Don with The Killer Doggies, Max and Isis.
Perfect.
One of many outings.
The Roberts Family
Father and son.
Isis arrives on the scene.
A bunch of kids rollerskating.
"Coop," Donnie and me.
Last winter, on the hill.
Don, adding "jet fuel" to the IROC at
EST Safety Park Dragstrip in Cicero.
Me and The Don at Cicero. He'd probably just
made a wisecrack about how much slower
the Mustang is than the IROC. "I just don't know."
Donnie, "dialing 'er in ... onto'r, over."
Donnie and Chris: Our girl's Godparents.
Roberts & Jensen families ... As a classmate of SV 1984, I want to share a memory that exemplifies the qualities of Don. He was always tinkering with something mechanical. I recall a time when, sitting in study hall with him, he observed a maintenance worker struggling to get a riding lawn mower working and he quietly got up and went outside to help him. Within minutes the mower was back in business and Don was back in his seat. My thoughts and prayers, as you honor the life of a special man.
Lori Grubham- Nemcek
(Sign or just visit Don's online Guest Book)We stood in the middle of the street Saturday as the streetlights flickered on and the last warmth of a short summer disappeared down the block, gone somewhere far west of the annual block party. We dodged kids coasting on bikes and scooters. We laughed a little, wondering which child would bleed next, becoming the victim of a street littered with pock marks. We compared exotic beer labels. We tended to dogs, burgers, sausages, some chicken and a nicely seasoned London broil, placed on the grill by a strange but nice woman none of us knew, cook away. It was suburbia heaven, it was suburbia hell, depending on whose opinion you got. But we sure liked it.
My sister-in-law Leslie, who'd just finished a successful block-long search-and-recovery mission for my nephew Emmit's blue and gold bike, slapped my arm. "I just hung up on your sister," she said. I didn't pay much attention, although I wondered for a second why she hung up on either Cathy in Iowa or Chris in Watkins Glen. Still, it didn't seem important why. Or which sister, for that matter.
She walked away and dialed some numbers. I yelled down the block to anyone listening, "The London broil's about ready and we can't remember who it belongs to."
Leslie grabbed my arm. Something wasn't right. She was on the phone. She
doubled over in what looked like pain, then she walked away, as if I'd been the
bearer of some horrific news, but I couldn't tell what was wrong, or who the true
bearer was. "Oh my God, no," she said, "No." My wife walked after her, then
she doubled over, too. They struggled to stay upright but they weren't saying
what was wrong.
"What? Who is it? What's going on?"
"It's Chris. Donald ... boating accident ... they can't find him."
I can't remember which of them said those words. They were muddy but the message was clear. "What?"
By now you probably know the rest. In short order: Donnie was on his 28-foot Kryptonite around 4:40 p.m. Saturday, September 4, 2010, with his employee and friend, Frank Carson. Carson was piloting the vessel when something went radically wrong at what everyone agrees was breakneck speed. Both men were thrown from the boat at an estimated 70 to 80 mph. Those who retrieved Carson from the lake said the impact of him hitting the water ripped some of the clothes off his body. Still, he's alive today, and we're mourning Don.
It took until the next evening until they found Donald. All day Sunday, people had visited my sister's and Don's home, knowing the reality of things. Some, myself included, tried to avoid it, though, and said we were holding out for a miracle. My 12-year-old son asked me more times than I can number if his uncle was dead. For a solid day, I answered, "We don't know."
But then we did. Sunday evening rescue workers' sonar picked something up. An officer called my sister, who was sitting cross-legged on her driveway's concrete. She
was part of what looked like a drum circle, without the drums. I'd asked her earlier in the day if she'd ever had a party in the driveway. She pushed out a small laugh and said, "Yeah, and Donald's missing it, dammit!"
The thing was, no one knew what to say, or do, or where to settle. Kids played in the
house and in the vast yard, but the grown-ups walked around with zombie stares.
Someone stopped in the foyer to peek around to see what was on the TV. Another
dished some ziti that Serafina and Bill brought from their restaurant. Me, I walked
around looking at all of Donald's stuff - his martial arts equipment sitting alongside
his weight bench, his carbon-fiber Trek mounted to its indoor trainer, his billards
table that sat a few feet from the plush home theater he'd built in the basement,
some folded clothes in a laundry basket - while his gigantic dogs, Max and Isis,
followed me. We all seemed to end up in the driveway, though. Dogs included. No one
felt it would have been right to get comfortable. So we stood and sat on concrete and
waited.
In a way, this felt strangely like all the other times so many of us had visited Don and Chris up on the hill. It was a holiday weekend, after all, so it fit. Of the 20 or so people holding vigil, most of us had had occasion to arrive at their house by mid-afternoon to see Chris and Donnie III (or "Cube," as I nicknamed my nephew years ago - I think I'm the only one who actually calls him that), then wait for Don to shut things down at his business, Glen Harbor Marina, and head home. If not for the driveway drum circle and all the swollen eyes, it seemed like he'd be along shortly.
But it was the phone call from the Yates County sheriff that arrived instead. The sonar that saw something earlier? It was Donald, and he was on his back, about 110 feet below Seneca Lake's choppy surface. The fear we all had about him never being found disappeared, replaced by the gut punch that there was no hope. He wouldn't come home.
The news got to everyone quickly. Some were inside, others sat on the back deck.
My daughter and Cube were on laptops in the living room, playing Webkinz.
Soon, they were the only two who hadn't heard the news. Chris and Don's father,
Donald Sr., decided they'd go inside and let my 8-year-old nephew know about his
daddy. I ushered my daughter to the kitchen where I briefed her. We had many
hugs and a long cry, then we joined Cube and his mom in the living room. By
then, the boy was playing a word search game online. We asked him if he could
find words like "poop," or maybe "fart." How about a compound word? Like
"farthead?" He mostly ignored us, although we got a grin out of him. And then he
was on to other things, running the property with cousins and friends and the giant
dogs. The reality hadn't arrived yet.
Almost a full day later, Don's mother, Marie Roberts, sat at the glass table in the kitchen area of her son's house. My wife was preparing our kids for the 80-minute drive home. I can't recall what I asked Marie, but she looked up and responded, "We'll all be seeing shrinks soon."
"They won't have any answers for all this."
"All this" wasn't just the cruelty of seeing their athletic, high-achieving
44-year-old son taken so senselessly. It was losing Donald, of course, but they
had also lost one of their daughters not too many years before - Dawn (Roberts)
Jake - in a winter car accident while she was upstate with a youth travel soccer
team. "All this" was losing Donald and Dawn, but also having lost another
daughter when she was very young. Michelle had died with a childhood ailment
when all the Roberts kids were still little. Don had cried when his sister Dawn
was killed, and he cried some more when he remembered playing with Michelle,
a lifetime before.
Five children for Marie and Don Roberts Sr. and they had to bury three of them. If you had trouble with your faith in a higher power - or maybe if you didn't - you wouldn't hesitate to tell God where to stick such a "plan."
Later Sunday evening, an hour or so before that day's sun started to disappear from Burdett, New York - a remote outpost in the hills above Seneca Lake where, across the valley you can see "the second largest dairy farm in New York state," someone told me - Donald Sr. stood on concrete near his pickup truck with a white sticker of some running horses in the side window. His brother, Donnie's uncle Butch, stood next to him. Other friends and family members stood in a semi-circle. Everyone here knew Donnie a long time. They reminisced about all his fast cars and fast boats and faster bikes and sleds and how they always seemed to go faster over the years, one right after another after another. Donnie always pushed his vehicles to the limit when he was younger, they said. And even when he was older. Eventually the stories faded and the group disbanded.
This couldn't be real. This couldn't happen to Donnie.
There was more such talk two days later. On Tuesday, somewhere around 1 in the afternoon, a smaller group of us sat around the dining area table in Chris and Donald's beautiful home. Chris and Donnie's sister, Kathy, in from Albany, and Donald's mother had gone to pick out the flowers for the funeral. At the table, though, the talk was of cars.
"Sixty-something Dodge Polara. He put a big ol' plastic hood scoop on it," is what Don Roberts Sr. described as his youngest son's first-ever car. "Then he had a '71
or '72 Cougar. Souped that one up. Then he went into a Dodge 600," he said.
"That's the one he went deer hunting with, with his eyes shut," said Frank Roberts, Donnie's big brother, the rancher. Frank's plane had arrived from Tennessee, touching down in Elmira Monday afternoon . The driveway conversation early on Sunday, before Donald was found, had been that Frank wasn't about to travel to New York just to see his little brother step through the front door. They'd been through too much together, after all, and Frank had seen Donnie walk away from plenty of scrapes.
He had survived being pummelled by gigantic men when, in his 30s, he decided he'd like to play semi-professional football. He got into "football shape" and made it through several team cuts and was being groomed as a kick returner. No one could keep up with his speed, depite being an old dude, the coaches had noticed. But then came the pre-season concussion and back to real life he went.
Out of nowhere, he couldn't stand upright for a time, a few years back. Vertigo, we suspected. Then, as fast as it came, it went, and he was fine.
He'd even survived one night at Funzy's with Steve Reed and Richie Tripp, Johnny Williams and Jerry Osterhout, all those guys. But there was no barroom brawl and he wasn't thrown through the joint's plate-glass window by Jerry, as so many others had been. No, this "incident" was as simple as laughing while daring his ticked-off girlfriend to punch him in the chin. He probably didn't expect that she would, or that her engagement ring would slice through the bottom portion of his face the way it did. But she did, and it did. And he still married her.
Frank Roberts knew what his brother was made of.
"He drove that Dodge 600 over a bank by Tim McHale's house," recalled Frank, who said his brother had been an Arby's nighttime manager when he was a teen, working late hours to make the big bucks to buy bigger, faster toys. One night, on the way home, he fell asleep at the wheel. "He wasn't hurt at all, though. He got out of the car, walked the rest of the way home and crawled into bed. He dealt with it in the morning. He called Wimpy to come and tow it out."
Then came the red Yamaha Fazer. The one with the first Genesis engine available. Don would ride that Yamaha, while Frank rode his bigger Honda (1000 cc's to the Fazer's 600). "We'd race home. Where Brady Hill Road and Pierce Creek Road split, one of us would head one way, the other one the other way," Frank said. "Whoever got to the house first, won. I'd get to a point where it would get crazy and I'd back
off. I had the faster bike, but Don was always on the edge. He never backed off
and he'd beat me every time."
One evening, Frank recalled, they were racing home again. This time, a Broome County sheriff's cruiser trailed them, lights flashing. They ditched the cop at the split in the road and made it home undetected. Never did get their license plates. The problem was, now-Broome County sheriff Dave Harder (who was then a deputy, the Roberts' neighbor and Don Sr.'s friend) was on the porch with the boys' dad when they buzzed up. Harder must have known it was the Roberts boys. Couldn't have been hard to figure.
"He was just sitting there with Dad, hanging out," the grown-up Frank said, grinning, shaking his head, arms folded in his brother's kitchen. "We did quite a bit of lawn work at the Harders' that weekend, as I recall it."
There was a 1979 turbocharged Buick Regal around the time of the Fazer, too. Donnie threw a small block Pontiac 400 into it, then blew up two superchargers
bolted to that engine. He had started to date my sister around that time. Might
have been mid- to late-1980s.
Once he'd exhausted the Regal, then came the piss-yella '85 IROC Camaro, which sits at the marina today, daring someone to try to race it.
I first encountered the IROC when Donnie managed Bob Kohut's Main Street BP in Binghamton. On a Friday, somewhere back in time, the work day was done and I stopped in. A few of us had popped open beers when Kurt Motsko jumped inside the Camaro, parked in one of the BP's bays. Donnie was finishing up paperwork in the office. Kurt turned the key and fired the thing up. Don looked up from the paperwork and shook his head. Kurt backed the car out of the bay and past the gas pumps. I don't think any of us believed this was going anywhere, but before we knew it, crazy Kurt had the very loud, very bright, very identifiable-to-police IROC in the center of Main Street, pulling donuts in front of the American Legion hall.
With the car back in the bay and Kurt trying to hug the ire out of his seething friend, I witnessed Donald madder than I'd ever seen him. Before or after that day. He got over it, though. It was crazy Kurt, after all, and the police never did come.
With the IROC came the Hurricane CBR 1000, a bike of Biblical speeds. The thing was fast off the assembly line, but, of course, Donnie had to tinker: Vance & Hines
clutch kit; Vance & Hines exhaust; a Dynojet carb kit; and, a bunch of cam tensioners. "Was that one of the fastest bikes around?" I asked Frank.
"Still is," he said, grinning.
And there were the boats. Before the Kryptonite, there was a Hydrostream
Viper, and there were jet skis, too. Even the 1969 wooden family boat had a 289 V-8.
He had mastered them all. He'd driven or ridden all these vehicles to the brink. Then he'd show up for the party, where we'd be waiting to order from Jerlando's.
After the September 4 accident, law enforcement officials took Don's speed boat upstate to investigate. Why did it make the hard turn that threw the two men overboard? Was it mechanical failure? On September 8, it arrived back at the marina. The investigation showed that the boat was sound, aside from the power steering belt having popped off. But that could have occurred when the vessel made the sudden jerk to one side.
Someone who said they witnessed the accident described the boat "chinewalking"
before things went bad. Talk was that perhaps an inexperienced pilot may have
decelerated rapidly, forcing weight to shift quickly from the bow to the stern. In 15 mph winds, who knows what happened next or why? All speculation. Still, knowing Don, if he'd have been driving the boat, are we having this conversation? Yeah ... probably not.
Donnie really did seem invincible, if that was humanly possible. He was unbreakable.
And if you're the sort of person who allows yourself to believe there are such people - not necessarily someone who's perfect, but the kind who always has sound, salty advice you wish you'd thought of yourself ... the kind who knows exactly how to fix whatever it is you've gone and broken, and he has exactly the right tools for the job ... the kind who never draws attention to himself, but who everyone wants to be around for reasons maybe even they can't quite pinpoint - you might even say Don Roberts was a sort of a "super man."
I knew it before, but a day after the accident I was reminded that the boat that turned so abruptly is a Kryptonite. And it killed Donnie in the deep lake where he'd worked and played and had spent the majority of his life since he was a boy, right up until one Saturday afternoon, when he plugged a laptop computer into that blown monster of an engine he built, then looked to "dial her in," as he'd say.
It was Kryptonite and he was Superman.
At the moment, it's about the only thing that makes any sense.
***
Don would enjoy this Silversun Pickups video. If you knew The Donald, you'll know why.
"See you next Tuesday, Donnie."
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