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RIP someone or another


Wmcmanus

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Rough watching all of the endless recap of this shit in Vegas, fucking sickening. So many innocent lives taken and others will never be the same. Don't even know where to begin, how to even think about it. RIP all, nobody should have to die like that.

Then the up and down all day long with Petty being reported almost dead, then dead, then not dead, and dead again... what an awful 24 hours all around. RIP, Tom. You did well with your time here.

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For the last 35+ years, I've loved Tom Petty's music.  When I first heard "You Got Lucky" on the radio and immediately set out figuring out who it was.  In the early 80s, the only members of my family who had cable TV were my grandparents.  They had MTV, which was a new and gee whiz thing.  They also disapproved of me watching it: "it'll rot your brain."  I had to sneak in my viewings, and I was lucky enough to see the video for You Got Lucky.  I was too young to understand the Mad Max references.  I just knew I liked the song and Tom knocked over an arcade game.  Several years later I got my first cassette player, and I bought Long After Dark and Damn the Torpedoes ("Refugee" was another favorite of mine.)  As my musical tastes evolved and changed from metal to techno to ambient, I have always revisited Tom's music and loved it.

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Saw Tom's 3rd to last show at the Hollywood Bowl last Thurs, been listening to nothing but his music since.  They were great live, not a single filler song for the 2+ hours and they could have played another hour worth of singles.  They did a 12 min version of 'Good to Be King' that was incredible.  RIP Tom Petty.

 

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RIP Tom.

I'll admit to wanting to do you harm when your CD got jammed in the CD changer. It was on the fishing boat, in the Bering Sea, and it played repeatedly for over a month. But that was no fault of your own. You made some great music and did things your way!

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Kind of a long story, and a sad one at that. 

I'm at home in Illinois this weekend, and attended the homecoming football game and after game tailgating party last night, including our first ever BruinsJam, which I helped to organize. Big stage, lots of great talent, and nearly everyone who performed was a graduate of the school, from the classes of '64 straight through to '15.

It's not my reunion year (I was in the Class of '80), but I've been going every year of late, and really enjoying the opportunity to catch up with people from the surrounding classes. It's a small Catholic high school (about 100 students per class) on a 1,000 acre campus with a monastery, apple orchard, an amazing art barn, lots of farm land, and deep woods leading down to a river. I'm on the steering committee for a $20 million capital campaign project, and we use the homecoming weekend as an opportunity to connect with some of our key donor targets on a social level.

One such highly successful person was Bill Prokup, from the Class of '82 (see pic of him and I from last night), who was a great guy and someone who (oddly enough) always seemed to look up to me. He went to Illinois State as an accounting major, and overlapped with my time there just long enough to enroll in the intermediate accounting course that I was teaching. I had done my bachelor's in 3 years and my master's in a year and a half, and then joined the faculty on a full time basis for just one semester. So it would have been my 5th year out of high school and Bill's junior year in college. 

So we've always had that connection, in kind of a big brother, little brother type of way. He was an A student at ISU, and went on to become a CPA and eventually left public accounting and started his own company in a totally unrelated business, which he was always quite humble about... but somehow, out of thousands of graduates, managed to land himself on the list of our top 75 most capable donors. While I wasn't, last night, directly talking with him about the capital campaign, he did bring it up to let me know that he was very much supportive and that we could count on him to be a part of it.

Then I opened Facebook this afternoon and learned that he died of a massive heart attack at around midnight. Attached is a pic of he and I taken at about 9pm, and he seemed perfectly fine. He was a great guy. A humble man with a gentle spirit. I'm shocked, and will really miss him, and feel gutted for his wife and kids.

As Warren Zevon would say, "enjoy every sandwich."

 


 

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