Bruce Antolovich (Bill Rockoff's Moto Guzzi friend of several Boone rallies)

[Bill_Rockoff]

Many of you East Coast Spring Rally attendees have met Bruce Antolovich, my friend from the Charlotte area who rode a Moto Guzzi police bike. Bruce joined us for a day of Boone riding a few times in recent years.

Instead of going to Boone for this year's East Coast Spring Rally, my wife and I drove to Waxhaw NC to exchange our car for Bruce's older X3 so we could drive it to him out in Rochester, MN, where he was receiving chemotherapy at the Mayo Clinic. His backache failed to get better over the winter, and in the spring he was diagnosed with undifferentiated cancer in the bile ducts, liver, and pancreas. He began chemo last spring at the Mayo, and his parents, his sister, his girlfriend, and a cousin were rotating weeks staying with him in an apartment across the river from the clinic. We brought him his own car so they wouldn't have to rent a car continuously. We figured either he'd be well enough to ride back over the summer for more chemo, or he'd fly back and one of us could go back out there and drive it home for him, and meanwhile I would have a good excuse to spend a few days with him.

Bruce and I were close friends since engineering school in the early 1980s. He went on to get his PhD, worked in the aviation industry doing sciency materials stuff.

He was a car guy, starting with the 302 '69 Mustang coupe automatic he brought to college, which morphed over the years into a '69 fastback 3MT with some small bit of help from us friends but a lot of involvement from his girlfriend/eventual-wife, who did a lot of the wrenching. They had a Forester 5-speed for a while, wound up with some diesel manual Mercedes sedans while they were in France. After he and his wife divorced, he moved back to the US and rebuilt a BMW E46 convertible for their son as a father/son project.

At about that time, we started concluding our phone calls and our visits by telling each other "Love you, brother."

In college, he discovered motorcycles at about the same time I did, and he bought a Honda XL250 at about the same time I bought a Suzuki TS185. We would go ride our cheap 1970s dual-purpose bikes around together, including through construction sites on and near campus at night. One night, when the campus police wanted to have a talk with us about this activity, we decided we did not want to have a talk with them, so we went off in two separate directions; I rode across the quad and up the library steps to a different part of campus and took back roads home, while he rode to the loading dock at his laboratory building and used the freight elevator to bring his Honda up to his second-floor office. The following year, I bought a KZ750 twin from one housemate and he bought a Seca 750 from another housemate, and we rode together around the northern Atlanta suburbs, up and down a twisty nearby road or just "from our apartment building to the front of the complex where the swimming pool was." We typically made that 1-mile ride in bathing suits, masks, snorkels, and swim fins (All The Gear, All The Time!)

After college, he had his uncle's old Moto Guzzi police bike for most of the last 25 years. He took it from Utica, NY to France when he and his wife and young son moved there for work. Andrew and I flew over to Clermont-Ferrand to visit them for a week a couple decades ago, and I got to ride his Italian motorcycle through French wine country and dine with my friends in Paris and see some sights and spend some great time.

After he moved back to the US, he lived in the Charlotte area and he would come meet up with some of us in Boone or out on the Blue Ridge Parkway a few times to join some of us riding for a day during the Spring Rally. One Thanksgiving, he came to Atlanta we took his son out riding together with his son riding passenger on the FJ1200 behind whichever one of us wasn't on the Ducati.

But he was mostly an airplane guy, and in addition to flying radio-control with his son, he was building a Cozy (4-seat canard pusher) that he was planning to finish this calendar year. He got busy with work, and with rebuilding the son's E46 convertible after it got rear-ended post-high-school, so the plane took a little longer than expected, because more than "a car guy" or "airplane guy" what he really was was a "family and friends guy." He shipped the repaired / repainted E46 to his son as a college graduation present almost exactly a year ago.

His son, who is at least as much of an airplane guy, went to college for aviation science and graduated last year. He starts in December with a Delta regional carrier, he will be flying airplanes for a living.

Bruce's plans for 2024 included "finish building his Cozy" and "propose to his girlfriend" and "book a commercial flight that his son would be flying, so he could announce to the other passengers 'The guy flying this thing is my kid.'" I told him this past spring, "the best I can do is book a flight and announce to the other passengers 'Anybody wanna see a picture of the pilot naked in a bathtub? Because I have that on my phone.'" (I baby-sat for a night while Bruce and his wife were in town for Bruce to receive an award of some sort; Bruce's sister came up to visit and did the bath stuff.) I think everyone fully expected both of those things to be able to happen until pretty recently.

In May, when my wife and I drove his car out to him, we stayed with him and his girlfriend for a few days. It felt like when he and I were housemates in the 1980s, like it had been a few months rather than 35 years since we lived together.

I was planning to fly back out and drive the car back for them later this summer after he finished with the chemo. We found out in early July that the chemo didn't have the effect we had all hoped, and things went downhill fast. His son flew out 4th of July weekend to be by his side, and he died July 10th. I imagine his son will be thinking of Bruce every time the wheels come off the tarmac.

Love you, brother.

[fj1289]

That's tough Bill.  My heart goes out to his family, you, and all that knew him.  Ride In Peace RIP!

[Pat Conlon]

Sorry to hear about this Bill.

[Sparky84]

Sincere Condolences for the your loss of a good friend Bill

[racerrad8]

God speed Bruce.

Bill, thank you for sharing. I am saddened by the loss of such a friend or should I say brother of yours.

Take care of yourself.

Randy - RPM

[aviationfred]

Sorry to hear of the loss of your dear friend.



Fred

[gdfj12]

Bill, Kris & I remember that ride & lunch in Blowing Rock with you guys. Bruce will be missed! Please pass on our condolences to Bruce's family.