In reality, Paige, said, “It's been a big community effort.”
He would see neighbors taking down their fence and would ask for the wood.” “He would do a little something different every year. With help from pictures of past years, they believe they put forth a worthy effort Keith would've appreciated. It was a small consolation because he dreamed of owning an actual boat and Kim said that wasn't practical. The pirate ship had started simple and small, mother and daughter said – a combination of how Keith enjoyed Halloween, as well as the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies with his daughter. They enlisted her mother and Keith's oldest son to help.Īdded Paige, “He'd be all mad at us if we didn't.” Kim and Paige said they didn't contemplate and then decide to construct the Halloween display, but rather, “We just knew we had to do it one last time,” Kim said. After Keith died, the family already had those Christmas decorations. Keith normally took his time disassembling the pirate ship each year and putting together a tiny cabin to be decorated with Christmas lights, but last year he decided to do that while taking a couple of extra vacation days from his job with UPS – in reflection, an interesting coincidence given his illness, Kim said. “This guy had taken maybe a week of sick days since I was born,” said Paige, a senior at Truman High School, and Kim added that her husband had lost a notable amount of weight shortly before that and “was in the best shape of his life.” A couple days later he went to the hospital, where he tested positive for COVID-19. He was on a mission to make something normal last year.”īut a week after Halloween last year, Keith fell ill. “With people young and old, he got such joy. “He liked to say, 'Halloween is a lifestyle, not a holiday,” said Keith's wife, Kim. The inside of their home becomes adorned with Halloween-themed decorations and trinkets, picked up throughout the year. In addition, the patch of yard on the other side of the driveway of the Gonzales' 30th Terrace house became populated with a graveyard of skeletons. In daylight or lit up in the evening, it attracted plenty of attention from neighbors, passers-by and even people who heard about it and made a short special trip.
His family determined they had to do the same one more time this year.įor about 10 years before each Halloween, Gonzales would construct a pirate ship with a literal skeleton crew as a large lawn decoration – an expression of his giant enjoyment of Halloween. Amid the craziness of pandemic-afflicted 2020, Keith Gonzales was determined to bring some normalcy and cheer to his east Independence neighborhood.
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