Recalling times with a lifelong friend—a brother

When my friend Lloyd Askew, who grew up on a farm south of Champaign, Ill., died in Anaheim, Calif., this past May, I’d known him for almost 60 years. It’s difficult to accept that he’s gone—that I can’t pick up the phone, call him and hear his sly, drawn-out, “Sí,” or his sarcastic enunciation of, “What do you want now?” to which I’d laugh and come back with something equally audacious.

Lloyd Askew displayed some of his many machines and artifacts of Singer products at a showcase in 2018. He became an expert on Singer Featherweight machines and was fascinated by the history and culture of the sewing machine company as part of the Industrial Revolution. (Road to California Inc. photo)

Those days are gone, but the memories will be there as long as I’m still here. He told us all that he’d “had a good run.” And he surely did. I don’t recall the first time we met, but it was through my cousin Mary Sue and her two roommates in Champaign, not long after I had gotten out of the Marine Corps and was a freshman at the University of Illinois. On the night of my 23rd birthday, she invited me over to their place to help me celebrate. I took a case of beer, and she made a chocolate cake for the occasion. No candles. No other food. Just chocolate cake and beer.

Lloyd drove me back to my room on campus that night. He parked his little Triumph in the driveway behind the house and shut off the engine. We got out, leaned up against the car and talked for a bit. I could tell there was something on his mind but didn’t ask what.

Finally, he said, about as serious as I’d ever seen or heard Lloyd since, “I think Mary Sue is the woman for me, the one I want to spend my life with.”

That was a lifetime ago. But he did just that until she passed away several years ago. Back then, he went on to tell me how much he thought of her and wondered what I thought about his chances with her. I didn’t have a clue. But I looked at him with a straight face and said, “Pretty good, I reckon, if Mary Sue’s silly enough to fall for what you’re sellin’.”

He didn’t know what to say for a minute, but then he laughed.

That was the first time I remember getting one up on him. It was usually the other way around.

When Lloyd and Mary Sue first moved to California, he had worked for Magnavox. He had been laid off one summer when they let my family and me camp with them for a few days, as they did several times through the years. The day we were leaving to head back to Illinois, Lloyd was going to work with this new company, Armor All, instead of going back to Magnavox. I asked him what he was going to do in the new job.

“Call on stores and shops to get Armor All on the shelves,” he said.

“Really?” I asked. I’d never heard of Armor All, shook my head in wonder and headed back east. But what did I know? Lots of product apparently got on the shelves from then on, and he was part of a company where he thrived for a lot of years.

Lloyd was fun to be with and brought fun with him when he came back to town. My wife said he always had a special place in our hearts, and she always loved to see him. “It’s very sad that he’s gone,” she said, “but honestly I can’t think of him that I don’t find myself smiling.”

That was Lloyd. He was the life of the party. We’d go to concerts, dinners, family gatherings, and we’d see him during some of his business trips for Armor All—often without any advance notice. Like one afternoon, I was driving down the street in Champaign and a driver in the other lane laid on the horn. I looked over rather irritated, and there was Lloyd with a big grin on his face. One of his gotchas on me.

Another time during one of his work trips, a friend and I were sitting on our front porch, and Lloyd stopped by with a small antique sewing machine he’d picked up, parked his car and brought the machine over to the porch and began working on it, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. We watched with amazement as he told us about finding it on a weekend trip out in the New England countryside. His fascination with antique sewing machines started when Mary Sue wanted a Singer machine like her mother had had. That was the beginning of a very profitable business that took him all over the country to buy and sell old sewing machines, conduct speaking engagements and seminars, and attend conventions—even to Europe. A rec room in their Anaheim home where there used to be a pool table was soon filled with various antique sewing machines in a historical, museum-like display. For a while, there was even one sitting in the tub of the guest bathroom.

One year near Thanksgiving, Lloyd called and said, “If you’ll meet me in Chicago, fly to Boston with me, drive up to Maine, help load 30 antique sewing machines I bought at an estate sale and help me drive them to Anaheim, I’ll give you $500, pay your expenses and roundtrip airfare.”

“But Lloyd, that’d take a week, and I’m teaching,” I said. “No way—”

“We can do it and have you back home in four days,” he said, cutting me off.

And we did, stopping only for gas and food and a little side trip to visit another sewing machine aficionado somewhere in Ohio. Late the first night at the airport in Boston, he tried to pay for a rental car with a credit card that had been canceled because he’d lost some cards in Miami a couple of weeks earlier.

“I wouldn’t trust him either,” I told the nervous young woman at the counter. “He looks dangerous to me.”

He scowled at me and fished out another card. We got the car and drove north, checked into a motel, turned the car in the next morning, rented a Budget truck, drove to the place outside of Brownfield, Maine, where he’d bought the 30 sewing machines in the estate sale, loaded them up and headed west. You can read the account of our adventure (“A Collector’s Fantasy”) in issue No. 25 of Tales from the General Store, a cultural journalism publication I was editing and publishing at the time. It’s in the Archive section on this website.

Many of my memories of that trip 25 years ago were blurred by sleep deprivation or caffeine-fueled stupors, but I remember distinctly stopping for breakfast at a truck stop in Amarillo, Texas, at 5:30 in the morning among the road-hardened and bleary-eyed long-haul drivers, smoking their cigarettes, eating breakfast and drinking coffee. We were just like them, only we were driving a small Budget rental truck.

When the waitress came to our table and asked what we wanted, Lloyd said, coyly, “Do you have any Egg Beaters?”

I choked a bit, but the unflappable waitress never missed a beat or changed expression. “Nope. Sure don’t.”

“Well,” Lloyd said with a chuckle, “how ’bout sausage, eggs over easy, fried p’taters and coffee then?”

With food like that and stops only for fuel, we made it from Maine to Anaheim in 60 hours and 20 minutes—about 100 hours from start to finish. I talked briefly with his wife (my cousin), ate dinner, went to bed, caught a flight back to Illinois the next morning, and went back to work in the classroom on Tuesday morning.

Most times after that when I was in California, I sat out in Lloyd’s garage shop while he and a neighbor or his grandson-in-law Ryan Breidenbach, who’d just gotten out of the Marine Corps, worked on repairing various sewing machines. There would always be two or three women stopping by to have a machine repaired or to buy one. And sometimes I’d ride along with him to deliver machines to clients or to his specialty painter to have a machine painted or to pick one up.

The small sewing machine Ryan Breidenbach had specially painted to commemorate Lloyd and the business he created around his passion.

Ryan had arranged to have a small machine painted with a sketch of Lloyd on it in honor of him. Later, at Lloyd’s memorial service where I and several friends and relatives spoke about him, Ryan said, “When I got out of the Marine Corps where I was jumping out of airplanes, I never thought I’d be working on sewing machines.”

But a lot of people enjoyed being around Lloyd for the time we had him here. As he said, he “had a good run.” And I was privileged to be with him for part of that run at their house, at our house, or around the country and even in England and Scotland. My wife and two daughters were visiting friends in London on the way to the Elliott Clan Gathering in southern Scotland and then on up to the International Clan Gathering in Edinburgh. Lloyd met us at our friends’, had dinner and we headed north the next morning.

He liked to drive, and I had no desire to drive from the other side of the car on the other side of the road. Didn’t bother him. He’d done it before and drove all the way from London to Edinburgh and on north to Glasgow to see the country and visit other friends. I may have meekly offered to drive, but he stayed behind the wheel. He even took me on a spin among the hills and curves in the beautiful Scottish countryside and through a herd of sheep moving slowly across the road out north of Newcastleton, the town where we were staying near Hadrian’s Wall.

On the way back from the north, we stopped for dinner. Lloyd and I ordered oysters on the half shell. So did my youngest daughter. Which surprised me. She was only 12 at the time, so Lloyd showed her how to eat the raw oysters. That’s the way he was. If you needed something, he’d help; if you wanted to know about anything or go someplace, he was usually ready help you find out or go with you.

Another memory I recall well is when he and Mary Sue stopped by Urbana-Champaign to visit us one day in early September 2001 on their way to New England. Not sure what the occasion was, but I’m sure there were sewing machines involved.

A few days later, we had gone to work and school when I saw the planes hit the World Trade Center, and then heard about the plane hitting the Pentagon and the crash in Shanksville, Penn., and all the 9/11 coverage. I knew that was the day they were scheduled to return to California and hoped they weren’t on one of the planes. This was before we all had cell phones, and I called their home in Anaheim and left messages, as apparently many others did.

Having frequently traveled through Boston on business trips, Lloyd knew the traffic would be heavy going into Boston that morning and had re-scheduled their flights out of Springfield; otherwise, they would have been on the flight to L.A. that crashed into one of the towers. Once again, Armor All was good to Lloyd.

If he were still here and asked me what I wanted now, I’d tell him just his friendship that I had enjoyed so much through the years. That was difficult to lose; he was the brother I never had. But as he told me very simply and directly during one of our last phone conversations, “It is what it is.”