My mate Bobby did not deserve to die

19 Oct, 2001 09:37 AM4 mins to read

Kiwi JOHN LATTA remembers Bobby Stevens, victim of the US anthrax scare.

The last time I saw Bobby Stevens I was wearing a particularly buxom nurse's outfit and he was dressed as a circus clown.

For two guys whose favourite spare-time occupation was wandering around the backwaters of the Florida Everglades, we looked especially silly. It was Halloween, the last week of October, last year.

This October Bobby died of anthrax.

For about five years I worked in the building that is today the American Media headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida, the building where Bobby contracted the disease that would kill him.

I'd known Bobby for years. Before we worked in that building we'd worked a few miles up the road. We were friends who'd leave work for a beer and burger lunch fairly regularly, maybe meet now and then on weekends. After he died I got to thinking: Bobby Stevens was one of the happiest people I ever knew.

Here was someone, an Englishman who loved the sunny life in Florida, who was always delighted to meet someone. He came to new people in his life with a genuine interest, listened to them and found things to talk about that interested them.

He asked them what they thought and took in their answers. I remember wishing I did that more often.

His common greeting to me was, "How ya goin, ya bloody Kiwi?" in his best imitation of a Brit trying to sound like a New Zealander. I remember how he had introduced me to Boddingtons, the beer you could pour from a warm can straight into the glass without the head foaming up and rushing over the side.

"Some little widget thing in the can does the magic," he said. And we sat at that counter and opened many, many more to see if they all worked. They did. We were late back to the office. I think that was our last lunch together.

He enjoyed every day of his life, but after a heart attack a few years back he started to watch what he ate. A beer aficionado, his drink of choice became a good glass of red wine, although he sometimes sneaked in a stout or dark ale because of its heart healthiness. He must have been really healthy and expecting to live a long while when he inhaled those anthrax spores.

The Halloween fancydress party was at a mutual friend's house. She has been mouth-swabbed for anthrax now, like everyone else in that building. I asked another friend how her sister, another former co-worker and mother of three young daughters, was handling it. She has good days and bad days. On the bad ones she just loses it, said her sister. She has since been found free of anthrax.

And another Englishman who worked with Bobby and me told me he'd been swabbed, too, because he pops in once a week to get his hands on some British dailies. So far he's free of it. Other friends from that building are shaken, jittery, but okay.

Many of the World Trade Center terrorists lived in Delray Beach, my old Florida home. My mother-in-law, from neighbouring Boca Raton, called my wife the other day with a strange hitch in her voice.

This week was my son's 12th birthday and his granny had sent him a card to our present home in Alabama. She called to say when it arrives my wife should collect it with gloves on and maybe one of those masks painters use to stop inhaling fumes.

She had posted it, she said, at the Boca Raton post office that services the American Media building where anthrax spores had been found.

Gloves almost certainly won't be needed, but my wife will use them anyway.

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