Sam's Memorial Speech

            Hi, my name is Sam Kafrissen. Although Steve and I have been 3000 miles apart for nearly forty years I have always considered him to be my best friend. Steve and I lived together for a few years when he was in law school in a group house in Somerville, Mass called Campbell Park. It wasn’t what you would call a commune mostly because Steve and I were never the communal types.

            I first met Steve on Labor Day weekend in 1970. The two of us spent that weekend watching the entire Jerry Lewis Telethon for Muscular Dystrophy from beginning to end. We were, of course, aided by a few substances and were convinced at the time that we were the only two people in America to watch it all. Or at least the only two who did so without making a donation.

            Nine months later my girlfriend Jeanne, now my wife, moved into Campbell Park and Steve and Jeanne and I became a threesome. Unfortunately, it was not the kind of threesome people refer to nowadays. We were just pals. The joke among us for years until Steve met Jackie was that if Jeanne hadn’t married me she would have married Steve. But in truth it was really just a joke. However, a couple of years ago the four of us were together and an incident occurred in which I stepped up. Steve immediately turned to Jeanne and said, “See, you married the right one of us after all.”

            I owe a great deal to Steve for the important things I learned from him over the years. As most of you know Steve was always an inveterate moviegoer. And his tastes in films ran to the eclectic. From Steve I learned how to recognize what a good-bad movie was. I learned that “The Wild Bunch” was the best western ever made – a film incidentally that Steve and I watched together at least five times. I learned who such important movie characters as “Pete, the bad guy,” “Polansky, the Polish guy,” and “Sean, the Irish Guy” were. I also learned never to talk during movies, because Steve always did.

            Steve also introduced me to Zap Comics and through him I became familiar with such important literary figures as “Mr. Natural, Freewheeling Franklin, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fritz the Cat, and Angel Food McSpade, among others.

            Steve showed me that it was necessary to stop and read every historical marker along the roadside or the sidewalk. He taught me how to TiVo a baseball game and then watch it 45 minutes after it started, thereby eliminating all the commercials and pitching changes. That way you could watch a ball game in 1½ hours, or 1¾ if you were a Red Sox fan like myself, because they scored more runs but also gave up more than the Giants did.

            Steve taught me that you could move beyond being a two-car family, and that once you got beyond three it didn’t matter how many vehicles you acquired after that. He also taught me that putting up with the foibles of one’s spouse was the key to a successful marriage.

            Many of you probably don’t know this but for a brief time back in the early seventies before moving to California Steve fancied himself as a fashion plate. He had just returned from Europe and he went through a period in which he was, shall we say, “styling.” Unfortunately, he had to leave that all behind when he moved out here because he couldn’t take my clothes with him. After that Steve fashion sense turned more toward what we would generously call the “utilitarian.” A few years ago Steve came to visit Jeanne and me and stayed with us for about ten days. Steve was always an early riser so each morning when we would come downstairs Steve would already be sitting on our living room couch usually listening to a book on tape. And each morning he would be wearing the same clothes: a pair of non-descript grayish brown cargo pants and a blue, three-button knit shirt. After four or five days when Steve appeared in the same outfit each day, Jeanne and I began to look at one another and wonder. Around the seventh day Steve asked if he could put some clothes in the wash and we readily agreed. He then dropped four pairs of the identical non-descript grayish brown cargo pants into the laundry basket along with four identical blue three button knit shirts. And this did not count the identical outfit that he was already wearing.

            I would like to close with one final anecdote about Steve. When Steve and Jeanne and I lived together Steve had a habit of leaving a half swallow of Coke or milk or juice in the fridge. He would likewise leave very small bites of some leftover food on a regular basis. Long after Steve moved out here whenever Jeanne and I found such a small amount of something in our refrigerator we would say “I guess Steve Dantzker must be here.” So when we heard the sad news about Steve we began to purposely leave small amounts of food and drink in our fridge so we could say to “I guess Steve Dantzker is here.” –and Steve you always will be.             So, Steve, I thank you for your generosity and hospitality whenever we came out here to visit you and Jackie. But most of all I thank you for your long-term friendship. I will miss our many rambling conversations: the serious ones, the absurd ones and above all others, the ones on subjects that were important only to you and me. And as the boys said to each other near the end of The Wild Bunch, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”