George Dacy

March 4, 2010 at 11:17 am | Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Yesterday a great man died. His name was George Dacy, and I owe him a debt I could never even begin to repay. For many years he served as an advisor to a student organization that was a large part of my life in college. It was a small role, and largely ceremonial except in organizational crises. But crisis or not, he was there at the meeting every single week, without fail.

I had the privilege of working with him during perhaps the largest crisis the organization had ever seen. The organization’s treasurer the previous semester–an accounting major, ironically enough–had through negligence, fraud or some other sort of malfeasance drained the organization accounts to nearly zero. When this was discovered, he disappeared from town, leaving his apartment littered with papers and garbage, which we waded through to try and find what financial records we could. He was of course thrown out of office immediately and a special election was held to fill his place. I was elected on a platform of, essentially, “1. I’m the bitchiest person running, and you know you can count on me to fix this.” Of course, no one in that room ever asked me out on a date again.  But at the end of the semester we were solvent, and I really don’t think anyone else there had the balls for that task.

But even I couldn’t have done it without George Dacy.  Because when we gave him all the cash for safekeeping after our new member ceremony at the beginning of the semester, I got the envelope that following Monday with substantially more money than he’d been given.  I didn’t know this until long afterward, because I had not been elected yet, and so had not been the one to collect the money.  And it made all the difference.  And then he and his fellow advisor, David Rainey, had my back on every single decision I made that semester, whether the president of the organization liked it or not.

I owe him a personal debt as well.  He wrote recommendation letters for me, both for pharmacy and for medical school.  I never saw the one he wrote for medical school.  But when he filled out the evaluation form for pharmacy school, he rated me “outstanding” across the board.  I begged him to change one of them to something less superlative, because, I told him, no one would take his recommendation seriously if he wasn’t critical of something about me.  And he replied, “but that’s what I really think, and I’m not going to lie just so someone will believe me.  So if you want me to fill out this form, you’ll have to live with being outstanding.”

That’s the kind of guy he was.  He always saw the best in people, and I have no doubt that I was only one of many whom he supported so unconditionally in all their endeavors.  We’ve lost a very bright light with his death, and I am sad to hear of it.