STORIES OF  ME AND MY FAMILY 

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DWW for the damn wiggle worm or Dennis W Wassman. Both were the same to my dad as that is what he called my brother Dennis. As a child he never stopped moving and this is how he got his name from our dad. 

It has been almost 2 and ½ years now that he died as I am writing this, and only now has the pain of his death subsided enough to allow me to write a little about him without tears filling my eyes so bad that I cannot see the page before me. He fought a long and painful battle against stomach cancer and lost that fight January 22, 1999. It was one of the few things in his life that he was not able to overcome with his amazing attitude and faith. Faith, I guess that is a word that typifies his life. He never lost his faith in his ability, or his love for God. He was true to himself and to God until the end of his life. 

Dennis was born in Tacoma Washington at the Tacoma General Hospital on December 16, 1943. Just two years on one month after my birth at the same hospital and in fact the same room. All of my children were also born at the same hospital. As a small baby he was a chubby happy little guy until all of a sudden he got very sick. He had long curly hair and it started to fall out. He could not keep anything down. At first the doctors at the hospital said that they thought he had leukemia. Of course this news was devastating to our parents and grandparents. After many tests, it was found that he did not have leukemia but a disorder that did not allow him to utilize proteins in food, and his blood production was not normal. He was given medicines and other treatments and after many years could live a fairly regular life, but could not eat many things. He was never able to gain much weight and was always quite skinny. When he graduated from high school, he was 6 feet tall and weighed 125 lbs.   

We both played instruments and loved music. I played the violin and Dennis played the accordion. He was really good at it and got a lot of attention form everyone. He also played the piano with little trouble. He in fact learned to play many instruments over his life and had a natural ability. He never had much longing to do much with this talent but probably could have it he had wanted to. We formed a little band with him on the piano, me on slap bass and a friend on drums. We were asked to play in a talent show at school. Of course me being a violinist they assumed that I was going to play some classical music with my brother on the piano.  Rock and Roll music was just starting to be popular. There was a musician by the name of Jerry Lee Lewis. He had a hit song of A Whole Lot of Shacking Going On. Well, we were not supposed to play that kind of music in school in those days. We practiced in secret and when the day came, we played that song. My brother had long cully hair kind of like Jerry’s and he stood up and banged away at the piano just like him. We did not sing, but the kids recognized the song right away and went nuts. They sang and danced in the auditorium and there was a general riot. They love it and this was one time my brother did get some recognition. I think the teachers were so shocked that I was involved in this event that they never did anything to me. I just had to let my brother have some musical fun and notoriety for a time. He was kind of famous for a while around school and did get into a little band because of it in his senior year when I was in college.  We were quite the contrasts in High School. I played the violin quite well and was considered by many to be a near genius. I was accepted at a famous musical school in New York City and could play very complicated violin concertos at an early age. I was also captain of the high school football team one year and played most sports in school. My brother on the other hand decided that he wanted to play the clarinet and be in the band. Now he never had any lessons or anything, just decided to get an instrument and some music and started to try to make the notes come out.   It was just fun for him. He was so poor at the clarinet that he not only did not make the regular band in any of his high school years, but he was last chair in the reserve band. He tried to play some sports, but with his skinny frame he was not at all successful. He heard a lot of “Why aren’t you good like your brother?” I am sure it must have hurt him to see me get all the awards in school. I was a member of all the clubs and groups.  I was very popular with most of the school. Nobody noticed my brother. He never let on if it bothered him. Oh and buy the way, would you believe it, he finally did get quite good at the clarinet and played in the Washington Husky Marching band and became a band teacher just out of college. This is just how he was, he had faith and kept at it and finally made his goal.   

Even at that early age with all the apparent discouragement, he was doing things that very few people noticed. They were things that would shape his life to come. He loved money. No I mean he really loved money. He was always doing something to make money. While I was playing sports, he had a paper route. While I was a member of the high school board of control, he went door-to-door selling doughnuts. He was always trying to make money. Not to spend it mind you, just to have it. It used to drive me crazy. We always had to work in the fields every summer to make money for school clothes. Mom and dad would let us keep a little of it to buy something we really wanted. I would buy something like a new fielders mitt. My brother would just keep the money in a can and take it out and look at it and smell it and kiss it for heavens sake. That is why I say he really loved money. He had a knack in talking me into buying something we both would enjoy, but very seldom would part with his beloved money. Maybe this is why he got rich and I didn’t. I learned to spend he learned to save. 

He may have been skinny, but he was very popular with the girls. I could tell you of many hair-raising events in his life that involved girls, fathers, sneaking out or in windows, calls to our mother etc, etc, but I guess they are better untold. But I have to admit that I was kind of jealous of this ability. I was more of a one-man dog. Had a lot of girl friends, but was loyal to each and took them seriously. My brother thought they were for fun. We both were thought that if the ultimate girl boy thing happened that we would have to do the right thing and we would have. Nothing like today when the guy says “OH Well!!!” and moves on to the next gal. When I went away to college my brother did raise a little cane while his big brother was away. I had left him in charge of my highly modified 52 Ford that had a full built 57 T-Bird engine in it. We loved to build hot rods and do street racing. We were never beat not even with the big Chevy 409s of the time. I like to build them and my brother liked to drive them and the faster the better. We also built and raced go-karts. But anyway my brother was not to race the car or even use it much while I was away at school. He did not listen to this and started driving it all over town. He somehow hooked up with two soldiers from nearby Fort Lewis and got them to buy him bottles of Thunderbird wine. He would give the soldiers a dollar for each bottle over the cost and then re-sell the wine to high school kids for three dollars above his costs. He used to sell 20 or 30 of these bottles each weekend. This was great money in those days. The cops got wind of what he was doing and tried to catch him. More than once he was being chased down the river road by the Sate Patrol while pitching bottles out the window. One day they almost caught him with wine in the car but he had gotten all of it out the window before he was stopped just in front of our house. My dad saw the lights and saw the cops talking to Dennis and found out what he was doing. Well he put a stop to it. The school found out about it when one of the kids got drunk at school and told on him. Denny was kicked out of school his senior year for a month or so, but got back in and was able to graduate with his class. Of course he was almost a straight D student in High School. But again he had faith in himself and graduated from college Summa Cum Lande. I am not even sure this is how you spell it as I was not even close.  This is just another example of his faith in himself and his ability to make money. 

Shortly after college he got married to Jackie, his first wife. His first job after college was as a band teacher at a Seattle junior high. He found out very shortly that he did not like teaching and got another job with a local bank where he was given the task of repossessing cars. Repossessing is the word they used but it was more like stealing them for the bank. He almost got himself killed doing that on more than one occasion when the owner would catch him in the act. I went with him once and it scared me to death. He changed employers a couple of times to get a better position. He was really good at his work and should have been given his own branch, but the banks actually told him that he looked so young, almost like a kid, and that they could not put him in charge of a bank because they were afraid the customers would not like talking to someone who appeared to be so young. He did not like this but had to agree that it was probably true, he did look even younger than he was. He got a job as an internal bank examiner and discovered many problems with employees taking money and was recognized by the bank he was working at for the good work he was doing and the money he saved them. He was offered and accepted a position as an investment banker specializing in the restaurants and the food industry. Over the next few years he made several restaurants and restaurant chains very successful, and the people in the chains of course very rich. He was in high demand and well known for his ability. He finally came to the conclusion that he was better at the business then most of the people he was making rich and decided to get into the business himself. One day a man came into the bank who had one restaurant in Port Townsend called Sea Galley. The man needed Dennis’s help. Dennis knew of an investor with deep pockets who could help and wanted to get into the business and he started to build a team that included him. Dennis told the men that he would only help if he could be one of the partners. They agreed but demanded that he put up at least $50,000 himself. Well a poor banker like him had to borrow and sell possessions to come up with that kind of money. He did and he was off and running after quitting the bank. The chain became very successful and went nationwide. He only left the company after he had a disagreement on future plans for the chain that he did not agree with. Apparently he was correct as the chain sold out to another chain a few years latter at a much-reduced value. Dennis was able to take about three million dollars out of that little exercise. He then went into a start up company by the name of TelCalc. This was an electronics company that made custom control equipment for monitoring boiler room telephone operations. He was successful with this company and at one time was owed over eight million personally by the baby bells. This was not all profit as he had to bankroll the start up, but he made a lot of money in those days. Enough to own a new Cadillac and a new Porsche along with a luxury home that had a pool, sauna, hot tube and a discothèque in it. In those days he would by his wife, daughter, and daughter’s dolls, mink coats for Christmas. He would travel back and forth between New York and his home, while making vacation plans on the plane and then flying off to some exotic location to lie on some great beach. Things were really going great for him financially, but the toll on his health and marriage were beginning to show. He was always under a lot of pressure. He started to look much older than he was. He was featured in a full-page article in the papers locally calling him one of the up and coming young tycoons of business. He seemed to have the world by the tail. The engineers who worked for him persuaded him to come out with a new model of the line of equipment that they were selling. The baby bells all wanted it and modified or built new facilities for the new equipment when it came out. Only problem was that the engineers could not make the equipment do what they thought they could and what the salesmen had sold. You can’t stay in business if you have only a limited customer base like the baby bells and you make them mad. Try as they might, they never could get the new system to work. The bells stayed with them and the old system, but it was obvious that they would soon look to another solutions. Dennis tried to sell the company to others. But was not successful. He finally closed the business after loosing millions of his own money. He was still far from done however. He got into manufacturing breath capacity and other medical equipment. He was doing great at this, but creditors from his previous business got to him and he was forced to give up the company to pay off previous debts. There was a spiral downwards financially over the years and up until the end he had faith that he would once again make millions. He was actually doing quite well in setting up equity loans for people at the time of his death. He made, invented and manufactured many other devices during this same time but almost all the money he made, got taken away by investors or other people who took advantage of him. 

I did not mention before, but there were a couple of very significant events that happened during this same time. The first event was that Dennis’s son Chris was killed when he was hit by a car at a family outing. This just about killed Dennis internally. He and Chris were of course very close. Chris was almost eight years old at the time and was a wonderful little boy. He had been playing with other boys with little boats on a small stream in a state park. One of the boats got away and Chris chased after it and ran into the path of a car going about 50 miles per hour. Needless to say he was killed instantly. My brother tried in vain to revive him but his neck was broken and there was no chance. A doctor at the park tried as well but with no luck, Chris was dead.   

After Chris’s death my brother and most of the family, me included, were in deep depression. My brother lost a lot of his lust for life and business and it started to show. This was about the same time he was getting out of Sea Galley. It may have been a prime reason he left. In his grief, some local evangelical people who started to read the bible with him and Jackie approached him. Dennis was before this time never very religious. He did not go to church and did not like anything to do with religion. But, in his present state of mind, he was receptive to the ideas presented to him. In my opinion he went off the deep end religiously. I am religious myself and should not criticize him, but he gave large amounts of money to these people to get a church going. He got the building they met in, bought everything even the organ, which he played every Sunday. He paid the biggest part of the salary for the minister of the congregation. He started to really study the bible himself, which would not be bad in itself, but he started to stay up all night studying and reading and writing about religious matters. He spent more and more of his time doing this. His writings were kind of disjointed and did not make a lot of sense. In his mind he was doing major research and was discovering the true meaning of all life or how life should be lived. I think this life style led to his loss of business success. He just did not seem to care that much any more and was just going through the motions. His marriage started to fall apart too. His wife resented that he was not as successful as he had been, and even though she joined the same religion and was active in it, she felt he was going out into left field. It was getting harder and harder to live with him. He started to criticize the minister of the group and they excommunicated him and advised Jackie to divorce him, which she did. I think by this time he was crazy or not of his correct mind. Almost everything he did from then on went bad for him financially. He ended up almost penniless owing our mother thousands of dollars she lent him to try to fight the cancer he got and to get back on his feet. During this time he became a preacher himself in an almost all black congregation in the hilltop area of Tacoma. This was an area of high crime and gang activity among the black community. He did many good things such as starting a training program to help the young black people to understand business and how to start companies themselves. He lived and fasted for almost a week on top a building in the hilltop area to try to get the young people to stop getting into gangs and stop killing each other. He was interviewed many times on TV and a lot of people respected him for what he was trying to do. 

After the divorce was over he was quite lonely and for some reason he decided to go to the Philippines to see if he could find a wife. I have no idea why he decided to do this other than he had corresponded with some women over there and liked what he heard in their letters. The family of course thought he was crazy as usual. Well it really worked out well. While he was there he met a young gal half his age by the name of Lelina. She turned out to be one of the happiest things in his latter life. She was just wonderful to him and they loved each other very much. In his last days he told me how much she meant to him and had wished he had found her sooner and could have had as much joy as they had in the last years of his life.   

He found out that he had stomach cancer after a routine check up to determine why he was having so much trouble keeping food down. The cancer was in his stomach and in his esophagus. The surgeons operated on him and thought they had it all out of him. He did feel better for about a year or so, but then again he started to have problems keeping anything down or even swallowing food of any kind. He really looked bad and was a skinny as a skeleton.  They tried all kinds of chemotherapy on him. Each one looked promising and we were all hopping he would overcome this obstacle in his life, but he only got worse. He never really let on that he was going to die, even though he said he was ready to go if the Lord wanted him to come home. On the last day that I saw him, he was in the same hospital he was born in. He was in a hospital gown and had some papers he had written on small strips of paper. He was reading them and told me that these were promises that the Lord had given him that he would not die during this last operation which was to be fairly routine to clear some scare matter that had built up in his lungs. He said, “Hay Larry don’t worry I will be just fine. I found these scriptures and they guaranteed me that I will be just fine.” He was using his great faith again.  He was reading them as they took him into the operating room. I never saw him alive again. The doctors came into the waiting room and told the family that when they opened him up they found that the cancer had spread to the membranes that supported his lungs, and without that there would be no way for him to breath again on his own. They had tried several things but nothing worked. He lingered on for a few hours but died without really gaining conciseness. 

My little brother was gone. The little guy who would have faced death for me any time I needed him. The brother that I was so proud of, who I loved so much. The brother who made us all so happy with the wild things he did. We cremated his body and placed him next to his son Chris. He is with him now and is happy. I will never forget my little brother. He was good and kind. He never hurt anyone in his life and was true and honest. That is all you can ask of anyone. There were hundreds of people at his funeral. Many childhood and business friends and many pastors and ministers from churches all over the Northwest were there. The service went on for over four hours and could have gone on longer. Everyone wanted to tell some story about Dennis and to tell how he had made a difference in his or her lives. Yes the Damn Wiggle Worm is gone, but he will never be forgotten. I hope I have told your story well in this chapter and in other chapters I have written.  Rest well my little bother until we meet again somewhere over the rainbow.