Island Profile: Dave Klenawicus – An idyllic world that remains intact

Before the accident that changed his life forever, Dave Klenawicus remembers an almost idyllic world, growing up on Shelter Island and surrounded by friends and family, playing sports at the local school. “My brother Joe calls Shelter Island ‘paradise,’” he said recently, “and he’s right.”

A third generation Islander, delivered by the Island’s Dr. Donald Currie in Greenport Hospital on July 5, 1956, Dave came home to an extended family. His father, Joe Klenawicus Sr. was one of four children. Best known of the other three was Frank, an aviation enthusiast whose large farm at the corner of Burns and Cartwright Roads later became “Klenawicus International Airport.” Their sister Adelaide was with Bohacks (later the IGA) and managed the meat department there for more than 30 years. Another sister, Frances, moved to New Jersey.

His mother, Martha Brower, was, of course, also an Islander; and like her husband and his siblings, she has passed away but her sister, Alma Ryder, is here on the Island. Dave was one of two children; his brother, Joe Jr., is married with two children, Kenny and Monica Lynn, and continues to live on the Island and they have cousins “everywhere.”

“My family had that farm down there on Burns Road,” said Dave. “They had that farm for many years. I remember my grandmother — she had chickens and a cow and things like that. That’s how I grew up, with the hay and all, all of that. That was great.”

And so was life at school. “It was fantastic. Everyone knew everyone. There was the A team and the B team and there was Little League.  We had championship teams and we tied for first place or won a championship every year. For a school as small as we were, we did pretty well.” He ran track, too, the only one in the school who wanted to. Gene Kingman, his coach, took him to all the sectional meets. “There would be these busloads of kids arriving and then ‘Here comes Klenawicus’ but that was okay. It was the way it was and we had fun. The key thing was, we had fun.”

A large part of the fun centered around the airfield. “My father owned a Kitty Hawk, which was rare. There were three of them in the whole United States and my father owned one of them, a 1929 aircraft. We’d fly out to all the air shows. It was wonderful growing up doing that sort of thing. I loved it. Airplanes were a big thing for me. Gosh, I grew up with them and I loved it.”

After graduation, what Dave really wanted was to attend the American Culinary Institute in Hyde Park but the tuition was costly and he couldn’t quite swing it. But there were other ways to learn and he took advantage of as many as he could, working restaurants here on the Island and on both forks as well.

The more he cooked at local restaurants, the more he learned. Eventually he went south and worked the Florida circuit, including the Jupiter Island Club, where he learned from international chefs. “That was really quite interesting,” he remembered. “I worked with people from all over the world. The head chef spoke five or six languages.” And he loved “commuting,” sometimes working Florida and sometimes coming back to the Twin Forks.

Then one sunny afternoon in 1978, back home on Shelter Island, came the moment when everything changed. He was driving his truck when, for reasons he has no way of remembering, he went off the road. The truck went into the trees and caromed into a brick wall. The right side of his head hit the windshield hard. He was left-handed and his whole left side was completely paralyzed. He had the equivalent of a massive stroke and, indeed, he was treated in stroke centers at several hospitals, both as an in- and out-patient for the next two and a half years.

For 17 days, he was in a coma; and for 50 of the next 52 weeks, he was an in-patient at Southampton Hospital. “My father would come over  every night. The nurse would stand me up out of my bed and sit me down in a wheelchair and my father would wheel me around the floor.” But he had no clear idea of who anyone was. “I knew the people around me were related to me but not exactly how. I would know them but just couldn’t remember their names or who they really were. I never knew what I was doing. Everything was all blocked out. I had to learn how to do everything all over again — eat, talk, walk, everything. I was a 22-year-old infant.”

“I know what people go through when they go through therapy,” he said. “It’s tough but the more you do, the better you’re going to get. That’s how you have to look at it. If you want to live, you have to do it. I wasn’t ready to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair and that’s what I was looking at. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to walk.’ And I did. I walked out of that place on my own.”

But his thinking was still unclear. He began outpatient therapy and was working at it daily for several months when, for some reason, he wanted to see his truck. His family was a little reluctant but when they discussed it with his doctor they were given the green light.

“The minute I put my hand on it, everything came back to me, just like that, like the snap of a finger. Before that moment, I had no idea of anything. They had to take me to my mother’s grave, I didn’t believe she’d been dead for two years. Everything was just blocked completely out of my mind. But it was all in there, if you just touched the right spot, and it all came back to me then and that’s exactly what happened.”

But it was a long while before he could work. “The thing about living here is that when the chips are down, people come together for you. They put a breakfast on for you, put a dinner on for you, give some kind of fundraiser for you, and they did all that for me.”

For more than another year, he was still working through daily physical therapy. Then after several months of inactivity, he was sitting next to Fred Ogar at an event in the Heights. “I was with him up at the church and started chatting, and Fred said. ‘Would you like to go to work for me?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, sure,’ and  he said ‘Okay, Monday morning 8 o’clock.’ So I went to work for him” riding the garbage truck with Mr. Ogar’s refuse collection company “and stayed for more than three years.”

Over the years that followed, Dave developed enough skills to make a life and earn a living. Among other things, he mowed lawns, opened scallops, delivered produce, bundled newspapers, had his own tile company, was the school caretaker, and eventually landed a job with the Highway Department, where he worked for the last 13 years of his active work life.

Although he’s quick to note that he’s always been a member of the fire department, except for those very few years of disability. “My whole family’s been involved with the fire service for 155 years, if you add it all up. Everybody put time in. All together? My father was 55 years in, my uncle Frank was 55 years in, my brother was 41 years, I’m 37 years, my nephew’s another 25 to 30 years. It all adds up. It was all volunteer, a big thing for our family.”

Retired, he lives quietly and, never having married, is delighted that he has found a significant other. He still copes with some of the residual effects of the accident but considers himself lucky. “The doctors said that two things saved me,” he remembered. “The fact that I was young and that I was in such terrific physical shape.” So all that “fun,” all of those miles of running track? In the end, it really paid dividends which he has lived to enjoy.