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Al Kiefer symbolized Dade City's past, present
© St. Petersburg Times When I think of Al Kiefer, who died this week, I think of the hottest day I ever spent outside Vietnam. It was nearly 20 years ago, and 25 or so of us crammed into a Quonset hut behind the National Guard Armory in Dade City. The heat created by the sun beating down on the hut's exterior was augmented by rows of open-flame deep-fat fryers and stoves on which massive pots of cheese grits were cooking. We had been brought there by a Dade City tradition of helping a stricken neighbor, Doug Newsome, a rugged taciturn firefighter in his late 30s who was in the last days of his battle with cancer. Roy Hardy, a Dade City humanitarian, was putting on one of dozens of his famous fish fries to raise funds to assist Newsome's family. I wanted to participate because Newsome and I were casual friends, and I wanted to write about the event. Too much seemingly participatory journalism is staged for the presence of cameras and ends as soon as they leave. You can get away with that covering people you will never see again; you can't when you will see them in line at the grocery store a week later. So I had asked Hardy, just so nobody would doubt my sincerity, "Give me the worst job you have." Five minutes later Circuit Judge Ray E. Ulmer Jr. and I were sandwiched between Al Kiefer and Dade City lawyer A.J. Ivey Jr. waiting for massive pots of water to boil before pouring in large bags of grits and bricks of butter and cheese. The process required constant stirring, and, er, fluid replacement. My need for credibility explained my presence there. For Ulmer, Ivie and Kiefer it was simpler. They were and are the kind of guys who always show up for that sort of thing and always take the toughest jobs. A local savings and loan association had provided a keg of beer, which helped replace the quarts of fluid we were sweating away, only some of it falling into the grits. Al had a bottle of vodka stashed in a small cooler behind where he stood. We helped ourselves liberally to the S&L's beer and Al's vodka. The guys from First Baptist Church, equally hot and deep-frying mullet on the other side of the hut, were drinking gallons of iced tea contributed by the local McDonald's. They didn't want any of our beer or vodka; we didn't want any of their tea, but we were all there in a good cause, and toasts were frequent. In the end we were exhausted, $20,000 had been raised and I, 10 years into my stay, was beginning to understand what living in Dade City was about. My colleague Chase Squires has already given you a broader view of Mr. Kiefer's contributions during a long and respected life. For me, it was simpler. I remembered the cheese grits, the night I badly needed pain medication after surgery -- Kiefer's Pharmacy stayed open a half hour late to make sure I got it -- and the famous Kiefer's 5-cent cup of coffee, probably written about by more journalists than any other aspect of Dade City society. There are sad and unmistakeable ironies in the unfolding of the fabric of small-town life since that hot day in 1982. Five years later Mr. Kiefer's son, Joe, also a pharmacist and one of the nicest guys in Dade City, died of cancer at about the same age Newsome did. Joe was also a volunteer firefighter, and his was to be the second funeral with full firefighter's honors that I was to see. I wish, as do we all, it had been the last. Ten years after that I was alone in Houston when my then-wife died of complications that arose during cardiovascular surgery. As I stumbled, shocked, back to the hotel where I was staying, a desk clerk handed me a faxed letter. Cindy Newsome Cox, whose sister, Fran, worked in the courthouse with my wife, offered her support and came to the hotel to have dinner with me. They were Doug Newsome's nieces. If telling the Kiefer family that none of us missed the integral part that Mr. Kiefer and all of them have been to so many of us these past decades gives them a brief smile at a hard time, I will have contributed to continuing the cycle. I tell you all of this because I am frequently asked why I have chosen to live in Dade City for nearly 30 years, and the short version is that I love the town and the people. This, I guess, would have been the long version.
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