News

By Ron Hayes

BRINY BREEZES —  On a Monday morning more than a decade ago, David Blonda was sharing a golf cart with a new resident, collecting aluminum cans for the town’s recycling club.
    “I asked him where he was from,” Blonda recalled, “and he said, ‘A little town you never heard of called Topsfield, Mass.’ I said, ‘Well, I grew up five miles away in Ipswich.’ And  that became the basis for a very long friendship.”
    During his 12 years in Briny Breezes, David Forrest developed many long friendships and earned the town’s gratitude for his volunteer work.
    Mr. Forrest died Nov. 1. He was 66 and had battled cancer.
    “He was a good guy,” remembered Ken Doyle, president of the town’s Boating & Fishing Club, which collects discarded paper and aluminum. “He was a quiet man, but a real nice guy. He helped all he could.”
    In addition to the Boating & Fishing Club, Mr. Forrest was a member of the Chiselers, a woodworking club.
    “He wasn’t there as a hobbyist so much as just to be helpful,” said Ira Friedman, the club’s president. “If you had a chair with a broken leg, he was one of the guys you called. Unselfish, that’s how he was known to his friends.”
    In the summer months, when dockmaster Doug Baumgarten went north to Wisconsin, Mr. Forrest filled in.
    “Last year a guy tied his boat up wrong. At high tide, the water started flowing in, and Dave caught that. I imagine he helped save about five boats over the years,” Baumgartner recalled.
    David Forrest was born on June 28, 1946, in Malden, Mass., and lived most of his life in Topsfield. After serving with the U.S. Army in Germany, he was honorably discharged in 1972 and worked as a machinist at Evans Industries in Topsfield until his retirement in 2000, when he moved to Briny Breezes.
    When he wasn’t volunteering, neighbors usually found him on his porch, enjoying a good book and the ever-present breeze off the Intracoastal.
    “David exemplified the slogan that a person’s word is their bond,” David Blonda said. “He was one of the most dependable and faithful persons that anyone could have had as a friend.”
    Mr. Forrest, who left no immediate survivors, was cremated, and his remains will be interred at the South Florida National Veterans Cemetery in Boynton Beach.