Hi Everyone,
Approximately 11 years ago our good friend Dan Willinger (co-founder of Ventriloquist Central) introduced us to his good friend Steve Hurst at Vent Haven ConVENTion. After a few brief conversations, we decided that Steve Hurst would be a good choice to develop our Website at TheDummyShoppe.
Steve always had a quick comeback with a humorous response for just about anything that came up as we proceeded to work together to build our website.
One thing that became abundantly clear very quickly was that Steve was a total professional as a web developer. Over the next 11 years, we got a bit spoiled because we never really had any problems with our site. Steve was just always on top of whatever might go wrong.
Two weeks ago this last Wednesday, I called Steve to discuss a couple of web related issues. After several attempts to call Steve that Wednesday, he finally called me back. We never got to talk about anything. It was obvious the second I heard his voice that he was very sick. He managed to say “call me back on Friday, I will be better by then”. Two weeks ago today I tried several times to call him and never could get through to him. I reached out to Dan Willinger in California to ask him if he had heard from Steve. He had not heard anything either, but he called and left a voice mail on Steve’s phone. The next day (Saturday) Dan called me back and said that he had gotten a call from Steve’s former wife who told him that Steve had been diagnosed with cancer the week before and it was very fast moving. That was on Saturday two weeks ago.
The next morning (Sunday morning) I got a text from Dan simply saying, “At 10:30 this morning, Steve passed.” We never had time to say goodby, but we lost a very dear friend that day. Rest in Peace Steve Hurst.
There is a lesson there for all of us. If you have people that you are close to, let them know how you feel about them. You never know when you will never have the chance to talk to them again.
Well life goes on. We have been working closely with Steve’s older brother Richard to try and get all of our website passwords so that we could take control of the website that Steve had always run so well. That is why we have not posted a blog for a couple of weeks. We now have another person who is good at this process, and we are trying to put all the pieces back together. Maybe by next week we will have finished getting The Dummy Shoppe Newsletter back together and we can run a bit like normal while the new website is put together.
That is all for now, we will talk again next week.
Steve and JET