| Wayne Batchelder | Minneapolis, MN | 9/1/2002 |
| Yvonne Brewitz (Peterson) | Burnsville, MN | 2/1/2003 |
| Robert Broman | Eagan, MN | 5/14/2009 |
| Evelyn (Cameron) Daly | Minneapolis MN | 12/11/2010 |
| Tom E Carlson | Plymouth, MN | 10/1/2001 |
| Ronald Crew | Eagan , MN | 11/1/2007 |
| Karen Curry (Olsen) | Minneapolis, MN | |
| Leroy Dreon | San Diego, CA | 12/21/1999 |
| Hope Fowler (Castle) | Minneapolis, MN | 3/4/2002 |
| Duane Gangelhoff | Oak Harbor, WA | 8/18/2008 |
| Robert Green | St Paul, MN | 11/24/2001 |
| Marion Guida (Bork) | Nisswa, MN | 2/15/2002 |
| Robert Gunner | Castle Rock, CO | 1/1/2006 |
| Charlene Seemann Hanson | Lake Jackson, TX | 8/7/2001 |
| Dennis M Harvanko | Hot Springs Village, AR | 9/1/2008 |
| clifford Husom | Billings MT | 9/11/2008 |
| Richard Johnson | Clatakani, OR | 12/1/2001 |
| Richard Kellington | Minneapolis, MN | 12/31/2007 |
| Delores Knutson (Spicer) | Champlin, MN | 4/25/2008 |
| Donna Kopecek | Bloomington, MN | 5/15/2003 |
| Ronald Kreft | Forest Lake, MN | 12/15/2003 |
| Richard Krell | Minneapolis, MN | 6/23/2009 |
| Gordon J Larson | Minnetonka, MN | |
| Janet Law (Brown) | San Jacinto, CA | 2/15/2005 |
| Catherine Munson (Boline) | Albertville, MN | 11/12/2004 |
| Avon Dauphinias Nyberg | Minneapolis, MN | 1/15/2004 |
| Donald Polomny | Coon Rapids, MN | 1/15/2002 |
| Marion Psihos (Westberg) | Minneapolis, MN | 9/10/2009 |
| Allen A Quigley Sr. | Burnsville MN | |
| Merle Quist (Pederson) | Maple Grove, MN | 5/6/2009 |
| David Redman | Woodbury, MN | 2/9/2009 |
| Marian Ross (Madura) | Minneapolis, MN | 7/15/2009 |
| Sharon Schluter | Minneapolis, MN | 8/1/2002 |
| Paul Skurupijs | Minneapolis, MN | 5/22/2000 |
| Joan Swanson (Hudson) | Minneapolis, MN | 6/18/2001 |
| Marilyn Thompson (Bolstad) | Prior Lake, MN | 1/1/2001 |
| Anne Leslie Tripp | St Michael MN | 5/22/2010 |
| Phyllis Trunk (Heitmiller) | Osakis, MN | 1/15/2005 |
| Carol Wawrzynaik (Bloominger) | Minneapolis, MN | 1/1/2003 |
| Marlene Weston (Schweger) | Sun Lakes, AZ | 5/13/2008 |
| Harvey G Winston | Minneapolis, MN | 9/10/2008 |
A TRIBUTE TO DAVE REDMAN by Tommy (Tom) Christensen
I like to think of my early life in south Minneapolis as the ‘The Four Buddies Era’. You know, like “The Four Musketeers”- “All for one and one for all”. That was Dave Redman, Dale and Paul Heffron and Tommy Christensen.
We were real buddies. You need to understand this - “The distance between a friend and a real buddy was large. With a friend, you had to watch yourself. With a real buddy, you didn’t. It was that simple, and the distance was that large.” (The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread by Don Robertson).
Our ‘Buddyship’ sprouted in 1943 when Dale was a third grader, Dave and Tommy second graders and Paul a kindergartener. We were students at Greeley Elementary Grade School located on the corner of 12th Avenue South and East 26th Street. Dale and Paul lived two doors down from Dave on 13th Avenue South and Tommy lived behind them on 14th Avenue South. Our ‘Buddyship’ bond lasted a life time until we recently lost one of our buddies.
The adventures and experiences I shared with Dave as we moved through the grades together will always remain with me. Let me share some of those with you and in so doing I hope that you also will get to know Dave Redman a little better and recognize how admirable and down to earth he was.
I must begin with the idea that Dave had when we were in seventh grade at Wendell Phillips Junior High School. He came up with the idea of how we could make our leather shoes really shine. We went up to his attic and proceeded to clean and buff our new leather shoes. Dave then opened a can of liquid shellac. With a small brush we applied the shellac carefully to our shoes. They dried overnight. Dave and I wore those shiny shoes to school the next day. Many of our friends commented on our glowing shiny shoes and asked how we did it. We were beginning to think that we had set a new fashion trend. However, toward the end of the day our shoe tops began looking like miniature earthquakes showing small cracks crawling from the eyelets down to the soles. Slowly the fine cracks widened and became grosser. After school we decided not to hang around and took off for home irked and let down.
After we graduated from South High School Dave and I went over to Lakewood Cemetery, one of the larger burial grounds in Minneapolis, in hopes of getting a summer job. We had a brief interview with the grounds supervisor who, to our surprise, hired us. Our job was to mow the grass close to the grave markers, monuments and trees so that the larger mowers would not need to get close to the markers and trees. We soon discovered that most of the men running the large mowers were winos hired for summer work at low wages but enough to buy cheap wine. From the start the grounds supervisor insisted that we show up for work, on time, even in rainy weather. We did as instructed. One stormy rainy morning Dave and I walked into the grounds shop ready for work wondering what kind of job we would do on this rainy day. To our utter amazement the supervisor ordered us to water the lawn. Dave and I gathered up two hoses from the supply shed and hiked in the rain to a tree whose leaves provided good rain cover. We began watering the hallowed lawn in the pouring rain. Occasionally we would look at each other, lift our shoulders and shake our heads, and laugh like hell.
In later years when Dave and I would get together, we would recall the things we did as boyhood buddies. The time he and I pushed my bike off and went down the steep scary Devils Hill at Powderhorn Park. Dave was on the handle bars and I at the pedals trying to safely steer and slow the rapid decent. The time we scavenged the neighborhood for discarded Christmas trees to build forts for snow ball fights. The digging of foxholes on the side of my house to play war and the time we were startled by two Minneapolis cops as we sat on my back porch shooting our new BB guns at robins and pigeons. We found out that the old lady next door had called the cops on us. Many times we walked to Stewart Field, in sub zero weather, to skate on the flooded ice park and play hockey in the specially made hockey rink. If we didn’t feel like going to the ice rink we would get a bunch of neighborhood kids together and play street hockey. Dave played goalie in our neighborhood games and three years on the Minneapolis South High School hockey team. Dave also played catcher on the South High School baseball team. He was so good that he inherited the nickname “Yogi”, after the great New York Yankee catcher, Yogi Berra. The nickname fit Dave well. He was always game and silently tough and ready to do his best even in adversity.
Over the 2008 holiday season I decided to call Dave rather than send him my usual internet email greeting card. Dave’s wife Virginia answered the phone and recognizing my voice passed the phone to Dave. It was a short talk. “How are you doing Dave?” “Okay”, he said. I responded “Hey buddy, how about a street hockey game?” He laughed in his unforgettable way and said “Let me play goalie.” I said, “Dave all you have to do is just lay down between the snow clump goal posts cause we probably can’t lift the puck like we use to - you could have a shut out.” He laughed again and said, “Well, I’ve a lot of scars on my body so one or two more won’t much matter”. I said, “Well, hang in there buddy and I‘ll see you this summer.” Dave said, “Well you better show up. I love you, my buddy.” “And the same to you my buddy”, I said. In less than 45 days after our phone talk Dave Redman died.
In his book, Unweaving The Rainbow, Richard Dawkins’ opening paragraph states:
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness that are here.”
So Dave Redman, our buddy, was here with us “in our ordinariness” for 73 plus years and we are the better to have known and lived life with him.
The Friends of South High Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation, registered in the State of Minnesota.
All donations are tax deductible. FEIN: 41-1506266.
