It's not often you see something like this:
Mitchell Van Yahres, a former member of the Virginia House of Delegates, who died Friday, February 8, 2008, in Charlottesville, aged 81, tended trees for a living and people for a lifetime. [...]His friends, who nearly included everyone who met him, are asked, in lieu of expenditures on flowers and the like, to make a healthy and significant contribution to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama or, if they insist, the charity of their choice.
I remember bounding up the steps with him at the County Office building to caucus in the special election after Emily Couric died and vacated her seat*. It was me, Mitch and my friend Max Fenton. This was the first time Max or I had ever been to a convention (I was probably about 23 years old) and Mitch explained the whole thing to us, but never talked down.
He was like a little kid, just excited with the whole convention in spite of having been through this kind of thing a million times before. The guy really loved the political process.
Nothing ever seemed to get old for him. Throwing himself at the same issues year after year in the GA despite knowing perfectly well that he was never going to muster anything near a majority. It was a new fight every year and he threw himself into it with the same apparent vigor each time.
*That was an interesting nomination; the candidates included a then-unknown Delegate named Creigh Deeds, who won the day, and Al Weed, who went on years later to win the Democratic nomination for Congress but lost the general election. Meredith Richards was also in that primary, and she also went on to get the 5th District Congressional nomination the following year.