ThrowBack Thursday

 It was about 1964 and North Dakota's own Lawrence Welk was paying a visit to his ancestral home and a big crowd had come to the Bismarck airport to see him.

Among them were my then-time wife and our two sons.

Welk was moving along a ropeline shaking hands but when he came to my little family he absolutely missed my two year old son, Scott, who then began to cry.

Someone made Welk aware and he returned and hoisted the little boy up to calm him.

A photographer for the local newspaper snapped a picture which he later gave to me.

Move the clock ahead a few years and by then I had divorced, relocated to Indianapolis, and was making a visit back to North Dakota myself.

Here are Scott (with a tooth missing), his brother Troy and I.

By 1971, my ex-wife had re-married and moved to suburban Chicago.

I also had a new mate and we drove up and visited the boys and took them through the Shedd Aquarium before relaxing outside at the shore of Lake Michigan.

Nine years later, I was working in Phoenix but stopped in Washington, D.C. after our news crew covered the Democratic National Convention in New York.

Scott was living in Gaithersburg, Maryland, then and we got together and posed with the U.S. Capitol behind us.

Probably about 1983 Scott flew out to Phoenix and I took him on a tour of some of my favorite spots in Arizona, like Oak Creek Canyon.

That little boy with the missing tooth had grown into a handsome young man.

Living as we did, in two separate families, often thousands of miles apart, we never were close but we always enjoyed each other's company when we did get together.

I last saw him in 2001 when he was helping move the company he then worked for from Los Angeles to Scottsdale.

We got together for dinner shortly before he moved once again to Orlando, Florida.

His mother called on New Year's Day this year.

Scott Alan Taylor died of a heart attack in his sleep at her home in Southern California the previous afternoon.

He was 57.