My Dad was collecting comics back in the mid 50s and had found a guy who sold comics in his home town. Imagine this, a teenage kid, riding his bike 5 miles from his farm into town to knock on someone's door to ask "hey, do you have this comic?". Yeah, that's how this starts.
Keith was in his mid 20's when my dad was in his teens. Keith had a nice house in the small town of Whitewater (yup, same Whitewater in my other stories). He and my dad became good friends and it was Keith who got my dad started with antique shows. Keith would set up with his guns, comics, war memorabilia, coins and my dad would have a corner of one of his tables for his comics. I don't know exactly when my dad started collecting everything under the sun but I know he started selling and buying antiques at shows with Keith.
Keith was there when my dad married, he visited when I was born and when my little brother was born as well. We would exchange Christmas gifts with his family and pretty much every time we visited my Grandparents or Uncle in Whitewater, we would stop by and see Keith as well. With Whitewater only 20 minutes away, Dad would go fishing with Keith, hunting and of course, they set up side by side at antique shows.
When I was younger, I got to go with my dad when he visited Keith with something to sell, or to show off. When Dad would find something super cool at a show, first thing he did when we got home was to call Keith. Keith would call my dad to talk about what he found as well. So showing off was a big thing LOL Visiting Keith was always fun. He had built his house right next to a small stream with a bridge built over the stream so his kids could go over to play in the park there. I never got to go to the park but Keith's house was better.
He had build a huge shed behind his house and it was like a magical place to go in. You got to climb up 3 concrete steps to get inside and those were like climbing a mountain. He had pipes set up for railings and had made several cross beams so kids couldn't fall thru the railings. After you survived climbing up the concrete stairs, there was a slender stairwell with 7 more stairs. No handrail so it felt even more dangerous to go up there. At the top of this stairwell, he had a Pepsi machine, filled with bottles of Mt Dew, Pepsi and Jolt Cola. He would always make a joke about me not being able to afford a soda but I knew where he had his ashtray with coins. Like seriously? I knew to grab exactly 35 cents and get a bottle. Unfortunately, I'd always get caught buying a soda - it was a loud machine and I had to get help to open the bottles. Most of the time, my dad would take the soda from me but sometimes if they were super busy, I could keep it.
Keith had a long room at the top of the stairs, there he had a perfect rectangle of glass display cases (the kind you see at jewelry stores) and in each one would be a different time period of antiques. He would always have a large display of duck decoys, old coins and paper money, and guns... lots of guns. I got to hold so many different types of weapons, I'd get in trouble at school telling kids about the guns I learned about and what they can do to a tank or a person. My Dad got a few phone calls from the school and I eventually got bribed by the teacher NOT to talk about weapons during school classes.
Besides this awesome building, Keith had a huge piece of land behind his house. There were berry bushes, apple trees, little paths you can run around on. Keith is the reason why Whitewater has little Duck Crossing signs around the city as well as a fine if you hit a duck in the street. He was a very influential person in that town, being a child, I had absolutely no clue what Keith did for a living besides antiques. As an adult, I still don't know what he did.
The best part about visiting Keith was twofold. Outside, we could throw a ball for the dog off the bridge, and she would go diving off it into the stream to get the ball. Her name was Sheba and she was a beautiful golden retriever. When Keith would go duck or pheasant hunting, Sheba was with him. When Sheba would jump off the bridge or the side of the driveway for the ball, she would normally catch it mid-air before she hit the water. She'd climb out, shake off and come bounding over the bridge to bring the ball back for us. She was such a good dog, Andy and I had a blast playing with her.
Inside Keith's huge house, his wife would always have cookies made and we could always have one each. Keith had a big living room with a couch that ran around two walls where you could look out the huge windows and see all sorts of critters outside. On the floor of his living room, he had the biggest rug you could ever imagine. It was oblong with a large rectangle in the middle - that's where they had their little table. The rug had different levels, each level would run the length of the rug, all around it. We would race matchbox cars around the rug, keeping each other busy until Dad was done doing business or visiting with Keith. Some days, we could sit on the couch (shoes off of course!) and crack nuts open. Keith always had a huge bowl of mixed nuts and another of peanuts. He is the reason why I can crack walnuts open by hand and open the most difficult pistachio shells.
We never got to play with Keith's kids, they were about 5 years older than me and after I had made a mess in his boy's room, we didn't get to play with them again. Couldn't even go upstairs anymore - it was ok, the nuts and cars were much more fun. On really awesome trips, we might find something cool in his workshop (his back building) and be occupied reading that comic or looking at every little detail of whatever little thing we'd found.
When Keith was ice fishing one day, he suffered a massive heart attack. Another fisherman saw him fall over and got help but Keith was already gone. My brother called me at work saying Keith had died and that Dad was a wreck, a complete mess. The wake was beautiful, I got to see so many fellow antique dealers who had known Keith. Every time I'd walk with someone over to see Keith laying there in his coffin, I would expect him to jump up and say he was fooling, that it was a trick.
My Dad wasn't the same since losing his friend. I'd seen him reach for the phone when we'd return from a show and start dialing, only to shake his head and hang up. When I was dating Jim, I had taken him over to introduce him to Keith - mainly to scare him, it worked every time and was always funny. Keith was a large man and as intimidating as my father was. About a year later, when I had my son, I wanted to introduce Ryan to Keith. We would show Keith all sorts of stuff, a kitten we'd found, a cool comic or toy we'd bought so it was just natural to show him my newborn son. I remember telling Dad that it wasn't fair, if Keith had been around just for another year, he could have seen my boy.
Keith wasn't just a friend to a teenage kid who collected comics, he wasn't just another antique dealer friend who would set up with us at shows, he wasn't another brilliant man who could help appraise things my father would find. Keith was my dad's best friend, he was a father figure to us, he was someone we looked up to, he was our friend. Keith was an amazing man who made a huge difference in our lives, and I miss him.
