In Memory of Reg Tully

by Dennis Lantz
7/12/2009

Reg is flying again. 
 
On April 28, 2009, the world lost a good man and the atlatl community lost a special benefactor, even though many of you may never have met him or knew him. Reg Tully did great things in my life and that of the other members of the Tyoga Atlatl Association.
 
Reg was a printer, a Yankees fan, a former pilot of small aircraft, a skilled blues harmonica player, a visionary (though his shyness kept him from expounding on his ideas much, except to close friends) and one of the funniest people I have ever known.
 
Most people called him Poppy, but I never once did. I called him Reg. There is nothing significant about that, except that our friendship was different from any I’ve ever had. I respected and loved the man like an older brother… like a fellow soul on this journey of life. 
 
Reg joined our group through Jack and Missy. I believe Jack was getting some business cards printed and Reg’s daughter Donna is the manager at the store where Missy works. Jack showed Reg his atlatl and darts and let him throw. Even though he threw the atlatl almost as far as the dart on his first attempt, Jack told him he was a natural. Reg believed him and was hooked. The atlatl world, at least that in the New York/ Pennsylvania region was about to change.
 
At this time, somewhere in the spring of 2001, the Tyoga Atlatl Association (TAA) was expanding its membership. We were starting our second year of league play and Reg joined us.
 
We’d been throwing around the idea of a newsletter. The World Atlatl Association had one, as did a couple other state associations and they were, at that time, simple photocopied pages stapled together… black and white, with no frills, but informative and well written.
 
I wasn’t working much then, taking the odd job here or there, so I had the time to plan out a newsletter. Like others, I was planning to type something up on my word processor, tape some photos or pictures to it and make lots of copies.
 
Reg changed that. 
 
It was while working on the first newsletter that our friendship began to develop. He didn’t have much input on the writing or articles, but he did the layout work and when finished printing we had what I believed was the best little newsletter any atlatl association had yet developed.
 
Reg was unique. He could work for hours on end as long as he took many breaks. Sometimes it took several appointments before we could actually sit down to work. The man had his own clock and he left many people frustrated with the process, but he never had them question the final results. If there wasn’t a deadline, there was no way to push him into finishing a project.
 
During our few years of co-authoring and printing, we talked for hours on end about every single problem, idiosyncrasy, fallacy, misconception, failure, success, greatness, wonder and miracle that consumes the human experience. We examined the handiwork of God and man, we had discourse on the abstract and the finite… we solved every problem known to exist… then promptly forgot them so we could examine them again another day.
 
It really wasn’t until the third issue of the Tyoga Point (that is what we called the newsletter) that Reg’s comic influence began to show up. Sure there might have been a couple small comedy ventures in the second issue, but I was still insecure in my writing or at least I was still concerned how others might respond to what I was writing. Reg spurred me on. He was constantly saying something ridiculous and I would respond in the same. We worked well together.
 
Later I learned that the banter wasn’t unique to Reg and me. He was like that with others, most notably his daughter Donna, his mother Doris and Dave Santos. But the interactions of each of us with Reg were slightly different, mostly because of different topics. He could be funny in many different ways to many different people.
 
In the same conversation he could joke about the best way to fry up a lazy cat to how silly it was that people believed that they owned their property (don’t pay your taxes and you’ll quickly learn that you are a renter, not an owner!).
 
It was a blessing to find someone whose mind worked like mine… OK, maybe a little scary too… because there’s junk in there that when whipped up is caustic, witty, sad, hysterical, hilarious.
 
Reg was my sounding board. Whenever I would write up something I thought was funny, I would share it with him to see his reaction. If he laughed, I knew I had done well. If he frowned, it meant that I needed to rework that idea. I’m not saying he was my editor; he was my audience.
 
We started many other projects that never got finished… may never get finished now. There are still articles stored in his old computer that would have been entered at some point into another newsletter or printed up into a booklet. 
 
Life caught up to me. The world changed. So many things happened that made the Tyoga Point stop being published. It was harder and harder to make the time that it took to do so. The older I got the less patient I was to make the time to do so, the less able. 
 
Atlatls became an obsession for Reg. He loved throwing. He didn’t care too much about competition, but he did love throwing the dart and watching it hit the target. Reg took frequent breaks in his work to go out into a cleared warehouse to throw darts. (Who says working for yourself isn’t perfect!). The problem with the warehouse is that it was always cold, it was made entirely of concrete and block, and we often had no sort of target except a few bags of garbage (mostly paper). Reg didn’t care about breaking his darts, in fact he was oddly persistent in the way he didn’t care. I once made him seven darts as payment for some job he did for me, business cards, I think. He immediately took them into the warehouse and threw them for hours. When he was done, four of the seven were completely broken and the other three were scraped and worn. He didn’t care! He had to throw and that was the only place he could throw. 
 
He was always trying new techniques for throwing darts. It didn’t matter if he was throwing well, he’d change something just to see what would happen. Inevitably that meant more broken darts.
 
Once he had an old wooden table he stuck up instead of bags of garbage. He was so impressed by how much damage the darts could do to the table and cared not one wit how much the table damaged the darts. Having made some of the darts, I didn’t understand this propensity to break them… but that was Reg. I know that Jack was forever making him darts or fixing the tips on the ones that were broken.
 
I consider myself blessed to have shared two moments throwing with Reg that I will remember forever (or as close to forever as humanly possible).
 
The first was when a group of TAA members were throwing for fun in the back yard at Tom Goble’s house (when he lived in Waverly). Reg was hitting ten’s like crazy. It didn’t matter how he threw, the darts were flying true. We threw an ISAC (practice, not a real one) and he threw a 97XX. That is an X better than I have ever thrown and was – at that time – the world record set by Terry Keefer. He had nine 10s and a 7. I believe the 7 was on his 7th or 8th throw. It was more than just his pleasure to throw a great score. Prior to this - and even after – he rarely threw better than mid-80s. It was a privilege to observe the zone he was in on that day. He was relaxed and enjoying himself and consequently, for a short period of time, had turned into a very accurate dart throwing machine.
 
The second moment happened when he and I were throwing darts out in the warehouse on a bitterly cold January (I think) day. It was always cold in the warehouse and this day was no exception. I brought along some balloons that we stuck up on a cardboard target leaning against bags of garbage. We were popping them with pleasure and chatting about a variety of atlatl games. Then one of my darts went through a balloon and it didn’t pop. It just stayed there, still inflated, about a foot up the shaft of my dart. I don’t know if it was so cold that the balloon somehow didn’t pop, if my dart tip was somehow lubricated with enough dirt and dampness that it slid right through the walls of the balloon. We thought up a dozen theories and none of them made any sense. We joked for days that I couldn’t throw hard enough to pop a balloon. Luckily, I was a reporter then and I had a camera to take some pictures. 
 
As I said before, Reg was a unique person. His work ethic during the time that I knew him was foreign to most everyone else I knew. He wasn’t lazy – he would work for hours on end to finish a job as close to the deadline as possible. In some way you could say that he was a procrastinator, but he wasn’t like any procrastinator I had known. He didn’t spend hours contemplating a job or worrying that it had to be finished by a certain time. It was, simply stated, that he preferred to be fishing or reading or watching the Yankees or, of course, throwing darts.
 
Reg didn’t have an easy life and he didn’t always make life easy for the ones he loved and those who loved him in return. Like most of us he had his shortcomings and, likewise, moments of deep compassion, empathy and happiness. It isn’t my intention to write his biography, but there are hundreds of stories he told me about his time in the Air Force, in Panama, growing up on a farm somewhere around Otsego, printing, delivering pennysavers in the wee hours of the morning, church and much more. I hope that he shared these stories with Fran, Donna and the kids because they gave a true sense of the man who was a husband, father and grandfather.
 
Every day I go to work I drive past the Dandy Mini Mart where he worked for the past couple of years. Every day I glance over to see if his blue Dodge Dakota is in the parking lot thinking that I should stop in to see him. Of course it isn’t and never again will be, but that hasn’t stopped me from looking. 
 
It has now been almost two-and-a-half months since he left this world and I have written and re-written this article a dozen times trying to get it just right. It seems like so much is missing because I have so many rich memories of our few years as friends. Thanks for that, Reg. I know that I am not the only one whose life is a lot sadder at your passing, but a whole heck of a lot richer for having known you.
 
Fly freely, old friend… whether in an old piper cub or with your newly attained wings.