More Mad Men of Aerospace

Speaking of crazy, good-natured people brings to mind Dale “Big Red” White. Now here is a character with a colorful past. Before becoming an aerospace engineer, his past lives included professional boxer, semi-pro & one-time Seattle Seahawk football player, and locomotive engineer for Burlington Northern. Dale was 6’-1” and 265 solid pounds of teddy bear. He was one of the nicest guys you will ever meet, but his language was colorful and his topics of discussion anything but politically correct. His congenial disposition also had a line. If you turned on him, his family or one of his friends there would be hell to pay, and he could dole it out in any way needed. There are at least as many Dale stories as there are Jerry Lalone stories. Several are worth re-telling, as they are priceless and quintessential Dale.

One evening Dale and a buddy were driving down a backcountry road when they came upon what looked like a biker bar. Well, he was thirsty, so they stopped. After catching a good buzz and partaking in a few games of pool, he suddenly had the urge to visit the men’s room. By this time the bar was pretty crowded and Dale didn’t see a good place to set his beer while he did his business. Then, he noticed a big biker type bent over readying himself for a pool shot and displaying a fine plumber’s crack. Dale promptly decided that was the proper place to stow his beer, so he walked over, shoved his bottle down the guy’s crack and said, “Here, hold this.”

The next thing he knew he was waking up in a pile of snow outside the bar. Rolling out of the snow, he asked his buddy where his beer was and why the guy was so offended. His question was met with rolling eyes and that typical ‘really!?’ look a friend gives you. Needless-to-say, they were now persona non-grata at that bar so they quietly moved on.

For a time, Dale worked at Greenpoint Technologies, a VIP aircraft interiors company in Kirkland, WA. A lot of Brit expats worked there and through my contract engineering days I knew most of them. The Brits liked to frequent Barnaby’s Restaurant in Factoria Mall next to the I-90/I-405 interchange. Dale would sometimes go with them as part of the engineering group. One night 8 or 9 of them were sitting around in the bar with their drinks and loose money lying on the table. This big guy about 6’-8” and 280 pounds walks in, saunters over to their table and without breaking stride sweeps 4 or 5 $20 bills off the table before finding a perch at the bar. All the Brits look at each other but don’t say a word. Dale immediately said, “Aren’t you guys going to do anything about that?”

They all shook their heads. One of them said, “Look at the size of him. I’m not going over there.”

Dale shook his head and said, “You guys are a bunch of pussies. Fuck that!”

He got up and headed toward the guy, who was already into his first beer. Dale got up to him and calmly said, “I saw you take that money off our table and I want it back.”

The guy sneered at him and said, “Fuck you, old man.”

Dale patiently, but firmly said, “I’m not asking again. Give me the money back.”

The guy raised his voice, “Get out of here you fat old fuck.”

Dale calmly said, “Okay” and fainted to turn away as the guy started standing up. Then, Dale spun, deftly planting a solid right to the guy’s jaw. He crumbled into a heap on the floor. Dale picked the five $20s off the bar and said, “Thanks, you old fuck.”

For Dale, the ability to land a punch was a finely developed skill. He had huge, meaty hands that looked more like sledges when they were balled into a fist. Earlier in life he had been an undefeated professional boxer with 17 victories under his belt. I asked him why he had quit and he shrugged, leaned over and whispered to me, “I got tired of gettin’ n*gg*r blood all over me.” 

That was Dale. Even though the comment was certainly offensive, to Dale he was merely summarizing several facts into a single statement: they were not good-hearted people and he didn’t like what they stood for; it was merely coincidental they happened to be black. He was actually the most basic and decent of human beings, but he never minced words and he was certainly old school. Most of life had little grey in it for him.

In my same conversation with him, he also related he had been a locomotive engineer for Burlington Northern, piloting long haul trains from Chicago along the Empire Builder to Seattle. He said it was mostly boring as hell, but the kicker was he got tired of scraping pieces of bums off the tracks after being hit. There was no way to stop a 150+ car train in any kind of reasonable distance, so by the time someone was spotted on the tracks it was too late. And between the semi-regular carnage and the mountain of resulting paperwork, he had enough of it.

Years before I knew him, Dale had an aunt whose husband had died while serving time in the Walla Walla penitentiary. The aunt didn’t have the money to arrange shipping, so Dale and his brother generously offered to pick up her casketed husband at the pen. With their aunt’s consent off they went from Seattle in an old Oldsmobile station wagon.

In those days, Dale and his brother barely needed an excuse to have a drink, and a long drive to Walla Walla seemed like reason enough to crack a beer or two. By the time they got to the penitentiary they were fairly well lit. Still, they managed to appear sober enough to sign for the body and load the casket into the back of the Olds. On the road, they realized they were simply not ready to head home, and for such a good deed they figured they should give themselves a reward. What started out as a few extra stops turned into a five day drunken diversion around the State. But they didn’t forget about their cargo. No, in fact they had the corpse join in by perching him upright in the middle of the back seat! It didn’t seem right not to include him in the party. By the time they reached their aunt’s house in Seattle, she was understandably no longer speaking to them.

If all this sounds far fetched, there were disinterested third parties who verified all of these tales to me. In fact, one friend told me Dale’s versions were often tamer than the real thing.

Dale was also full of little one-line gems. In golf, he hit his 8-iron 220 yards and took divots that looked like beaver pelts. Each year he had his clubs re-lofted because he swung so hard the hosels would bend. His message: “If your butt cheeks aren’t puckerin’, you’re not swingin’ hard enough.”

On his invitation to tryout with the Seattle Seahawks: “Yeah, I stayed about ten days – until I figured out they were only using me for a tackling dummy.”

While I was rooming with him in Bellingham, he was sitting on the couch in his boxers one day after work and farted. Then there was a grimace, a little squirm and an exclamation, “Oops, I think that was more than a teaspoon full.”

After the laughter, he left for the bathroom and I noticed a spot on the couch….

Dale passed away in December, 2011 of a rare lung disease, Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. Despite his sometimes awkward utterances, he was a gifted storyteller with an easy laugh. He was a good, honest man, well-liked by all who knew him. They were not easy to find.