The Kneebone's Connected To The Heartbone

An old family friend passed away suddenly last week of a heart attack: link

I remember Dave well and what he did for me and my family. Dave was the shop steward or chaplain there where my did worked. From the beginning, he was the guy who always made sure that the Printer's Union picnic ran smoothly every summer. The picnic happened every summer at Hoyt Park in Madison and was sponsored by the union and not by the company. Dave was there for the kids and for the grown ups. I remember competing for prizes in the gunny sack races and the eggs spoon races. We thought the prizes were generous. We kids, as we got older and outgrew the games, used to sneak off to explore the old stone quarries and the rickety old Hoyt Park ski jump, now long gone.

Dave mostly hung around the beer keg with the other printers. I stopped going to the picnics around 1976 when I was around sixteen, but my last memory of those picnics was the time I won a bottle of Korbel brandy playing bingo. "You're going to give that to your Dad, right Bruce?"

A year or two later, the newspaper and the union had a big falling out. My dad lost his job prior to the strike and he got a negotiated severance. I have all the paperwork from that time. Dave Kneebone was my dad's advocate. A year or so later, I met Dave again when my father drove me to the picket line in Madison so that I could interview workers for a high school journalism project. It was a freezing cold evening and most of the guys on the picket line wanted to keep moving rather than stop and talk to a pesky kid. But Dave remembered me and I mostly got my answers from him.

We met again briefly during the short-lived run of the Madison Press Connection. I was a volunteer upstairs in the circulation department, while Dave was always doing paste-up somewhere or seeing that the offsite printing was going well. In essence, being a printer.

David Kneebone, R.I.P.