Allan Michael Tremmel, 1946-2026 - a friend of many years

At my age, I find myself often having to pay final tributes to old friends, or to people I've admired from afar. My last post here was an obituary of a cat. Now I mourn my friend of longest standing. I met Allan Tremmel in 1958 when we were students at James Monroe Junior High School in Tampa, a city to which we were both recent arrivals. I found his accent intriguing. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, a place I would then have been very surprised to know would be my home for over half of my life.

As schoolmates, Allan and I quickly found we had common interests. One was in astronomy and space travel. My parents gave me a small refractor telescope, and we spent many clear evenings looking at the planets, the M31 galaxy in Andromeda, and other celestial sights. Another was trains, particularly model trains. We each had small train sets, and would visit each other to play with them. My parents were always happy to see Allan, whose unfailing politeness and unassuming disposition appealed to them.

As we went together through high school, Robinson in Tampa, and college, the University of South Florida, our common interests expanded to include art, history, literature, and music. During junior high and high school we had both listened to pop music - Chuck Berry through the Beatles - but in college our now late friend Mike Starling and I introduced Allan to the baroque music of Bach, Telemann, Vivaldi, and others, which Allan came to enjoy. I remember that he loved, as did I, Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men, a required reading in our first year "The American Idea" course at USF. 

After USF Allan and I separated geographically. I went north to law school, while he stayed in Tampa, got a job with Verizon, and married Marcia. I saw both of them during summer breaks, and later, when I settled in New York and into my career as a lawyer, when I visited my parents in Florida. We also kept in touch by email. He was delighted when I told him I'd moved from Manhattan to his native borough. When I told him that a well known theater couple had paid a hefty sum for an apartment on Sterling Place, his childhood home, he replied that he regretted having left Brooklyn. 

The last time I saw Allan face to face was in March of 2013, at the ceremony for the commital of my mother's ashes to lie with my father's, who had died in 2008. Marcia, who is an ordained Episcopal priest, read the appropriate liturgy. I introduced Allan to Julene Gordon, who had been my parents' across-the-street neighbor, and whose late husband Robert had, like Allan, worked for Verizon. Allan said he had known Robert well and had enjoyed working with him.

Since then we were in frequent touch on Facebook. Allan was always keen to send me news of planetary conjunctions, photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, videos of steam locomotives, and the like. I did my best to respond in kind, and to give him occasional news about Brooklyn that he might find interesting. I continued to hear from him into June, then got word from Marcia that he had been hospitalized with cancer. Several days later I got the news of his passing, which took place two days before his eightieth birthday. I've lost a friendship that I valued long and deeply. Marcia told me that his last days were painful for him. I'm grateful that he was released from that pain, and is at rest with God.