For several days recently, I have been in somewhat of a daze and even mourning for the passing of a long-time friend, Jerry Gouveia, former athlete, hunter, fisherman, etc. who died suddenly here recently. He was known as “Gov” by the many who called him friend, or “Big Jerry” to differentiate him from another Gerry Gouveia. My connection with him goes back to our days as school mates at St. Stanislaus College when some strange kindred spirit grew up between us despite my total disinterest in the hunting/fisherman side of Gov. I distinctly recall, in the years after school, when he was working at PanAm, often at Timehri for flights, and I was there in the airport building, as a Flight Clerk at IAL aeradio, that we would frequently meet (he dated my sister Cecelia for a short time before his marriage to Yvonne) and sometimes would venture into the terrain around the airport on Jerry’s formidable BSA motorbike on a joy ride. On those trips, Gov would often get up to speed and then, on a long stretch, reach back beside me to remove the air filter on the bike to make the machine go faster. On one of those extractions, the filter fell out of his hand, bounced on the tarmac, and went flying off into the parapet. Totally unfazed, he just turned around and we spent the next 15 minutes or so combing the grass looking for the missing device until we found it. We were different in most ways. He was an athlete, I was not. I was interested in Caribbean music; he was heavily into country and would suddenly give you horrible impersonations of well-known country tunes, painful to the listener, but joy to Gouveia.
