Black leather, good friend, talented journalist: Dave Rhodes won't be forgotten

Editor’s note: Each Sunday, The Herald-Mail runs “A Life Remembered.” Each story in this continuing series takes a look back — through the eyes of family, friends, co-workers and others — at a member of the community who died recently. Today’s “A Life Remembered” is particularly poignant because it is about David Howard Rhodes, who was one of two reporters writing the feature for the past few years. Dave died on July 13 at the age of 64. His obituary appeared in The Herald-Mail on July 17.

How many people do you know who, despite not going to college for it, became a dang good newspaper editor?

And, making it all the more unpredictable, what if that guy once worked in a factory snapping lids on throat-lozenge tins?

Friends and family members say the guy practically trained himself at everything he wanted to do: Car mechanic, radio personality, sound engineer, writer.

Family, friends and longtime employees of The Herald-Mail know it could only be one person: husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather and good friend, Dave Rhodes.

For more than three decades, Dave kept everyone on their toes with his unique outlook on life; the adventurous stories he'd bring back from an assignment to the newsroom; the fun he shared with others at events, especially the Western Maryland Blues Fest that he loved so much; and, well, just being Dave Rhodes.

This was no conventional-looking journalist.

Those who knew Dave won't soon forget the sound of him coming down the hallway, the long chain on his motorcycle wallet banging against his leg, before he plopped down in his newsroom chair. He took off his black leather jacket before the straightening of his long mullet-style haircut, pulled back into a ponytail in later years.

Dave was born Nov. 1, 1957, in Natrona Heights near Pittsburgh. Although Dave was preceded in death by his mother Shirley, his father, Howard, who lives in Cheswick, Pa., will turn 90 on Aug. 4. Besides his wife, Josie, Dave is also survived by three children, Marlene, Roger and Jodi, plus three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

'The girls just loved him'

Dave was a big music guy, a love planted in him while attending Springdale High School in Natrona Heights. He became a bass player and joined the school's jazz band before graduating in 1975. He had another band — The Ripcords — which often played at weddings.

He exuded cool, illustrated by the powder-blue hearse that he used to haul his band equipment in at the time, according to his sister Lori Palermo, who lives in Springdale, Pa.

"The girls just loved him, the bass player and all that," she said.

After high school, Dave joined rock 'n' roll bands that traveled throughout the South and Midwest.

Many of the gigs were in clubs, and the disco craze was underway.

Disco? Coming out of Dave's bass?

"That's what he had to play," Josie said, laughing.

Dave met Josie when one of his groups was performing at the Osterman House in Chambersburg, Pa. She was a waitress there, and Dave struck up a conversation at her work station.

At some point, a band of Dave's broke up on the road, and without a job, he started heading back home to the Pittsburgh area.

He thought again about that waitress that he met at the Osterman House.

He looked Josie up and stopped in to see her in Chambersburg on his way back. He asked her if he could stay with her for a while as he looked for a job.

She agreed, even though she had a boyfriend at the time. Long-story short, love won out and Dave and Josie married.

Good Humor man; the Sucrets factory

Dave had all sorts of jobs at one time or another, including driving a Good Humor ice-cream truck. Josie remembers when he got a job at a Sucrets factory in Chambersburg. He would come home and tell her there was nothing quite like spending eight hours a day snapping lids on containers of throat lozenges.

Then he heard about a job at radio station WCBG in Chambersburg. He interviewed for it, and the person at the station told Dave that his deep voice would be perfect for newscasting.

It was not the job he went there for, but he ended up delivering the daily news for the station.

And so another unexpected turn came in Dave's life — a career in radio.

"I don't know what he was going to do with his life, but that's what came to him," Josie said.

What did Dave do on the radio?

Dave's radio career grew, leading him to jobs with stations WJEJ and WQCM in Hagerstown and WFMD in Frederick, Md.

At WJEJ, Josie remembered Dave doing daily newscasts while longtime local weather personality Lou Scally gave the forecast.

"Him and Lou Scally were like a little pair," she said.

Former Herald-Mail Media Publisher John League remembers when news gathering in Hagerstown was a big thing in the early 1980s. Reporters from The Morning Herald and The Daily Mail newspapers along with reporters from two or three radio stations and television often covered government meetings in the city.

Dave was one of the radio reporters.

"It was a lot of fun, and Dave was very good," League said.

Then the station where Dave worked made some cuts and Dave started thinking about where to go next. League, who became managing editor and executive editor at Herald-Mail Media in 1985, decided to hire Dave as a reporter.

What was life like behind the newsprint?

Dave became a reporter at The Morning Herald's Chambersburg bureau when the company had a number of bureaus in the Tri-State region. He covered the usual mix of government, courts and breaking news stories. When it came to feature stories, it was only as Dave could deliver, like the time he jumped out of an airplane for a story he did on skydiving. A photo for the story showed Dave sailing through the air, his wide mustached-smile beaming back at the camera.

League shook his head over the memory, trying to imagine the newspaper company today agreeing to that degree of liability for a story.

As for the music, perhaps it got no better than in July 1993, when the Lollapalooza music festival moved to the old Shenandoah Downs horse track near Charles Town, W.Va., after it had been running in Reston, Va. There had been complaints about the event and it's offering of alternative rock in Reston, and it found a new home at the dusty old property in West Virginia's Eastern Panhandle.

As for this reporter and lover of music, it certainly got no better. I was The Morning Herald's Charles Town writer, and Dave and I covered Lollapalooza together. We had a blast. I will never forget walking back into the bureau office that night after covering the festival and finding Dave passed out asleep on the floor, obviously overcome by too much rock 'n' roll and another newspaper deadline.

I was not attuned to that style of music like Dave was, and he suggested some cassette tapes for me to buy to get ready. I still have those Smashing Pumpkins and Tool tapes somewhere upstairs.

Dave eventually turned his interest to editing at the paper. That's when he met longtime friend Mark England, who became a copy editor at the company in the mid-1990s.

They discovered each other's love for music.

"Real quick, we started playing together. I went over there (to his house) every Wednesday, almost without fail," England said.

England did the guitar playing and singing to Dave's bass runs.

"He would not sing. He didn't think he had a good voice, but actually he did," England said.

A drummer joined them at one point, and they performed for Porchfest, a Hagerstown festival in which live music was staged on the porches of peoples' homes, usually along Prospect Street.

England reflected on the unique nature of his friend. Even though Dave became an editor at the paper, England said Dave often second-guessed his role because he didn't go to college for journalism. But England said Dave did the job a lot better than others he knew.

What Dave didn't know, he trained himself to do, like being a writer and a mechanic, said England.

Lori, Dave's sister, said her brother didn't express an interest in writing when he was young. But she said he was always eloquent, and therefore writing seemed to come naturally to him.

League said someone doesn't necessarily need to have a college degree for journalism.

"You just need to be curious and you need to be accurate, and Dave was both," League said.

At a July 20 celebration of life for Dave at his and Josie's church — Lifehouse Church on East Wilson Boulevard — former work colleagues, friends and family members filled a sanctuary. They told Dave stories, like one former Herald-Mail Media reporter and editor, who said spending time with Dave was like looking into different "wells."

There was always something interesting and often surprising to find in them.

'Hardly had a bad word to say about anybody'

Dave and Josie became devout members of Lifehouse Church, and Dave's love of others reflected the love he found for his God. His mechanical know-how meant he could fix anything, and there were laughs during the ceremony about how Dave would go to his lawnmower graveyard at his Clear Spring-area home along National Pike to bring one of the machines he had found back to life.

He often gave the repaired ones to people for free as well as repairing friends' mowers and cars at no charge.

As the technical director at Lifehouse Church, Ridge Bingaman oversees all the church's audio and visual operations. He said Dave used to be a sound engineer at the Leitersburg campus the church had. He said Dave was always so happy to see people coming to the church and referring to everyone as "brother."

England became choked up when asked to reflect further on what type of person Dave was.

"He hardly had a bad word to say about anybody. He just loved people," England said.

"On July 13, the music stopped. The last story was filed. And there are no other lawnmowers to repair," Herald-Mail Media sports writer Bob Parasiliti said as he reflected on the "nuts-and-bolts" life of his friend.

"Dave left suddenly, but he is remembered very fondly," Parasiliti said. "Dave was one of life’s omnipresent constants, so there’s a big void for the many he touched."

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This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Herald-Mail Media reporter and editor Dave Rhodes remembered