Ole Donald Bruno Lash Where Arth Thou?

Don in Times Square\

Don with Empire State Building looming behind him

The other day on facebook I mentioned my old Navy buddy Don Lash, or Donald Bruno Lash (for Google purposes). 

Another Navy friend saw it and asked me what happened to Don.  I wrote back and said I have a  feeling he died.  But I could be wrong... hopefully, I am.

After Don got out of the Navy, which  was two weeks after I got out, he went back home to Chicago and was rehired by the Chicago Tribune.  For years he kept me with a free Chicago Tribune subscription.

For the next  eleven years or so after we left active duty we continued our friendship..  He drove to Florida every year to visit his grandmother.  He would always drop back and forth and spent a couple of days.  And I went several times to visit him in Chicago and we drove to Minneapolis to visit Sam Kasuske, another Navy friend.

 Don went back to college, got his degree in communications and in the long run became a professor  tenured at the University of Illinois..

About 1976 we quit communicating over some minor disagreement and haven't heard from each other since.

In 2001, around Labor Day, about a week before 9/11 Anna and I flew to Chicago for a week.  Anna was there for a work related conference.  I was there to wander around the big city.  Our hotel room  had a Chicago phone book and I looked up Lash.  Don's brother Michael lived in their parents' house on Troy Street.   I was tempted to call, but didn't.  And regretted not doing so. 

Don at Guggenheim Museum, NYC

Don with my two cousins in Carmel, NY, at my uncle Royi's house

Don showing off his black eye a Marine gave him at the E.M. Club

I and Don posing with statue at Philadelphia Art Museum

Don posing of being dead on the ground outside HU-4 Barracks, NAS Lakehurst, NJ

Joe Rexroad and Don looking at Hudson River at Hyde Park, NY (Roosevelt Mansion)

Dick Hyatt, Don, and Ray Shultz at Fountain at Plaza Hotel, NYC