When we lose a fellow classmate memories of them still live through us and give us strength. The time we have spent with those we've lost makes them part of us. Our thoughts are with all of you who have loved and lost.
Clear back in the 6th grade, Kevin and I had Mrs. McCabe at Oakridge Elementary. One day he told me about a cave on the southwest side of Mt. Olympus. Kevin had explored it and agreed to show me and Brent (I think) what was down there. I wrapped up my BB gun in a sheet, held on with a rope around it, took it to school, and on a Friday went home with Kevin. We hiked out along the bench to where the cave was, it was actually a large mine. We went in. I remember shining our flashlights around one enormous room and I remember that it was uphill to get back out the entrance. I don't know anything about Kevin's passing, but I do appreciate the memory. Kevin was a good kid.
Alas Kevin has departed this world. It was a sad day when I received an email from his wife Pat and his son Jeff letting me know he was killed when the truck he was driving hit a high tension power line tower leg at 60 mph. He was killed upon impact. Apparently he had a seizure upon exiting the freeway and managed to navigate through the intersection at the bottom of the exit ramp without hitting anyone. The truck was going so fast that it sheared the bolts off that held the tower leg in place. Kevin's ashes were spread on one of his reclaimed oil wells in Texas and under a pine tree somewhere in the Rockies.
Below are some of the adventures that I shared with Kevin after we graduated from Skyline.
The Chronicles of Kevin and Glenn’s Magnificent Adventures and Virgin Voyages
I got to know Kevin our senior year in high school. He had the Physics class before me and we used the same lab bench on lab day. So when his class was over and he was cleaning up, I’d come to get ready for mine. Because Kevin had just finished the physics lab experiment I thought nothing about picking his brain on the work that he just finished. People learn in many different ways. I thought nothing of going to a source of knowledge that could help my lab partners and me work through the exercise for the day. Kevin never said anything about this until years later he would give me grief about it. You see Kevin was always willing to help another person out who asked and this lead to a friendship and many Magnificent Adventures that filled our lives through our college years. Kevin was always pulling together another adventure in those days. He introduced me to a number of firsts aka “Virgin Voyages”.
One such VV adventure involved our friend Steve West, duck hunting and Redman Chewing Tobacco. For some reason that I fail to remember, Kevin started chewing Redman. Kevin thought it was special. I thinking it was because he sort off center in a good way. He offered us some and I felt I owed it to myself to at least try it after all it was a VV for me. Steve knew better. It took about 15 seconds for me to know that this was not for me but Kevin seemed to love this stuff. Well after getting the taste out of my mouth we wandered out of the camper on to the banks of Willard Bay just before dawn. Kev was chewin and spittin Redman as we walked along bank looking for ducks to shoot when a brace of Mallards came winging overhead. Kev swung up his shoot gun; took a bead on those birds and pulled the trigger. The recoil of the shoot gun knocked Kev onto his ass. He missed the ducks, and he was looking sort of green around the gills while he was sitting there. When I inquired about his condition, he responded with a moan that he had just swallowed the wad of Redman he had been chewin on. Steve and I both had a good laugh over that one. I don’t seem to remember him every chew Redman after that day.
The summer of I think it was 1970 Kev got a job working on a trail clearing team cutting trails for the soon to open Snowbird Ski Resort. This gave Kev an in on all the great powder stashes when the mountain opened that winter. He became my personal guide that season. Kev liked being a guide. There were a number of times we’d be skiing and he would strike up a conversation with a couple and before you knew it we’d be showing them all the fun spots on the mountain. One time he picked up this couple, he was from Chicago and she was from some place in Jersey. Not sure how they got together but they were at the Bird to ski and Kev was set to show them around. They were both ski instructors so Kev and I thought they should be able to hang with us. After a couple of shake down runs to make sure they could hold their own on the expert runs, Kev and I decided it was time to introduce them to the Cirque. The Cirque is the large bowl at Snowbird that has about a 1500-foot vertical drop. It is all open, no trees and one has to drop off a cornice to get down into the bowl. Now the drop is only about 10 feet and your skis really never have to leave the snow if you enter it at the right spots. You just have to commit yourself to it. “Don’t think about do it” is the attitude that one needs to adopt when skiing a lot of the runs at the Bird. Well, Kev and I drop in because we’d skied this many times before. Chicago drops in a little apprehensively but once in he doing okay. We ski down about half way and stop to make sure everyone is with us but Jersey girl is nowhere to be seen. As we look around we notice that she is still up on the cornice and she is skiing along trying to figure out how she is going to get down into the bowl without killing herself. Finally she got down on her stomach and sort of rolled over the edge. Poor girl had reverted to a beginner. The 10-foot drop became a 1510ft drop to her. You see they don’t have anything quite like the Cirque in Jersey and she was doin too much thinkin. After getting over her VV on the Cirque she got it back together and 4 of us had a great day. Thorough out the next few years we’d play ski guide numerous times and because of this many ski resorts including the Bird now have mountain hosts. You see few people know this; Kev made the ski host a popular service.
We had a lot of Magnificent Adventures the surrounded skiing. One summer I hired Kevin and my brother Scott to help me test swimming pool slides. UBTL (the Utah Biomedical Test Laboratory) had hired me to test the slides. They were trying to redefine who they were after Nixon pulled government funding to test artificial hearts which was why they came into being and need money. The swimming pool slide testing was being performed because OSHA just came into being and the manufacturer of the slides was being sued because people were being injured coming off of them into the water. UBTL wanted me to run the test program. I hired Kev and Scott to help me set up the slides at the UofU swimming pool complex and then film people sliding off the slides. From this we could calculate the speed in which they would impact the bottom of a pool and determine if one could injure one’s self if the slide was installed properly. So what does this have to do with skiing you ask? Well, we had worked solid for over a month on this project and it was the middle of June when my boss gave us a day off. Kev came up with the idea that we needed to go skiing. I told him all the resorts were close but this didn’t faze Kev. He said we just hike up the Alta. I was game so we grabbed a bottle of white wine, some summer sausage, cheese, a loaf of Shepard’s bread, my camera (couldn’t let this MA go undocumented) our skis, boots, and poles and climbed into Kevin’s dad’s orange 41 Willys Jeep and took off for Alta. Now that jeep only went about 20 miles an hour so it took a while to get up to Alta. No problem, no worries. The sun was out. The Willys didn’t have a top so the wind was blowing though our hair (I had hair back then). We weren’t working on swimming pool slides. It was the middle of the afternoon when we finally had hiked to the top of one of Alta’s bowls and sat our butts down for lunch. The wine, sausage, cheese and bread hit the spot and the run down through the slush was magnificent.
On another summer occasion Kev, Whit, and I hiked up Superior Slide across the road from Alta. When we got up to the top we looked down and saw a group gathering. We put our skis on and all three of us took off for our run. The crowd was cheering us on our descent. It was an epic run. When we got to the bottom we noticed a sign that we missed on our ascent. It said “Warning Watch Out for Unexploded Warhead.” You see, Alta would shoot down slides on Superior every winter with a 55mm howitzer and some of these shell don’t explode on impact. If one of us would have hit one of those…… Oh well it didn’t happen. Looks like God had more Magnificent Adventures install for us.
Kev and I did a lot of things together during those years. I talked him into pledging the SAE fraternity with me. He was social chairman one year. Does this surprise anyone? I became Chronicler. I got to photo document all the great parties he set up. We became Ski Instructors for the UofU. Thought it would help us find the babes. Only problem was I was in love with one so he was sort of on his own. We tried setting him up on a number of occasions. When asked what sort of guy Kev was our standard response was “Well Kevin is well Kevin.” He had some troubles finding a steady girl friend back then. You see whenever he would meet a woman he would proceed to get real intense and focused on her. He would lean forward, arms folded on the table and stare deeply in to her eyes and proceed to grill the poor woman. This and his unibrow didn’t make great first impressions. We tried to get him to ease back but I guess is analytical nerdness wouldn’t let him. To this day I have no idea how he wooed Pat into marrying him because he usually scared women off.
I did my first ocean dive with Kev off of San Clemente Island. We booked a dive boat out of Long Beach. It took off on a Friday night and anchored in the morning. The visibility was about 60 feet. Pretty good. The diving was pretty much in kelp beds. This was back when there was abalone to be found and harvested so we popped number for a meal when we returned. The diving was great the food they served us on board tasted wonderful. It was truly another Magnificent Adventure. We borrowed a couple of dive lights and did our first night dive. We kept loosing each other because the kelp kept blocking light. I had to constantly surface to find his bubble stream and follow it back down to find him. On the final day of our dive trip we surface and handed our tanks off to the deck hand who filled the tanks. We had time after a fruit break for one more dive. In those days we didn’t have pressure gauges on the regulators so we relied upon deck hand to fill our tanks. After our fruit break we slipped on our tanks checked airflow and jumped back into the water. Well at about 60 feet my air ran out. I pulled the J-valve reserve and found that I didn’t have but a few breaths left so I swam over and pulled on one of Kevin’s fins to get his attention. Kev turned around I gave him the universal “I’m out of air” sign. He looked at me with a puzzled look and I indicated I was out of air again. So I let me have a few breaths off of his air and I proceeded to do a free assent from 60 feet. Kev soon joined me on the surface and headed back to the boat to see if I could get my tank filled. I was SOL. They said that they were getting ready to leave for the mainland and didn’t have time to fill my tank to let me have one more dive. Kev and I tried to buddy breath off of his tank but without a second regulator (standard equipment today) we were pretty restricted in what we could do or see so I swam along the surface and kept an eye on him down at 60 feet. Kev gathered a number of scallops for the gourmet feast that we were to have back at his grandma’s trailer in Long Beach. That afternoon upon our return, Kev showed me how to clean the abalone we collected and prepare it for our feast. He trimmed off the entrails, and sliced the foot out of the shell. And grabbed a hammer. I looked at him with a puzzled look and he proceeded to bound the foot until it was about an 1/8 of an inch thick. He told me it would be a little tough if he hadn’t flattened it. A hot pan, a little butter and garlic, 30 seconds per side if that, and it was the most wonderful thing I had ever tasted. This MA was just full of VVs. Kev was my inspiration to learn how to cook
I shared my first apartment with Kev. He taught me that cooking was nothing to be afraid of. We had Thanksgiving at the apartment I volunteered to cook the turkey. Another VV for me. Couldn’t figure out why there weren’t any giblets with the bird until a girl friend went to un-stuff the neck cavity and guess what she found. We were two “Wild and Crazy Guys” then. Steve Martin sold our stick.
In those years Kevin bought his BMW 2002tii. He loved that car. It was one of the first great sports sedans and he loved blasting up the canyons outside of Salt Lake City. I don’t think he ever got over that love affair. You see that was what the “tii” in his email address was all about.
One of the last Magnificent Adventures Kev and I had was a 6 week trip to Europe in 1976. Our only timing was to leave on June something and fly to Gatwick Airport in the UK and be back at Gatwick 6 weeks later. This was Kev’s second trip. I had my camera. Everywhere I looked there was something to photograph. I didn’t care where we went. It was a VV for me consequently Kev got to play tour guide again.
We rented a car when we went up to Edinburgh Scotland so we could drive out to take a look-see at St Andrews Golf Course. Driving was very hilarious. Neither one of us had ever driven on the left side of the road on purpose. It definitely ranked right up there with an all time VV for both of us. Kev decided he would drive first. He had a very difficult time trying to figure out what lane to turn into when he would turn a corner. I gave him tremendous grief for this until he had all he could take and stopped the car and told me I could drive. Oh my. It turned out that it wasn’t as easy as it was when I was in the passenger seat. Every corner I turned started with turning on the windshield wipers because they were where the turn signals were on American cars. I would then honk the horn because it was on the end of the turn signal lever and then I proceeded to turn the corner into the wrong lane. Kev was beside himself in the passenger seat. Two Wild and Crazy Guys with wheels. We spent a week in the UK getting our feet wet in a foreign country. Now it was time for the continent.
Kevin had arranged for us to buy a car from a man he worked with at Imco. This man lived in the Netherlands. It was his wife’s car. He told us he would sell it when we were through with our tour of the continent. It should have cost us less than renting a car for the remaining 5 weeks. The car was a piece of junk but it ran and we were off. In the end it costs us about the same. Kev’s co-worker took advantage of our naiveté.
The first night we camped out in Germany. You see Kev bought a spring bar backpacking tent for this trip. We were to camp out at the camping plazts that were all over the continent. This saved us a lot on board and gave us the opportunity to meet a lot of different people. Well that first night was quite interesting. It started raining. Kev decided to retire soon after it got dark while I opted to read a book I brought a long for a couple of hours. The only dry place was in the car and with the dome light on I managed to kill a couple of chapters before heading for the tent. When I opened the door on my side of the tent I was surprised to find Kev sound asleep in about 2 inches of water. We had bought a couple of foam rubber mattresses to sleep on so he didn’t know he was about to drown. I pulled up on the floor of the tent to drain the water out before I climbed into my sleeping bag. It took about 2 minutes to drain it but things were still pretty wet. Throughout the night I kept waking up to drain the tent. Kev kept sleeping. It wasn’t until the next morning he realized what happened. His down filled bag was soaking. It took three days to dry it out draped open the backseat of our car as we traveled through Germany. My bag dried that day because I had bought a poly filled bag for the trip. So why didn’t the tent keep us dry that night? Kev bought the tent for the trip and he didn’t know that he needed to seal the seams to make them water proof on a new tent. We made a pack that next day that if it were going to rain, we’d be spending the night in a B&B. We were fortunate; we only had to find a B&B on two other occasions.
Opening up our car on the Autobahn was an experience. We thought it was going to rattle apart when we hit 120 kph. 160kph (100mph) was out of the question. Given this and the fact where wasn’t much to see as we drove along the Autobahn we decided to stick to the back roads. This led us to Dinhklesbuel. Dinhklesbuel was a small town in Germany. They were just happening to have a festival that night to celebrate the day the children saved the town from a Swedish conqueror. We had no particular place to be so we decided to stay the night and found the camping platz about a block off the main street and pitched the now dried tent for the night before wondering off to the feastival. We both drank a lot of beer, eat a few brats and I learned Kevin didn’t have to speak the language to have a meaningful conversation. He knew napkin-speak and was a master at it, especially after a couple of liters of beer. That beer was pretty good and I didn’t particularly like beer at that point of my life. The first liter went down real easy. Anyway Kev struck up a conversation (napkin-speak) with a young frauline. She taught us the chicken dance. Kev found out she liked American university tee shirts so he got her address so he could send her a couple when we got home. Won’t you know it he did just that when we got back to the US. He was generous that way. Kev head back to the tent after his third liter. I decided I liked beer and had another liter (number 4) before weaving my way back to the tent. The next day Kev had to do all the driving because my head decided it didn’t like the beer as much as I did that night. The whole trip was much like this. A string quartet in the Zurich Castle being invited into a gay bar afterwards. Meeting up with a tour group of girls from the Midwest at Ludwick’s castle in Germany. Running into them again in Austria and attending a concert of Motzart or Bach or some other Renaissance composer in Vienna with them. Meeting a couple of girls from Canada in Switzerland and running into them again at the Hoffbrau House in Munich. They were with some other Kling-On who had a car. We all went for a ride in his Saab (that looked like a flat-sided VW Bettle) down the Munich walking mall after we were all three sheets to the wind. Lucky we didn’t get arrested that night. There was another round of napkin-speak in the mountains of Switzerland with a couple. The man had had both hips replaced with artificial ones. He explained the whole operation on a paper napkin. Even the last day back at Gatwick airport the adventure continued. Our chartered flight had not arrived on schedule. We had to spend the night at the airport. It didn’t turn out to bad because we connected with this woman who used her womanly ways to find her group, Kev and me an office area to sleep in that was out of the main terminal.
Life around Kev was never boring. I will sorely miss him until it is time to join him on the next Magnificent Adventure in the afterlife. I’m sure he will have the whole thing wired by the time we make that journey.
Vicki Harding
When we lose a fellow classmate memories of them still live through us and give us strength. The time we have spent with those we've lost makes them part of us. Our thoughts are with all of you who have loved and lost.
Dan Judd
Clear back in the 6th grade, Kevin and I had Mrs. McCabe at Oakridge Elementary. One day he told me about a cave on the southwest side of Mt. Olympus. Kevin had explored it and agreed to show me and Brent (I think) what was down there. I wrapped up my BB gun in a sheet, held on with a rope around it, took it to school, and on a Friday went home with Kevin. We hiked out along the bench to where the cave was, it was actually a large mine. We went in. I remember shining our flashlights around one enormous room and I remember that it was uphill to get back out the entrance. I don't know anything about Kevin's passing, but I do appreciate the memory. Kevin was a good kid.
Alan Pearson
I remember Kevin from Spanish at Churchill Jr. He was a riot to be with. I had a younger sister who was friends with his younger sister.
Todd Tanner
Kevin is gone! He was one of my favorite ski buddies and a great friend. What a loss.
Glenn Baumann
Alas Kevin has departed this world. It was a sad day when I received an email from his wife Pat and his son Jeff letting me know he was killed when the truck he was driving hit a high tension power line tower leg at 60 mph. He was killed upon impact. Apparently he had a seizure upon exiting the freeway and managed to navigate through the intersection at the bottom of the exit ramp without hitting anyone. The truck was going so fast that it sheared the bolts off that held the tower leg in place. Kevin's ashes were spread on one of his reclaimed oil wells in Texas and under a pine tree somewhere in the Rockies.
Below are some of the adventures that I shared with Kevin after we graduated from Skyline.
The Chronicles of Kevin and Glenn’s Magnificent Adventures and Virgin Voyages
I got to know Kevin our senior year in high school. He had the Physics class before me and we used the same lab bench on lab day. So when his class was over and he was cleaning up, I’d come to get ready for mine. Because Kevin had just finished the physics lab experiment I thought nothing about picking his brain on the work that he just finished. People learn in many different ways. I thought nothing of going to a source of knowledge that could help my lab partners and me work through the exercise for the day. Kevin never said anything about this until years later he would give me grief about it. You see Kevin was always willing to help another person out who asked and this lead to a friendship and many Magnificent Adventures that filled our lives through our college years. Kevin was always pulling together another adventure in those days. He introduced me to a number of firsts aka “Virgin Voyages”.
One such VV adventure involved our friend Steve West, duck hunting and Redman Chewing Tobacco. For some reason that I fail to remember, Kevin started chewing Redman. Kevin thought it was special. I thinking it was because he sort off center in a good way. He offered us some and I felt I owed it to myself to at least try it after all it was a VV for me. Steve knew better. It took about 15 seconds for me to know that this was not for me but Kevin seemed to love this stuff. Well after getting the taste out of my mouth we wandered out of the camper on to the banks of Willard Bay just before dawn. Kev was chewin and spittin Redman as we walked along bank looking for ducks to shoot when a brace of Mallards came winging overhead. Kev swung up his shoot gun; took a bead on those birds and pulled the trigger. The recoil of the shoot gun knocked Kev onto his ass. He missed the ducks, and he was looking sort of green around the gills while he was sitting there. When I inquired about his condition, he responded with a moan that he had just swallowed the wad of Redman he had been chewin on. Steve and I both had a good laugh over that one. I don’t seem to remember him every chew Redman after that day.
The summer of I think it was 1970 Kev got a job working on a trail clearing team cutting trails for the soon to open Snowbird Ski Resort. This gave Kev an in on all the great powder stashes when the mountain opened that winter. He became my personal guide that season. Kev liked being a guide. There were a number of times we’d be skiing and he would strike up a conversation with a couple and before you knew it we’d be showing them all the fun spots on the mountain. One time he picked up this couple, he was from Chicago and she was from some place in Jersey. Not sure how they got together but they were at the Bird to ski and Kev was set to show them around. They were both ski instructors so Kev and I thought they should be able to hang with us. After a couple of shake down runs to make sure they could hold their own on the expert runs, Kev and I decided it was time to introduce them to the Cirque. The Cirque is the large bowl at Snowbird that has about a 1500-foot vertical drop. It is all open, no trees and one has to drop off a cornice to get down into the bowl. Now the drop is only about 10 feet and your skis really never have to leave the snow if you enter it at the right spots. You just have to commit yourself to it. “Don’t think about do it” is the attitude that one needs to adopt when skiing a lot of the runs at the Bird. Well, Kev and I drop in because we’d skied this many times before. Chicago drops in a little apprehensively but once in he doing okay. We ski down about half way and stop to make sure everyone is with us but Jersey girl is nowhere to be seen. As we look around we notice that she is still up on the cornice and she is skiing along trying to figure out how she is going to get down into the bowl without killing herself. Finally she got down on her stomach and sort of rolled over the edge. Poor girl had reverted to a beginner. The 10-foot drop became a 1510ft drop to her. You see they don’t have anything quite like the Cirque in Jersey and she was doin too much thinkin. After getting over her VV on the Cirque she got it back together and 4 of us had a great day. Thorough out the next few years we’d play ski guide numerous times and because of this many ski resorts including the Bird now have mountain hosts. You see few people know this; Kev made the ski host a popular service.
We had a lot of Magnificent Adventures the surrounded skiing. One summer I hired Kevin and my brother Scott to help me test swimming pool slides. UBTL (the Utah Biomedical Test Laboratory) had hired me to test the slides. They were trying to redefine who they were after Nixon pulled government funding to test artificial hearts which was why they came into being and need money. The swimming pool slide testing was being performed because OSHA just came into being and the manufacturer of the slides was being sued because people were being injured coming off of them into the water. UBTL wanted me to run the test program. I hired Kev and Scott to help me set up the slides at the UofU swimming pool complex and then film people sliding off the slides. From this we could calculate the speed in which they would impact the bottom of a pool and determine if one could injure one’s self if the slide was installed properly. So what does this have to do with skiing you ask? Well, we had worked solid for over a month on this project and it was the middle of June when my boss gave us a day off. Kev came up with the idea that we needed to go skiing. I told him all the resorts were close but this didn’t faze Kev. He said we just hike up the Alta. I was game so we grabbed a bottle of white wine, some summer sausage, cheese, a loaf of Shepard’s bread, my camera (couldn’t let this MA go undocumented) our skis, boots, and poles and climbed into Kevin’s dad’s orange 41 Willys Jeep and took off for Alta. Now that jeep only went about 20 miles an hour so it took a while to get up to Alta. No problem, no worries. The sun was out. The Willys didn’t have a top so the wind was blowing though our hair (I had hair back then). We weren’t working on swimming pool slides. It was the middle of the afternoon when we finally had hiked to the top of one of Alta’s bowls and sat our butts down for lunch. The wine, sausage, cheese and bread hit the spot and the run down through the slush was magnificent.
On another summer occasion Kev, Whit, and I hiked up Superior Slide across the road from Alta. When we got up to the top we looked down and saw a group gathering. We put our skis on and all three of us took off for our run. The crowd was cheering us on our descent. It was an epic run. When we got to the bottom we noticed a sign that we missed on our ascent. It said “Warning Watch Out for Unexploded Warhead.” You see, Alta would shoot down slides on Superior every winter with a 55mm howitzer and some of these shell don’t explode on impact. If one of us would have hit one of those…… Oh well it didn’t happen. Looks like God had more Magnificent Adventures install for us.
Kev and I did a lot of things together during those years. I talked him into pledging the SAE fraternity with me. He was social chairman one year. Does this surprise anyone? I became Chronicler. I got to photo document all the great parties he set up. We became Ski Instructors for the UofU. Thought it would help us find the babes. Only problem was I was in love with one so he was sort of on his own. We tried setting him up on a number of occasions. When asked what sort of guy Kev was our standard response was “Well Kevin is well Kevin.” He had some troubles finding a steady girl friend back then. You see whenever he would meet a woman he would proceed to get real intense and focused on her. He would lean forward, arms folded on the table and stare deeply in to her eyes and proceed to grill the poor woman. This and his unibrow didn’t make great first impressions. We tried to get him to ease back but I guess is analytical nerdness wouldn’t let him. To this day I have no idea how he wooed Pat into marrying him because he usually scared women off.
I did my first ocean dive with Kev off of San Clemente Island. We booked a dive boat out of Long Beach. It took off on a Friday night and anchored in the morning. The visibility was about 60 feet. Pretty good. The diving was pretty much in kelp beds. This was back when there was abalone to be found and harvested so we popped number for a meal when we returned. The diving was great the food they served us on board tasted wonderful. It was truly another Magnificent Adventure. We borrowed a couple of dive lights and did our first night dive. We kept loosing each other because the kelp kept blocking light. I had to constantly surface to find his bubble stream and follow it back down to find him. On the final day of our dive trip we surface and handed our tanks off to the deck hand who filled the tanks. We had time after a fruit break for one more dive. In those days we didn’t have pressure gauges on the regulators so we relied upon deck hand to fill our tanks. After our fruit break we slipped on our tanks checked airflow and jumped back into the water. Well at about 60 feet my air ran out. I pulled the J-valve reserve and found that I didn’t have but a few breaths left so I swam over and pulled on one of Kevin’s fins to get his attention. Kev turned around I gave him the universal “I’m out of air” sign. He looked at me with a puzzled look and I indicated I was out of air again. So I let me have a few breaths off of his air and I proceeded to do a free assent from 60 feet. Kev soon joined me on the surface and headed back to the boat to see if I could get my tank filled. I was SOL. They said that they were getting ready to leave for the mainland and didn’t have time to fill my tank to let me have one more dive. Kev and I tried to buddy breath off of his tank but without a second regulator (standard equipment today) we were pretty restricted in what we could do or see so I swam along the surface and kept an eye on him down at 60 feet. Kev gathered a number of scallops for the gourmet feast that we were to have back at his grandma’s trailer in Long Beach. That afternoon upon our return, Kev showed me how to clean the abalone we collected and prepare it for our feast. He trimmed off the entrails, and sliced the foot out of the shell. And grabbed a hammer. I looked at him with a puzzled look and he proceeded to bound the foot until it was about an 1/8 of an inch thick. He told me it would be a little tough if he hadn’t flattened it. A hot pan, a little butter and garlic, 30 seconds per side if that, and it was the most wonderful thing I had ever tasted. This MA was just full of VVs. Kev was my inspiration to learn how to cook
I shared my first apartment with Kev. He taught me that cooking was nothing to be afraid of. We had Thanksgiving at the apartment I volunteered to cook the turkey. Another VV for me. Couldn’t figure out why there weren’t any giblets with the bird until a girl friend went to un-stuff the neck cavity and guess what she found. We were two “Wild and Crazy Guys” then. Steve Martin sold our stick.
In those years Kevin bought his BMW 2002tii. He loved that car. It was one of the first great sports sedans and he loved blasting up the canyons outside of Salt Lake City. I don’t think he ever got over that love affair. You see that was what the “tii” in his email address was all about.
One of the last Magnificent Adventures Kev and I had was a 6 week trip to Europe in 1976. Our only timing was to leave on June something and fly to Gatwick Airport in the UK and be back at Gatwick 6 weeks later. This was Kev’s second trip. I had my camera. Everywhere I looked there was something to photograph. I didn’t care where we went. It was a VV for me consequently Kev got to play tour guide again.
We rented a car when we went up to Edinburgh Scotland so we could drive out to take a look-see at St Andrews Golf Course. Driving was very hilarious. Neither one of us had ever driven on the left side of the road on purpose. It definitely ranked right up there with an all time VV for both of us. Kev decided he would drive first. He had a very difficult time trying to figure out what lane to turn into when he would turn a corner. I gave him tremendous grief for this until he had all he could take and stopped the car and told me I could drive. Oh my. It turned out that it wasn’t as easy as it was when I was in the passenger seat. Every corner I turned started with turning on the windshield wipers because they were where the turn signals were on American cars. I would then honk the horn because it was on the end of the turn signal lever and then I proceeded to turn the corner into the wrong lane. Kev was beside himself in the passenger seat. Two Wild and Crazy Guys with wheels. We spent a week in the UK getting our feet wet in a foreign country. Now it was time for the continent.
Kevin had arranged for us to buy a car from a man he worked with at Imco. This man lived in the Netherlands. It was his wife’s car. He told us he would sell it when we were through with our tour of the continent. It should have cost us less than renting a car for the remaining 5 weeks. The car was a piece of junk but it ran and we were off. In the end it costs us about the same. Kev’s co-worker took advantage of our naiveté.
The first night we camped out in Germany. You see Kev bought a spring bar backpacking tent for this trip. We were to camp out at the camping plazts that were all over the continent. This saved us a lot on board and gave us the opportunity to meet a lot of different people. Well that first night was quite interesting. It started raining. Kev decided to retire soon after it got dark while I opted to read a book I brought a long for a couple of hours. The only dry place was in the car and with the dome light on I managed to kill a couple of chapters before heading for the tent. When I opened the door on my side of the tent I was surprised to find Kev sound asleep in about 2 inches of water. We had bought a couple of foam rubber mattresses to sleep on so he didn’t know he was about to drown. I pulled up on the floor of the tent to drain the water out before I climbed into my sleeping bag. It took about 2 minutes to drain it but things were still pretty wet. Throughout the night I kept waking up to drain the tent. Kev kept sleeping. It wasn’t until the next morning he realized what happened. His down filled bag was soaking. It took three days to dry it out draped open the backseat of our car as we traveled through Germany. My bag dried that day because I had bought a poly filled bag for the trip. So why didn’t the tent keep us dry that night? Kev bought the tent for the trip and he didn’t know that he needed to seal the seams to make them water proof on a new tent. We made a pack that next day that if it were going to rain, we’d be spending the night in a B&B. We were fortunate; we only had to find a B&B on two other occasions.
Opening up our car on the Autobahn was an experience. We thought it was going to rattle apart when we hit 120 kph. 160kph (100mph) was out of the question. Given this and the fact where wasn’t much to see as we drove along the Autobahn we decided to stick to the back roads. This led us to Dinhklesbuel. Dinhklesbuel was a small town in Germany. They were just happening to have a festival that night to celebrate the day the children saved the town from a Swedish conqueror. We had no particular place to be so we decided to stay the night and found the camping platz about a block off the main street and pitched the now dried tent for the night before wondering off to the feastival. We both drank a lot of beer, eat a few brats and I learned Kevin didn’t have to speak the language to have a meaningful conversation. He knew napkin-speak and was a master at it, especially after a couple of liters of beer. That beer was pretty good and I didn’t particularly like beer at that point of my life. The first liter went down real easy. Anyway Kev struck up a conversation (napkin-speak) with a young frauline. She taught us the chicken dance. Kev found out she liked American university tee shirts so he got her address so he could send her a couple when we got home. Won’t you know it he did just that when we got back to the US. He was generous that way. Kev head back to the tent after his third liter. I decided I liked beer and had another liter (number 4) before weaving my way back to the tent. The next day Kev had to do all the driving because my head decided it didn’t like the beer as much as I did that night. The whole trip was much like this. A string quartet in the Zurich Castle being invited into a gay bar afterwards. Meeting up with a tour group of girls from the Midwest at Ludwick’s castle in Germany. Running into them again in Austria and attending a concert of Motzart or Bach or some other Renaissance composer in Vienna with them. Meeting a couple of girls from Canada in Switzerland and running into them again at the Hoffbrau House in Munich. They were with some other Kling-On who had a car. We all went for a ride in his Saab (that looked like a flat-sided VW Bettle) down the Munich walking mall after we were all three sheets to the wind. Lucky we didn’t get arrested that night. There was another round of napkin-speak in the mountains of Switzerland with a couple. The man had had both hips replaced with artificial ones. He explained the whole operation on a paper napkin. Even the last day back at Gatwick airport the adventure continued. Our chartered flight had not arrived on schedule. We had to spend the night at the airport. It didn’t turn out to bad because we connected with this woman who used her womanly ways to find her group, Kev and me an office area to sleep in that was out of the main terminal.
Life around Kev was never boring. I will sorely miss him until it is time to join him on the next Magnificent Adventure in the afterlife. I’m sure he will have the whole thing wired by the time we make that journey.