dave was always very curious, very attentive and full of intelligent questions and humorous comments.  He was more impatient than some of the kids, though.  He thought that science was fine as far as it went, but when were we gonna MAKE something?  I’d say, “Well, OK, let’s make some chlorine gas!”  and he’d look at me like “That’s not something you MAKE – it’s something you BUY in a CANISTER!”   HE was always the guy who had the “make-it” projects on the bench.  He later turned out to be a lot more interested in my go-kart than the lab, and was great, with John Rice and Steve Brahm, at souping up the engine.

 

        Quite the Ingenious Hobbyist

 

Well do many of us remember the buzz of Dave's alcohol-powered model aircrafts, as he flew them over various and sundry ball diamonds and fields near home.  As well do we remember his sleek, lacquered soapbox derby and the beautiful wooden airplane propeller from a plane of his dad’s that decorated his room.  Dave took up the snare drum in junior high and used to let me take a run on his trap set.  He also learned the trombone.  The den of his home on Charles Street always displayed evidence of Dave’s latest hobbies.  You would usually see a pair of skis, a bicycle or motor taken apart, his drum pad, an airplane wing being built, or some chemicals he was going to use. 

 

Dave was one of the few guys I knew who would get a Popular Mechanics or Popular Science issue and actually work a project through to completion.  In this, he was like Mike Hahn, who was, from Day One, a recognized engineering genius in our class, and who remained a friend of Dave’s for life after junior high.  These guys knew the Lima Radio Hospital store long before the Radio Shack national franchise became a   household word.  Both had mechanical and electrical ingenuity and were determined tinkerers, creating fascinating and, often, entertaining gadgets and machines.  Dave was a very good draftsman and his friends included kids from the shop side of school, not just the academic types.  In this regard, he was a lot like Mike Hahn, Norman Rath and their entourage.  Dave liked to work with his hands, not just with his mind, and he liked a practical result.

 

This demanded organization, and Dave was always laying out some new project, in heated anticipation of getting started.  One morning, at the beginning of tenth grade, Dave saw me coming into school and said, “Hey, you’ve got a notebook already.”  “Yeah,” I said.  He grabbed it and opened it up.  It was a three-ring binder and I had the subjects written on the tabs, ready for the class notes.  He said, “Well, aren’t WE just so organized!” and he shoved it back at me in disgust.  The heck of it was, Dave was very organized himself, and I knew that his comment was a mixture of mockery and envy.  HE was usually the guy to have the business all laid out, ready to go to work.  

 

        Dave's Mental Makeup

 

I think a word I would use to describe Dave would be “progressive”.  I noticed this right away in fifth grade: he was always plugged into new things coming out.    He was the one who first showed me a cassette tape.  I was using reel to reel tapes, and he had these cassette tapes of his dad’s and showed me how they popped in.  I think they were sales training tapes or some such.  I just couldn’t comprehend how you could take something as messy as rethreading those reel tapes after every cycle through a side, and package it up into that little cage that way.  To Dave there was nothing that brain-boggling about it.  “It’s a CASSETTE, Robb, a CASSETTE!”  “What does that mean?  Cassette?  What does it stand for?  Is it French?  What kind of a word is that”  “It’s just a cassette, OK?  That’s what it’s called.  It’s a tape!  It’s self-contained.  It goes in like this.  I don’t know why it’s called that.”

 

Dave had an active imagination and was strikingly inquisitive and outgoing in his pursuit of new knowledge.  He was a great networker, and met and befriended all kinds of new people with humor and skill.  I believe he got kind of a start in Scout Troop 86.   Both his folks were in sales, and Dave’s apple did indeed fall close to the tree.   Starting at about the age of 15, he always treated adults as peers, calling them by first name, a seemingly assumptive thing to do, to my less worldly ears.   He would make friends with anyone, regardless of age, position, status, or intimidation quotient if he felt the person was worthwhile.  He was not cowed by brash people, though God knows he could joke about them.  When he wanted to get into something new, he would wade in, a new friend at a time.

 

        His Individualism

 

He also had a nonconformist streak in him that I used to imagine was related to his Christian Science church rearing.  Whatever the source, you could count on Dave to be both interested in and skeptical of the fascinating attractions he was always finding in life.  He was indeed an individualist, in every positive sense of that word.  Surrounded by three talented and beautiful sisters, he was never lost in the shuffle.  To compensate, like many a bother, he could be a merciless tease because, like many a brother, he dearly loved those he teased. 

 

He also liked to tease the girls at school.  He always called Peggy Koch “Margaret” and would make my neighbor friend, Diane Warner, roll her eyes and scoff by calling her “Fair Maiden.”   He also enjoyed the innocent charms of Betty Beery, who sometimes seemed a little flirtatious in class in spite of herself.  

 

Following 9^th grade, when we were imitating Mr. Bixel’s ways of calling on students, I got my permanent new name from Dave.  We used to have Bixel call me “N’yobb”, as though just looking up from his book and kind of half-sleepily calling on me.  So Dave distorted this to “NY-obb” and when I would get a call from him after a long spell, he would always answer my hello by saying, “Is this NY-obb Murphy?”

 

Since a lot of us had been calling him “Ravid Dado” for years, I guess this was only fair.

 

One spring, Dave was especially taken with a novelty song on the radio (this version is a revival by the Muppets).  It was kind of like the Swingle Singers doing Bach in that it had singers, but no words; the vocalists would just sing crazy little jazz syllables.  Every line started out with a guy going: “Mah-nah mah-nah.”  Then the female chorus would respond, “Bop dee, ba dee bee!”, backed up by a little jazz bass and rhythm ensemble.  Dave absolutely loved the absurdity of this, and would intone the opening line endlessly when walking to or from school to stave off the boredom.  There was also a section where the singer guy would go off into an extended solo riff of nonsense, kind of improvising, and Dave would launch into his own version of this.  Our friend, Dennis Burns, came under barrage when Dave chanced on the realization that “D.B.” (Dennis’s initials) kind of fit the syllables of the song.  For many long months thereafter, every time Dave saw Dennis, we would hear him call out, “Deebee - deebee -  deebee!”   Oh, that Dave!

 

Dave is one of the very few people who, long into adulthood, still sometimes call me “Robin,” a grade school throwback.  I think he might have been trying to protect me from painful memories by getting away from my normal name, because his dad would always call me “Rod,” no matter how many times people would correct him.  (Dave, naturally, loved this, and would imitate his dad doing it ad infinitum.)  Dave did love to joke but I always knew he was going to tell me something serious when he would say, “Robin . . .” beforehand.

 

        Sports

 

During high school, Dave was a huge skiing enthusiast, and he worked as an instructor, starting out at Valley Hi in Ohio, and later moving on to Vale and beyond.  Word is that he was a tremendous skier. Kathy Hawisher took a lesson from him once and Doug Turners say Dave could really ski great.  Dave was buddies with fellow skier, Don Spyker, who was famous for his family’s restaurant and burger stand near Central.

 

After college, Dave became a small-plane pilot and he also taught his wife to fly.  She also got her license to solo, and the two of them enjoyed making jaunts around the U.S. in their plane.  This fall, Dave finally made it aloft in a jet aircraft he had just finished constructing for a client.   Years ago, I had seen another such craft up on blocks, surrounded by about an acre of parts, tools and drawings.  As I remember, it was to be a small, black jet that would fly somewhere between 300-600 mph.  Dave used to work on planes with his best buddy, Joe Rodriguez, another Lima transplant to California.

 

        Projects for Fun and Profit

 

As you might imagine, Dave’s garage was also often scattered about with useful litter as he made improvements to this car or that.   Whether working on an engine or an exterior, he always gave me the impression, as many garage fiends do, that he never really wanted to be DONE with the project at hand, complain though he might to the contrary.  The others under his roof, of course, would always readily volunteer their great readiness to be rid of the latest albatross.

Though a flier, Dave preferred building and maintaining airplanes on the ground as his aviation employment.  Now and then, he would take on side jobs for fun.  One of my favorite examples was  when his neighbor, a high school math teacher, hired him to make some 3-D models of various functions and how they graphed out.   That was so “Dave”, the combination of theory and demonstration.  I’m sure the neighbor got his money’s worth and probably many jokes thrown into the bargain.  I can just see Dave fussing people away while the glue was drying on the models.

 

For a number of years, Dave also worked very ably as a construction supervisor on luxury homes in the Southern California region.  During a visit out to see him, Dave took me to a multimillion dollar building site where he was in charge.  It was being financed by a wealthy Chinese couple who had made their fortune manufacturing running shoes.  He walked me through all the plans, budget and time sheets, and showed me how all the building materials were being handled and where they were coming from.  It was a great adventure to walk down in the cellar trench, around the foundation, as Dave inspected and pointed out the work, caught flaws, and lined up the tasks for the day.  Here was a fellow with a great load on his shoulders, and Dave was a model of calm, and of method, in overseeing it.  I admired this to no end.

        Personality

 

After moving to California, Dave developed a very amusing way of commenting cynically about politics, and times with him were always uproarious as he got in his digs.  He was a no-nonsense, principled guy who suffered all sorts of aggravation at the slipshod, ungrateful, immoral and inconsiderate ways that he noted in so many of the folks in his adopted state.  He had a lot of his dad, Dick, whom many of us fondly recall, in him.

Dave was also, however, a very sentimental chap, who often talked wistfully of Lima and our school days, and of our friends from old times.    He never ceased to miss his father, who had died in the 1980s, and Dave loved to go over Dick Rado's outrageous salesman comments, and to tell of his amazing abilities to demo the Kirby vacuum cleaner.   (In tribute, Dave later named their small family dog "Kirby.") Dave's warmth and ready laughter always showed him to be a kind and loving man.  He always liked hearing the news of old school friends, and would enjoy with zest any accounts that could be given to him.
 

 - - - - -

Please notify any friends you know of about Dave.  This is so much appreciated.

May we hold in lasting esteem the memory of David Rado -- our kind, humorous, individualistic, industrious and, above all, ingenious friend. 

 

He is irreplaceable.

Most sincerely,

Robb Murray

Chicago, Illinois

(773) 975-8020

ctoncall@aol.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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