Guitar man Don Skuce was always in tune
Remembering a husband, musician, guitar collector, fan
Don Skuce was a good person.
Write all the words you wish for this local guitar icon, but GOOD PERSON says it all.
Someone said he loved his guitars more than anything.
Not true.
He loved his wife of 41 years, Karen Page. Nothing, nobody, was more important.
The 66-year-old also loved life. He loved music.
And then he loved his guitars. Guitars had been a passion since the first one he bought withn his newspaper route money as a young teen. He headed home, racing as the rains came, on his bicycle with the banana seat, his new caseless guitar strapped around his shoulder. Music was his real passion. As much as he knew about guitars, he knew more about music, and he had a love for any that hit his ears. He loved the local music scene and could name all the players who he grew up listening to, whether it was Buzz Thompson and Bobby Watson of The Hangmen at Adam Scott when he was a student or Don McCallum and Paul Butler of Mary Ford at the Queens Hotel or Ian Hully and Ralph Parker with whatever band they had hooked up with.
He loved to get a seat at the old Queen’s Hotel Wagon Wheel bar back in the 1970s and listen to the local bands doing their best to imitate Jimi Hendrix, Neil
Young, Cream, Sam and Dave, The Beatles and The Stones, but he also would lend his ears to folk, blues, jazz, whatever came into his eardrums to push into his musical brain.
He could play those guitars he made, fixed and sold. And while he played publicly wth a folk group when he attended Fleming College, he shied away from it most of the time.
Guitars were not just a passion but his profession. He owned the old Ed’s Music Workshop on Park and McDonnel streets, buying it from his boss Ed Dick, many moons ago. He not only knew his guitars and how to repair them, but he collected them.
He sold guitars to Neil Young, Randy Bachman, Greg Wells. He owned vintage guitars that so many guitarists wanted but couldn’t find. If Don didn’t have it he could find one for them.
He had a guitar in common with me. We both owned 1952 Jumbo Gibson acoustics. He sold his about two years ago, mine, a memory of my father, still has my home as its case.
Don told me more about that guitar than I had ever known. Even when I pursued more knowledge about it from Gibson historians and so-called authorities, Don Skuce had told me more. He was THE authority.
Don Skuce was a curious man who loved nature, bicycling, walking, sunshine, company and traveling, real travel where you could discover the world, not lie on the beach and burn.
He was a collector of not only guitars but cards, radios, and memorabilia. It was displayed in every room of the Skuces’ Pearl Ave. home.
He and a couple of other guys, who shared a love for rock ’n’ roll music, started getting together every Thursday morning at Momma’s Restaurant on Monaghan Road for breakfast more than a decade ago. Today you might find more than 20 local rockers tuning up their memories while having their weekly musical breakfasts there.
Don, even during his sick days, was there laughing and remembering.
He’s been battling cancer for years, since his retirement in 2012, but seldom complained. He talked about it as if he had a cold. He had lost some height, some weight, through the various treatments over the years. He never lost his enthusiasm for life, never lost his determination to live and never, ever lost his enthusiasm for people. Don loved people, loved talking with them, loved discovering more about them.
This cursed cancer finally got him on Sunday night. He had had another stem cell transplant but pneumonia caught him this time. The battle he had fought so valiantly, finally took him.
The rock ’n’ roll boys will no doubt be gathering Thursday morning for their weekly breakfast, remembering Don with his big bushy hair, moustache and who knows what hat he’d have on covering his balding head.
It won’t be the same without him, but the boys all know he will be with them. He loved the boys, the breakfast and the laughs. He will always be there with Rico, Geoff, Ian, Ken, Dan, Scott, Al, Buzz, Bobby, all the drummers, keyboardists, singers and guitarists who brought him such happiness. They all know he brought them much more in the form of genuine conversation, and a caring, listening ear.
Yes, Don Skuce loved music, but most of all he loved his wife, his best friend, the person who kept him going and lived through his many health related ups and downs.
His life that he loved to live so much has now been taken from us all.
He wouldn’t want you to be sad, so If you knew him, smile at the memories and the person.
Or better still, even if you didn’t know him, turn on some of your favourite music. It doesn’t matter what it is, but turn it up… Don Skuce is listening and wants to hear it, chances are he’ll recognize the tune and who played it.
He would thank you for the tunes and the smiles with a wink and smile of his own . . . that’s what a good person does.
Don Skuce was a good person.
Ed Arnold is a Peterborough author.
He wouldn’t want you to be sad, so If you knew him, smile at the memories and the person.