Paul was the center of my Baker High School experience, though he was a grade ahead of me. Our dads worked as engineers at the Army Corps of Engineers, though I don't remember meeting him until I got to high school band. We had similar interests: I had been nerding out just reading about early microprocessors in the 70s, and I had learned to program on a Radio Shack Color Computer before I met Paul. He had the same computer, and we played with those a lot of ways, we wrote machine language programs for them, we changed the operating system.
Paul played euphonium in the band, and I played trombone. I considered that the more obnoxious cousin of the euphonium, and that matched our personalities pretty well. I enjoyed his playing on the euphonium so much that when he graduated, I switched to euphonium my senior year and finally made All-State Band.
We went to our first Rush concert together my senior year in high school, we stayed with his grandmother in Pensacola. We returned more than a decade later with our wives, again in Pensacola, for another visit and another Rush concert.
Paul was my first roommate at Auburn. He was a good roommate, probably better than I was. We had similar tastes, and he had a great stereo. I do remember getting tired of listening to a couple of albums...something by George Thorogood and the Destroyers, and the musical Chess, I think. But I still enjoy them decades later...
When Paul had graduated from Auburn and he and Michele lived in Alex City, my wife Lisa and I enjoyed driving up pretty frequently from Auburn to see them and their kids. That continued even when we moved up to Huntsville, stopping by on our trips to Auburn. We had some great meals with them!
I've always been interested in whatever Paul wanted to talk about, whether computers or music or his shooting and outdoors activities that I haven't been able to do myself in a long time.
We haven't seen him as much the last few years, since we moved to Maryland then back to Atlanta, only seeing each other at weddings, or maybe a weekend at the lake in Dadeville. I'll miss the possibility of catching up again. Thanks for everything, Paul!
