ABOUT GARY:

I have no idea what took him.

I knew his dad had died but didn't know his mom had died.

Last time I saw him was about 5 years after high school.  He was working at St. Rita's in the pharmacy.  He had just married Deb and he showed me this cute little house they had closed on.  He was so excited about it!  It was on a corner lot, I believe.  He was making all kinds of improvements to it, to the ductwork and all.

Then a few years later I got a card with his baby's picture on it.  He was really excited to be a dad.

I have a lot of memories about him:

            BEING IN SCHOOL

 --I first ever heard about him through Harvey Bennett in 8th grade -- another Roosevelt kid.   Then I think I actually met Gary in 9th grade (I had only met Harvey in 8th) and it was in biology.  I still remember saying, "Oh -- you're Gary Werff.  I've heard all about you from Harvey."

--I used to make up "radio magazines" for him starring Mr. Bixel in various ridiculous situations.  I came up with many songs for these shows which Gary  never failed to enjoy.  I would give him a tape reel as kind of a mystery and he would pedal off with it on his bike and then call me later to say what he thought of it.  He would always have his own little wry comments to add.

--Gary took Spanish for about 6 years.  He used to laugh at some of the stories they'd read and my Spanish guitar reminded him of various ones that he would recount and laugh about.  He also had some lessons on tape on his big reel-to-reel that he would mock now and then.  He and Ron Campnell used to joke about their Spanish lessons, especially various double-entendre or semi-risqué words that the classes would laugh about, such as “somplandor.”

--In tenth grade, we had a riot when Mrs. Griffiths assigned us to dramatize a scene from a novel.  Gary and I decided to do the scene where Lennie, a large and mentally challenged man, accidentally kills the wife of Curley.  I was Lennie and Gary was the wife.  Since this occurred out in the country, we were putting on suitable accents.   At one point, Curley's wife says, "Your hair is soft.  Not like Curley's.  His hair feels just like wire."  When we were rehearsing, Gary was putting on such a strong accent that all we could do was laugh and not do the scene.  We were trying to see just how much of it he could actually do in class without our losing control of the acting.  When it came to it, Gary put on his falsetto and said, "HIS hair feels jiss lock wahr!" and we both starting shaking and quaking and trying to suppress the guffaws.  The class laughed, which diffused the steam and we were able to go ahead and finish with no problems.

            AT HOME

--Gary lived on Nixon Street, near Judkins where Mr. Widener lived, nearby my Aunt Ethel's sister, June Blinn and family. He also lived near Rosie Witham, a beloved and very outgoing lady from our church whose husband had tragically died young.

 --Gary lived next to Harry Kirsch (dad of Shari Kirsch and father-in-law to the Starbuck's guy) and would baby-sit their dog, Shep.  He always dreaded when Harry would bring him over to again show him in too-much detail how to do every little job that Gary already knew how to do in taking care of the dog.  He said it almost wasn’t worth getting the work to have to go through the re-training every time.

--He had a reel-to-reel tape recorder with large reels that he would use to record rock albums onto.  I remember the day he was recording Jumpin Jack Flash.  He would borrow a lot of albums to tape, such as the Tijuana Brass, Switched On Bach, Classical Gas, and various Beatles songs.

--He had a neat attic bedroom that his folks paneled for him in light brown wood.  He also had air conditioning in the summer, which seemed a huge luxury to me.

--Gary always had two steel ball sculptures on his bedroom desk. 
     One was a row of steel balls that hung on strings.  On either end you would pick up the ball and let it fall onto the row.  Then the last ball at the other end would be bonked up into the air.  It would come back down and when it hit, its force would smack the original ball back up.  The machine would keep repeating this sequence over and over.  It was always kind of amazing because nothing constrained the intermediate  balls from swinging.  But the only two balls that would move were the ones on either end.  When one ball would hit the row end, it seemed to transfer an exact "quantum" of energy, a packet, that would exactly be enough to knock the opposite-end ball up.  It could transfix you.
     The other sculpture was some nondescript pivot-point  balancing thing, a metal sculpture of some guy you couldn’t easily knock over because of how widely his balancing beams were being  extended out --  I guess it was supposed to be amazing but neither one of us really seemed to go for it.

            FAMILY

--Gary was an only child. 

--His mom was an attractive, very youthful-seeming blonde, who used to remind me of Alice Cramden on The Honeymooners, although she was prettier than Alice.  When she would itemize things, she would bend her fingers far back with the other hand as though to really emphasize the items.  When his folks and Gary would eat lunch or supper in their kitchen, it was just the three of them, and it seemed so deserted and quiet, compared to most families I’d been in.  I wondered how they could stand the quiet.

--His dad was the nicest, most mild-mannered guy you ever met, and his sense of humor was very innocent and Old Time Radio-like.  For example, he would laugh about the name of some new place, when it first opened, that was like Denny's, but was called Lum's,

--Both Gary’s folks are gone now, too, sadly.

            SPORTS and FUN

--In gym, I remember Gary’s being decent in basketball and the usual PE sports.  He loved imitating John Barton and Al Scrivner.

--He had a nice English bike and we used to ride now and then around the reservoirs in the park.

 --I remember in ninth grade his playing around on my go-kart along with other kids like John Rice.

--When there was a re-release of “Gone With the Wind” with much ballyhoo, we went over to see it.   It was on a slushy winter Saturday and we came home in the early dark.  I think he was more wow’d by the movie than I was.

 --Dating-wise, I think he once went out with Debbie Dahlke, who was in  in my older brother, Scott's, class.  He used to like and see Holly Blair, whom I was in Sunday School with.  They were both taller kids.  You know how that always goes.

            ENJOYMENT OF PEOPLE

--He used to really bust up when my piano teacher’s husband, Fred Wertz, would call out to me on the sidewalk from his garage to give me bottles.  He didn't see so well anymore, and so he used to yell, "Is this Robby? Robby!  I got some bottles for ya, Robby!"   Gary would always call me "Robby" in imitation of Fred. 

--His other favorite imitation was of Greg Harlan on the school PA system as "the vocational sports reporter with this morning's results."  We would greet each other like Greg, saying "Hi, 'ere", which we later contracted to "Har."  At a booth at some fair or other they were once selling "bicycle license plates" and I got Gary one that said, "HAR"

--Gary used to find Mr. Russler quite boring and used to like to imitate him with me, saying "Will ya please . . . ?"  Gary would always write down the most foolish things Russler would say each day to inform me about.

 --We would laugh at Boyer’s mis-calling him "Gene" Werff and Russler's calling him Gary "Worth".

--He used to love how Boyer would shout "CampNELL!" at Ron, accenting it wrong.

--Gary had three ways of laughing:  1) a silent kind, where he would laugh out of his nose and shake, 2) another kind where he would kind of gasp spasmodically internally and keep his mouth closed, and 3) like #2 but with his mouth involuntarily open.  Gary was a very modest laugher.

            SCIENCE AND GADGETS

--Gary liked my chemistry lab but never started his own.

--His science project in ninth grade was an overview of the functions of  computers

--I remember studying many times with Gary in high school, especially for Physics I and II.  His mind was very good.

--The Werffs had an IBM Selectric typewriter that Bob Werff  had brought  home from his job at IBM.   One day they let me start typing up my science project on it and it kept taking longer and longer.  At the end of the day, it was obvious that I was stuck because I couldn’t do the rest at home with a different font.   So they let me borrow the Selectric and I think they let me keep it for about a year!   It was a great machine and I couldn’t believe they never seemed to need it back.  You could type like a demon on that thing and it had automatic carriage return--so advanced!

            A TRULY GOOD GUY 

--I never saw Gary get in any kind of fight, even verbal.  

--He  was confirmed at St. Luke's with Sally and I think Mike Meffley, Branden Hines and Dana Earl.  He had a hardcover new Testament from the New English Bible that I borrowed, and read, and would tell him about.  The book was a lot like the J.B. Phillips translation that I was reading a lot at the time.    I found it quite illuminating and Gary liked hearing about it.

--In high school, I wrote a play for English class called “Merchant of Menace” that was basically an excuse to be able to take off on the teachers.  A couple of students were actual characters written into the play.  One was Gary ("Garrulus Veridictus").  Gary was supposed to be kind of a polar good-guy opposite to the cunning villain and it seemed so natural, with him being such an unassailably virtuous guy, as he was.

--I'm sure he was in the top 10 or 20 kids in our class, grade-wise and test-score-wise.  He was a bright guy, and very unassuming, of course.  He nearly always knew the answer when called on in class.