home

‹ previous page  1  2  3  4  5  6  7   next page ›

Mary Duffie says that George didn’t care much about clothes.

Some friends this week were also remembering the wood work he did for another gathering spot. After 2003’s Hurricane Isabel covered the floor of The Bean with several inches of water, George helped Russ Stewart refurbish the floors.

“He took so much pride in his work,” said a friend, Ralf Anselm. “And he did his homework.”

Ken Pitts echoed that. “If George didn’t have an answer, he would look it up on his computer, or in a book, learn the “ins and outs” of the problem, and then explain it to you in such detail you would be in awe. Then he was ready to get to work fixing the actual problem.”

Mary and George Duffie at Oriental’s History Museum, December 2010 at the opening of an exhibit about the Midyette family, looking for George’s mother’s place on that family tree. George was a volunteer at the museum and contributed a history about his uncle Lewis Bracy Midyette who died in WWII.

At the Duffie home on Tuesday, Mary Duffie spoke of a ladder to the attic that had been a bear to put in place and that she’d implored George to make something easier to use. George redesigned it, and as she unfolded it Monday, messages from George were revealed, warning the user step by step — on the step — about just how to deploy it.

Climbing George’s ladder. George placed step by step (literally) directions, cautioning about intricacies in the motorized device and anticipating issues a user might have with it. Mary and their daughter Alyson demonstrated the other day.

As Greg Piner remembered his friend this week, he laughed about growing up in the Methodist Church in eastern North Carolina and thinking that there was a test to weed out any new minister who showed any mechanical ability. George busted that impression, he said. “George had a great engineering mind.”

Piner says George had passions for sailing and woodworking, and combined a “childlike excitement for life” with an “uncommon wisdom that made you feel good.”

“You just very quickly found you could get on a level of conversation that was substantive. He touched my life like few have.”

‹ previous page  1  2  3  4  5  6  7   next page ›

Posted Saturday June 25, 2011 by Melinda Penkava