Mark liked to hang out at McDonalds alot. He even got to work there for a while. He like to practice his spanish and enlarge his vocabulary like the parts of the human body and different measurements. Ha Ha. What he would do thou really was befriend the workers there and help them with our system.  

When Mark was at SIU, he was hanging with the Jewish organization and they were trying to come up with a way to publicize their Holocaust rememberence.  So Mark invited members of the American National Socialist Party (Nazi) to speak on campus.  Mark pretended that he wanted to become a member of the nazi party.  He went to chicago to invite them to speak  on campus, and picked them up at the airport when they came.  The Jewish group paid for the travel expenses, this part was not well known.  Mark asked me to write a letter to the paper demanding that the Nazis be banned from speaking on campus, which caused many other letters to be written taking me to task for being intolerant of the free speech rights of others, even if they were nazis.   A lot of free publicity for the holocaust rememberence which was very well attended.  Mark taught me about the real world.  These were the same nazis that threatened to march in Skokie, which resulted in a supreme court case, a made for tv movie, and a cameo characterization in the blues brothers movie.  Mark will be missed.

I will always be grateful for a journal of stories Uncle Mark wrote down about he and my dad when they were growing up.  My dad (Mark's brother, Jeff) died when I was 14, so having these stories gave me a part of my dad and a part of Uncle Mark.  It also has given me a place to collect stories about my dad, since Mark wrote 37 pages, but not a whole journal-full. :)