I’m just going to say it: One of the first things anyone would notice about Bob Prichard had to be his hand. It was brutally mangled – some fingers missing, the rest unartfully rearranged. Honestly, I couldn’t bring myself to ask what had happened to him, and when Bob voluntarily told me, some years into our friendship, the story was so incredible I thought he was joking. I mean, Bob had an overactive sense of humor; surely he hadn’t truly been hit by a freight train – as a toddler! But, oh my goodness. Yes, he had.
Here’s the thing, though: About two seconds after you met Bob, that hand didn’t matter one whit. In fact, despite knowing this man for more than 15 years, I couldn’t tell you whether the affected hand was right or left. More surprisingly, neither could his lifelong best friend, business partner and next-door neighbor Frank Shimkus. When we met to reminisce about Bob over coffee, we both guessed it was his left hand. We both were wrong.
“That’s why he pitched with his left hand,” Bob’s son Aaron told me.
Bob didn’t just pitch. As a young man, his vast repertoire of curve balls, junk, smart pitching and switch hitting attracted the attention of the St. Louis Cardinals, whose scouts tried to sign him to their farm team. They even promised to make him a custom glove, so he wouldn’t have to go through his circus routine of tucking a regular glove under his right arm while he threw with his left. Bob’s mother went behind his back and put the kibosh on that deal.
But that didn’t mean he gave up baseball. He continued pitching – hardball and softball – in rec leagues at the Brown Bomber Ballpark well into middle age. He also played shark-status pool, darts, shuffleboard and horseshoes, and strummed guitar well enough to imitate Elvis. There’s no telling what Bob might’ve become if he had two good hands.
Instead, he made his living working in construction trades. Beginning in his teens, he worked as a plumber, a contractor, a builder, a repairman – just an all-around handyman – which is how I and many other people in Springfield came to know him. In the years since I met him, I’ve owned two properties, each more than a century old, and I could not have survived without Bob. In the first house, he remodeled the kitchen and main bathroom twice, rebuilt the front porch, dismantled a treehouse, and addressed more plumbing issues than I could count. The garage was collapsing, but also built across a property line, so Bob – whose formal education topped out with a GED – devised a way to avoid legal shenanigans by stealthily rebuilding the entire structure from the inside out.
He had that innate creativity that’s necessary for dealing with decades of Springfield jury-rigging. He always figured out what could be done and had a way of talking me out of what couldn’t. He knew my financial limits, as well as my kids, my dogs, my friends, my work schedule, and the code to my front door. Constantly running from one job to another, he had license to come and go pretty much as he pleased, and I know that most of his clients felt the same way. Bob was 1 million percent trustworthy.
He wasn’t quite perfect. I once made Bob replace brand new chrome bathroom fixtures purely because I don’t like shiny stuff. So later, when he installed my kitchen sink, he added a chrome faucet that he had found for a bargain. “I know you hate it,” he said, “but just don’t wash it and it’ll stop being shiny.”
When I hired him to fortify my backyard fence, due to my dog Rosie’s discovery of some mysterious escape hatch, Bob inadvertently let the dog out – while building the fence to keep her in. He drove around looking for her for hours, utterly distraught, until she nonchalantly sauntered home. We had a running joke about all the ways I would’ve killed him if Rosie had not returned. Sometime later, when Rosie was killed by a reckless driver, Bob sent me a beautiful potted plant.
Over the years, I noticed Bob fading away, from slender to featherweight to so skinny he had to wear some brand of bedazzled jeans, because they were the only ones that stayed up on his scrawny ass. Apparently, he subsisted on a diet of coffee for breakfast (one pot, maybe two), and ice cream for dinner chased by his favorite beer or tequila. He had shoulder replacement surgery (partly because of all that pitching, and partly – Aaron later told me – from taking a hard fall in my backyard). And he constantly struggled with COPD, exacerbated by his inability to kick cigarettes. This year, Bob devoted most of his time to being caregiver in chief for his beloved wife, Betty, who has several serious health issues. Booking him for work became understandably impossible.
One day, I was standing on a downtown street corner, waiting to cross, when I saw Bob’s rattletrap van fly by. I immediately dialed his flip phone and asked, “Hey, was that you?” He said yup, he had just picked up something for Betty but he had been thinking about my latest repair request and had a great idea, he would get back with me soon. Turns out, that was our last conversation.
Bob died June 19, at the age of 74. Sitting up in bed, he dozed off and simply failed to wake up the next morning. It seems impossible that such a force of nature snuck away so quietly. I still think of him every time I shower with my preferred plumbing fixtures, every time I cringe looking at my shiny kitchen faucet, and every time I pass the Beware of Dog sign I hung to cover a hole in the drywall that Bob isn’t here to patch. I have found another handyman, but I will miss Bob Prichard forever.
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