By Bob Kaster, June 23, 2026

Yesterday morning I received a call from Karen, whom I’ve known for more than sixty years. She lives in Sonoma County, a five-hour drive from my home. I couldn’t take the call right then, so it went to voicemail. Twenty minutes later I listened to it. “Hey Bob, it’s Karen. When you get this message, give me a call … please. Thanks. Bye.”

I could tell from the emotion in her recorded voice that I was about to hear something very bad, so I returned her call with trepidation. “Frank died this morning,” she said. “He went out walking the dog around 10 o’clock last night. When he didn’t return, we went looking for him. He had fallen and hit his head. He was taken to the hospital at 11:45, but there was extensive brain bleeding. He was taken off life support at 2:00 o’clock this morning. You’re the last man standing.”

“The last man standing.” I’ll explain what she meant. There once were four of us: Mike, Steve, Frank, and me. It began in San Francisco in 1964. San Francisco was a wonderful place in 1964. In my opinion, it started going downhill a few years later. It’s finally beginning to get better, but still not the same.

I entered law school in September of that year, at Hastings College of Law. I rented a room in a residence club called The Montesque, on Pine Street. Frank, a little older than I, was also a resident there, starting a new career in San Francisco. Another Montesque resident was Mike, a business student at Golden Gate College.

My first day of law school was when I met Steve, also a first-year student. He was from Ephrata, a small rural community in central Washington State. We started a conversation that morning in front of the law school building and discovered that we were neighbors, as he had a room in a residence club on Bush Street, a block down the hill from mine.

During that first year, the four of us, Frank, Mike, Steve, and I became good friends. At the end of the school year we decided to see if we could rent an apartment together for the following year. I spent that summer traveling Europe, but my three friends found an apartment, actually a flat, and reserved it for us. It turned out to be a wonderful place, on Mason Street near North Beach, on the cable car line. It had a living room with a bar, a kitchen, three bedrooms, and two bathrooms. The living room had a corner window that you could open wide and look down at the cable cars passing by. We could sit out there on that windowsill, listen to the clanging of the cable cars, and wave down at the riders, who would wave back.

Frank and I had separate bedrooms, and Steve and Mike shared a bedroom.

Steve had Swedish roots and got us invited to a party at a Scandinavian social club which catered to young people who had migrated to San Francisco from countries such as Sweden and Denmark. It was a great party, with a lot of young people in attendance. I remember Frank dancing with and spending time with a petite drop-dead beautiful blonde girl that looked about eighteen years old. Her name was Karen. He introduced her to me, and I believed her command of the English language was almost zero.

The next day, back in our apartment, Frank and I were talking about the previous night’s event. I said, “That blonde girl you were dancing with, what’s her name, Karen? She was really cute.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m going to call her and get a date.”

“Yeah, right. You’re going to call her on the phone? How’re you going to do that? She doesn’t speak English.”

“I’ll find a way,” he said.

To this day I don’t know how, but he did it. He got a date with her and they started going out.

My bedroom in that apartment was directly adjacent to the kitchen. One morning I woke up and was headed there to get some coffee when I heard a lovely Danish-accented female voice say, “Good morning.” There was Karen, at work making a batch of pancakes.

That was in 1965. Frank and Karen were married September 10, 1966. This coming September would be their sixtieth anniversary.

Writing this is hard. I’m eighty-four and still in relatively good health (fingers crossed). But I’ve reached the age where more and more of my contemporaries have passed on. I’ve been to a lot of memorial services in recent years; actually Ann and I went to one just last week. It’s part of the deal, I guess. There is a beginning and an end, and we’re getting closer to the end.

Looking back on my eighty-four years, I realize that there are certain periods of time, some quite short, that are vivid in my memory, almost like they happened yesterday. And then there are other stretches, some pretty long, that just weren’t memorable. My short three years in San Francisco were very memorable for many reasons. It included the first year of my marriage to Ann. We were married on July 16, 1966, and we are looking ahead to our sixtieth anniversary this July.

And it was when I first met Steve, Mike, Frank … and Karen.   Mike, who lived an unusual life, is surely dead, but I don’t know how, when, or under what circumstances. For many years he lived in the Seattle area, where he created a successful business that manufactured a certain type of fasteners, called Cully Screws, which he invented. Cully is still a well-known brand of industrial and electrical fasteners, and its catalog is widely distributed through major electrical supply networks across the United States. Mike spent his winters in South America, living what I think was an unusual bohemian lifestyle. He would commute back and forth each year and stop in and see us while en route. Then, a few years ago he stopped showing up. I can only believe that his life ended somewhere in South America.

Steve was the athlete of the group. We all played tennis together over the years, but Steve was always a notch above the rest of us. Steve married Ulla, a beautiful Swedish girl, and had a successful law practice in Santa Rosa for a long time. He died about four years ago.

And now, there’s Frank. God damn it!

I miss them all. But I guess it’s just part of the process. It will be my turn soon enough.