Good night, my friend
An appreciation of Bob Drylie | Aug. 3, 1956 - Feb. 16, 2020
More than a decade ago, I needed work done on my house and asked my Central North Side neighbors for recommendations. “You want Bob Drylie,” they said. “He can be slow, but he’s the best.”
He couldn’t get to my job as quickly as I needed to get it done, and he wasn’t available for the second job I had, either, but I would see him around — at the corner market, loading tools in his truck, on a ladder, painting. It seemed I already knew him.
Once, I teased him about avoiding working for me, and he said, “Oh no!,” genuinely distressed that I might think that.
I finally found out why he was in such demand. After a plumber fixed a leak that had loosened paint on the walls below the upstairs bathroom, I called Bob.
It took parts of three days for him to repair an area the size of a broom closet, but he did it with the precision of an industrial illustrator. Each visit, we talked about history, movies, books and writing — he had done a stint as a reporter for City Paper. He seemed to know who directed any movie you quizzed him on.
He was a Beaver County kid who studied film and art at Edinboro University.
One afternoon in the spring of 2011, he was on a ladder on Arch Street as I walked by on my way home from the library carrying a copy of “Within a Budding Grove.”
“Whatcha readin’?” he called, descending the ladder. I told him of my New Year’s resolution to read all seven novels of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” This was the second.
“When you read them all, you will join me in a select group,” he said, grinning broadly. “Maybe 300 people in the world.”
Days later, he appeared at my screen door holding a little basket of black raspberries, saying, “This gift represents my esteem for your adventures in Proust.”
Recently, I reminisced about Bob with our mutual friend, Cindy Nichols.
“Oh yes, the black raspberries,” she said. “Every season, he would go to a spot in Aliquippa, where he grew up, down thorny hillsides, risking brambles to pick them. He would give some to me and I would bake a pie for all of us.”
The berry picking went back to his youth, when he and his dad would forage on that hillside. His older of two sisters, Denise Diehl, of Glendora, Calif., said their mother made berry pies, too.
Denise fledged from the
household when Bob was 12, but she remembers her preteen brother making little drawings.
“He always made small things,” she said. “He would work meticulously on them. He loved things that were beautiful and well done.”
For the last 25 years, Bob lived in a third-floor apartment in the Mexican War Streets. Denise doesn’t know what prompted that move, but I suspect I know why he stayed. He had found a quirky, friendly, artistic neighborhood filled with historic homes that needed varying degrees of restoration and paint.
He taught himself how to be a contractor so he could afford to write and make art, Denise said.
Neighbor Lee Hodsoll said she “just wants people to know what a great human and neighbor he was. Planted about six people’s whiskey barrels [with flowers] every spring.”
Former neighbor Dennis McLynn said Bob helped him keep his truck running and fed the fish in his pond when he was away for six months.
Stories like this abound among my neighbors.
Last summer, Bob agreed to replace some rotting wood on the back of my house. He hand-wrote the two-page description of the work to be done in slender, elegant, perfectly uniform letters.
In September, he stopped by, settled into a chair and said, “First the bad news, then the bad news.”
The bad news was that he could not do the job, he said, “because the bad news is I am dying.”
It was lung cancer and the prognosis was grim — several months.
Last Monday morning, Cindy messaged me that Bob had died the night before at a hospice in Beaver
County at age 63. We reminisced via email about his quirkiness, his humor and old-fashioned gentility.
“He was such wonderful company and a gentle soul,” she said. “Our hearts are heavy.”
Her husband, Brian Kaminski, wrote on Facebook, in part, “The Northside lost a fixture in our lives, and I lost a dear dear friend. We both grew up blue collar, yet there was something that inspired us in college. For me it was Philosophy and Architecture, for him it was Literature, Graphic Arts and Film. I don’t think I have ever met a more cultured man … a very kind and sensitive soul. Good night, my friend.”
Besides Denise, Bob has left his sister Susan Schuller, of Industry, Beaver County; his mother, Gerri Drylie, now of Industry; several unpublished manuscripts and a large group of neighbors who loved him.