My best friend died. He was also my plumber.
I met Jim the Plumber when I was a 4-year-old and my folks bought an old house on Elizabeth Street in Pueblo. It was 1955. I followed him around picking up his tools and generally making a pest of myself. He was 33 at the time but we became friends. He was my mentor until he died last month at age 88.
Jim Coudayre was a tough Irishman, a Marine who served in the South Pacific at Tarawa and Saipan. You’d never tell him that it was foolish to drop the atomic bomb on the Japanese because he was ready for that darned war to end.
In 1945, he came back to Pueblo and like many hometown veterans went to work in the steel mills. But Jim wanted to own his own business. He quit and apprenticed as a plumber until he could start his own company.
Jim the Plumber taught me a thing or two about getting along with people when I was a youngster at Thatcher School. I couldn’t get along with Mark and Kitty. Mark and I were in kindergarten together with our 1950s crewcuts and our snippy attitudes. We came from pretty good families and attended each other’s birthday parties. We both even graduated from Miss Macintire play school together. But we bickered constantly.
Jim did plumbing work for both of our families. One day we were rolling around in the dirt having a great fight. Jim came around the corner, screeched his plumbing truck to a halt, got out and sat us down on the curb. He ordered us to cut out the nonsense and play nice. Fifty-five years later, Jim was still asking me if I remembered the day he “settled things out between you and Mark.”
Kitty moved into the neighborhood to live with he grandpa after her dad got out of the military. I didn’t like girls and so I didn’t much care for Kitty as a 6-year-old and I sat on the roof of my house and yelled at her. Jim straightened me out real fast because he went to the Catholic church with her family. He asked me how I would feel if I was new in the neighborhood and other kids were nasty to me.
Kitty grew up to become president of the school board of the Pueblo City Schools. We are still friends.
Jim helped me get a Boy Scout merit badge that required learning plumbing repair. All I remember is all the water I had to clean up in the bathroom once we got through. Jim the Plumber always took time for me.
In 1990, Jim did something that really stirred up the community. He owned a building lot by the new fire station in a nice part of Pueblo where he planned to build a shop for his business, Grand Plumbing. He decided not to use it so he donated the land to the Pueblo Community Soup Kitchen. They had been forced out of their existing location at St. Anthony’s Church to an obscure location that was difficult for the clientele to find.
From the reaction in the Pueblo community and the letters to the editor in the local paper, you might have thought that Jim Coudayre was a ax murder. Instead of a vote of thanks, he was publicly condemned. People in the Pueblo community did not want “those kind of people” who used the soup kitchen hanging out in their nice neighborhood. It was a public display of disrespect to Jim.
In 1992, Jim and his wife left Pueblo behind after spending a lifetime here. He sold his business and moved to Las Vegas. I flew out to see him often (sometimes every year) and we talked on the phone often. His sage advice was something I depended in my life — even though he watched Fox News and read ultra-conservative writers.
We talked as recently as two months ago, when he said that he was ready to die. His voice was strong but at age 88, he had cancer and was confined to a wheelchair.
Even though Jim had been gone from Pueblo for 18 years, when they held his funeral at the town’s Sacred Heart Cathedral, the place was packed with family and friends. The Pueblo Chieftain ran an article about his death and told about the donation of the land for the soup kitchen.
Jim Coudayre was more than Jim the Plumber. He was a Pueblo institution who cared about people. He touched a lot of lives.
The soup kitchen built on Jim’s land, where they serve the needs of the Pueblo community today.
David A. Becker (evadgorf@comcast.net) of Pueblo is a reviewer of religion books who runs an Internet bookstore.
