I'm Don's cousin Scott White.  He was the oldest son of my Uncle Donald and I'm the oldest son of his Uncle Charlie.  I'm a few years older.  We hung out as cousins in Massachusetts up until 1964 when my family moved to Southern Ca (Palos Verdes Peninsula).  After that it was hit and miss when we saw each other.  I have lived in PV, Santa Barbara (UCSB), the Bay Area, Redondo Beach (up until last September) and now Solvang.  Our common grandfather was Charles D. White Sr who was called Chick.

Don grew up to be quite the adventurer--Norway, Alaska, China and probably other places and countries.  I grew up to be more "conventional" working the last 48 years in the electrical business.  Don has gone to a hell of a lot more places around LA than I have although I have the feeling I visited a lot more golf courses.  Let's look at Chick--50 years in the electrical business, traveled many times to South America and the Caribbean including Havana and he played a lot of golf.  Chick was a great story teller. Don was a great story teller.  You can see where this is going...

With apologies to Lois White who is from Spenser Iowa (Google Spenser--it is next to Lake Okoboji):

In 1989 Don's youngest brother Phil married Lois and the wedding was in Spenser.  We all stayed at a Resort on Lake Okoboji in a bunch of A frame cabins.  My wife and I passed up a vacation in Hawaii with a bunch of friends to go to the wedding.  The upper NW corner of Iowa was not the hippest place to visit and it was hard to get you.  5 hours by car from Omaha or 31/2 from Sioux Falls, SD--through cornfields.  We wound up having a very good time.  We would all sit out on a big lawn in front of the cabins and we could look at the lake about 100 yards away.  There was a cooler that we kept stocked with two beers, Miller Genuine Draft and Dubuque from Dubuque Iowa.  No one drank much Miller. 

I'm going to say we were not there to hang out and pound beers.  It was more social drinking. The afternoon before we all went to the wedding we were all sitting on the lawn and Don and I were sitting together, just watching the world go by and commenting on our general status of being in Iowa.  We came to the agreement that the Dubuque beer was pretty damn good.  Don looked at me and said it was the cultural highlight of being in Iowa. I still laugh at that today

I like to tell stories too

When I first moved to LA in 2012, I didn't know anyone. I birded here and there, but my first year in town I was extremely focused on work, so the 2013 CBC season was really the first time I started to stretch my wings, so to speak. I had been in touch with Dave Moody and Charlie Keller about participating in the Palos Verdes CBC. A couple days before the count, Charlie contacted me that there was a local who was hoping to carpool to PV for the count - some guy named Don. "Could you pick him up?" A random request, but not that unusual in our corner of the world, birders wanting to carpool. Sure, why not.

530am that Sunday morning, I pulled up to Don's house along the Culver City stretch of Ballona Creek. His 6'5" frame clambered into my ill-fitting Prius's passenger seat. I wish I could remember his words of greeting, but it was probably something like "Good morning, sunshine!" as tongue-in-cheek as he would always be. We spent the day birding with a group, and the two of us hit it off as car companions - you know when you bird with someone who you just have a good flow with. It's like playing music with others - sometimes it just clicks.

Knowing Don now, that first CBC was emblematic of so many things I would grow to learn and appreciate about him as a birder, an environmentalist and a friend. Don was always game for anything if it meant more time outside, or more time birding.

Six weeks later, we ended up reconnecting on the annual Pasadena Audubon pelagic boat, where between Don, Layton Pace, Bhaskar Krishnamachari and myself, our Big Day team of four began to coalesce. The 7 years to follow held some epic trips, impressive big day efforts and golden memories.

Don and I took a weekend birding trip to Morro Bay in August 2015.    This was a classic trip with Don.

We started with a LA Audubon field trip to Piute Ponds.   Don knew the trip leader and many of the other participants very well.  When the cars stopped and people got out, he would go to the center of the pack.   He always offered his view of the ID's, but did not argue with others even if he disagreed with their IDs.   We saw Pectoral and Bairds Sandpipers and LeConte's Thrasher, so had a great outing.

After a couple of hours and heat rising to the low 90's, we left for Fraiser Park, the Carrizo Plain and on to Morro Bay.   Don knew much about the plants and animals of Southern California, but also had an endless sense of humor, so you had to be on guard with some of his ID's.    So when he pointed out a White-tailed Antelope Squirrel as we crossed the Carrizo Plain, I thought for sure that he was joking.   Who would know such a thing.

We knew that camping at the coast on a weekend in August meant crowds.   So, we could not have been too surprised that when we reached the campground just west of San Luis Obispo that all of the regular campsites were taken.    However, for $10, they let us camp in the overflow area.    The overflow area actually meant the overflow parking lot, but at least it was grass.   We staked out a prime corner of the overflow parking lot near Hwy 1 with my tent and Don's cot and left for Morro Bay.   Yes, Don slept under the stars.

We closed out the day birding Morro Bay.    The sunset was great.    We found and closed out a restaurant at the marina and rehashed the day -- from the Mojave to the Pacific.   What a day.