Wednesday, January 16
Andy
I've lost another friend. Last summer, it was Frank. And we're still hurting about Emma. This time it's Andy Prouty. Andy was 47.
I was a childhood friend of Andy's. I grew up in the Proctor Heights in California; our family moved to the hillside neighborhood when I was seven, and we lived around the corner from the Prouty family, six or seven houses away. Andy and I quickly became friends even though he was a bit older.
We spent a lot of time playing together and having sleep-overs throughout my years at Rincon Valley Elementary, playing games and sports with the neighborhood boys (mainly boys like Shaw Kobre, Chris Neumann, Jimmy Panting, Mike Hassen, Marc Coudeyre, and sometimes the Wallrich boys or Tommy Morales). We were in Boy Scouts together for a while, too, until I quit [I see in his obituary he stayed with it]. As kids do, we went our own ways in junior high, and I didn't see him at all after high school.
One of my favorite childhood memories about Andy is this: As kids we frequently played "Emergency," which was our own recreation of the then-popular Saturday night television drama about Los Angeles paramedics and firefighters. Andy created a whole set of "pretend" first aid kits, portable CPR units, oxygen tanks and boxes of other gear for us to play with. It was very cool.
We'd run around his house or yard, or my house or yard, and rescue people trapped in various places. Andy and I would help someone who we would pretend had fallen off a back deck, for example, or who got stuck in a tree, or trapped under a truck [the piano bench, I recall, served as a wide variety of vehicles], or wrapped inside a bicycle, buried under a tumble of boxes, wedged under a ping pong table, and so on. Sometimes our older sisters would let us bandage an arm, or splint an ankle, or wrap an ace bandage around a head. He always played John Gage, and I was always Roy DeSoto. I think the roles were assigned to us due to our hair color. Those were good times.
Most of all, I love the fact that Andy grew up to be a firefighter. Go hug your loved ones.
Here we are together, on our front lawn, in 1970:
I was a childhood friend of Andy's. I grew up in the Proctor Heights in California; our family moved to the hillside neighborhood when I was seven, and we lived around the corner from the Prouty family, six or seven houses away. Andy and I quickly became friends even though he was a bit older.
We spent a lot of time playing together and having sleep-overs throughout my years at Rincon Valley Elementary, playing games and sports with the neighborhood boys (mainly boys like Shaw Kobre, Chris Neumann, Jimmy Panting, Mike Hassen, Marc Coudeyre, and sometimes the Wallrich boys or Tommy Morales). We were in Boy Scouts together for a while, too, until I quit [I see in his obituary he stayed with it]. As kids do, we went our own ways in junior high, and I didn't see him at all after high school.
One of my favorite childhood memories about Andy is this: As kids we frequently played "Emergency," which was our own recreation of the then-popular Saturday night television drama about Los Angeles paramedics and firefighters. Andy created a whole set of "pretend" first aid kits, portable CPR units, oxygen tanks and boxes of other gear for us to play with. It was very cool.
We'd run around his house or yard, or my house or yard, and rescue people trapped in various places. Andy and I would help someone who we would pretend had fallen off a back deck, for example, or who got stuck in a tree, or trapped under a truck [the piano bench, I recall, served as a wide variety of vehicles], or wrapped inside a bicycle, buried under a tumble of boxes, wedged under a ping pong table, and so on. Sometimes our older sisters would let us bandage an arm, or splint an ankle, or wrap an ace bandage around a head. He always played John Gage, and I was always Roy DeSoto. I think the roles were assigned to us due to our hair color. Those were good times.
Most of all, I love the fact that Andy grew up to be a firefighter. Go hug your loved ones.
Here we are together, on our front lawn, in 1970:
