Racing lost a friend yesterday. Racing doesn’t know it, but I know it. The small professional circle in which Dave Randall worked knows it. The racing community itself never knew his name, which is the way Dave would have wanted it. He wasn’t loud or flashy, didn’t have it in himself to show off, but, in his hushed, dignified way, he made a difference in a little corner of our world.
Racing, of course, was just a sliver of his difference-making realm, for he was father, husband, son, brother, editor, car enthusiast, historian, humorist and dime-store humanitarian. I’m not sure even Dave himself knew how many people he touched in the course of his life. He wouldn’t have said it if he did. He was typically Norwegian/Midwestern stoic, never one to attract attention or shine too brightly. I strongly believe that’s why we bonded in the first place. We were of the same temperament. Reserved, humorous, cynical yet caring, at times too introverted for our own good. I considered Dave my best friend, have since I first met him decades ago.
For years we worked together in various roles in the Des Moines Register’s newsroom. On weekends, he often worked the “slot” in sports, deciding which stories went on which pages, how much space they got, how large the headlines would be. Always, without question and against consensus, he played up auto racing. Dave was a car guy, so he enjoyed racing. NASCAR in particular, but all forms in general. Whenever I covered a race when Dave was in the slot, I knew the story would get appropriate ink. On a typical summer Saturday night at Knoxville Raceway, the crowd often was the largest to witness a sporting event that day in Iowa. Dave had firm beliefs about journalism. Big crowds meant people were interested in it, meant it was news. In his opinion, the larger the interest, the bigger the play. Sounds like a simple philosophy, but it had fallen out of favor. What editors wanted to be newsworthy occasionally overrode what actually was newsworthy. And few editors wanted racing to be newsworthy. It was backwoods, uncouth, non-athletic. It wasn’t real sports.
That’s where Dave differed from the mainstream. He knew racing was popular long before the rest of the nation’s sports pages saw the numbers and finally admitted it. When I proposed that the Register should be covering the Indianapolis 500, he agreed. The largest single-day sporting crowd in the world was only a seven-hour drive from us. Undoubtedly many of those thousands were Iowans; there was no reason we shouldn’t be covering it, if for no other reason than to sell newspapers to race fans as they returned home. It was typical Dave. To him, the interest in news was almost a function of science, yet he had an uncanny knack for what people – regular, everyday folk – found interesting.
He also worked local and national news desks during his career, which also included a stint in San Antonio. In Dave’s opinion, murders, fires and plane crashes were news. It’s what people wanted to know when they read a newspaper. If people heard sirens, they wanted to know what happened. If they saw a car crash, they wanted details. If it bleeds, it leads. It was newspapering at its most basic. It was so simple as to be genius.
We had endless conversations about this. Our ritual when we worked nights was to meet at Johnny’s Hall of Fame after the final city edition deadline, which was usually 1:20 a.m., giving us just enough to time for a beer and some bull before last call. We solved the world’s problems in 40 minutes, had some laughs and went home.
I learned from Dave Randall. I learned what was correct and appropriate in the business, even as we watched corporate journalism swallow and trash what had been a great newspaper. I learned about old cars and old films and old music. I learned how to be clever and appropriate and cool in an uncool way. I learned never to think I was too good. Or too smart. Or too significant.
I also learned that family is most important. The first time I saw him after he told me he had cancer, we met at a girls’ softball game. He was thrilled because he’d taught his daughter, Gillian, how to bunt, and she was good at it. I’d never seen him beam like that. He knew he was ill, knew the reality and gravity of the situation, but he was thrilled that he’d passed along a skill from his youth. He didn’t want to leave her at such a young age. He never said that to me. He didn’t have to.
We knew the boundaries without speaking them. Certain things were off limits, but neither of us knew exactly what those things were or why they were off limits. We instinctively knew what the subject matter was and what it would never be. We stuck to cars and sports and movies. We didn’t get too personal or overly emotional. Yet we knew (again, without saying) that we’d go into a burning building to save each other. That’s as good a friend as you will ever hope to find.
There was a time when Dave befriended a man named George who stopped by the bar every night. George lived at the YMCA, struggled from job to job, sometimes drank too much and lived a meager existence. Dave saw after George, made sure he had a drink and good conversation, then made sure he got back to the ‘Y’ safely. If Dave wasn’t there, it was my responsibility to drive George home. I’m not sure I would have befriended George by myself. Dave would have.
In as many years as I knew Dave, only once did I see him bristle. One night conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination entered the discussion. Briefly. He didn’t tell me to shut up about it, but I did. With Dave, certain things were right and certain things were wrong. He didn’t have to tell me which was which. I never brought up the subject again. Lee Harvey Oswald could have walked into Johnny’s and ordered a round, and I wouldn’t have spoken a word of the grassy knoll.
Dave loved films and tunes. He loved James Coburn and Lee Marvin and Steppenwolf. His idea of a perfect night would be watching “The Magnificent Seven” on AMC. He e-mailed me not long ago to tell me he’d been riding around in his ’69 Chevelle when Kim Mitchell’s “Go for Soda” came on the radio. He always told me what he’d listened to as he drove to work. Usually something old, invariably something cool.
We shared a farewell shot when Dean Martin died – because Dave thought Dean was the epitome of hip. Dave loved American muscle cars, had the Chevelle and ’67 Mustang in his garage. He loved the New York Yankees. He loved old TV shows, especially “Gilligan’s Island.” For a time, “Magnum, P.I.” was in reruns at 1 a.m., so it became part of our post-work ritual. Dave’s favorite bit was Rick’s hair. Magnum’s buddy, Rick (played by Larry Manetti, as only Dave would know) had perfect feathered hair that never ruffled. He could fall from T.C.’s helicopter into a volcano and emerge with the same perfect hair. That always made Dave chuckle. Still makes me smile to this day.
We loved what we did, adored the history of a Pulitzer-winning newspaper, and hated what the suits had done to it. We were both locals, so names like Clark Mollenhoff and Frank Miller and James Risser meant something to us. We knew what a Pulitzer Prize was before we’d heard of the Cy Young Award. I’d delivered the Sunday Register and afternoon Tribune as a kid; Dave had worked in the press room since he was in high school. It was a great newspaper. We were proud of it. Its demise made us sick. We bitched about it incessantly, yet we still loved that damned rag.
At the height of our bitch sessions, the other member of our after-work club, Tom Suk, a charmingly cynical police reporter with a Carolina-by-way-of-Chicago accent, would loudly proclaim the impending doom of newspapers. “Boys, we’re riding a mastodon to the tar pit!” he’d shout. At which point we’d salud and laugh knowingly, with only a hint of sadness. We knew were on the caboose of the newspaper business. We cared, yet we didn’t. We were doing what we loved. We were running into a burning building to save that godforsaken newspaper.
Last summer, I asked some friends at Panther Racing for a favor. I told them I had a friend in his early 50s who was battling cancer. He had season tickets to Iowa Speedway, but I wanted to get him closer for the IndyCar race there. With their help, Dave got as close to a race as he’d ever been. Danica walked right past him. He touched the race cars. He ate at Panther hospitality and watched the race from the top of the team’s transporter. At one point, when I brought him into the garage and he saw the cars in pieces, he stopped cold. “I forgot my camera,” he said, eyes wide. “I’ll be right back.” Weak from chemotherapy, he hustled back to his car and got his camera, then returned to photograph the cars in various states of preparation. That was the part that interested him. The guts of it. The reason why. He smiled a great deal that day. He was completely into it.
On Sunday, Register sports editor Bryce Miller visited Dave. The TV was tuned to the Daytona 500. Dave drifted in and out. Bryce told him I’d be upset if I knew he was watching a NASCAR race instead of an open-wheel race. Dave smiled faintly. The following afternoon, he passed away.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Dave Randalls in and around racing. You don’t know their names, and they won’t be in the headlines anytime soon. They silently, anonymously devote their lives to it. They might be crew members or truck drivers or managers or engineers. They don’t make the big money or get the big glory, but they aren’t there for those reasons. They do it because it is their calling. They don’t care that it doesn’t make them rich or famous. They only want to be a part of it.
Likewise, there are thousands of people who silently, anonymously devote their lives to newspapering. It is their calling, and it is a noble one. I consider Dave a part of both worlds. He had no idea that he carried the torch for racing on those nights he was in the slot, but he did. He did because he understood its popularity and value. He understood his readers. He understood both businesses. He understood people.
Had he edited this column, Dave would have muttered under his breath. He would have been somewhat embarrassed that I wrote it. He would have deleted the semicolons – Dave hated semicolons – and trimmed the wordiness and toned down the gushiness. Then he would have buried it on Page 8 because, to Dave, it wouldn’t have been newsworthy.
