Dood to the highest order, Andrew Thomas Latimer, passed away from pneumonia Saturday, August 19, 2023, family by his side. He was 57 years old. 

Andrew became a dood early in life. At the age of four, he would walk into a room of people at his home In Prescott, Arizona, pull his thumb out of his mouth and proclaim an always original insight or wisdom. 

At the age of five, he watched his brother, Ben, build a lemonade stand. After three hours, the ice all melted, Ben hadn’t made enough money for the toy he wanted to buy. Andrew took all the unopened packages of powdered lemonade, sat on the wall that ran along the sidewalk, and sold out in fifteen minutes. He gave Ben the money. 

The Dood told wild stories of teachers releasing bees in the classroom. Became friends with the actor that played Martin in the movie Billy Jack. He raised a chicken named Carrie-Doris. At a spiritual retreat, a psychic placed a hand on Andrew and told his parents, “This boy is a very old soul. One who will surpass us all in his spirituality.” 

Andrew began his grade school years in a one-room schoolhouse in the woods of Northeastern Washington State. He lived on 66 acres of mountainside in a hexagonal cabin built by his parents, Tom and Glenda. It was a home with no running water. No electricity. And a rope swing suspended over a deep ravine. It was here, along with his sister Tammy and brothers Salvador and Ben, he first heard John Prine sing the words from Spanish Pipedream on a little battery-operated record player. 

Words the Dood would live by. Although he gave the TV a lot of second chances.

The family moved to Eltopia, a little town in southern Washington, where Andrew went to high school, made friends out of church folk and rabble-rousers alike. He didn’t discriminate. During these years he knighted Ben “Dood” and that became their name for each other. If immediate attention or emphasis was needed, additional o’s were added: “Doooood.”

He talked his parents into trading the family car, a 1964 Chevy Impala, for his first vehicle: a 1975 Honda CB125S motorcycle marking the beginning of his lifetime obsession with vehicles in crap condition. These motorcycles, cars & trucks dripped oil, refused to start, hood latches would fail and wrap over the windshield at speed. That one happened three times. One little Ford truck had a destroyed clutch, so Andrew learned to shift a manual transmission without one. Riding with him you wouldn’t know, except he never came to a full stop.

The Dood graduated from Connell High School in 1984 and set out for Chapman University in Orange County, California. His artwork, sculpture in particular, got a lot of attention. Otis College of Art and Design, offered him some scholarship money and lured him to LA for his second year. That was a total disaster. The balance of good influences in his life was outweighed by the bad and he tumbled. His parents threw him a lifeline, bringing him home to straighten out and start again. It was a rough couple years, but it worked. 

In 1987 he decided to move to San Francisco to live with Ben. After landing a job at the same company, McCune Sound, Andrew was promoted above Ben in his second month there. Being a proper dood, he seldom lorded this fact over his brother.

Andrew was promoted and promoted again. Then promoted again. He quit and worked in furniture restoration. He invested in a coffee cart and opened his own business, Kaldi’s Coffee, on New Montgomery Street in San Francisco. He befriended business people, cops, the homeless. He was generous with the coffee, pastries and bagels he sold – to the point that the little cart had trouble turning profit enough to make a living. And he needed a living, because he was about to fall completely head over heels – truly, madly, deeply – for Patti, a nurse at the VA Hospital.

He went to work for a company as a chimney sweep, getting his picture in the Chronicle wearing the customary tophat while climbing a ladder with a San Francisco sky behind him. No fear of ladders or standing on steep rooftops. Even after a twelve-foot fall chronically injured his back. 

He started his own business cleaning chimneys and became a certified mason. He and Patti married in May of 1994 in San Anselmo, California. He wore a tophat to the wedding. 

They bought their first house in the San Francisco neighborhood of Bernal Heights, with a view of Twin Peaks. A crazy person had lived in the house before them so Andrew spent his off-hours pulling garden hoses, golf balls and fifty years of the neighbor’s mail out of the walls, refinishing and repainting and getting the house ready for the arrival of their firstborn, Joseph.

Dana was born four years later, and the family was complete. Andrew called them all Dood and soon they all called each other Dood. Fate would see them lose the San Francisco home to fire. Andrew wasn’t sentimental about the possessions they lost, instead focusing on what came next. Always planning, dreaming and preparing for life in front of him and his family. 

They bounced between rentals until moving to their second home, a beautiful, older Victorian in Vallejo, California, with a large yard, some questionable neighbors and no end to remodeling projects Andrew would take on. 

They eventually moved to Citrus Heights, California, where Patti worked as an RN at the VA hospital and Andrew became CEO of Handy Andy, a handyman service company with himself as the sole employee. Some partners came and went. He homeschooled his kids, built them guitars and bought them drum kits as he cheffed up feasts of stews, salads, pastas, pizzas and lemon cream pie, kept up his deep love of the Blues and John Prine, troublesome cars and two dogs that adored him, Toby and Millie.

His health was up and down during this time, but despite some major diagnoses and a few surgeries, he always came back, working at his various handyman jobs, repairing his cars, and taking on projects at the house. 

He also helped those considered by others to be lost causes. A knock on his door one day revealed a homeless man who had once been a teacher. The man asked if he could just take a shower. The Dood opened his door, his shower and his friendship. Approached on the internet by a Ugandan missionary, Musoke, asking for money to help dig a well and build an orphanage — everyone said scam. Andrew gave him money, helped manage his US operations and realized Musoke’s years-long dream. Andrew and Musoke never met, but became lifelong friends. Against all we’ve been taught to watch out for on the internet, an orphanage exists in Uganda today in part because of Andrew’s love of people the rest of us might fear.  

In June, he went on a vacation with his family to watch some sunsets from a northern California cabin. He celebrated 29 years of marriage to Patti. He was also building out his chimney business, studying for his state contractors license and buying a 40’ extension ladder so he could climb to even greater heights. 

In Andrew’s world we were all doods and he led by example. He taught every one of us how to dood and to be the best doods we can be. To the strangers, dreamers, misfits, churchfolk, cops, addicts, homeless and always, always, always to each other. 

The Dood is survived by his wife Patti, his kids Joseph & Dana, his father Thomas and his siblings, Salvador, Tammy and Ben. He will be buried near his mother’s gravesite, in a rural cemetery in Eltopia, Washington, where the grass grows a little wild, the summers bring warm, gentle winds and junker cars abound.