Please forgive me if you find this inappropriate for this forum


 I knew from the moment I met him that he was off grid which is an essential quality for any good board designer and especially for the Porch Dawg that he was. Steve Toothacre was one of those people that could amaze you one moment and get you riled up the next. But he could always make ya laugh. He was a heck of a harp player - played it everywhere he went and understood all the complexities of it. He was an early member of the Porch Dawgs - first chair harmonica.They tell me he was also a good designer and from what I've seen of his work I can believe it.
We could spend hours if not days recounting stories involving "Pork Chop". Many of them are truly the stuff that legends are made of. Talking today to people that knew him we found ourselves sad one minute and laughing our butts off the next remembering stories involving Steve. There was the time he tried to sneak a huge hunk of bone, with some meat still left on it into my hotel room. I mean the thing was big enough it took two people (him and Rich Collins) to carry it. He'd taken it from the carving station on the show floor at PCB West and was gonna play a Godfather style joke on me. When he couldn't get anyone to let him in my room he thought to stash it in the shower in his room. The next morning he got up a bit late and went down to get breakfast. Well as luck would have it, housekeeping came to make the room while he was gone. Can't you just image the maid's reaction when she flung back the shower curtain to clean the tub and saw this huge hunk of bloody meat lying there? And then Steve walks back into the room while she's having a panic attack. Another variation of the story, told by an innocent and anonymous bystander (named Ronda) has Mike Fitts and Rich Collins teamed up with Steve in the caper. It was her first show and the first time she'd met any of them. When she got on the elevator and saw them holding this white table cloth wrapped around something with blood dripping out she began to get scared.  She says Fitts looked at her, grinned, and said "uh, it's not a body."
Another time he was passing out business cards at the show and telling people to put these cards in their wallets and within 30 days it would change their life. Well, the card was magnetic. It changed people's lives all right, when it demagnetized their credit cards.
Another time he called me about a month after PCB West. " Hey Pete, I've got your carpet."  Huh??? "Yeah, on the last day of the show when everyone was breaking down the show floor and packing up, I got some guys to roll up the piece of carpet with the PCB Design Conference logo on it and shipped it to my office. I was gonna mount it on the wall. Problem is it's too big for the *%@#%&* wall. The damn thing is huge! Where do ya want me to ship it to?" 
Turns out it was the third year we'd used this piece and the show management was gonna trash it anyway. Steve was stuck with it and we didn't have to pay to have someone to haul it off
There's lots more stories of the "Pork Chop". Teresa Gentry and Laura Sims (who Steve loved and always said was the one that got away, others say the one who RAN away) tell that one year they were having lunch in the lobby of the Westin at Santa Clara when Steve showed up. They asked if he'd like to have lunch but Steve said he'd already eaten and didn't wanna spend the fourteen bucks for the buffet. Trouble is the pork chops smelled so good that Steve had to get a closer smell. Taking a cloth napkin in hand, he walked over as if to examine the buffet and sort of apprehended a couple of grilled pork chops that were clearly intending to escape by jumping out of the steam tray onto the floor. As luck would have it the runaway chops fell square into Steve's folded napkin. Well, what could he do but punish the recalcitrant chops by forcing them to spend a couple of hours in his stomach and points beyond. Steve was, from that point on, affectionately known as "Pork Chop".
I didn't tell him often enough, but I loved and respected him. And I'll love his memory for a long, long time. And next time there's a full moon, I'll go outside, look up at his smiling mug etched as the new man-in-the-the moon, and howl long and hard for him. Hell I hope that every hound for miles around joins in and creates a noise that will reach all the way up there where he is now. 

See ya next time Pork Chop, play it loud brother. 


Pete Waddell
President 
UP Media Group
678-589-8813


Pete Waddell
President 
UP Media Group
678-589-8813
[log in to unmask]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DesignerCouncil Mail List provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8d
To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in
the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF DesignerCouncil.
To temporarily stop/(restart) delivery of DesignerCouncil send: SET DesignerCouncil NOMAIL/(MAIL)
Search previous postings at: www.ipc.org > On-Line Resources & Databases > E-mail Archives
Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-615-7100 ext.2815
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------