I work with an engineer whose husband works for the same company my friend Rich Mankiewicz did. Rich had relocated to India to oversee a board shop there. Making conversation several weeks ago I asked whether she had ever met or heard stories about Rich, one of the great characters I’ve had the pleasure to work with in my career in printed circuit boards. She had not, but a couple days later she came in and said, “You know, I asked Bob (her husband) about Rich and he said he died just last week in India.”
I was stunned. I had heard nothing! Evidently he had suffered a heart attack and died, at 55, which is 2 years younger than me. They had videotaped his funeral pyre and shown the tape to employees at the plant here in Rolling Meadows.
My last contact with Rich was a little over two years ago when I had emailed him photos of our daughter, who we had just adopted. He sent back two photos, one of a very pretty Indian woman, who he said he planned to marry, and the second of the motorcycle that was his main mode of transportation. H also stated he did not plan on ever returning to live in “Amerika”, as he called it.
Over the next week or so I called several people ho had worked with Rich, to see if they had heard anything and only one had, probably because he still worked in the PCB industry, for another Indian-owned shop.
You have to have known Rich to understand his “Amerika” comment. He claimed he was a fascist, but I think he just had an authoritarian streak. His comment, whenever we discussed the lack of commitment we found in most workers was, “What we need are some heads on stakes!” It has remained a running joke since then (the mid-90s) between Oscar Salazar and me.
He had walked away, or been fired form, most of his positions over the years. He was a self-described Eagle Scout- Mexican gun runner- heroin addict, and the latter caused him issues with several companies as would be expected. He was fired once, from Dynacircuits, I think it was the 3rd or 4th time he had worked there, because he slapped the union steward’s husband for smoking on company property. A smoker himself, Rich didn’t like other people doing what he couldn’t, and he could be very caustic in his comments.
But I must admit I had more on-the–job fun with him than almost anytime in my career. When he was promoted to Quality manager at Dynacircuits, after Lar, the Dancing bear, was asked to leave, Oscar Salazar, Rich, and I would sit in his nice big office (it had been the office for one of the original owners. it was connected to another large office by a bathroom with a phone next to the commode: real classy!) and play trivia games. Rich was one of the few people who had as much trivial knowledge as me, and Oscar would just sit back and laugh as Rich and I tried to stump each other with pop culture questions.
When he left Dynacircuits the 2nd time, for Tingstol, his main goal there was to become a VP so that he would get a company car. I have never known Rich to own a car in the 20 years I knew him. He drove a Jeep at Dyna, but he made the payments to the girl he was living with at the time, and when they broke up, she kept the car.
Rich finally got his company car, a Taurus station wagon, but several months later he walked out of Tingstol after getting into an argument with the owner. It was a cold, rainy November day and Rich had to walk to a bus stop in Elk Grove Village and ride a bus back to his hovel (I never saw it, but he shared a house with another addict) in Oak Park.
Rich was also one of the few co-workers my wife has met over the years, as I wrote in an earlier posting. We got together socially with co-workers at Dyna, but he scared her with his intensity. At the time, about 3-4 years into our marriage, I had expressed a whim of mine to establish a “Randyland”, a man cave, as the kids today say, in our 105-year-old Victorian in Elgin.
At one get together, Rich took this and ran with it. He came up to Lynn several times that night and kept going on about coming over the next weekend to begin construction of “Randyland”. Lynn looked at me with a frozen smile, “Yeah, sounds good.” I knew it was the alcohol talking (another Rich weakness) and the “Randyland” never came to fruition.
Anyway, I always kind of felt that I had Rich to thank for the set-up I eventually got in the house we moved to in 1998. A really nice video/stereo room with ample storage for my books, albums, VCR tapes, and DVDs.
Vaya con dios, Rich, and thanks.
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