Duane Tallman

[pilkguns]

Funerals, Firewood & Friends

I spent 12 hours Saturday on a funeral. 4 hours driving there. 4 hours of mixed joy and sadness. 4 hours driving back home. Obviously I wouldn’t have done that for just anybody. He was a friend since we worked together at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta despite being a little older than me (a lot I figured out at the funeral, older than either of my parents). We had several interests in common like woodworking and trains, real and toy in addition to Olympic Shooting that was the common tie at many events around the US over the next 15 years. Over those years he was an influence on me. No matter when you asked him how he was doing he was “absolutely fantastic”. That set the tone for the rest of the conversation, the rest of his day and his life as a whole. It’s something I’ve tried to emulate in my own way to keep positive when I reply to the same question “SupercalifragilisticXPalidocius”. It’s a mouthful and I don’t always use it on a total stranger but often I do to smiles or some reference to the movie or the next line of the song (if they are over 30 that is, younger than that I might as well be speaking Greek).

But I digress. I was surprised to learn that “absolutely fantastic” was a common denominator with many other of his friends and family. His wife of 37 years also was drawn to his positivity. I was also intrigued to find other similar interests like Boy Scouts and photography that existed long before I knew him. Let’s face it, he had significant jobs in Air Force photo reconnaissance and then NCR before I was born. Despite his positive outlook on life or perhaps because it , he was not afraid to call crap crap and then get his hands dirty fixing whatever it was and make it better. That approach gave him upward mobility at NCR and later in my time working on electronic target scoring machines with the Swiss firm Sius Ascor . I had planned to visit him after his wife told me last week that if I wanted to “it needed to be sooner rather than later” but I let the predicted Snowmegaddon postpone my trip 48 hours and he made his own trip into the next world in my delay leaving me with plan B, attending his funeral. There I saw other faces from long ago days and met new ones to include his eight year old Great-granddaughter who announced that there were three things she wanted to say about her grandpa. First, he was always kind. Second, he was always reliable. And third, he was always Grandpa. That’s as good an epitath as you could ever want to have.

Early the next morning after arriving home late I get a text from a different old friend that’s less than a mile away as the crow flies informing me that I’m expected at the 8:00 meeting of Highlander Wood Splitting Association an organization of which minutes before I was blissfully unaware of and apparently the sum total of it’s membership is him and me. That really wasn’t on my Sunday morning agenda but after a complaining reply requesting breakfast sustenance which I know he is well capable of preparing I am on my way to spend another four hours with him, first over whole-wheat cat head biscuits accompanied with eggs and bacon then splitting fat logs in the woods, hauling it out to the truck and stacking it back on his porch. There is a great satisfaction in swinging a big splitting maul and watching it drop into the same place several times in row and then on the last swing watching it cleave downward all the way through causing fragrant halves of Red Oak equally falling on opposite side all the while laughing and telling stories of life as we know it with a friend worthy of the name.

Stay “absolutely fantastic” my friends

Rest In Peace Duane Keith Tallman

[Will Hart]

As with Scott, I met Duane at Wolf Creek, around ‘95. We became instant friends and I always looked forward to seeing him and Bill Wayda. When Wolf Creek hosted the NRA Collegiate Pistol Championships, Duane could not wait to show the MIT team how the electronic targets worked, a huge bonus for the team, especially the electrical engineering students. That formed a bond that lasted for years. He was always happy to educate and share.

God’s speed, Duane.