tool name
closeSamuel Boob was a fixer. He fixed up old cars, motorcycles and tractors, restoring them as toys for himself and future gifts for his four beloved children.
He fixed up food. He cooked every Thursday at staff meetings
for his co-workers, for his family at home, for his friends when they’d meet.
Call him for any problem, his friends say, and Sam would show up within minutes — rain, shine or otherwise to fix your problem with a smile on his face.
“Anyone in Penns Valley can come up with a story that at one point or another Sam has lent a hand, dropped everything he was doing for somebody else,” said longtime friend Jon Brooks. “That kind of personified who he was, that he would give the shirt off his back to anybody.”
Sam, or Sammy to friends and family, was shot and killed in his own home Sunday. He will be buried today.
But those who knew him aren’t focusing on the tragedy of his death, but the life and memories he left behind and the void that is left in their lives without him.
“His pervasive kindness was really overwhelming,” said another friend, Ben Battaglia. “When my father died, he made sure to speak to my mother, give her his number and tell her that he would do anything she needed him for. ... It didn’t matter how well he knew you. The world’s kind of just much worse off without this particular young man.”
When he was 12, Sam took a scrappy old Chevrolet Nova and by the time he was 16, perfected it, said Ben Cort, who also grew up with Sam in the Valley and became his family when in 2000 he married Sam’s sister.
“He built a bunch of those, he built up a Corvette that he had, he built up a Harley and rode that,” Cort said. “Over the last couple of years, he really spent a lot of time restoring tractors. He was working toward having one for each of his kids, had three done.”
“He was truly a kid at heart, he loved his toys,” Brooks said. “But he would drop all those things to be able to help a friend.”
Everyone says he was happy-go-lucky, a phenomenal mechanic who loved to hunt and ride in the woods, and was already scoping out deer season.
“I think I’m going to miss our time spent hunting in the woods,” Brooks said. “It’s tough approaching hunting season with that coming up.”
Cort recalls three days they spent at a cabin where Sam cooked while everyone else had fun outside.
“He loved to cook, he was a heck of a cook,” Cort said. “We’d all be having fun and enjoying ourselves, and he’d be doing what he could to have dinner ready.”
Herb Grove met Sam when they were in the third grade, and Sam followed him off the Bible-study bus to ride his 4-wheeler home. His nickname quickly became “Booby.”
“There has been nothing I have done or nothing that I will do in life that doesn’t have his name all over it,” Grove wrote in a letter of stories that went to Sam’s children at his memorial service Friday.
“He taught me everything I knew,” Grove said. “He was a great kid all around.”
Sara Ganim can be reached at 231-4616.
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