If rewards are passed out in Heaven, Donald Lea Carlisle may have to add on a room to his mansion to house all of them.
Don’t worry, he can do it. He did it down here.
Donald, who passed away on Sunday, Jan. 11, was a friend and co-worker of mine for more than 50 years.
He and I began our long tenures at the Enterprise-Journal the same year, 1963.
A couple of months after I started, I made my first hire, a bright-eyed Air Force veteran six months younger than me. Among his first duties was operating a machine that transposed photographs onto hard plastic plates that would print on our old letterpress press.
When I tried to use it, the plastic often caught fire; hence I figured someone who had worked on airplanes could operate it.
He did, of course, along with learning just about everything else in the backshop as the newspaper went through multiple changes in the production processes over the years.
Along the way, he became a trusted friend whom I imposed upon to look out after my property and animals when I was out of town. And to fix just about anything that was broken.
There weren’t many tasks Donald was afraid to tackle.
I bought an old pickup truck that had been wrecked and restored. It looked OK, but the engine was shot.
Donald told me if I would buy the parts, he would rebuild the motor. He did and it worked well.
After he had repaired a number of other things for me, I dreamed one night that I was flying in an airplane that Donald had built and it crashed. I told him about it, and that Christmas he gave me a replica of an airplane he had built.
My wife Virgie learned from me: If there was a problem around the house, call Donald.
She had a birdhouse, probably one he had built, mounted on a pine tree. One day, when I was out of town, she decided to take a peek and see if some eggs had hatched. Instead of baby birds, a big snake was in the nest.
She called Donald, who came out and got the snake out with a hoe and killed it. Virgie claimed that Donald was about as frightened of the snake as she was. He wasn’t. She’d have never got it out of the nest.
As was noted in his obituary, Donald would do just about anything for anyone. He was forgiving, and if he had anything to say about anyone it was positive. So far as I know, he never held a grudge.
As I observed via text messages with several E-J veterans last weekend, he was the embodiment of a Christian man.
Charles Dunagin’s career at the Enterprise-Journal lasted more than 50 years. He succeeded Oliver Emmerich as editor in 1978, and continued to work part time after retiring from that job in 2000. He and his wife Virgie now live in Oxford.
