Dear Partner, 

You’ve always had a way of taking a song and making it your own.

Dear Partner, 

Listening to you sing with those musicians nearly forty years later delights and thrills me to this day. Good music. Even better the process and the people we met.

Dear Partner,

Spending lots of time these days creating these Dear Partner Letters. Sharing in songs and stories about what it means to be a friend for fifty-five years as we continue to sing our way down the road.

Dear Partner,

The Lady 80’s Tour with The Brothers Four in the summer of 79 gave me some confidence. It also put me back on my feet financially.

From time to time the focus of a Dear Partner Letter will be to talk about something I’ve learned in the 55 years since I first met Mike McCoy. This is one of those letters.

Dear Partner,

    After starting and discarding half a dozen letters to you about who we were in those years after college, I’ve decided to start like this: I believe we spend much of our lives answering two questions: Who are we? and What are we doing here?

Dear Partner,

We were a couple of small-town kids drawn to the big city and the University of Washington on football scholarships.

Dear Partner, 

For the past twenty-six years we have gotten together for a meal the Monday after Thanksgiving.

After a Thanksgiving greeting and the song Thankful I will be sharing another Dear Partner letter written to my longtime friend, Mike McCoy.

Dear Partner,

Who would have thought or could have imagined in the fall of 1965 that two kids, one from Spokane and the other from Sumner, with football scholarships to the University of Washington, would today, at least figuratively, be sitting on that park bench Paul Simon wrote about all those years ago thinking indeed how terribly strange it is to be 70, or in our case in our 70’s.