Rafael & I dated our senior year & for a short time after graduation; however, we always stayed close friends & loved visiting one another. I have many good memories of our times together. He was smart, funny & talented. He identified strongly with his Greek heritage & changed his last name back to what it was before his father immigrated, Athanasopoulos. He worked so hard to become a dentist. Sadly, his career (& life) was short-lived (1956-1990). I grieve for his family; he was very much loved. R.I.P. Rafael!

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(This is a letter I wrote to Bill Bignotti’s Dad, after learning he was nearing his 90th birthday. I never heard back. My recollections can get a bit…colorful, but this is how it plays back.) May 26, 2008 Mr. George Bignotti: There’s no reason you’d remember me, but I was your neighbor during some of the years your family lived on Hillside in Burlingame. Billy and I were classmates, and best friends or worst enemies, depending on the week, from about ’64 - ’68. I was checking out the Indy 500 grid yesterday to see if I could find any attachment to your legacy to root for, as I have since I was a little kid. This led me to the posting about your 90th birthday (congratulations!) and this address. It also led me to several references suggesting Billy passed away in 2005. Words fail me to express how sorry I was to learn that. Bill was the most gifted kid I knew, and somehow most of his peers instinctively knew that as well. From that age, I wouldn’t presume to know what Bill’s “calling” was, but one thing was clear: if something held his interest, he’d be very good at it in very little time. I thought a few memories of Billy as a young man might possibly cheer you up a quarter notch. You may not know that Bill had one hell of a singing voice, and sang the lead in our sixth grade play. He was scary-good. On a related note, Bill decided one day he might like to play the French Horn. There was a story that this was the one open “position” in the school orchestra, hence why Bill chose it, but I honestly think he just dug French Horn. By the next week he was in the band, and by the next month he was a featured player. I clearly remember how listening to Bill practice that horn went from being torture to being kinda cool in a matter of days. The last time I saw Bill was at a party in ’75. He was a bit stand-offish but he was as always under the influence of pretty, young women. I misspoke about the oversteer inherent in our ’65 Mustangs, and Billy never suffered fools. It was a short conversation. I’m unclear, but as it plays back in my mind, I don’t think Bill graduated with our class. He was “always” getting into trouble at school, and – I think – finished High School at the private Moore School on Peninsula Avenue in Burlingame. What his friends knew that seemingly none of the Mills High teachers cared enough to realize was that Bill was such a pain in the ass because he was profoundly bored. I’ll give just one example. There was a reading class we were required to take in our sophomore year. As I recall, the intent was to test and increase your reading speed and comprehension by making you read increasingly difficult short articles with a horizontal bar skimming down the page, blocking the words above it, that went ever faster the farther you got into the succession of color-coded skill levels. You didn’t “graduate” to the next color group (four “lessons” per color?) until you demonstrated 75% comprehension over all four lessons at your current “level”. I’d guess there were 16 color levels, which weren’t the same but oddly similar to the color progression on a Monopoly board (this surely wasn’t a coincidence). A majority of my classmates hated the class because it was pretty tough, and your success was apparent by which color level you were reading at. But I liked it. I’ve always been a slow reader and have always had a poor memory, but I’m a bit competitive, and so I was very keen on keeping up with my best friend, Eric Rodli. He was well in front of me but I was drafting pretty well. I’ll say Eric was at level 12 and I’d closed some ground to level 10, and…where’s Billy? He’d graduated the class, first, and was thus no longer required to attend, always an attractive attribute to Billy. When we were like nine, Billy, Jimmy (Peterson) and I built a “fort” of plywood and heavy gauge cardboard underneath the stairway that led to the loft above the Hillside house’s garage. For an entrance we built a long tunnel that began on the house-facing side near where the stairway began. We purposely built the tunnel just 2’ x 2’, barely big enough for us to crawl through, on the theory Carol [Mrs. Bignotti] wouldn’t get on her hands and knees and crawl that twenty feet to see what the hell we were doing in the large end room, where we’d laid a 6’ x 6’ piece of foam rubber as a mat, under which we hid our collection of Playboys. We built onto the fort for a couple of weeks, until it had a third floor, and then, typically, moved onto something else, leaving the fort behind. Carol got tired of looking out her kitchen window at this “eyesore”, and made repeated threats to tear it down, which Bill of course ignored. I don’t recall what it was she said or did, but one night she convinced us she really was going to rip it down the next morning. By that time we hadn’t been in there in several months. After dinner that night Bill convinced me we needed to retrieve the Playboys before Carol tore the fort down. So we went out there about 9p, and crawled the twenty feet on our hands and knees into the larger room. In order that Carol not see us from the kitchen, we didn’t turn on our flashlights until we cleared the 20-foot tunnel and got into the larger room. When we did, and turned our flashlights on, we saw we had company: seemingly a dozen black widow spiders. The best part of the story is when we looked at each other. I was horrified: Billy almost smiled at the irony. He wisely let me panic and therefore go back down the tunnel first, our waving flashlights confirming we’d just crawled through a bunch of widow webs. Bill did finally allow himself some fear when we got out, stood up and began swatting widows off each other, but he was not nearly as freaked out as I was. I remember him pulling me by the arm around to the south side of the garage so Carol wouldn’t see us long before I was sure we’d gotten all our passengers off us. Cool in a crisis, that kid. The banana yellow electric go-kart you gave Billy was a huge success, but then I guess his path in life pretty well confirms that. Even if it did only go 10 mph, it was the coolest thing in the neighborhood. As his succession of karts got faster and faster, the less and less he’d let his friends pilot them. Casual friends took this as snobbery, but Jimmy, Greg (Hart) and I knew it was because Billy was getting into speeds we couldn’t handle. He wouldn’t want to see us get hurt or, much worse, screw up the alignment. The last time Billy let me drive his current kart I spun it turning down Newton Drive from Hillside at about 165 (okay, 25) mph. In hindsight, his decision to not let me drive again is probably the reason I survived the seventh grade. Obviously we knew nothing so our standards were naive, but it was still somehow clear from the git-go that Bill was one hell of a driver. It was very important to Billy that you prove your courage. One of his favorite stunts when some new kid came around was to go into the garage, take a steel wash bucket, fill it a quarter full with gasoline, and toss lit matches into it. I knew the fumes in the (somewhat) contained area would eventually ignite, but somehow Billy always knew just when to quit. How close to the bucket you were willing to stand, which is to say how close to Billy you stood, seemed to measure his companions’ worthiness. It took me several times through this ritual before I realized Bill always used the third garage stall for this “Rite of Passage”, the one opposite the sliding glass door, which, like the garage door, was always left open. Bill liked explosives. I thought bottle rockets and cherry bombs were cool, but it took M-80s to hold Billy’s attention. He liked using his wrist rocket (a wrist-braced aluminum sling-shot with surgical rubber tubing) to shoot M-80’s a good 50 feet into the sky, or maybe just past my Aunt Judy’s rear window. The idea was you pulled the M-80 back past your ear, your buddy lit it and told you when the fuse was lit so you’d know when to let go. After a few it became kinda funny to wait a half-beat after it was lit to tell your pal to launch it. My ears are still ringing but as Billy would note, “You still have all your fingers, don’t you?” I do. As mentioned, Bill and I didn’t always get along. We fought more than a few times, and the fact he clearly was never that mad at me contributes heavily to the reason I’m able to write you today. But at least as often as we fought each other, we fought for each other. One afternoon on the bus my smart-ass mouth had gotten me into a silly rock and roll argument with Ken Mountain, who was a pretty tough customer. Ken jumped me as we got off the bus and was wailing on me pretty good. I was on my back and considering giving up when instantly, the huge silhouette of Mountain vanished, as if a fork lift had plucked him up. It was Billy, and just Billy. He got the better of Ken, who retreated. I asked Bill why he’d done that (this was during one of our “I hate you” weeks), and he simply said “That wasn’t for you: that was for (my older brother) Brandy.” We never spoke of it again. It’s interesting that the much bigger Mountain wanted no part of fighting Billy. Before closing, I want to thank you again for introducing me to that saint, A.J. Foyt. It really was a thrill, seemingly a bit more for my cousin Dave and me than him, but that was shaking the hand of greatness, and we knew it. Seeing the Parnelli Jones Special in your garage was almost as cool as the first time I saw tits. Okay, almost half as cool. One more story. The east edge of our lot was a thirty-foot cliff to the lot below. In this day and age, people would be flocking from miles around so they could trip off it and sue us. Back in the 60’s, well, we were going to get around to building a retaining wall and a fence as soon as the jerk who owned the lower lot agreed to pay for half of it. One afternoon I was to meet Bill at the end of the Hillside alley (one door uphill from your place). I don’t know why I remember this, but when he was late, I was annoyed. Among his other fine qualities Billy was pretty punctual for a sixth grader. He showed up, apologizing for I’m not sure what because I interrupted him to ask why he was bleeding. Not that Bill bleeding was big news, but he’d removed his T-shirt and was holding it against his head. It was a white T-shirt, probably, but the amount of red on it made that debatable. He’d used my back yard as a short-cut, and in his haste, stumbled, fell off the cliff, and landed way too close to head first. Thankfully, he hadn’t hurt any part of him that had common sense. He didn’t understand my concern. About ten years later I’d remember Billy’s attitude at that moment when Monty Python’s Black Knight (“Monty Python and the Holy Grail”) observes, after he’d just had his legs cut off above the knees, that “It’s only a fleshwound”. I told Billy to “Look at the blood!” on his T-shirt. He casually did so, and only then began to think this might be a situation worth considering. But he decided it wasn’t a big deal, and we were able to stop the bleeding before long. Carol disagreed, and I got “grounded” for not bringing the matter to my Mom’s attention when she saw Billy’s stitched-up head a few days later. Mom just didn’t get it: Bill Bignotti was pretty near indestructible. Such are the foolish beliefs of childhood: it turns out none of us are. Mr. Bignotti, I hope this handful of anecdotes give flavor to how much Bill’s childhood buddies looked up to him as a fearless, brilliant, possibly slightly crazy, but absolutely faithful friend. Today I consider others from those days as greater friends, because they’ve remained friends, but the simple fact is Billy outgrew me. He outgrew all of us. Even when he was a boy, Billy was a Man’s Man. I’ve often wondered which races his wrenching was winning, what he was driving that would keep that cheetah in him at bay, and how many wives he’d had. At the same time. It would be great to hear from you, sir. - Respectfully, Guy Atkinson

I recall Jim Bradshaw from elementary through high school, a seemingly sweet kid with a big smile. Sorry to hear he's gone.

Julie, Meeting up at your house and walking to Mills together was always a great way to start the day. You are missed, but not forgotten.

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Julie, I miss your boisterous laugh, the good times we had and your caring spirit. I loved being tomboys together, hanging out at BIS and in high school and all the good times we shared.

I knew Mark peripherally at Mills and Temple Sholom. It wasn't until adulthood that I got to know him, and what a wonderful man he was. And gone much too soon.

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Mike, thanks for all the great rides in your gold Mustang while singing loudly and proudly all over Millbrae and Burlingame.

What do you say about a friend who changed your life? Dean and I were camping when he mentioned going to Puerto Vallarta with him. Halfway through our trip I met a girl vacationing from San Francisco. We started dating back home and 2 weeks later we were engaged ! Been married for 36 years and counting. Thank you Dean ! Always fun times together boating,shooting pool, and drinking cuba libres ! Wish you were still here bud

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Dean had a special needs older sister who sustained a head injury as a toddler. Dean looked after her with compassion. I witnessed it as I lived in the same neighborhood. In kind, Dean was thoughtful and loyal to anyone he considered a friend. And Dean had friends. Dean sadly passed a few months after retiring in his middle 50’s.

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Dean, we went to school together at Lincoln, BIS and Mills and later were work colleagues at California Teachers Association for many years, where we talked every day and supported each other. I remember my first day at CTA, seeing your name on the list of employees and knowing I would have a good friend. We decided to sit together at the 30th Mills reunion. You were such a good man and I miss our friendship.