Day 26 - Memorial

My uncle Dave was a force of nature. He looked like a 1960s Sean Connery would have if he’d possessed the sunnier temperament of Jimmy Stewart playing George Bailey. He was a colonel in the Air Force stationed in Germany back when his young family was just beginning, and there was always an American flag proudly displayed somewhere in his front yard when his days in the service were over. He was a high school teacher in a small Wisconsin town who possessed the kind of social genius that could make each of twenty different people feel like the most important person in the room at the same time. If Dave was going to be around during holidays or family events, the times were always happier. He had a clear, resonating laugh that could cut through any crowded room, and it was always a prize to be the one who brought that out of him.

For my part, I always saw him as my uncle second and my godfather first. When I was much younger he’d greet me the same way each time I saw him, calling me George and messing up my hair. The times he took me out on my own were special moments, whether it was just getting together with his friends from the Lions Club for coffee or breakfast at the diner in town, or walking me down to the lake near his house where I caught my first sunfish at about five years old. Once he took me up to the Air Base in Duluth to see a C-5 -- one of the largest airplanes in the world -- that had briefly landed there. I thought it was so cool when the guards at the entrance saluted him as we entered.

So many Memorial Day weekends of my childhood were spent with our families at a campground just a short drive from his house. There was swimming in the lake, hiking through the woods, uncomfortably navigating the outhouses, and staring into the campfire late into the nights. There were also many golf games on those weekends. I was too young to play much less swing a club effectively, but I always caddied for my uncle, earning ten cents for each hole and a can of pop that my mother probably wouldn’t have approved of back in the clubhouse.

We lost him far too early. His funeral was one of the first my family had faced. Starting on that day as well as so many times since, I’ve been struck by how much of him I see in my cousins when they work a room, especially back in their hometown when they encounter the people from earlier in their lives. His funeral service had been on a perfect autumn day. I remember my father saying as the two of us drove back to the Cities afterward, “Leave it to Dave to have his funeral on a day like this. He was always a class act.”

Years after he passed there was a pavilion constructed on the same county fairgrounds where he had spent so much time in his work with the Lions Club. It was named Ritsche Pavilion in his memory. If you were to ever see it, you’d see one corner with a sketched portrait of him, there to let people know about the man for whom the structure was named. I’m sure there are a lot of people who pass through that building now who have no idea who he was. But I know there are still a lot of others who remember.