David Sullivan, our dad, embraced adventure.  Super smart and a fiercely independent thinker, he filled a room with his presence and laughter. "They broke the mold after he was born," says his cousin Anne Thompson, who grew up with him in Hartford, Connecticut.  Dad was third generation Irish American. His father owned a foundry.  Dad's extended family owned a large duplex. Dad, his parents and his cousin Catherine, who was raised like his sister, lived upstairs. A couple of aunts, an uncle and cousins Anne and Bill lived below. He grew up in the bosom of this devout Catholic family.

As a young boy of 8, Dad got the travel bug from reading his subscription to National Geographic.  Despite the distractions of growing up and becoming a young man, the goal to live overseas stayed with him. He was the first person in his family to go to college, where he majored in drinking and women.  I am not sure what his minor was, but Bill thinks it was cracking up cars.  Afterwards, he joined the Navy, in part to see the world.  He was a pilot, which entailed taking off and landing on aircraft carriers, which he likened to postage stamp in the middle of a huge ocean.  About his time flying, he said "It was hours of boredom interspersed with moments of sheer terror."

Dad was a brave man who took what life handed him unflinchingly.  Nor did he shy away from challenges that would give many people pause. When Dad met our mother Shirley, she was a recent navy pilot widow.  She had 3 young children.  I was the eldest at 4 years old, my brother Robert was 3 and Bill was 1.  Dad married the four of us and carried us on his world adventure.

In order to get overseas, Dad got his MBA at Thunderbird Global School of Business, one of the best international business schools. He then began working at Union Carbide in the 60s, when it was in its heyday.  Union Carbide, which made batteries, chemicals, pesticides and plastic, was his ticket abroad.  First we lived in Greece, where we were stunned by the antiquity and history.  The oldest buildings we knew in the US were 400 years old.  In Greece they were thousands of years old.  Boris Sokoloff was our dad's boss and so began a lifelong friendship with Boris, his wife Joan and his 2 fun kids Katie and Sandy (now Kate and Alex.) We visited temple after glorious temple; saw gorgeous statutes and art; we roasted a whole lamb in a country field for Easter and danced to live Greek music in a village square afterwards, at the insistence of the men leading the dance.  Then my family moved on to Switzerland, where Dad took us fossil hunting and we all learned to ski (thanks to the Sokoloffs) and thrived on raclette and fondue.  As in the rest of his life, it was hard not to notice Dad on the ski slopes.  It was his distinctive style that made him stand out, a complete lack of grace and finesse.  He tackled the slopes with determination; he would jerk this way and then that way and then point his skis down.  Oh, the speed and then the catapulting through the air.  I remember once watching in amazement as he metamorphed into a large snow ball, ski poles flying, and spun down a hill.  All the other skiers stopped to watch, fearing for the worse.  The hill flattened out and Dad came to rest.  He stood up and the hill erupted in claps.  In his short ski career, Dad managed to break a ski in half on one occasion, demolish a ski pole another and rip the sole off his boot a third.  However, he never hurt himself and any bruises and aches were easily remedied with a bottle of wine.

From Geneva, our next wonderful adventure was Istanbul, Turkey.  Dad's love of shopping and bargaining began in the old serpentine hallways of the Grand Bazaar and the Iskeli Bazaar.  Over cup after cup of sweet tea, Dad bargained all day for copper and brass pots and lamps, for inlaid mother of pearl Ottoman furniture, for roman glass and ancient Hittite pottery.  Dad relished Turkey with its layer after layer of history going back to the Fertile Crescent civilizations of Mesopotamia. Ancient Greek and Roman cities existed next to grandeur of the Ottoman Empire surrounded by the hustle and bustle of Modern Turkey.  Gunay Aktay was the third person Dad hired for the Istanbul Union Carbide office. When Dad was promoted to another position back in Greece, Gunay took over the running of the Union Carbide office and grew it strong.  He and Dad remained friends until Dad died, exchanging emails regularly with each other. Bill and I enjoyed great pictures of Turkey in addition to amusing stories that Dad forwarded us from Gunay.

After his second stint in Greece, Dad was sent to Egypt.  The family lived in Alexandra, Dad worked in Cairo and commuted home on the weekends.  Being in Egypt allowed Dad and our mother Shirley to carry on their love of decorating with Ottoman furniture and art.  The family was only in Egypt about a year, but thanks to an enthusiastic buying effort, by the time they left, every room in the house was Ottoman.

A couple of years after leaving Egypt, Dad retired and returned to the US, where he set up camp in a houseboat in Seattle which he remodeled in his usual creative and unique style.  Then, bored with retirement, he joined the Paunch Corp (his nickname for US AID) and journeyed to the country that ended up claiming his heart, Morocco.  LIving in a cabano on the ocean outside of Casa Blanca, he took picture after picture of beautiful sunsets.  He told us of wonderful friends Mustapha Oualli, Abderrim Skalli and Leila Benabdejlil and their delightful families.   And, of course, he was in pig heaven with the shopping and bargaining.  Copper, pottery, carpets, fountains and Berber jewelry were added to his collection.  When he returned back to the US to retire permanently, he decorated his Florida home to remind him of beloved Morocco.  Each year he journeyed back to Morocco to spend a couple of months in a cabano on the ocean, see his dear friends, eat sardines and ...... shop.  

When he found out last summer that he had Myelo Dysplastic Syndrome (MDS) and that it was going to limit his life to a few months to a few years, his goal was to visit Morocco and Turkey before he died.  He underwent 6 months of chemo therapy in the hopes that it would return some of his strength and energy so he could enjoy these two wonderful countries and his dear friends Gunay, Mustapha, Abderrahim and Leila and their families.  Very sadly, MDS claimed him June 17th, but I am sure he journeyed across the world as he zipped like a meteor pass us all.

Bill and I would like to give a special thanks to our cousin Nick Callahan and to Dad's dear friends in Florida:  Philip Hart and his son Andrew and Misty and Bill LIndstrom.  Nick and his lovely wife Teenamarie and 3 daughters Robyn, Kelly and Brittney brought my Dad lots of joy and fun and love.  Nick was with our dad when he died, doing everything to make him comfortable.  Philip and Andrew were also with Dad, sharing their loving thoughtfulness with him.  We are so very grateful to these three men for the love and care with which they held our dad's last hours.  

Dad's next door neighbors Misty and Bill looked in on him and fed him during the long chemo months.  Misty participated with Dad in his two great passions: going to estate sales and sipping wine and talking in the evenings.  Bill tried to shame Dad into cleaning his pool and car, but as you all know, Dad was not one to be shamed.  Bill ended up tending Dad's pool instead.  Dad was a master delegator.

We would also like to thank the delightful nurses at Bay Pines VA Hospital who gave Dad his chemo and blood transfusions.  How he loved chatting and laughing and flirting with them!  They took such sweet care of him.  And we know how much Dad appreciated his no nonsense gentle Port Charlotte doctor, Dr. Patell.  

Our Dad would have been disappointed if there had not been a pretty woman by his bedside to usher him to his next adventure.  We are glad to report that the hospice nurse who attended Dad when he died was young and pretty.  We asked Nick to whisper that sweet fact to him before he died.

As you all know, Dad loved to talk and he loved to hear your stories.   This site is a place for us to share stories about the character David Sullivan, who lives in our heart and in these stories.  Please don't hesitate to share something small, something big or something in between. And please feel free to share the stories in the language you are most comfortable writing in.  

All our best,
Kate and Bill