Business partners, best friends die 3 days apart

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Bobby Dudley and William Eisel were business partners and the best of friends.

For more than 60 years, they worked, raised children and lived through life’s struggles together. And this month, they died within three days of eachother.

Mr. Dudley succumbed first, on Nov. 8, of cardiac arrest at a hospital near his Citra, Fla., home. The 84year-old had been struggling since falling from his bed and breaking his neck.

Unaware that his best friend had died, Mr. Eisel, 81, of Penn Hills, died Nov. 11 at Forbes Hospital, after a long battle with chronic obstructivepulmonary disease.

“We think my dad came and got him out of bed and said, ‘Let’s have some beers together, pain free,’” said Mr. Dudley’s daughter, Sandy Johns. “[Mr. Eisel] died not even knowing that my father had passed away.”

“Nobody had the heart to tell him,” said Bill Eisel Jr. about his father. “He was doing better and we didn’t want to bring him down with that news.”

Mr. Eisel and Mr. Dudley met in the early 1950s, when they worked as installers for Rothman Awnings in Hazelwood. The two later paired up to purchase the company, but theearly days were a struggle.

The son of a sharecropper in North Carolina, Mr. Dudley was on his way to Alaska to make his fortune when he stopped to find work in Pittsburgh in 1952.

“He left North Carolina with11 cents,” said Ms. Johns, of Salem, Westmoreland County,about her father.

Mr. Eisel was raised in Oakland and almost didn’t get the job at the awning company.

“They both worked for [Reuben Rothman], the founder of the company,” Ms. Johns said.

“My dad told Mr. Rothman not to hire Mr. Eisel because he had long hair and a ponytail.

He hired him anyway and that’s when their friendship started.”

Mr. Dudley married the late Lillian Shoaf in April 1953 and the couple raised five children at their home in Bell, Westmoreland County, before divorcing 45 years later.

“They were friends and they loved each other, but they just couldn’t stay married,” Ms. Johns said.

By the 1970s, Mr. Dudley and Mr. Eisel rose in the ranks of the company and Mr. Dudley started another awning business out of the basementof the family home.

“He was working 20-hour days — he said he had to feed five kids,” Ms. Johns said.

Mr. Rothman’s son, Ben, had taken over his father’s company and was looking to retire in 1972, when Mr. Eisel and Mr. Dudley agreed to purchase his business but to maintain the name Rothman Awnings.

Mr. Dudley was named president and Mr. Eisel vice president, a partnership that lasted until about 10 years ago, when Mr. Dudley purchased Mr. Eisel’s shares in the business.

By that time, the two had largely retired, Ms. Johns said, while she and her siblings ran the company on a daily basis.

“They both went into semiretirement unless they were needed,” said Ms. Johns, who started working at the business 30 years ago and is now president.

Mr. Eisel raised five children and is survived by his wife, the former Mary Lou Miller, whom he married on Valentine’s Day 1972.

The couple made their home in Penn Hills, where Mr. Eisel enjoyed several hobbies, including stamp collecting and a love for scratch-off lottery tickets, remembers his sister, DonnaEisel.

For his 81st birthday this year, he got 81 scratch-off tickets as a gift, she said.

Mr. Eisel’s family recalled that his friendship with Mr. Dudley spanned the decades and the two got together every time Mr. Dudley traveled back from Florida — usually every few months.

“They were very, very close,” said Mr. Eisel’s daughter, Noel Harrie. “I would definitely say they were best friends.”

“When Mr. Dudley came home he’d call my brother and they would get together for a beer,” Ms. Eisel said.

The loss of both men hit their families hard.

“When he passed away it was like losing a second dad,” said Ms. Johns of the death of Mr. Eisel.

“He was extremely hardworking and incredibly selfless,” Ms. Harrie said of her father. “He was the type of person who thought of others before himself no matter what.

“He was a man of action, not words. You knew you were loved; he was an incredible human being.”

Along with his daughter, son Bill Jr. and wife, Mr. Eisel also is survived by his sons, Keith, Gary and Dale, and six grandchildren.

Mr. Dudley is survived by sons Richard and Brian, daughters Linda Dudley and Ms. Johns, sister Doris Ann Johnson and 12 grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his son, Paul.

Mr. Eisel’s funeral service was last week, and Mr. Dudley’s was Saturday.