In Macolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, he developed categories of individuals by their role in helping ideas spread throughout societies. For example, “mavens” were passionate about gathering knowledge, researching, and staying in the know about products, prices, and trends. Mavens are the people in your life you go to for advice about optimizing Amex points or whether the Toyota RAV4 is a better value than the Honda CRV. Gladwell’s most memorable group were the people he called “connectors”. They were individuals who had an amazing ability to quickly connect and remain networked with thousands of people. The average human tends to keep their network between 200-400 individuals (which may have evolutionary social norms going back to our tribal ancestry). Connectors are very rare, maybe less than 0.1% of society, but everyone knows at least one connector. David Schneider was my first connector.
He knew someone, somehow, everywhere he went. Literally everywhere. It was a super power.
I recall one time when we were waiting for a flight home from a ski trip in Colorado. I don’t recall the airport, but it was one of those tiny ones that only has one or two gates and you have to climb stairs outside to board the plane. We were a part of a small group including my family, looking to spend a week in the mountains. This tiny airport could only hold maybe 100 people, most of which were families like us. Though the place only had one security agent, it did have a bar staffed with three people. David, true to form, walked up to the bartender and gave him a big hug. They knew each other from some event in Atlanta from years ago. Ten minutes later, David looked across the waiting area and saw another couple he knew from his college days. By the time our flight took off 45 minutes later, David could name nearly every one of the people in that terminal from that afternoon.
David came into my life roughly the same time I entered adolescence. As a late 20-something, he moved back to Kentucky after several years as a journeyman carpenter in Atlanta. Like all of his adventures, a friend of a friend of a friend put him in contact with my mom. She hired him on the spot. At the time, she was a few years into building her own business specializing in high end antique English furniture. She had developed a reputation for hiring smart twenty-somethings who needed work. Drawn to their energy, intelligence and optimism, I think they made her feel younger. If you were an able bodied young adult not sure what to do with your french literature degree, call my mom. She will put you to work.
I too spent a lot of time at the antique shop. Despite family ties to senior leadership, I was at the bottom of the hierarchy. I was the peon or domestique to the elder gen x’ers who seemingly ran the place. I helped move furniture, wax tables, polish brass, pack the truck, unpack the truck, stack books, and all the other endless chores.
In addition to my career as a furniture mover, I was a also competitive swimmer on a club team. During the summer, we practiced ten times a week. I did not have a drivers license. In this world, it meant my mom used her employees to chauffeur me to practice. They used me for for manual labor, especially the jobs they did not enjoy doing. Somehow it all worked out. Regardless, I spent a lot of time with young adults who were maybe ten years removed from adolescence themselves.
This is how I got to know David. We spent most of those hours on US-27 in his black F150 XLT extended cab long bed truck commuting back and forth between Danville and Lexington.
David could talk. David had stories. David liked the sound of his own voice.
He was a very fun person to be around. He was both confident and laid back. He had a style all his own. Something like a cross between Matthew McConaughey and Mel Gibson, complete with the early 90’s mullet, Levi 501s and cowboy boots.
To David’s credit, he never complained about having to shuttle me around when my mom told him to drop what he was doing to drive me to practice. In fact, I think he saw me as a little brother and was eager to both enlighten and corrupt my teenage brain.
We often talked for hours about everything from music, cars, school, cities, travel, and food. Most of all we talked about girls. As a teenager in the pre internet era, I knew very little about dating and or the opposite sex. David found that both amusing and endearing. With a straight face, he would answer any question I put forth. Then he would launch into a story from his own life. For me, an introvert and awkward teen, this was a huge step forward in my growth and development. Looking back, I still remember how he was the first adult to listen to me at that stage in my life. Few emotions in life make you feel more important than the undivided attention from someone you admire.
Before meeting David, I largely followed the music and other style trends of my fellow middle schoolers. They probably picked up those trends from MTV or older siblings, who also probably picked up those trends from MTV. Our uniform consisted of Guess jeans cuffs rolled paired with a Varnet tee-shirt and oversized flannel shirt tied at the waist. I listened to the early hip hop groups like Digital Underground, Run DMC, NWA, Ghetto Boys, Too Short, etc. There wasn’t much variety, and most of us just wanted more than anything to fit in. For most middle schoolers, conformity was the rule, not curiosity and exploring. David disrupted that for me.
First of all, he took every car ride as a personal challenge to expose me to new music. His music. Aside from his truck and two yellow labs, his most prized possession was his CD collection. He loved music, all kinds of music, but mostly bands like REM, U2, and the Pogues. He was also a die hard dead head. He spent his summers during college following the Grateful Dead across the country. Hello New Potato Caboose. In the many hours we rode together, I don’t think he ever played the same CD twice, except maybe Joshua Tree. Note, He had a Sony Discman on his console that had a cassette converter with a wire that ran to the headphone jack in his discman so we could listen thru the truck speakers. Through David, I learned about many new bands from the 80’s. We would do entire weeks of just the same artist going through each album end to end. It didn’t matter if I liked the song or not, we listened to everything, no skipping songs.
He loved live concerts. I think it combined his favorite things, music, people, and girls. We went to see Mellencamp once at Riverbend in Cincinnati. While it wasn’t my first concert, it was my first one with an adult who wasn’t related to me. True to form, within minutes of walking into the venue, David ran into several folks he remembered from some party in Atlanta years ago. They invited us to join them on the lawn and a new concert experience opened up for me, sharing good times with strangers. But to David, no one was a stranger. His wanted to know everyone. He never forgot a face. He never stopped going out and meeting people. Thus his network kept growing and growing.
Charisma comes in many forms, but I never met anyone who was so friendly, engaging, and unafraid of new people. He was approachable as a Labrador Retriever puppy. After an hour into the show, he had made maybe 50 new friends. Yet despite his growing entourage, he didn’t ignore or forget me. Somehow despite him being the center of every story and crowd, I was never pushed out or left alone. He nudged me to shake hands, swap names, and share stories. To him it came naturally.
David did not stay long in my life. The same winds that brought him to my town carried him out a few years later. By then, I had progressed from a meager adolescent to a late teenager preparing for college life. At the time, I was unaware of his influence. As one comes of age, your behaviors and mind are like a sponge absorbing from the people you orbit, often not acknowledging the source. As I look back many years later, I am grateful for David’s brief tenure in my life. As an introvert, I could never match his gift of casualness with strangers. Yet, I followed his lead in being fearless in new situations. As a result, the world for me is much friendlier and bigger as a result.
I don’t recall the last time I saw David in person. I think it was at a late night party when he was visiting town. I was still in high school and likely out past my curfew. He made a point to catch up with my evolving music tastes (I was on a Pink Floyd kick at the time). He also asked about my dating life and what colleges I was interested in. Sometime afterwards I heard he moved back to his hometown, Louisville, where he married and settled down.
Maybe ten years since I last saw him, word got back to me that he had passed away at the age of 43 from an aggressive form of cancer. His obituary said many attended his funeral to celebrate the life of the unofficial mayor of St. Matthews. I imagine the crowd was enormous.
I always think of him when I hear “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
