Saying Good Bye To My BFF of 52 Years

“Dik, I was laying here in bed (been awake a while but Nancy’s still sleeping) thinking about Christ rising and his most painful time on the cross. My mind rambled over to the founding of our nation on “religious freedom”: (as long as you’re a Christian) and then to the Palestinians in Israel. Then I thought, ‘Dik will be calling soon. It’s a little past 8.’ Then my phone ‘dinged” and I knew all was right as it should be. Thanks, Dik. May you, Suk and Irene have a BLESSED EASTER. Love Larry.”

Larry Chik’s Easter Morning Text to Author Dik Ganahl (2020)

 

McBride HS Hall

AUTHOR’s NOTE: Larry’s life, like most of our lives, is relatively unremarkable at the macro level and will be little remembered one-hundred years-or even twenty-five years-from now. But at the micro level, at the day-to-day granular level, his life is poignantly important to many of us and should always be celebrated, and never forgotten. And so, I feel compelled to write his story as I remember it.

Larry is a true native son of Missouri, and certainly the state’s motto ‘Show Me,’ could easily be Larry’s epitaph. His self-proclaimed high school ambition to be a ”Soul Searcher” rings true to those of us who know him. And it seemed most fitting to me, the day of his funeral Mass was the day devoted to the celebration of Thomas the Apostle, commonly known as Thomas the Doubter.

 

It’s damn hard to say good-bye-forever-to your BFF of more than

Lawrence 'Larry' Chik-McB Year Book

52 years. For me, it’s taken almost one year to say good-by to mine: Larry Chik, my BFF of more than 52 years. I met Larry in the early fall of our sophomore year (1966) at McBride High School in Brother Sheehy’s home room, and we remained friends on a nearly daily basis until his death in June 2020. We stood for each other on our wedding days, and we mourned our mothers’ deaths together. 

We explored life’s mysteries, inhaled life’s exalted moments and were thrilled by each other’s simple triumphs. Through it all, Larry was always Larry: patient, giving, loving, and incredibly curious. For Larry, life was an immense question mark, and he never lacked for an opinion. He lived life, mostly, on his own terms. He loved cars, baseball, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and most of all his wife Nancy, his son Michael, his grand-daughter Tori and niece Lanae. 

 

Larry and I shared many, many long talks over the last 50 years. We discussed every conceivable dream, worry, elation, mystery that might intrigue two 15-year-old boys through their teens and early man hoods, into their lives as husbands and dads, finally wrestling with life’s questions as early seniors. And while we disagreed often, we always laughed, and were never, ever, disagreeable to the other. Quite a remarkable achievement, not once equaled in all my other relationships. 

McB's Lefties L-R: Roger C, John H,
Ray F, Jack F, Larry C, and Marv S-StLPD 

Larry’s triumphs during our high school years at McBride were in band, theatre, and baseball, and they’ve taken on an added aura over years of reminiscing. His role on McBride’s 1969 varsity baseball team-arguably the best team since the school’s founding in 1929-was prodigious according to the team’s catcher Marv Schaeffer. 

 

“I remember a headline in the (St. Louis) Post after one of our games- we were 19-3-that said, ‘Chik Clicks for Micks’. Larry was our leadoff guy and was one of those guys that drove pitchers nuts. Hard to strike out and would run up the pitch count on you. He was a really good right-fielder as well. In short he was just a really dependable, fundamentally sound High School player and the kind of guy you wanted on your team,” Marv remembers.

 

McB Baseball Greats Larry, Bob, Marv, Ray 

Third baseman Bobby Joe Scanlon adds, “Larry always batted leadoff.  He batted left-handed. He was a good hitter with an ability to get on base consistently, and he was also fast…I suspect he led the team in steals. So, you could say he was our spark plug and the guy Coach Eilerman wanted to get us going…I would say he had to be a .300 hitter. He..was a great teammate and a key member of the best team I ever played with.”

As first trumpet in McBride’s Concert Band, years later Larry always grew wistful as he lovingly shined his prized silver trumpet and wondered what might have been. 

 

“Larry was a very good trumpet player…(and) was one of the few people in our class who had previously played a band instrument prior to McBride…because of that, Larry and those like him, were the backbone of the McBride band and the foundation for its long reputation of high quality,” recalls band member Ron Wojcicki.

 

McBrice HS Concert Band

In our senior year he became our theatre’s director of lighting and created magical settings for our productions. He and I, along with the rest of the crew, spent many late nights in dress rehearsals tweaking lines, checking blockings and fine tuning the spots between carry-out meals from the Parkmoore on North Kingshighway at Cote Brilliante. 

Larry’s life after McBride was adventurous in many respects. He worked full-time jobs as a student at UMSL, starting as a ‘sand-blaster’ at Emerson Electric in St. Louis and then becoming the overnight manager at Budget Rental Car’s Lambert Airport office. Later I joined Larry at Budget, and we shared the overnight job though he remained the night manager. 

 

Budget became our buddies’ late-night meeting place-it was our clubhouse. It also was one of two places where Larry’s life-path bizarrely crossed the paths of two national figures. At Budget, he crossed paths with Marshall Applewhite, the cult founder of Heaven’s Gate and the leader of a mass suicide event that took the lives of 39 people in 1997. The second person is the famous rock singer Walter Scott, but more on him later. 

Larry and Datsun-Road Trip w Dik

Larry described the Heaven’s Gate founder as, “tall, thin, and hyper with the weirdest eyes that looked right through me.” He continues, “Out of nowhere,” Applewhite walked right into the Budget office in the middle of the night. He seemed confused and distant, insisting on renting a Mecury. Larry cleared his credit card and was relieved when he drove off the parking lot into the dark, “it was so strange.” 

 

Seven months later in 1974, Applewhite was arrested in Texas for stealing the car he had rented earlier from Larry. He was extradited to St. Louis and was sentenced to jail for six months after Larry testified against him. 

 

Applewhite

Twenty-three years later, Larry was alarmed by the eerie stare of the man in the news story who had led 39 people to commit suicide in California, “that’s him, Dik, that’s the guy that stole the car he rented that night at Budget. Later he went to jail after I testified against him…I’ll always wonder.”  

Larry’s life through college paralleled our country’s turbulent times. On election day 1972, he and I delivered George McGovern campaign literature all through St. Louis in his cold, convertible, yellow Datsun sports car, convinced we helped defeat Nixon. That night we watched the returns in total disbelief at McGovern’s complete defeat.

 

In the mid-1970’s he joined a small-painting company I had co-founded, eventually taking it over on a handshake. He shared a house in Overland with his cousins and painted residential homes and had contracts with several area apartment complexes. Life was simple and single for Larry, but his bachelor days were numbered, and on September 7, 1979 Nancy and Larry became Mr. and Mrs. Chik-forever.

 

The couple’s first home was a wooden-framed, two-story farmhouse with a three-stall outer building on Gutermuth Road in St. Charles. The three of them-Nancy, Larry and son Michael, built a happy home. It was open to all, in any condition, at any time, in any weather. Many happy nights were spent around their kitchen table. Their annual Halloween party invited hundreds over the years to dance, and sing, and enjoy the huge, annual bonfire that burned well into the night.   

Nancy and Larry Chik-1979

Larry’s work as a contractor for developers had sparked his interest in real estate, so he earned his agent-broker license, captivated by the entrepreneurial independence and financial complexity driving the dramatic growth engulfing the St. Charles County region. 

 

Eventually, Larry’s knowledge of the real estate industry and its related sectors: finance, construction, tax laws, etc. grew to almost encyclopedic proportions. And over the next forty years, as St. Charles’ population exploded from 90,000 to over 400,000, so too did his intimate familiarity with the area. A drive with Larry through the region was more of a narrated historical tour, richly detailing an almost half-century of changes in Missouri’s fastest growing county. 

 

So, how about Walter Scott, the famed singer of The Bob Kuban and the In-Men Band, how’s he fit in this story? 

 

Every Mick of a certain age knows the names of Walter Scott and Bob Kuban. And every one of us remembers some special Friday night dancing and sweating in McBride’s hot, dimly lit gym to the band’s blaring horns and the famed crooner’s voice, “Look out for the cheater!” 

 

And all of us were mystified by Walter’s sudden disappearance. What happened to him on December 27, 1983 after his Cadillac was found abandoned at the St. Louis Lambert Airport? Why did he leave his wife, family and beloved fans? 

 

Walter Scott

In April 1987 we discovered Walter’s grisly ending, “his body was found floating face down in a cistern. He had been hog-tied and shot in the chest.” The four-column, four-color picture on the Sunday issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch pictured Larry, myself and a few others stretching over the police tape, attempting to peer into the cistern that had hidden Walter’s body for four years in a murky, watery grave. The killer, Jim Williams, Jr. had conspired with Walter’s second wife JoAnn to murder Walter and hide his body in Williams’ back-yard cistern beneath a massive concrete flower box built by Williams to entomb the body. 

Williams, an outsized man with an even larger, seething personality worked as an independent electrical contractor, and was well known to Larry, Nancy and the rest of us regular visitors to the Chik home. He was their closest neighbor, separated only by a six-foot high, stockade fence built by Williams in a not so subtle attempt to block out the world.   

Mike, Nancy and Larry-2019

In addition to my Mom’s home in Hazelwood, the Chik’s home was my geographical center, the place I always returned to. Starting in the mid-1970’s I was a journalistic nomad, moving among a number of small Missouri towns as I pursued the life of serial entrepreneurial newspaper manager and publisher. I also returned twice to Columbia for advanced degrees at the School of Journalism. Larry and I stayed in regular contact, visiting each other often. 

 

Eventually, I left bachelorhood and Missouri too, and married and moved in 1994 to Pennsylvania as a university professor where my family now calls home. Larry and Nancy visited us in the East several times and we introduced them to New York City and the Pennsylvania mountains. 

 

Larry and Dik-2015

My family and I returned to St. Louis at least once a year until my Mom’s death in 2010. Since then, I’ve returned at least five times, most recently for the McBride High School Class of 1969 Fiftieth Reunion in July 2019. 

On almost every trip during the last 27 years, Larry and I spent time together. On many of these visits, I spent the night at the Chik home, talking and laughing most of the day and night about our lives, our dreams, our worries, our times together. And of course, our financials.

 

And so it began, just a short time ago, I met Larry in Brother Sheehy’s home room class at McBride High School on North Kingshighway and Cote Brilliante. He was my height, wore a long-sleeved, red-ribbed sweater and had soda-bottle-thick, black-rimmed glasses. 

 

We said hello and started talking…