Honoring the Warehouse Manager
Auto Immunity's Run Boys!
Have you ever looked up something such as a date, maybe a person you want to remember more clearly, only to learn something else, something more? Something unexpected. This short essay is an example of that situation.
In the Auto Immunity essay, I first wrote that the Warehouse Manager graduated five years ahead of me (it is corrected). For the sake of accuracy, I decided to look up the Warehouse Manager to verify when he graduated from our high school. I was not certain about the five-year age difference.
The Warehouse Manager graduated from Southeast Polk High School two years before I did, in 1978. Why did I think he was older? Why did I write a fair number of words about him? That question is easy for me to answer: the Warehouse Manager was at the time mature beyond his years. He was solid in himself, and he knew what he wanted out of life and what was important to him. I could tell he lived his life in accordance with his values. He was authentic, genuine, polite, and direct. He set a good example.
The Warehouse Manager is one of the reasons I liked my summer job at the moving and storage company. The Warehouse Manager has a name: Donald “Brian” Shaver. Working with Brian Shaver made those hard days loading and unloading go quickly. The tired was a satisfying physical kind of tiredness.
Donald “Brian” Shaver died in 2005 when he was struck by a car while riding his bicycle. He was forty-five years old, and that would have made him sixty-six or sixty-seven now. Is this something that I knew but forgot? Know but “didn’t know?”
This information came as a sad and unexpected bit of knowledge to me just now, even though Brian Shaver was killed by a car on a county highway not far probably from his home almost twenty-one years ago.
An organization called Bike Iowa chronicled and archived the Des Moines Register stories about Brian Shaver’s death and the proceedings afterward. The year 2005 might have been a blur to me, and I did not regularly read or watch the local news. I have a sense of loss to have not participated in the Ride of Silence in his honor.
This is the 2026 version of me writing now and not the 2005 rendition.
The guy just had a good spirit about him. My bullshit meter is sensitive, and I can attest after all these years of intervening memory that Brian Shaver did not truck in bullshit. He was not harsh about it. He ignored it and did not give the smelly behaviors any time of day. That is a rough way of putting it.
The Bike Iowa page that I linked above is valuable if only to look at Brian Shaver’s photograph. His person, his attitude shines through. This is why I remember him so well. The moment when I saw the photo, I knew it was the same Brian Shaver. Sad.
The Warehouse Manager had moved on to own his own moving company, which he talked about with me on those summer afternoons at the warehouse—and he was getting in a last bike ride before a family vacation. He called his company Shaver Relocation Services. Brian Shaver would talk about his father driving long haul for North American Van Lines, its electronics division. Perhaps it was his dad who had the bad back?
His father, Donald “Don” Shaver died naturally in 2025, aged eighty-eight, on Father’s Day. Is it not an unspoken rule that a child not precede in death the two people who bring them into the world?