Bill was my tall friend — at least three inches taller than me when we met 15 years ago. He got shorter and weighed less during the last six months in his battle with leukemia. Up ’til then, he had never been in the hospital nor taken any meds. He stood tall, but never looked down on anyone.
Bill was my retired friend. We did not know each other in our professional lives, nor as wage earners, nor as active parents of young children. Though we talked about kids and grandkids frequently, we shared interests well beyond golf. That meant that walking and driving together was often more fun than trying to get the little white ball in the darned hole. As avid readers of the New York Times, we frequently tried to help each other form educated opinions, criticize political antics, and express chagrin at the state of our nation and the world around us. Bill was a student of history and enjoyed the widest range of subjects from arts to theater to business to travel to sports. We joked about Yale, but he was no snob — especially loving messy hot dogs and loyally following his Cincinnati Reds.
Bill was an attorney, though not my attorney. He practiced in Los Angeles for 37 years before retiring and moving to Santa Barbara in 2008. He volunteered for the Alternatives to Violence Project at Lompoc federal prison, where he introduced the program into the federal prison system in California. He was beloved and valued by the incarcerated individuals he worked with.