Bob Heisey

 

 

 

The unforgettable and exasperating Bob Heisey

• By Ward Degler/Times Sentinel columnist

 

If you ever wanted a friend you could love and get furious with at the same time, you needed to know Bob Heisey. For seven years Bob lived on his 42-foot sailboat next door to My Friend the Boat Owner’s boat in Key West.

I counted Bob as a friend from the first moment I met him. I had just arrived at the boat yard to spend a couple weeks working on our sailboat. As I began unloading my car, Bob ambled down the gangplank from his boat, wearing a torn tee shirt, a floppy bush hat and a pair of shorts that looked like they had been used to soak up engine oil and bilge water. They were kept in place by a length of electrical wire instead of a belt. He held a cat under his arm and had several thick slices of bread in his other hand.

“This is the most delicious bread I’ve tasted in years,” he said, offering me a slice. “I found it at this new Bosnian bakery down on Elizabeth Street. A couple of refugees from the Czech Republic opened it last week.”I took the bread and bit into it. He was right. It was ripe with the aromas and flavors of Old Country, rich and yeasty. We never formerly introduced ourselves, but from that moment on, Bob Heisey was a friend.

Bob was a native son of Oakland, Calif. He seemed to be born with the genes of an adventurer. When he was 16, he and a buddy bought a dilapidated cabin cruiser that had been sitting in someone’s garage for an interminable period of time. Without checking for watertight integrity or even if the engine had oil in it, they launched it in the bay and roared out toward open water.

Halfway across San Francisco Bay, the engine died. When Bob opened the engine compartment, he found it was full of water. The boat was sinking. He and his buddy starting bailing like mad. Meanwhile, the tide was going out and they were being pulled out to sea. That was when they discovered the batteries in their two-way radio were dead. 

Fortunately, a fishing boat came by, threw them a line and towed them back to Oakland where they promptly hauled the boat onto dry land to check for leaks.

“In retrospect, we probably should have done that first,” he said with a sheepish grin. “The boat was so full of dry rot that I’m amazed it didn’t disintegrate when we put it in the water.”

Bob told that story as though it had happened just the day before and he had only just that moment realized buying the boat was a mistake. The fact is, Bob Heisey was a man of a thousand stories, maybe more. And in the course of seven years in Key West and two more up the coast in Titusville, I heard them all. 

Every time I saw him, I encouraged him to write things down, put them on paper and send them to a publisher. I can’t imagine anyone not being enthralled by the tales of Bob Heisey.

The December following the ill-fated boat episode, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and America went to war. Panic seized the west coast of the United States as rumors of Japanese submarines floated up and down the streets of Oakland.

“I really believed the Japs were going to come ashore within the hour,” he said. “I got out my Dad’s rifle and as much ammunition as I could find, and spent the entire night sitting on the roof of my parents’ house. I figured they might get me, but I’d take as many of them with me as I could.” “Write that stuff down!” I would yell, and he would nod graciously and launch into another story. It was infuriating. His words were pure gold, capturing the ear of anyone who happened by. But once spoken, they evaporated into thin air.

Later, Bob became a reporter for the Oakland Tribune and covered a myriad of fascinating events in and around the bay area, everything from practical jokes to heinous crimes — stories perfectly recorded in Bob Heisey’s memory.

After leaving the Tribune, he went to work for a major construction company which had a government contract to build airbases, roads and other infrastructure in Vietnam. More stories.

When his job in Vietnam was done, the company sent him to Kinshasa in Zaire — a city and country freshly born of what had been Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo. Bob arrived shortly after the bloody 1966 revolution led by Mobutu Sese Seko during which the entire country was Africanized and all hints of Belgian influence were swept away.

He was there to witness the fabled “Rumble in the Jungle” prize fight between Muhammed Ali and George Foreman.

Among the friends he and his wife Kathy made while there was a couple who claimed to have benign jobs in some vague and boring area of agricultural development in the emerging country. From time to time, Bob and Kathy would spend the night as guests at their home. One such morning they woke to find the couple gone, along with all of their possessions. A terse one-line note asked if Bob would drop the apartment key off at an attached address. “I had no clue, but, in retrospect, I think they worked for the CIA,” Bob said. “I never heard from them again.”

Later, Bob bought his sailboat “Liebchen” and began a life at sea. At first he sailed frequently around Florida, back and forth to Cuba and in the Gulf of Mexico. He gathered more stories — people, places and events, all rich, warm and humanly rewarding.

As the years advanced, Bob stopped sailing. He parked his boat at first one marina and then another, one boatyard and then another, finally winding up on Stock Island next door to Key West.

There he enjoyed the passing scenery, bought used equipment for his boat on eBay that he would never use, tried endless new recipes for exotic dishes and doted on Mazola, the African gray parrot that he bought before leaving Zaire, and a tailless cat named Bob that showed up one day on his gangplank.

Bob Heisey died last week after a two-year battle with cancer. He was 84. He never recorded his stories. It’s almost like a library burned down.