The Oldest Guy in the Yoga Class

The Oldest Guy in the Yoga Class

“With old friends, you’ve got your whole life in common.”

Lyle Lovett

I met Dick Kelsey when I was fifteen. He was forty-seven and had just moved in around the corner with his wife Jane and their kids. You could have knocked me over with a feather if I knew then that Dick would become one of my dearest friends.

The Kelseys’ and Frazees’ relationship went back to the 40s, when my mom dated Dick’s brother, John, while they were at USC. My parents, Harry and Mary, along with Dick and Jane Kelsey, and Dan and Cam Gross, lived within three houses of each other and became the closest of friends. And yes, those are their real names. They often had dinner at each other’s homes and were each other’s favorite out-to-dinner companions as well.

When I started making stained glass windows in college, Dick was one of my first customers, secretly commissioning a window for Jane’s birthday that simply read, “Dick loves Jane.” He was in the paint business, so when I started a silkscreen t-shirt company, Upfront T-Shirts, with my friend and classmate, Tim Rogan, Dick pretty much gave us all our tools and supplies, even though we were Bruins, and he was a Trojan. My mom was our only employee.

When my dad and Dick eventually retired, the Kelseys would often walk around the corner to our house together or by themselves for a morning cup of coffee. They knew my parents could be found at the kitchen table, having their cup of java and getting ready for the day.

Dick would regularly ask my mom if she had anything sweet to go along with the cup of coffee. And so began their frequent ritual, as he and she both knew he was talking about the two-pound box of See’s Candies she kept on the third shelf of the refrigerator.

Mom would bring the box out, and Dick would scrutinize what was left on the top layer. Not seeing anything too appealing, he would gently ask if they might look at the second layer. My mom was very particular and would never go into the second layer of a box of candy until the first was completely gone. Of course, Dick knew this but would ask anyway. Mom would also not let us open birthday cards before the day of our birthday, and the same rule applied to Christmas presents.

My friendship with Dick was what you might expect for the first several decades; he was more a friend of my parents than mine. But as we got older, after my parents and Jane passed, I started checking in with Dick. I think it was good for him and for me, and I began to call him every week or two. We shared the same birthday, and that was as good a reason as any to start having the occasional lunch together. I think it also allowed me the opportunity to connect with a generation that had nearly all passed, and that felt good.

Whenever we parted, Dick would say, “See ya later, kid.” I liked that a lot; it was endearing, and it had been a long time since anyone else called me “kid.”

In his nineties, I remember offering to pick Dick up for our lunch. He said, “No thanks, I’ll meet you there, I gotta go work out afterwards.” He also attended yoga classes, which tremendously impressed me. It’s one thing to go to yoga as a younger person, but quite another to go in your nineties!

Dick would regularly volunteer at the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement community, visiting folks who couldn’t get out and didn’t get many visitors. He would also visit shut-ins in the area to cheer them up.

He had a wonderful sense of humor and a great, quick wit. When he was nearing one hundred, I called him and said we better hurry up and apply for life insurance if he wanted to save the age ninety-nine rates. Without missing a beat, he quipped, “Anyone that would insure me ought to have their head examined.”

Dick worked with us in our consulting business, just for fun, and cold-called the managers of nursing homes he visited to interest them in a product we were representing. He was ninety-seven at the time. Occasionally, some of our other introducers would worry that maybe they were too old to work with us, to which I replied, “Do you know that our oldest introducer is ninety-eight? You’re still just a kid!”

I had to keep updating that sentence as Dick turned ninety-nine, and one hundred, and a hundred and one.

I didn’t know until the last ten years that Dick had served in the military during World War II. It was only in the last year that I learned he was a navigator flying over Germany in the 8th Air Force, the military unit that took the most casualties of any division in the war.

Dick lived to be a hundred and one, and three hundred and fifty-five days, just shy of our birthday, September 20th.

He was a dear friend and a great role model for me. As I get older, I’ve gradually realized that I want to be just like Dick Kelsey — kind, funny, generous, and perhaps eventually, the oldest guy in the yoga class.

-Hank