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closeSPRING MILLS — This weekend is about everything Sammy Boob loved.
His children, food, friends, family, cars and hunting. Sharing stories, and celebrating life — in his case, one lost too soon.
Even with inclement weather, 500 people who knew Sammy during his 29 years showed up to support him, just as he would have done in the pouring rain.
“It’s amazing and wonderful and really shows the heart of this community Sammy touched,” his mother, Eva Boob, said.
One friend, Marlene Norris, called it “the power of Sammy.”
Smiling, his mother said, “I never knew where he was, and then with all these people coming up to us, even at the funeral, finally I figured out he was helping all these people.”
The benefit continues today, with a clay pigeon shoot from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Spring Mills Fish and Game Association, followed by an auction at 5 p.m. of Sammy’s Marlin 30/30 lever action shotgun. Raffle ticket winners will be drawn at 4:30 p.m.
All of it goes to benefit Sammy’s four children.
“For a young fellow of 29 to have such a following is just amazing to me,” said Dan Dixon, his boss at the Centre County Solid Waste Authority. “He was just a stand up guy.”
Eva Boob said her son would have loved being there.
“He would have been right here in the center of this, starting up his car to let people know he was still here,” she said.
Samuel Boob died Aug. 23 after being shot twice with his own gun in the garage of his Tusseyville Road home. His wife, Mirinda, and another man have been charged with his murder. But from the beginning, friends and family have kept their focus on his four children who he adored.
“He was a very good dad,” his older daughter, 10-year-old Emily said. “He knew how to take care of problems but in the end, he would always cheer it up.”
Emily said she’ll cherish most the many memories of fishing and hunting with her dad.
When she was in kindergarten, Sammy took her to a secret spot she where she caught a 22-inch palomino trout that now hangs in her bedroom. A picture of that catch, along with dozens of other family pictures, were blown up on posterboards in the hall Saturday.
Laughing with her grandma, Emily recalled one time her dad greeted her at the school bus with a bear he’d just caught dead in the back of his blue pickup truck.
“He won’t like brag, brag, but he’d like show off,” Emily said, smiling. “He was so excited.”
Then there was the time he shot a rabbit in the garden, cooked it like a turkey and tried to get Emily to eat some.
And she still has a note he wrote her when she was 7, where he playfully bickered that he was stealing her share of grandma’s cookies.
“She carries it to school with her every day in her backpack,” Eva Boob said.
Sammy’s three younger children are now living in Colorado with his sister and childhood friend Ben Cort.
“The kids are great,” said Cort, who was granted custody of the three younger children days after their mother was arrested.
“They miss their dad,” he said. “They ask about dad a lot. They’ve got a lot of pictures. They were all very close to him.”
Last weekend, Sammy’s father and a bunch of his friends made the 27-hour drive to Colorado with the children’s stuff, Cort said.
Chad Stover was one of those who made the drive.
“Sammy and I were good friends in school,” Stover said. “It was a great drive and I’d do it again in a heartbeat for the reason.”
At work, Sammy was known for his talent with cooking.
“Sam was a good eater, too,” Dixon said. “He would clean up anything that was left over, too.”
And Dixon said he brought his love of fixing things to his job at maintenance supervisor. That was on display Saturday evening, as several cars that Sammy helped restore were rolled in for people to see.
“There’s a little bit of him in most of the muscle cars in this Valley,” Cort said. “He could take junk and make it into something very special.”
One of them, Sammy had been working on since he was 12. The man he sold it to just a few months ago didn’t hesitate to bring it back for the benefit.
“That’s what’s cool about Sammy,” said Herb Grove, a longtime friend. “They only knew him 10 minutes, but they knew him enough.”
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