To the greatest man I have ever known…
DB,
I will honor your life with greatest respect and admiration.
We honor you with the love and the whole of our hearts because you will never and cannot ever be replaced.
You were like a father to me. You are my godfather.
Donald L. Baum
You were the greatest man I’ve ever known.
I would never give up the time we spent together.
With the tears I will shed today, and the grief I feel, your memories will be honored, your life celebrated and your existence never forgotten.
I know you will look down from above at all of us. I can feel the pride you have for everyone that you guided and helped.
It gives me great strength knowing you are still with us and will be forever, when we leave this place. I will miss you but I know that I will see you again so this isn’t a farewell.
I look forward to more political conversations, football talk, playing with gadgets, or a poker game and to share jokes with you again someday.
Maybe someday I will beat you in a game of pool. (Fall 2011)
Your life on earth was cut short but your list of accomplishments were long.
Your gifts of confidence that you instilled in me, the wisdom that you shared and the value I place on your work ethic, values, morals and norms were priceless principles in my toolbox, shaping a young man.
You will always be my family’s patriarch, the leader, helper, teacher and a Marine.
You won’t have to fight anymore and can now be in peace going forward.
You showed me that life is not just the here and the now but the then and there as well. With your passing, I am taught another great lesson; that we should never dwell on the past nor the future but the now, for life can end at any point, for any reason, for anyone, even for the greatest man I have ever known.
When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure
One of the fondest memories that I have as a kid (and one of my earliest) was treasure hunting with my uncle Don (or DB as everyone knew him) .
We were out walking with a metal detector. Somehow DB knew where to go to find the treasure. We walked all over from silver dollar to quarter. I can still remember how exciting it was to locate these things and was even more impressed with his uncanny ability to know where to always find them…
Years later I figured out that we were only in his back yard (although it seemed huge to a little kid) and that he was throwing the change from his pockets out ahead of us so that there was always something that would make the metal detector buzz and whirl with sound as we got closer.
This man was much more than a fun person. He enjoyed spending time with kids, he had a knack for it and was always my favorite uncle. He was a successful man, interested in tech gadgets (something that we shared) and could always make you laugh with a poetic pause while ever slightly leaning his head back with wide open eyes and a funny look on his face that was part of his character. There are few that are as great as he was or as much of a charmer. A big man, mostly in heart.
The world is not as great of a place as it was yesterday when you were still in it DB, no treasure lost because you are always in my memories…
August 12, 1942 ~ March 29, 2014
