WE HUNG OUT A LOT WITH TOM AT YVC. HE WAS THE BEST OF GUYS TO BE AROUND WITH A HEART OF GOLD! HAD SOME GREAT TIMES WITH HIM AND A GROUP OF US AT SCHOOL. I WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER TOM AND HIS KIND HEART. I BET I HAVE A FEW PICTURES OF HIM IN THAT TIME PERIOD... I WILL TRY TO DIG THEM UP.
I am going to share a memory of Tom which was actually predating West Valley in 8th grade. Apple Valley's basketball team. We played a game against Tom's team (not sure of the school). Have you ever had to guard someone who stood 6 inches taller than you? My proudest moment, I stripped the ball away from Tom without a foul and scored. We did not do too good against his team though. In high school he was good and helped create a lot of basketball excitement.
When I think of Tom my heart is full. Tom and I became very close friends and stayed in frequent touch up until the end of his life. I have a big void in my life now and miss him dearly. I have countless memories of fun and laughter and amusement with Tom and his family. I persuaded his wife to let me have his guitar that we had spent many fun times making up stupid songs on and laughing with. I will cherish it forever.
What I remember most about Tom was his kindness and his regard for fairness. There seemed to be a maturity that wasn't typical for the rest of us. He didn't seem to have any demons. I guess I was wrong. It goes to show how short life really is.
Hi Everyone from the Class of 78. As I write this it is August 6th, and I am sitting in Chicago O’Hare airport waiting on a flight home to Alaska. Due to some conflicts in my schedule, I will not be able to attend the 30th class reunion. The first two reunions were a blast, and Lord willing, I’ll be at the next one.
Several weeks ago Tam and Andy asked me to post on the class reunion website some thoughts and memories re: Tom Behar. I’m not sure why it has been so difficult for me to do so, but time is running out and here goes…….
One day in 1993 I received a call from Tom’s wife. I remember it like it was yesterday. She told me that Tom had shot himself and that he was dead. It was one of the worst days of my life. I’ll explain a little bit about what led Tom down that road later, but first let’s remember who Tom was.
We all remember what a great athlete Tom was. He held the high jump record at WVHS for many years (I think he jumped 6’-5” or 6’-6” in our senior year). He was also a great teammate and the starting center on our high school basketball team. Tom rarely had a bad word to say about anyone. He was a big, gentle guy. However, when he got angry on the court, he could become a one man wrecking crew. He had really sharp elbows, and it was a good idea to stay out of the way when he was swinging them around in the key .
Tom and I spent a lot of time together both during and after high school. I remember some great pick up basketball games at Randall Park with Tom, Rick Monnot, Tom’s brother Skip, Russ Fuerst, and many others. We went to a lot of movies together, double dated together, and went skiing (as total novices) at White Pass and tumbled down the ski hill in tandem. I remember that when I was nominated to the naval academy in 1978 by our congressman, Tom drove with me to Fort Lewis and was there while I went through all the physical tests they had for me, and he was there just outside the door when I had my very first “bend over and grab your ankles” experience in a doctors office. Not a great memory, but Tom was there to laugh with me when it was all over. Tom was just a genuine, thoughtful, and proud person, and he was a very important part of my life while in Yakima, and afterwards as well.
Here are a few good stories about Tom. There was the car wreck up on Ahtanum Ridge. He rolled his Dad’s Plymouth Fury while he was out drinking beer in the car – his story was that a cow ran out in front of him and he swerved to miss it, then caught his tires in the loose ground on the edge of the road. His parents bought it. Unbelievable!
Another one was the basketball game at Wapato when the little Latino guys were full court pressing us and driving everyone, especially big tall Tom crazy. He was so upset after one of them stole the ball from him that he said to me, “I’ve had it with these little bastards – I’m going to the basket every time I touch the ball”. Every time he touched the ball he just turned around and drove to the basket and jumped over everyone. They fouled him a bunch of times and I think he made like 13 free throws and laughed the whole time.
Another time was the ski trip to White Pass when we were both learning how to ski our senior year. It was snowing really hard and Tom was unprepared – he was wearing Levi’s and his letterman’s jacket. He really didn’t know how to turn but he could snowplow. Finally he just gave up on all technique and started bombing down the hill knowing he was going to eventually wipe out. He was on his rear end all day and by around 2pm he looked like the abominable snowman – totally coated in snow and ice from head to toe.
Another time was one of the inner tube/float trips down the Yakima River in the summer of 1980 – we did that several times with friends. There are these cliffs you can jump off and the top shelf is really high. I was too afraid of ending up a paraplegic to do the top cliff, but Tom walked right up there, yelled out some expletive, and jumped off. Bill Lynch is the only other person I ever saw jump from that spot. Tom went “splat” and swore he received a permanent enema from the impact in the water. He was so funny.
Another memory was his approach at drinking milk. He would grab a gallon jug of milk from the fridge with one hand and chug right from the carton like it was his own personal supply and then put it back for his parents and brother to share later - pretty gross actually.
Another food story - during the summer of 1978 Tom and I were bragging about how much we could eat and not “blow”. We decided a contest was in order. We both starved ourselves for a day and met at high noon at Pizza Hut during the all you can eat lunch buffet. They had those red and white checkered vinyl tablecloths. Much like a demented game of food cribbage, we each put a dime in the box closest to the edge of the table and every time we ate a piece of pizza, we got to move our dime one space. Some of the slices were small, some were large. Ultimately Tom ate 26 pieces of pizza and I made it to 25. He was an inch and a half taller than me so I told him he had more room to hold his pizza than me and it was cheating. We rolled out of there looking like pregnant men, but were laughing the whole time. Since the contest included keeping the food down, we hung together for a couple of hours to make sure the other guy didn’t explode. Unfortunately Tom didn’t and I lost.
Lastly, Tom taught himself how to play guitar by listening to rock and roll music on the radio. I remember visiting him at his parent’s place in roughly 1985 and he was sitting upstairs playing Stairway to Heaven perfectly. He was actually very good and he just learned by ear and messing around by himself. In many ways he was a talented guy.
After high school, Tom received a track and field scholarship to Wenatchee Valley College to be a high jumper. He really enjoyed that year, and I had a chance to go spend a couple of weekends with him in Wenatchee and met his college buddies. We went skiing at Mission Ridge, and just hung out ( I remember both of us really enjoying listening to a combination Rush and Foreigner music really loud during that trip ? ).
After his freshman year in Wenatchee, Tom returned to Yakima and worked at Shields bag and printing along with Russ Fuerst. After my freshman year at the University of Washington, my Mom was home alone and I decided to head back to Yakima and finish my pre-business courses at YVC, before heading back to the UW to finish. I lived with Mom during that time and from June of 1979 to March of 1980 were some of the most tiring, yet enjoyable, days with Tom. I worked evenings and weekends at a grocery store and went to school. Rick Monnot and Shawn Schai were still in Yak and they, Tom and I spent a lot of time together hanging around Mom’s house, listening to music, going to movies, playing basketball, and studying as well. When I left to finish my last two years of college at the UW in the fall of 1980, it was the last time I lived in Yakima.
What was really neat is that Tom knew my Mom was lonely and he arranged to stay with her for many months that winter after I left town for good. He was a rock for my Mom – shoveling the driveway, doing the things that he could do to help Mom out. I was actually home to visit Mom the weekend Mt. St. Helens blew and Tom was living with her at the time. I had a mid-term exam in Seattle the day after the eruption, and Tom drove me to the bus station while the ash was falling to get me out on the only bus that left Yakima for the next week. I made it to Seattle via Portland and got through the mid-term thanks to Tom. As was his style, Tom spent a week helping Mom recover from the eruption, shoveling the roof, cleaning up, etc.
Tom ultimately decided to get into the fiber optics industry way back in its infancy. He went to JM Perry Institute and obtained a fiber optics Tech degree, and then spent a few years working in that industry. He really enjoyed it and was apparently good at it, since he always seemed to have work.
When my wife Jeana and I were married in December of 1984, Tom was my best man in the wedding. I didn’t really realize it until just now, but Tom is the only friend of mine from the Yakima days who has ever flown up to Alaska to visit me and my family. He came up in I think 1989 for a week and we had a lot of fun – it was May and he really liked the beautiful mountains and Anchorage in general.
I’m not exactly sure what year it was, but I believe Tom was around 30 years old when he started getting sick. It started out as mainly attacks of nausea. In the next few years it got worse. He was able to work for a few months, then he would be stricken by severe nausea. He would throw up for days, and ended up in the hospital each time totally dehydrated. His ailment went undiagnosed and was never really figured out by his doctors. He went in for many, many tests. What he told me was that it appeared his gall bladder or pancreas was not working right, and that his digestive tract would be assaulted by excess bile and digestive enzymes to the point where it made him sick. The doctors couldn’t do much for him except keep him hydrated and wait until it stopped.
Ultimately his state of being perpetually sick ended up wearing down his immune system. He had a very large non-cancerous tumor removed from his lung, along with a portion of his lung. I remember visiting him and his wife and his adopted son out in Selah at the house they had moved into, approximately two or three months before Tom died. He was trying to put up a good front, but I could tell he was tired and discouraged about being stuck at home and sick. The normal Tom Behar bravado was not there. His wife was working and he was feeling bad about not being a consistent bread earner and a burden.
That day Tom’s wife called me to inform me of his death, she told me something that to this day really makes me upset and sad at the same time. She said that the night before he shot himself, he was sitting quietly in the kitchen by the phone. On the kitchen table in front of him was his personal address book, and it was open to the letter “V” – the page with my name on it. She was convinced that Tom was trying to get up the nerve to call me. I’m sure he wanted to say goodbye to me, but his wife said that she believed he did not call because he knew I would detect that something was wrong and that I would talk him out of doing what he needed, in his mind, to do.
Tom had some life insurance and a lot of unpaid medical bills. Ultimately I think he was just tired of fighting being sick, and felt the noble and best thing for his family from a financial and quality of life standpoint was to just take his life. The medical bills would get paid and his wife would not have to put up with taking care of him and bearing the financial burdens of the family. Tom was a proud and strong man who had been brought to his knees by an illness, and to be in the situation he was in was obviously too much for him. He killed himself in 1993. What a sad, sad day for those of us who loved Tom so much. That said, I can sort of understand the decision that he made.
It is unfathomable to me that it has been 15 years since Tom and I last talked. He was such an incredible guy, and the lives of his best friends are much richer for having known him. Rick Monnot, Tom and I were sort of the “three amigos” for the first two or three years after high school. My wife Jeana loved him like a brother, and even though she only knew Tom a fraction of the time I knew him, she was devastated by his death as well. I was so crushed by Tom’s death that I really could not bring myself to attend the funeral. I said goodbye to him in my own way from Alaska. Since that day, I have great difficulty at funerals. I probably have never really dealt with his death totally, sort of out of denial, although I have always accepted it happened. It was interesting when I heard from Rick today in an email that he feels the same way – neither of us can believe the sad road Tom spent his time on the last few years of his life.
I had better wrap this up and get on my plane here in Chicago. I’ll post this on the website when I get home. I understand that Ed Chadwick has been elected to read the memorial information regarding our classmates who have died. Sorry Eddie that this went on and on. It is a difficult thing to put so many important memories into a brief document on a computer. I’m really disappointed I can’t be there with you all. Unfortunately the reunion was scheduled on my 48th birthday, and by tradition I will be on the Talkeetna river near Mt McKinley in Alaska, fly fishing for salmon and trout and camping with our family and some friends. Hopefully I’ll see you all with my wife, Jeana, in ten years at the next reunion! If anyone takes one of those Alaskan cruises and wants some down home cooking while you are here, be sure to look us up.
God bless you all and have a great time at the reunion. Tom would not want anyone to pity his struggles in the final years of his life - please remember the happy times we all had with him and celebrate who he was – a great man and a good friend.
Linda K DeLong (Morgan)
WE HUNG OUT A LOT WITH TOM AT YVC. HE WAS THE BEST OF GUYS TO BE AROUND WITH A HEART OF GOLD! HAD SOME GREAT TIMES WITH HIM AND A GROUP OF US AT SCHOOL. I WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER TOM AND HIS KIND HEART. I BET I HAVE A FEW PICTURES OF HIM IN THAT TIME PERIOD... I WILL TRY TO DIG THEM UP.SINCERELY,
LINDA (DELONG) MORGAN
Chuck Gonsalez
I am going to share a memory of Tom which was actually predating West Valley in 8th grade. Apple Valley's basketball team. We played a game against Tom's team (not sure of the school). Have you ever had to guard someone who stood 6 inches taller than you? My proudest moment, I stripped the ball away from Tom without a foul and scored. We did not do too good against his team though. In high school he was good and helped create a lot of basketball excitement.Rick Monnot
When I think of Tom my heart is full. Tom and I became very close friends and stayed in frequent touch up until the end of his life. I have a big void in my life now and miss him dearly. I have countless memories of fun and laughter and amusement with Tom and his family. I persuaded his wife to let me have his guitar that we had spent many fun times making up stupid songs on and laughing with. I will cherish it forever.To Tom I miss you. God Bless
Chuck Gonsalez
Marty Wilson -What I remember most about Tom was his kindness and his regard for fairness. There seemed to be a maturity that wasn't typical for the rest of us. He didn't seem to have any demons. I guess I was wrong. It goes to show how short life really is.
Kevin Van Nortwick
Hi Everyone from the Class of 78. As I write this it is August 6th, and I am sitting in Chicago O’Hare airport waiting on a flight home to Alaska. Due to some conflicts in my schedule, I will not be able to attend the 30th class reunion. The first two reunions were a blast, and Lord willing, I’ll be at the next one.Several weeks ago Tam and Andy asked me to post on the class reunion website some thoughts and memories re: Tom Behar. I’m not sure why it has been so difficult for me to do so, but time is running out and here goes…….
One day in 1993 I received a call from Tom’s wife. I remember it like it was yesterday. She told me that Tom had shot himself and that he was dead. It was one of the worst days of my life. I’ll explain a little bit about what led Tom down that road later, but first let’s remember who Tom was.
We all remember what a great athlete Tom was. He held the high jump record at WVHS for many years (I think he jumped 6’-5” or 6’-6” in our senior year). He was also a great teammate and the starting center on our high school basketball team. Tom rarely had a bad word to say about anyone. He was a big, gentle guy. However, when he got angry on the court, he could become a one man wrecking crew. He had really sharp elbows, and it was a good idea to stay out of the way when he was swinging them around in the key .
Tom and I spent a lot of time together both during and after high school. I remember some great pick up basketball games at Randall Park with Tom, Rick Monnot, Tom’s brother Skip, Russ Fuerst, and many others. We went to a lot of movies together, double dated together, and went skiing (as total novices) at White Pass and tumbled down the ski hill in tandem. I remember that when I was nominated to the naval academy in 1978 by our congressman, Tom drove with me to Fort Lewis and was there while I went through all the physical tests they had for me, and he was there just outside the door when I had my very first “bend over and grab your ankles” experience in a doctors office. Not a great memory, but Tom was there to laugh with me when it was all over. Tom was just a genuine, thoughtful, and proud person, and he was a very important part of my life while in Yakima, and afterwards as well.
Here are a few good stories about Tom. There was the car wreck up on Ahtanum Ridge. He rolled his Dad’s Plymouth Fury while he was out drinking beer in the car – his story was that a cow ran out in front of him and he swerved to miss it, then caught his tires in the loose ground on the edge of the road. His parents bought it. Unbelievable!
Another one was the basketball game at Wapato when the little Latino guys were full court pressing us and driving everyone, especially big tall Tom crazy. He was so upset after one of them stole the ball from him that he said to me, “I’ve had it with these little bastards – I’m going to the basket every time I touch the ball”. Every time he touched the ball he just turned around and drove to the basket and jumped over everyone. They fouled him a bunch of times and I think he made like 13 free throws and laughed the whole time.
Another time was the ski trip to White Pass when we were both learning how to ski our senior year. It was snowing really hard and Tom was unprepared – he was wearing Levi’s and his letterman’s jacket. He really didn’t know how to turn but he could snowplow. Finally he just gave up on all technique and started bombing down the hill knowing he was going to eventually wipe out. He was on his rear end all day and by around 2pm he looked like the abominable snowman – totally coated in snow and ice from head to toe.
Another time was one of the inner tube/float trips down the Yakima River in the summer of 1980 – we did that several times with friends. There are these cliffs you can jump off and the top shelf is really high. I was too afraid of ending up a paraplegic to do the top cliff, but Tom walked right up there, yelled out some expletive, and jumped off. Bill Lynch is the only other person I ever saw jump from that spot. Tom went “splat” and swore he received a permanent enema from the impact in the water. He was so funny.
Another memory was his approach at drinking milk. He would grab a gallon jug of milk from the fridge with one hand and chug right from the carton like it was his own personal supply and then put it back for his parents and brother to share later - pretty gross actually.
Another food story - during the summer of 1978 Tom and I were bragging about how much we could eat and not “blow”. We decided a contest was in order. We both starved ourselves for a day and met at high noon at Pizza Hut during the all you can eat lunch buffet. They had those red and white checkered vinyl tablecloths. Much like a demented game of food cribbage, we each put a dime in the box closest to the edge of the table and every time we ate a piece of pizza, we got to move our dime one space. Some of the slices were small, some were large. Ultimately Tom ate 26 pieces of pizza and I made it to 25. He was an inch and a half taller than me so I told him he had more room to hold his pizza than me and it was cheating. We rolled out of there looking like pregnant men, but were laughing the whole time. Since the contest included keeping the food down, we hung together for a couple of hours to make sure the other guy didn’t explode. Unfortunately Tom didn’t and I lost.
Lastly, Tom taught himself how to play guitar by listening to rock and roll music on the radio. I remember visiting him at his parent’s place in roughly 1985 and he was sitting upstairs playing Stairway to Heaven perfectly. He was actually very good and he just learned by ear and messing around by himself. In many ways he was a talented guy.
After high school, Tom received a track and field scholarship to Wenatchee Valley College to be a high jumper. He really enjoyed that year, and I had a chance to go spend a couple of weekends with him in Wenatchee and met his college buddies. We went skiing at Mission Ridge, and just hung out ( I remember both of us really enjoying listening to a combination Rush and Foreigner music really loud during that trip ? ).
After his freshman year in Wenatchee, Tom returned to Yakima and worked at Shields bag and printing along with Russ Fuerst. After my freshman year at the University of Washington, my Mom was home alone and I decided to head back to Yakima and finish my pre-business courses at YVC, before heading back to the UW to finish. I lived with Mom during that time and from June of 1979 to March of 1980 were some of the most tiring, yet enjoyable, days with Tom. I worked evenings and weekends at a grocery store and went to school. Rick Monnot and Shawn Schai were still in Yak and they, Tom and I spent a lot of time together hanging around Mom’s house, listening to music, going to movies, playing basketball, and studying as well. When I left to finish my last two years of college at the UW in the fall of 1980, it was the last time I lived in Yakima.
What was really neat is that Tom knew my Mom was lonely and he arranged to stay with her for many months that winter after I left town for good. He was a rock for my Mom – shoveling the driveway, doing the things that he could do to help Mom out. I was actually home to visit Mom the weekend Mt. St. Helens blew and Tom was living with her at the time. I had a mid-term exam in Seattle the day after the eruption, and Tom drove me to the bus station while the ash was falling to get me out on the only bus that left Yakima for the next week. I made it to Seattle via Portland and got through the mid-term thanks to Tom. As was his style, Tom spent a week helping Mom recover from the eruption, shoveling the roof, cleaning up, etc.
Tom ultimately decided to get into the fiber optics industry way back in its infancy. He went to JM Perry Institute and obtained a fiber optics Tech degree, and then spent a few years working in that industry. He really enjoyed it and was apparently good at it, since he always seemed to have work.
When my wife Jeana and I were married in December of 1984, Tom was my best man in the wedding. I didn’t really realize it until just now, but Tom is the only friend of mine from the Yakima days who has ever flown up to Alaska to visit me and my family. He came up in I think 1989 for a week and we had a lot of fun – it was May and he really liked the beautiful mountains and Anchorage in general.
I’m not exactly sure what year it was, but I believe Tom was around 30 years old when he started getting sick. It started out as mainly attacks of nausea. In the next few years it got worse. He was able to work for a few months, then he would be stricken by severe nausea. He would throw up for days, and ended up in the hospital each time totally dehydrated. His ailment went undiagnosed and was never really figured out by his doctors. He went in for many, many tests. What he told me was that it appeared his gall bladder or pancreas was not working right, and that his digestive tract would be assaulted by excess bile and digestive enzymes to the point where it made him sick. The doctors couldn’t do much for him except keep him hydrated and wait until it stopped.
Ultimately his state of being perpetually sick ended up wearing down his immune system. He had a very large non-cancerous tumor removed from his lung, along with a portion of his lung. I remember visiting him and his wife and his adopted son out in Selah at the house they had moved into, approximately two or three months before Tom died. He was trying to put up a good front, but I could tell he was tired and discouraged about being stuck at home and sick. The normal Tom Behar bravado was not there. His wife was working and he was feeling bad about not being a consistent bread earner and a burden.
That day Tom’s wife called me to inform me of his death, she told me something that to this day really makes me upset and sad at the same time. She said that the night before he shot himself, he was sitting quietly in the kitchen by the phone. On the kitchen table in front of him was his personal address book, and it was open to the letter “V” – the page with my name on it. She was convinced that Tom was trying to get up the nerve to call me. I’m sure he wanted to say goodbye to me, but his wife said that she believed he did not call because he knew I would detect that something was wrong and that I would talk him out of doing what he needed, in his mind, to do.
Tom had some life insurance and a lot of unpaid medical bills. Ultimately I think he was just tired of fighting being sick, and felt the noble and best thing for his family from a financial and quality of life standpoint was to just take his life. The medical bills would get paid and his wife would not have to put up with taking care of him and bearing the financial burdens of the family. Tom was a proud and strong man who had been brought to his knees by an illness, and to be in the situation he was in was obviously too much for him. He killed himself in 1993. What a sad, sad day for those of us who loved Tom so much. That said, I can sort of understand the decision that he made.
It is unfathomable to me that it has been 15 years since Tom and I last talked. He was such an incredible guy, and the lives of his best friends are much richer for having known him. Rick Monnot, Tom and I were sort of the “three amigos” for the first two or three years after high school. My wife Jeana loved him like a brother, and even though she only knew Tom a fraction of the time I knew him, she was devastated by his death as well. I was so crushed by Tom’s death that I really could not bring myself to attend the funeral. I said goodbye to him in my own way from Alaska. Since that day, I have great difficulty at funerals. I probably have never really dealt with his death totally, sort of out of denial, although I have always accepted it happened. It was interesting when I heard from Rick today in an email that he feels the same way – neither of us can believe the sad road Tom spent his time on the last few years of his life.
I had better wrap this up and get on my plane here in Chicago. I’ll post this on the website when I get home. I understand that Ed Chadwick has been elected to read the memorial information regarding our classmates who have died. Sorry Eddie that this went on and on. It is a difficult thing to put so many important memories into a brief document on a computer. I’m really disappointed I can’t be there with you all. Unfortunately the reunion was scheduled on my 48th birthday, and by tradition I will be on the Talkeetna river near Mt McKinley in Alaska, fly fishing for salmon and trout and camping with our family and some friends. Hopefully I’ll see you all with my wife, Jeana, in ten years at the next reunion! If anyone takes one of those Alaskan cruises and wants some down home cooking while you are here, be sure to look us up.
God bless you all and have a great time at the reunion. Tom would not want anyone to pity his struggles in the final years of his life - please remember the happy times we all had with him and celebrate who he was – a great man and a good friend.
Kevin Van Nortwick
Paul Clark
This makes me very sad, Tom was a wonderful guy and always treated everyone with respect, he is greatly missed.