Though David McKown was only two years older than me, those years formed a yawning gulf when we attended the East Boothbay school in the 1950s. But we got to know each other better after I started taking local history articles into the newspaper in 1988. His stamping ground was the Register office, where he did kind of stamp around in a gruff manner. If you didn't get past that, it was your loss. After all the kidding (which I've barely begun), David helped his friends, the historical society and countless other groups and individuals.

He and I had a 24-year tussle. I'd trip-trap down the office stairs to his lair, and he'd say "Uh-oh, here comes that upstate New Yorker." I'd retort, "David, I came from Buffalo, 500 miles west – I'm a western New Yorker. And McKowns didn't get here until 1763 – 33 years after the first permanent settlers! We're both transplants!" He usually got in the last word, but we both got a kick out of our little mocking he-said-she-saids. We wrote a few seriocomic letters to each other; I put a couple in the McKown file at the museum a few years ago. Obituaries don't take you anywhere near the whole person, so I do what I can to fill in with other stuff about townspeople.

I quoted him in a 1998 article on my 10 years of writing the historical society's column and again in 2008 in an article on my 20-year mark. The photo that ran last week was one that editor Kevin Burnham took of us near the side steps to illustrate the 2008 column. It showed David and me (I'm cropped out) as a spoof of Grant Wood's painting, American Gothic. David's sign read "8th Generation Boothbay Native" while mine read "New Yawker." I had a New York pitchfork and he had a "New York" clam hoe, a poor imitation of the real thing.

I was honored that David broke his longstanding vow of no photos of him, but I kept my lip zipped about that; I figured he'd rip up the photo if I made a big thing of it. As he said to me more than once, “Put you in a paper bag, shake it up, and you come out 'New Yawker'!”

We lived near each other for the last 22 years. I walk down Meadow Cove Road now and then, and lately if I saw a few pickups by the McKown shop near his house, I'd stop in to shoot the breeze for a few minutes with him and his buddies (guys I knew from school days, like Wally Dodge and Craig Giles). We'd hash over the latest indignities here and away. David and the guys were good to me, and I appreciated that.

Sometimes David gave me a hard time for not writing about McKowns. I came up with lame excuses, but finally wrote articles on the family last year. I ended the last, "I wrote these articles for David, who razzed me for not writing enough articles about McKowns. How's three out of 498, David – am I inching up there?" If you'd stuck around, David, I would have come through again and those you left behind would not be so heavyhearted.