In Loving Memory of David A Huestis (1953-2024)

It is with sadness that I write this in memory of my friend, traveling companion, confidant, and, eventually, my brother, David A Huestis. For most of our friendship there was much geographic distance between us. He lived in Rhode Island, and I have lived in the Chicago area since 1982. Most of my friends in Skyscrapers knew him longer than I. But, notwithstanding the miles, we maintained a close friendship by telephone, email, and Facebook. I would dare to say, perhaps, I knew him better than most.

Dave and I first met in March, 1979, at a Wednesday evening public session at Ladd Observatory. I was a fourth year chemistry graduate student at Brown University. The program that night was Dave’s presentation of what he saw during the February 26, 1979 eclipse in Canada. I was impressed by his ability to express his experiences in the form of an interesting story. After the presentation I went to speak with him. I asked, not knowing him, what his connection was with Brown University. His response was cordial: “I am a member of Skyscrapers Incorporated.” Having not heard of Skyscrapers, I had to ask Dave what that was. The rest, as they say, is history. We met several times after that at the public sessions, and meetings, held at the club.

At the time I had an interest in “chasing” eclipses. We both became involved in a proposed camping expedition to observe the February 16, 1980 eclipse in Tanzania. How we became “tentmates” is somewhat amusing. The expedition leader explained we were going to be traveling Africa in two-person tents. As such, we needed to pick someone with whom we would share our tents. To aid in this process, the twenty of us gave one-minute introduction speeches. As luck would have it, I was sitting next to Dave. There was one member (whom we both later came to enjoy and appreciate) whose speech was so “off-beat,” Dave and I turned to each other and whispered, nearly simultaneously, “I don’t want to be stuck in the same tent with that guy!” The partnership was born, Dave and I became tentmates, and we saw the eclipse in Tanzania together. My photo of third contact is still on the wall of my living room.

Not to dwell on the matter, but my first wife decided to leave me while I was in Africa. The next phase for Dave and myself was that of “young bachelors.” We cruised around Rhode Island a lot, and hung out in places like Gulliver’s, in Smithfield, and the Brown University graduate center bar. The struggle for happiness has a way of bonding people. We shared good times and bad, and even exchanged dark memories from our pasts. Some of the things I told Dave are known now by only my wife Anne as well. We helped each other through false starts in the search for new interpersonal relationships. But when he met Tina, I knew Dave, at last, had found his soulmate.

It has been said meeting others has a way of breaking up a previously happy friendship. Look, for example, the effect Yoko Ono had on Lennon and McCartney. Not so with Dave and I! We became best men at each other’s weddings, and shared our married experiences as our friendship grew. I enjoyed hearing about their trips. I cried when I heard of Tina’s miscarriages. Dave was the godfather of my third daughter. Dave and Tina even took me on a birdwatching trip. Tina started my “life list” (a list of bird species spotted). Dave and I both made mid-life career changes to become educators. Our friendship thrived over the telephone, and we enjoyed personal visits when our careers allowed.

It was with great sadness that I received Dave’s phone call telling me Tina had died. She was the love of his life. As Joyce mentioned in her post, Dave was never the same after that. He was overcome with grief, a grief he never fully processed. I tried several times to steer my friend to grief counselling. As far as I know, he never followed up on that. His grief diminished a little with time, but the topic came up in nearly all of our subsequent conversations.

I last saw Dave in the summer of 2022. Dave, as we all do as we approach our 70’s, had his share of maladies. It would be hard to say which of the two of us had more! Part of our conversations involved “war stories” about various treatments and medications. Dave was a little slow in movement, but we, together with Anne, still enjoyed a day of touring our old haunts in Rhode Island. No surprise, our first stop was the Seagrave observatory, our second the Brown campus. We toured the shore, and had dinner at a nice restaurant. As we parted, it wasn’t far from my mind this might be our last in-person visit.

I last spoke with Dave by phone on Christmas day 2024. When I reached him he was watching sports on television with his brother. He seemed happy and upbeat. I hung up with the nice feeling he might, at last, have made progress on his grief. There is a line in the film Forrest Gump where Forrest, speaking about the loss of his friend Bubba, says “If I'd a known this was gonna be the last time me and Bubba was gonna talk, I'd of thought of something better to say.” So true.

Dave and I had a tradition of calling each other on February 16th of each year. It was our eclipse “anniversary” phone call. In the early years we tried to beat each other to the punch. One year he called me at 12:01 AM. Eventually, considering we lived in different time zones, we called a truce on the early phone calls. There were several times when the anniversary had slipped one of our minds, and the call came to the other as a complete surprise. For our 30th anniversary, when I was by then a professor of chemistry, he sent secretly an eclipse drawing to my department chair. When I walked into my 8:00 AM chemistry classroom, there was Dave’s drawing, sitting on my podium. Of course I still have the drawing 15 years later.

It was because of the calls that I learned, indirectly, of Dave’s passing. We never missed a single year of our anniversary phone calls. When I called Dave on Sunday the 16th this year there was no answer. When I called on Monday the 17th there was also no answer. After failing to connect yesterday the 18th, my first thought was to open the Skyscrapers web site. There I saw Joyce and Francine’s post. Francine was kind enough to call me when I reached out to her.

Dave was my friend and I loved him as a brother, I will miss him a lot.

Walter Smith
wsmith@carthage.edu
February 19th, 2025