John Zaccagnini and I were brothers-in-law, but neither of us had any regular brothers. Just girl siblings.
After I met John for the second time, I remember remarking to my sister Heather about how I had never heard anyone talk so much or so fast.
"Oh, he hardly talks when you're not around", she said.
I know that many family, friends and co-workers, might find it hard to believe that anyone considered John quiet, still others might have trouble believing he talked much and fast. I think that John had a lot to say about many things, and when those things weren't at hand, he was conserving energy. He was a smart man, an articulate man, a generous man.
He was good at what he did. After he got riffed in the wake of the dot-bomb crash, his skills and his specialties were so attractive that he found a niche within weeks, when so many of us were jobless for months. When I met him he was with ACC, and he moved to Shomiti, Cacheflow, Fineground, Cisco, all the while delivering on the Zaccagnini promise, everywhere he went.
I am especially lucky, and especially sad, since my relationship with my brother-in-law was really only for fun. All we ever did together was recreational -- mowing pastures, building fences, digging big holes, filling in holes, clearing rubble, reading emails with our PSPs, talking about routing and web caching, putting the horses out, putting the horses in, and travel -- you know, fun stuff.
My family are part of the rural culture of work, where work is just something you do while you're talking. You show up for the fellowship and you joke around all day and somehow a great deal of stuff gets moved from one place to another. John accepted the fellowship of hard work and performed it with good humor, but then he did everything with humor.
He especially liked the irony of repeating a funny joke long after it was funny, so that it became sort of "meta-humor". Whenever the room lights blinked, John would say "did the power just go out, or did I have a stroke?", and whenever anyone asked John if he had gotten a haircut, he would say "yeah, it was gettin' all down in my eyes." John's enourmous, shiny, bald head was very easy to find in crowds. My head's big too, of course, but it's not shiny. I think that's probably why women liked John, because he was shiny. And funny. And good natured. And he drove cool cars.
John was a good friend, and not a fairweather friend, obviously, because he was a Cubs fan, after all. Any man can love a winning team, or even a team that played in the first game of the World Series within that man's lifetime. But it takes character to be a Cubs Fan. Holy Cow...
I will miss him, I'm not even sure that I realize he's gone yet.
Dorrel Alan Whinery
John is my daughter's godfather. Sofia is 3. She cannot comprehend this tragedy but she will always know her Uncle Johnny. John bought her a yellow baby boxster Porsche (just like his) last year. We live next to a bike path that is pretty steep. Sofia loved to ride her boxster down the path at a much faster pace than I have ever been comfortable with. There is a tree at the bottom of the path and usually Sofia has excellent steering skills managing to race down the hill and turn safely onto the sidewalk. Once and only once she managed to roll into the tree. She grabbed her boxster, came up the driveway and said "Mommy I crashed the Porsche" - Something I thought I would not ever here from my little princess - I couldn't help but laugh because the next words out of her mouth were maybe uncle Johnny can get me a brown one because the yellow boxster had a mark from the tree on the hood.
To say that John loved Porsches is a bit of an understatement. He often talked about his 1988 911 and how he missed the car. After many years of driving his Acura, John was recently able to buy a yellow Boxter S. He loved that car and often showed me pictures from autocrosses. When winter came and he had to get into the Buick it was like parting with a child.
