High School

I got to know Rick Dow in high school, at Prairie School in Racine, Wisconsin. We were in the same grade, but travelled in totally different circles. While still in high school, Rick had all kinds of crazy nighttime adventures which he was reluctant to talk about when I knew him in college, but which involved explosives and machine guns. Also while he was in high school, he had a girlfriend who was in college, an arrangement which kept all of his male peers in awe.

Rick's high school car was a VW Beetle which he worked on in his grandmothers' driveway (his two grandmothers lived together). Rick would use this VW to take friends off campus during lunch hour, a practice strictly forbidden at Prairie. One day while coming back from a lunch excursion, he had a spectacular accident where he was coming through the fog near the lighthouse and another car hit him broadside. I remember hearing from other kids that Rick was pinned in the car while his stereo got stuck at full-blast volume. That's how the police found him and the other kids who were with him in the car.

College

I didn't really get to know Rick well until we went to college together at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. While I was living in the dorms, he had apartments in interesting houses, usually with interesting roommates. He lived for a long time in a house off of Willy Street which used to be a hospital. His long-time girlfriend Rachel and his cats really made it seem like a home when I would visit them, which I did quite often, because I was often lonely. Rick was one of the first people I knew who had a Mac at home, which he let me use for typing term papers. This would have been around 1984 and 1985. While I was typing, he and Rachel would make a wonderful dinner which we would eat in the kitchen while talking about all sorts of philosophical things.

Rick was one of those people who struggled in high school but who did really well in college. I believe he got a double major in english and biochemistry. I remember taking organic chemistry with him and laughing all the way through it because he was so funny. Unfortunately, we both got a very bad grade in the class because we had no idea how to study for organic chemistry, but he took the class over and passed with flying colors.

While I was in college, I did my junior year in Tokyo, and I sent letters to Rick, talking about the things I missed in Japan because you couldn't buy them there. He responded by sending me an entire box of Sweet Tart candy, which I enjoyed for months.

Rick had some sort of magnetic effect on women. I saw him strike up a conversation with a woman we were sitting next to at the Rathskeller in Madison and talk to her as if he'd known her for ages. At first she was surprised and a little stunned, but she soon fell under his spell and they dated after that.

After College

After college, I moved to the Washington DC area and Rick stayed in and around the Madison area. He had several girlfriends at the same time, all of whom knew about each other.

I would come home to Racine to visit my family during the summer, and I would often take a day to drive out to Madison to see Rick. He always had some amazing cozy set-up in a nice house and we always talked for hours while cooking supper

We sent letters to each other infrequently, but in 1990, I got a Christmas card that I saved:

Dear Todd,

I'm sorry that I haven't written in a while, once a delinquent, always ... In any case, I hope things are going well for you out in D.C. I finally graduated from college and got a job as a Research Specialist in a Lab on campus. I'm doing fiber studies. Sushie's good and she wishes you well. She's working with the government now doing "special-aid" programs. This spring I'll be starting to take some grad courses at the UW so I'll have lots of time to sit around writing you letters.

Take lots of good care and send me a post card!

That was pretty much the last time I heard from Rick, although I heard from other people that he had left school and was driving across the country to the Atlantic so he could get his pilot license. He thought he'd be able to swing by Washington but he ran out of time.

He sent me a copy of a paper he wrote and which he was proud of: A Scanning Electron Microscope Study of the Developing Embryo of Manduca Sexta

Apparently he did get his pilot license and he headed down to the Caribbean.

We got a letter postmarked December 14, 1993 inviting us to his wedding to Elisa Bryan, to take place on February 5, 1994. We were thrilled, and while we were home in Racine for the Christmas holiday, we were talking about how we could get down to St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. The very next morning, we got a phone call that Rick had drowned.

His Death

Apparently, Rick went free diving the day after his engagement party by himself and he was found drowned above a popular spot for divers, Buck Island, December 20, 1993.

I've thought about Rick for years now, and talked about him with other friends who knew him, trying to make sense of what happened.