Wayne Joseph Peter Dalton
Family man, baseball coach, mover of money. Born on Oct. 24, 1948, in Peterborough, Ont.; died on Feb. 2, 2015, in Ajax, Ont., of kidney failure, aged 66.
Wayne Dalton was raised in a red-brick bungalow in Scarborough, Ont. That house, hard by the schoolyard where we as boys played endless games of road hockey, was a mystery to his friends. We counted two aunts and an occasional uncle, but no discernible father or mother.
Only much later, when we learned the truth, would we wonder how Wayne survived his childhood, how a boy denied love somehow learned to give it so freely. He never explained his circumstances, or complained about them. He possessed sad-sack eyes, but no one was more upbeat than he. Wayne had a hee-hee laugh and shoulders that rose and fell as he invariably made some joke about himself. We do not remember a cross word coming from him, or aimed at him.
When he was 17, he met 14-year-old Dodie Sobisz at a church dance. They married in 1971, raised two sons, Jeff and Matt, and later welcomed four grandchildren. Wayne was proud to be known as GW – Grandpa Wayne.
Wayne had artistic talent (he created the mascot for his high school, Wexford Collegiate; was devilishly clever as a cartoonist; and studied at what was then the Ontario College of Art) but, sadly, his gifts would go largely untapped. Over the years, his résumé took pretzel-like twists and turns. "He was so unpredictable, always the dreamer," Dodie recalled.. "He would say one thing, and do the opposite. There was never a dull moment."
Wayne worked in the advertising department of an insurance firm, as a sales rep for a doughnut company, as a labourer in construction, for a copier company. Finally, the man who had perfected job insecurity landed a job – in security, moving bags of money in a Wells Fargo truck. That suited Wayne just fine because his route invariably passed a doughnut shop.
One of his passions was baseball. He had coached his young sons in T-ball and fastball, then he launched a neighbourhood slow-pitch team, the Night Hawks. Wayne was catcher and coach, and the team occupied the centre of his social universe.
They say you should make lemonade when life hands you lemons, but did Wayne have to be handed so many lemons in his final years? Lymph node issues, for example, turned his legs into massively swollen stumps. Yet he met these indignities with his own brand of dignity, good humour and a stoicism that he retained almost to the end.
Wayne was ever kind, ever goofy, ever sentimental, ever keen to be teased, ever serious about some things (military history, reincarnation, valued friendships). When he said goodbye after reunions with old friends, he would hug us so hard we worried about ribs snapping.
"He was a very nice person," Dodie said. "He was always there for me. He was good to everyone. He was loyal to his friends. The one thing he could not stand was being lied to." What a fine epitaph.
Lawrence Scanlan is Wayne's friend.