David was my closest friend for 50 years and these comments represent a redaction of the eulogy that I delivered at his memorial service in Buffalo on November 21. I am sure that everyone who views this website shares the tremendous sense of loss that I feel and that those feelings are tempered by only one thing- our deep appreciation for the lasting rewards that have accrued to us from knowing David whether as a family member, a teacher, a colleague or a friend. My grandmother, Anna Maisel, who David knew and respected, used to have a saying that you never knew who your real friends were in life until you needed them and that when you needed them, you could count them on the fingers of one hand. For the last 50 years, whenever I started to count my friends, David was always the first person that I counted. When I dropped out of graduate school in 1974 and was unsure of what to do, it was David who invited me to come out and visit him in Berkeley. Perhaps he hadn’t realized that I was going to stay with him for the next 5 years! But the point is that he was there for me. Similarly, when my father died unexpectedly, David came back to Buffalo from California to be with my family. And when my mom went through a long and difficult illness, David was there for her as well. Of course, our friendship was reciprocal. I recall the day that David persuaded Mary and I to go with him to the Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California and Mary stumbled a few times when we were walking around. That night at dinner, they told me that Mary had just been diagnosed as having MS and that for now I was the only person that they wanted to share this with. Twenty years later, when I learned that Mary had died in East Lansing, I picked up Dave’s parents who lived near me in Buffalo and the three of us immediately drove to Michigan to do whatever we could to help out.

My wife Patti was a kindergarten teacher for 15 years and has always said that you tell pretty much tell what a person will be like as an adult from the way that they act in kindergarten. I didn’t know David at that young an age, but his character and interests demonstrated a remarkable consistency over the last 50 years. From the time that he was a very young man, David always loved music and theatre. When other 13 year olds were watching monster movies, David was into The Sound of Music. In fact he and I, along with our friend Andy Myer, were probably the only straight guys in our high school class of 800 students who really loved musicals. David always acted in our high school musicals and he and I ushered several night a week at a professional theatre in downtown Buffalo where we were paid $2.00 each per performance. Every summer for years David and I, and frequently Mary, would go for a marathon trip to the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. David would pick me up at 5:00 am in the hope that we could get to the box office when it opened at 8:00 so that we could get the limited student price tickets. Then we would see two Shakespeare plays in one day and crash for the night sated on Cymbeline, King Lear, or the Dutchess of Malfi. When we were in high school, David proposed that he and I write a one act musical as a class project. My piano teacher liked one of our songs called Paint a Horizon so much that he did a choral arrangement of it and had it song by the high school choir where he taught. Then he introduced David and I as the young composers and everyone in the auditorium gave us a big round of applause. It was a great night for us and our parents who were all there as well.
Along with music and theatre, David had a lifelong love for books and learning with deep roots in his youth. Here it might be possible to liken David to Othello as “one who loved not wisely but too well” insofar as his book collection may rival that of the Library of Congress. This started at an early age. Every Saturday when we were not engaged in a hot game of Risk, David and I and our friends would take the bus to downtown Buffalo and hit our circuit which included the library ( where we would each take out the 6 books/records that we were allowed per week), the music store and a variety of new and used bookstores. Years later when David and I were both in graduate school at UC Berkeley we followed the same pattern. In our free time we would either comb the multiple used bookstores on Telegraph Avenue or for a special treat go into downtown Oakland, San Jose, or San Francisco to visit the bookstores there. More recently, on David’s trips home to Buffalo to visit his mom, he and I would always search the bookstore in North Buffalo for interesting finds. Part of David’s perpetual quest here was the sheer joy of the hunt- trying to complete his set of the works of James Thurber or the American Guide Series. And part of it was more personal. For example, David had great respect and admiration for my father who was also a book collector. After dad died, he purchased my father’s collection of Harry Steven Keeler books ( known as the Ed Wood of mystery writers) from my mom. Over the years, David assiduously added to the collection because this was his way of maintaining a connection with my father. In fact David’s last words to me on the day before he died were that we had something of great importance to discuss and when I asked him what it was, he said ” the Keeler collection.”
But David was not just a book collector who enjoyed the possession of his books, he was an amazingly avid reader himself with a tremendous breadth and depth of knowledge. Again, the roots of this go back to when he was a young man. Every Sunday morning, he and Andy Myer would walk to Benson’s drugstore on Kenmore Avenue, even in the bitter January cold of Buffalo, so David could buy his Sunday New York Times which he would then read pretty much in its entirety. Based on this, he developed a remarkable knowledge of the world around him at an early age. A love of learning came naturally to David and years later he was able to share it with his students through a wide variety of courses that he taught- from American religious and intellectual history to courses on sports and music. In addition to having a special gift for learning, David was fortunate as well to have a reciprocal gift for teaching. In his senior year of high school I heard him speak to our combined two english classes for 45 minutes on the works of his then favorite playwright, Eugene O’Neil and I can’t remember his using any notes! It was the best english class of the year. Many years later, I heard David give a class at MSU with the same fluidity and drama and passion that he had demonstrated 30 years earlier in high school.
I cannot overestimate the influence that David has had on my life- always in ways that have helped to make me a better person. He will always be in my thoughts and will be a profound part of the world around me. Thank you for allowing me to share these thoughts and memories.