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or ten years, the next-to-the-corner seat at the M&M’s bar was Dave Shirk’s. When you came in to M&M’s in the evenings, Dave was one of the first people you’d see. From that perch, he’d greet, in his understated Midwestern way, customers who came in thru either the front or side door. He saved the corner seat for his wife Marsha, and the rare moment when she wasn’t running around the restaurant.

That scene has flashed in a lot of minds since Friday when news spread that Dave had suddenly passed away at age 55.

Dave Shirk.

“He was my best friend,” Marsha said on Sunday.

She laughed about that particular seat at the bar and all that Dave could survey from there. “He could see the TV. He could look in to the mirror (behind the bar) and see who was coming in the front door. He could see the kitchen doorway. He could see the register, too.”

“He could see the kingdom.”

It was a kingdom that he and Marsha built, starting in December of 1994 and running until 2005 when they sold M&M’s Cafe.

Their story started decades earlier.

Dave was born in Tulsa in 1952 and grew up in Ohio. At Purdue University, he lived in the married students housing, where Marsha and her then-husband lived across the hall from Dave and his wife. They were all friends. A decade and a half passed, and so did the marriages. In that time, Dave earned a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering, set up a computer software company, Technical Systems Consultants, TSC and moved it to Research Triangle Park.

Dave settled in Chapel HIll in 1980 and began coming to Oriental in 1983. He’d drive to Minnesott Beach, get on his Endeavor, “Misbehavin’” and sail it to Oriental. He would hang out at the Topside Lounge, a bar and nightclub on the grounds of the Oriental Marina. That’s where he met his good friend, Fred Johnston. Fred says that as the years went on, Dave stretched his weekends longer and longer, returning to Chapel Hill — and work— on Mondays. Then Tuesdays. Then Wednesdays.

Dave Shirk, on his boat in the early 1990’s at Oriental Marina.

Meanwhile, Marsha was in Lafayette, Indiana, divorced, raising her two daughters and working as Nursing Director for Visiting Nurses. She says Dave was already her best friend. Then, she says, “he wooed me until he wore me out.”

In July of 1989, he brought her to Oriental for the first time. It was her birthday. She approached the town by water. They’d sailed Dave’s boat from Minnesott, down the Neuse and in to the harbor. Getting off the boat, she says, “I fell madly in love with this town.”

Dave and Marsha Shirk. (Photo Credit: Andrea Bruce).

Dave introduced her to his circle of friends. It was as if, she said the “whole town was wooing me.” They went out on a shrimp boat for her birthday party. There was seafood buffet — Marsha, who’d come from Indiana, remembered calling crab claws, crab toes — and drink. There was something else, too.

“Dave asked me to marry him.” Marsha says.

“I said, ‘Maybe.’”

She’d known Dave 16 years at that point and “it was just so much pressure”. Still on the shrimp boat in the Neuse River, she talked it over with some of the women she had just met. “I think I told Robin Johnston I’d say ‘yes’ before I told Dave.” She told him a few days later as he drove her back to the airport to Indiana.

That set in motion a whirlwind two weeks in which Marsha quit her job, sold her house in Lafayette, moved her daughters Andrea and Becky, then 16 and 12, to Oriental and got them in to school here. Dave, meanwhile, was selling his software company in the Triangle. Marsha and Dave got married on the deck of the Oriental Marina on August 19, 1989.

Dave and Marsha’s wedding on the deck of the Oriental Marina, August 1989.

A wipe board from 1989 which Jay and Paula Winston hung on the front door of their business, The Inland Waterway Treasure Company. announcing they were across the street at Dave and Marsha’s wedding.

They settled in to life in Oriental, and got some sailing in. They sailed to the Chesapeake. They sailed to the Keys.

Marsha went to work tending bar at the Topside Lounge. Longtime Oriental resident Grace Evans recalls Dave in what would become a familiar pose there.

“Thinking about Dave and Marsha,” Grace emailed the other day, “ He had another stool that he sat on back in the glory days of Topside at the Marina when Marsha was bar tending. I always took it that he was there supporting and protecting her through closing time and had the same feeling at M&Ms.”

Dave Shirk, at right with Fred Johnston (center) and Bert Quay (left) at the Topside Lounge. This was Dave’s 40th birthday party.

Starting a restaurant of their own came almost as a challenge or even a dare. Dave and some new managers at the Topside didn’t see eye to eye on how the Topside should be managed. Dave and Marsha set out to start their own place.

They bought the Cape Cod house on South Water Street and opened M&M’s December 15, 1994, offering lunch Wednesday through Sunday and dinners on Wednesday and Thursday. They served sandwiches. They had small expectations. “We thought doing 30 dinners a night would be big.” Marsha recalls. “We thought 5 employees (including herself) would be enough.” They were soon surpassing both.

At the start, they served up sandwiches on pie plates. (It was something they’d admired at a bar in Indiana.) Two weeks in, though, customers were saying otherwise. They wanted to eat off of real plates. Marsha said she went next door to Lucille Truitt, who ran the Ol’ Store junk shop and bought every random plate there. Ross Pease donated many plates from his collection. Ross also got the fledgling restaurant through its first year by providing direction. As Marsha says, “I was bartending and didn’t know anything about food. Ross Pease taught us the mechanics of running a restaurant.”

While Marsha was everywhere in the restaurant, Dave took his post at the bar. Marsha remembers that the first week, he took a bar seat closest to the register, but then she moved him down to the spot he’d occupy for a decade. Grace Evans recalled the role Dave played:

“Single patrons never had to feel alone or strange …. with him sitting and always ready to talk. It made it seem like “Cheers”, and I, for one, was always comfortable wandering in and visiting for a while until I got my bearings. At M&Ms he kept a close eye on what was leaving the bar, and how, leaving Marsha free to process the meals and staff.”

“Even though he didn’t get up from the stool, he was the major part of M&M’s success. The food and staff were important, but keeping track of the finances and the liquids made him an equal partner in that operation.”

Rounding out the picture of Dave at the bar were three things. The bottle of Heineken. The omnipresent cigarette. The remote to the TV 20 feet away in the corner.

No one but Dave controlled that remote and he had that TV just about always tuned to The Weather Channel, volume down and closed-captions scrawling across the screen. He wielded the remote with an iron wrist. He could be obstinate about it.

A few hours after Dave passed away Friday, one Oriental resident offered an explanation of why. He recalled being in M&Ms one night when a customer badgered Dave to raise the volume on the TV. Dave resisted, and finally ended the debate by telling the woman that he’d spent years in bars with TVs so loud it was hard to hear conversation and be heard. Now that he had his own bar, he told her – and everyone nearby – the volume would be kept down, if not off altogether.

Dave was a night owl, staying til closing and remaining awake a few hours more. He used to half-joke that he got up in the late morning in time to watch “The Price is Right.” Late in the afternoon, he’d get in his car and drive the two blocks to M&M’s. The car, a high performance vehicle, rarely got a workout on the highways.

After a decade of running M&M’s Dave and Marsha sold the place in 2005. Dave remained a regular until the new management put in a “no smoking” policy. He turned his attention to setting up a recording studio, upstairs at the Old Theater. He also became, for two seasons, a concert promoter. Pamlico Sounds, his company, brought acts such as Livingston Taylor, Loudon Wainwright III, California Guitar Trio, George WInston and Roger McGuinn to the Old Theater.

From his new perch, high up in the balcony, he emceed the shows in an understated manner. Dave had worked on a college radio station, and his voice coming over the house sound system brought “Carlton the Doorman” to mind.

Marsha and Dave a few years ago at The Silos, when there was a motorcycle inside..

He continued to keep his late hours, going to bed after 2am, waking in late morning. (He only half joked that he woke for “The Price Is Right”.) He had an Apple computer and two monitors set up on the kitchen table in front of a window overlooking the Duck Pond. It was like the bridge of a boat. Many of his hours were spent on watch. One of the two monitors was invariably tuned to a weather website, bouncing between national weather and TownDock.net. He seemed especially enthusiastic about what was going on overhead. If an odd moon or a space satellite was going to be over the Oriental sky, he let the neighbors know.

Dave was also an avid ham radio operator. He’d done that since he was 12, in Medina, Ohio. At his kitchen cockpit was also an array of ham radio equipment and he recently upgraded his license to the highest level – Extra. He changed his call sign from K14KQ to AA4OK.

A few months ago, Dave asked a neighbor for help in carrying another piece of ham radio equipment up one flight of stairs in to the house. It was heavy and Dave said then that he felt something snap in his back. The back pain persisted, but Dave resisted going to the doctor for a while. He went to the hospital last week and died suddenly Friday morning.

A memorial service is planned for this Saturday, December 6 at 2pm at Bryant Funeral Home in Alliance. As Marsha put it a few days ago, “Dave was not a morning person.”

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Oriental’s History Museum. PO Box 103, Oriental, NC 28571.

Posted Tuesday December 2, 2008 by Melinda Penkava