Ovid_and_Flem

Cotton said:

Very sad.  I kept meaning to reach out about the Porsche wheels he was selling,  but just never got around to it.  I had seen where he had indicated in a few posts he had health problems,  but I had no idea how bad.

I bought them, what a nice guy. Sorry to hear this news and I’ll pray for his family.

☹️

I don’t have any words. I liked him from his first post. 

He will be missed. 

Joined too late, gone too soon It was great having him with us for a few years, guy was entertaining as hell, on top of being a real mensch by the accounts of others on here. Apparently I was at 2 Challenges with him but didn't put a face to the username.

RIP.

:( I clicked this expecting you needing to get in touch with him for epic challenge or gambler concept fun. 

I hate this news. Rest easy, kind and entertaining fella. 

GameboyRMH said:

Joined too late, gone too soon It was great having him with us for a few years, guy was entertaining as hell, on top of being a real mensch by the accounts of others on here. Apparently I was at 2 Challenges with him but didn't put a face to the username.

RIP.

He was the guy sitting at stampies bar.

Thoughts and prayers to his family and friends.   His posts, were some of my favorite reads.  It's raining pretty hard in our hearts right now.

I take a day off the web and come back to this. Very sad news. Prayers for his family and GRM family that knew him better than me. 

He seemed like such a good person, I’m sorry for his family and friends. 

Damn. Gonna miss him. His posts always had such an unique mix of solid life advice and wild humor.

I could only hope to be a tenth of the online persona of him. To be honest he was one of the people I was looking forward to meeting this fall. I wish there was a way to share this thread with the family. Knowing that he had such a following might offer a sliver of comfort in these hard times. 

NickD said:

Damn. Gonna miss him. His posts always had such an unique mix of solid life advice and wild humor.

Amen to that!

It’s taken me over a day to try & compose my thoughts on Jim, and a part of me still expects a call from him at any moment declaring “You’re never going to guess what happened yesterday...”

Like everyone else, I didn’t quite know what to think when he arrived on the forums before the 2016 Challenge. However, when I posted about spectating that year, he replied declaring that I was on his team. 

As others who met him can attest, he was both the life of the party, and yet a true southern gentleman as well. If not for his enabling - by offering himself and his truck(as well as wheels/tires) - I’d have never had my Vette at the 2017 Challenge. 

I didn’t get to visit him much outside of the Challenge. Thinking back now I believe the last time I saw him was a year ago on one of my return trips from IL. I’d contemplated stopping by last Sunday on our way back from IL, but we had our critters with us & wanted to get home before they woke up. We did talk and/or text almost weekly though, and he’d messaged me Wednesday excited about his 911 clutch arriving and asking me to chauffeur him to the Challenge in it this fall. 

Without a doubt, from all the stories he told to me, his was a life well-lived and one without regrets of the past. 

In reply to white_fly :

I'm so glad you got to experience Jim firsthand. He would give the shirt off his back to anyone who needed it. Not a pretentious bone in his body. He always allowed people, me especially, to be themselves & was truly interested in what they had to say. He has left a great legacy, as I read these responses. There is a huge void in my world now but this photo shows who he truly was & I'm so grateful for your post! 

Javelin said:

I'm gobsmacked at the news! Rest in peace Jim.

 

I feel like designing a memorial Bolus & Snopes Ltd decal or something.

That is a great idea.  If I can help sketch something up on the computer let me know.

And this is terrible news.  It was pretty clear from reading his posts he was a super guy.

In reply to Pete Gossett :

Thank you for this, Pete. He thought the world of you & often told me about discussions on this forum. He so enjoyed having like-minded enthusiasts to engage with. Please know that he was so excited about finishing the Porsche rebuild, even emotive, which really wasn't his style. He had hoped to have it road ready in the next 2 weeks & even was going to allow me to drive it. Now it glares at me as a monument to how fleeting life is. Jim lived a full life, holding nothing back, and I can honestly say there are no regrets for missed oportunities to say what was felt, from either of us. I loved him madly & miss him madly.  

Jim showed up and it seemed like he’d always been there. He knew exactly how to fit in with just about everyone. 

He treated me like family, with us both having roots in Albany Ga  

He will be missed. My heartfelt prayers for his family. 

It's always hard to lose another of our friends.

Okay, the hooligans are in bed...

Its been a busy weekend with kids.  There was some driving time which is always good for me and putting my thoughts together.  Everything else is just rambling, so here we go.  

This news came to me by way of Patrick, via text, Saturday, 5pm-ish.  We exchanged some OMG's and disbelief.  I then got onto GRM and saw this thread.  That is when I went back and found the intro thread.  That night, in bed, I re-read the whole  the admittedly very odd yet very entertaining thread.  The re-reading reminded me of that time.  I had just come off Challenge $2015 which was The Year of the Aristocrats.  I had finished 10th overall and 1st in Aristocrats with the Q45 but more prestigious and more important to me, I had won Spirit of the Event Award that year.  I took this as high praise that I was doing something right according to the powers that be.   As appreciation for this award I had taken a vigorous stance for $2016 to get more people involved.  On the board I had tried to be a "cheerleader" for getting others to "come out and play."  I boiled this motto down to "GO".  If nothing else, GO and see what it is all about, even if that means to go as a spectator/investigator because I believe, if you go once, you'll be back.  Go as a spectator.  Come back as a competitor.  I had. 

When Jim came on the scene with his famous thread, I think he had seen other posts where I was doing this cheerleading.  I was active on his thread but shortly after he started posting he reached out to me directly.  We spoke on the phone multiple times before the event.  A couple of the calls were lengthy.  The calls we mostly going over the rules, the format and the process flow.  I tried to get him in on the Spirit of the Event.  We also talked about Jackson, MS.  I have an uncle who lives there.  Though Jim did not recognize my uncles name, they we both successful men living in generally the same part of town (not far from the reservoir)  in a town that really isn't that big in the grand scheme of things.  We agreed that the degrees of separation between them could not be that great.  

So, when I arrived at $2016, I already had a relationship going with Jim but we had not met in person.  Immediately, Jim made me feel special and important.  Naturally, I thought this was from giving him tips and insight.  As I read the posts of others here, I think I may have learned that Jim made everyone feel important, even in just casual encounters.  At the Challenge after party, I sat for a long time with Jim at a table, poolside.  He had with him bottles of Cathead Brand Vodka.  We did some major damage on a bottle of Pecan Vodka.  I think we might have been drinking it with iced tea...I don't quite remember, its blurry.  He sent me home with a bottle of Pecan and a bottle of Honeysuckle.  I still have the Honeysuckle.

Again, I thought I was important.  What I may have just now learned is that Jim was the one who was important.  I am the one who is better off for having known him!  

We then gathered again the next few years.  Always good to see him at the events.  

Like others, I enjoyed his replies on the board and I followed his 911 Safari project.  I had not realized until reading the comments here, just how much he was pouring into others.  He did seem like a guy who knew a lot and had even more to give.  

There is another thing that is just coming to my revelation....  Sure, Jim was an older guy.  I'm gonna guess mid 70's.  I know he had had a stoke that "challenged" one side of his body a bit and there was a cane.  This is a guy who had an interesting past with quite the history.  He could have come onto the board and told stories of the past and probably not run out of stories, but...  Even if you go back and read his "burst on the scene" thread, there is history in that thread but that thread is not about history, that thread is about his plans for the NOW.  His plans to enter The Challenge.  He's also known for his 911 Safari build.  Also, not a history lesson but the chronicles of his NOW.  

I too looked for a photo of Jim but did not find one in my Challenge photos.  However the pic posted by White Fly is a great picture.  This is the Jim I knew.  Always at the events in his signature overalls.  I started to crop the picture down so we had a closer picture of Jim but then by doing that you loose the smiles that surround him!  So, I intentionally cropped the picture down to half the face of the others and all the face of Jim.  This way, you still get the smiles and as an added bonus, you can inset yourself in as half the smiling face next to him.  

Thanks for the lessons Jim.  Make others feel important and keep planning for the NOW.

Wow, while I was writing this out, I see comments have come in from his account.  I was initially sort of startled.  

In reply to John Welsh :

I sent Robbin a link to the thread.

In reply to John Welsh :

That was beautiful . I smiled even more when I clicked the thumbs up button and it went up by +4. It always felt like he was always here. Which makes his passing even harder. 

There's no way I can sum things up as well as John, but I'd like to share my story as well.  The $2016 Challenge was my first as well as Jim's.  Neither of us knew who the other was, although I had my suspicions given his proximity to the Bolus & Snopes C4; when I approached him towards the end of the Concours, despite a four decade plus age gap (and me looking every bit like the grimy and sleep deprived kid I was{/am}), I was greeted with respect and we shared a moment of wonder at the vehicles and competitors around us.  We only spoke for a few minutes, but our shared takeaway from that first event and that first conversation was "This is my kind of event and these are my kind of people- I will be back."

 Jackson is a long way from me, but if anyone wants a group to get together and finish the Safari 911 I'll be there.

Damn. 

RIP. 

NOT what I expected to be reading when I saw the post.

One of the bricks is gone from our house. NOT what I expected to be reading when I saw the post.

Pete