Today is not a normal SoCS post. As most of you know, the characters in these posts, save for special guests, are fictional. There is no David, no Curley, no Skippy, and while Cheryl is a real person and a good friend, she’s not a bartender in Connecticut. This has been explained many times and is mentioned on my About Page.
The character David is a composite, drawn from my experiences with several friends over many years. When I first started this series in 2015, it wasn’t combined with SoCS, and my buddy didn’t have a name. He was just “my buddy.” By 2019, people had begun to ask about his name. I liked the name “David” but I worried it would be confused with my good friend David Pennington of Ipswich, U.K.—to be clear, David Pennington is part of the character David. I asked him if I could call my buddy “David.” He said, “As long as you never call him any short form of that name.” Always David, never Dave.
David Pennington passed away yesterday.
I worked with David Pennington for 25 years. He was a systems development consultant in England, and he had developed several add-on packages for the Smalltalk programming language which we used where I worked. We became friends over email and phone calls during the mid to late 1990s. We met for the first time in Cincinnati, Ohio at the Smalltalk Solutions conference.
We continued to meet at conferences for years. In addition to Cincinnati, David and I met in Connecticut, New York, Florida, Boston, Toronto, Niagara Falls, Vermont and when I had a meeting in London, I took the train to Ipswich. We had many common interests, including woodworking, photography, models, science and history. Once while in Florida, I took him to the Kennedy Space Center. While in England, he took me to the Imperial War Museum in Duxford.
My favorite memory with David is when Smalltalk Solutions was in Toronto, Canada. David flew into Boston and drove with me and my daughter to Toronto. We took some vacation time and came home via Niagara Falls, and we had a wonderful time.
My favorite bar memory with David was in New York City at the Molly Wee Pub. There were several TVs high above the bar. The sound was off on all of them. A woman a few stools down from us noticed that “The Magnificent Seven” had started playing on one TV. She asked the bartender to change the channel because “watching a movie without sound is stupid.”
David and I started filling in the dialog. I think we could have gone on through the whole movie, but by the time Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen were driving the hearse back into town, the woman understood our point. The bartender gave us a round on the house.
Everyone in my family will miss David. He was a wonderful man. Our hearts go out to his wife, children and grandchildren.
Comments are closed. I will be taking a blog break after Monday’s CFFC post. I’ll be back here at the bar on April 11th.
I hope you enjoy some photos of the real David.
No Facilities 