Back in the mid-eighties I smoked a pipe.
One day while I was at the state fair, on a lark, I entered a pipe smoking contest.
I won a daily contest which qualified me for the championship, held on the last day of the fair. I don't remember where I placed in the championship, I think it was around 14th out of 21, but I was hooked.
I started entering every contest I could find and over time, I started to win one occasionally.
Fast forward a couple of years to the "International Association of Pipe Smokers Clubs" world championship which was held in Michigan that year.
There I met a fine older gentleman (I was in my mid 20s at the time and he was newly retired) who befriended me.
He wasn't like the majority of the people there, he was as country as I was, just from a lot farther north.
He was the first chainsaw collector I ever knew. Prior to that time a chainsaw was just a tool to me. I had a real nice 3400 Poulan, the first saw I ever bought.
He was a huge Stihl fan and had many of the different models and variations, and used to give me the ####ens over my "junky old PooLahn" as he called it. (He later picked up a 3400 that became one of his favorite "go to" saws. He would never admit it and said the reason he always took it was because "If I drop a tree on that damned thing there won't be nothin' gone".)
Over time, he became one of the very best friends I've ever had, almost like a mix of step dad, uncle, and best friend.
Through the years my wife and I made many trips to Michigan to visit with him, and he and I spent many quality hours in his garage working on saws and pouring over the volumes of books and sales brochures he had, drinking a few beers and smoking our pipes. I never tired of hearing the stories of his life and gleaning bits of wisdom from his classes at the school of hard knocks.
I would call him or he would call me a couple of times a month and we would talk for hours.
In the middle of the year before last, he started complaining that he didn't have any energy and tired very quickly.
I told him to get to a Dr. and find out why, because he had always been a strong and hard worker that would stay right with me step for step all day long, but he just kept saying that it was all part of getting older. Then during one particular phone call, I noticed his "smokers cough" was a lot worse than it had been, and he said he wasn't worried about that but that he had been having trouble going to the bathroom.
I finally convinced him to call his Dr. in November and was LIVID when the earliest appointment he could get was in Jan.
When Jan. rolled around, the Drs. office furnace quit and the pipes froze and they rescheduled him for April.
His daughter called me at the end of March to tell me they had taken him to the E.R. and found cancer in his lungs colon liver and brain.
After the funeral, his son-in-law took me out to the garage and said "Pop wanted you to have these".
There, sitting lined up in a row were his near mint 056Super, mint 026PRO and a 009 that I had tried to talk him out of for years.
Yeah!!!
Those three will always have a home!!!
Mike
