Richard Smith

Richard Smith died last night. That sucks. He used to be my dad’s best friend but they had some ridiculous falling out years ago. But me and him stayed friends, sorta. I’ve known him all my life. When I was a teen, he’s the guy I’d call to come and pick me up when I had car trouble. And he always answered all my computer questions and gave me tons of free pirated software. I remember him coming by and picking me up once at 2 in the morning with my parents not knowing. In the late 90’s I started seeing a lot of him again and we worked on computer stuff together. He got me some job with Ray Grimley which I never got paid for because Richard ran off to Ohio for some contract job. That’s the last I saw of him. He’d been back in the Alton area for a few years but I’d never seen him. He had a stroke a few weeks ago, then they found that he had lung cancer in both lungs. He was a heavy smoker. Even though I haven’t seen him in 6 years and I probably never would have seen him again, I’ll miss him. He was 58.