‘Dick’s Lunch Bunch’ in grief

It was 10 minutes before noon on Thursday, and my wife called out a rhetorical question as I headed for the door.

"Goin' to lunch with The Old Guys?"

The Old Guys is what she calls "Dick's Lunch Bunch," a group of 50-, 60-, 70- and 80-somethings -- and one 90-something, 51s special assistant to the general manager Bob Blum -- who meet for lunch on Thursdays at Mustang Sally's Diner on the Las Vegas Auto Mall campus.

The group is named for Dick Williams, the Hall of Fame baseball manager who died suddenly Thursday morning at age 82, about a half-hour before he was to meet his bunch for lunch.

Dick's wife, Norma, had called Don Richardson, the used car manager at Findlay Toyota and Dick's best Las Vegas pal since the Williams' moved here in 1991, at 11:15. She said Dick wasn't feeling well and wouldn't be at lunch. In fact, she said, he was feeling so lousy that his son, Mark, a skycap at McCarran International Airport, was on his way to take him to the hospital.

When I arrived at Sally's, The Old Guys were sitting around their usual table, not being jocular for once. They were quiet, and heads were bowed.

There was one fewer Old Guy among them.

"Needless to say," Don Richardson said in a halting voice, "one of our buddies isn't with us."

I had brought a notebook, which is highly unusual, if not against Lunch Bunch rules, because most of what is said -- and embellished -- at Lunch Bunch meetings is not for publication. But Dick had missed last week's meeting, and I had missed the week before. And I had just finished reading this book called "The Baseball Codes" in which practically an entire chapter is devoted to the notorious Braves-Padres brawl of 1984, when Dick was managing San Diego. I thought it might make for a good column.

Instead, I used the notebook to jot down some of the nice things the Lunch Bunch had to say about their friend, once the shock of the news of his death had subsided a little, once seven glasses of iced tea and orange juice and Mustang Sally's tap water were raised in his memory.

There was Lou and Doc and Bob and Don and Tim and The Blumer. Don Richardson's voice kept cracking and that was understandable, because he knew Dick best.

They had met in 1995, when Dick bought a Saturn and Don had provided a little service after the sale -- an oil change. Dick invited Don to lunch, at Carmine's Little Italy. And that is how Dick's Lunch Bunch began, inauspiciously, like a game-winning rally that begins with a two-out walk.

If you mentioned an obscure player that he had managed -- such as Dalton Jones or Jose Tartabull -- you could get Dick going a little bit. And when it appeared he might be shunned by the Hall of Fame, Dick said that when he died, his pals should take his ashes to Cooperstown, and when nobody was looking, scatter them a little at a time. Like Andy Dufresne, emptying his pockets in the prison exercise yard in "The Shawshank Redemption." But most of the time, Dick just listened while the others told their stories.

When Dick finally got the call from Cooperstown in 2007, it was a package deal. The Lunch Bunch went with him. They wore bright yellow "Dick's Lunch Bunch" shirts with No. 23 -- Dick's number -- on the back and Oakland A's caps and made a giant banner and got to meet Joe Rudi and whooped and hollered all weekend, especially when Dick thanked the Lunch Bunch for coming, right on ESPN.

It was a little bit after that when I joined them for the first time. Dick wasn't there a lot, because he was caring for Norma, a lovely woman and person, I'm told, who once finished runner-up in a Texas beauty pageant to the woman who would marry Bing Crosby. Norma Williams had had a stroke; Dick was spending much of his time caring for her.

When I rejoined the group this spring, mostly because I like hearing The Old Guys tell stories and have learned to tolerate their jokes and their politics, Dick was usually there. By this time, I felt more comfortable telling my own stories, and there were times I had to catch myself, because there I was monopolizing the conversation.

And there, sitting across the table, working on a plate of ham and eggs, was Dick Williams, listening to me talk, as if what I had to say was interesting.

Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.