The Book of Dietz: Memories of the late great 

by Mark McDermott 

This is the beginning of a story I have been unable to write for two years. On June 26, 2023, my friend Pat Dietz and his grandson Charlie were outside the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Torrance when an elderly man driving a Tesla ran into a parked car and lost control of his vehicle. Rather than braking, the man accelerated, and sped toward Pat and Charlie. 

If you knew Pat Dietz, you know that he was one of those rare humans possessing the ability to slow down time — whether telling a slow-winding story, teaching a music lesson, or playing a graceful guitar lick, Pat had mastered one of life’s most elusive arts, that of pace. In a world increasingly governed by pings and gnawing distraction, Dietz moved unhurriedly, with clear focus for whatever task, situation, or fellow human being was at hand. 

And so at this moment, Dietz saw with utter clarity what was about to happen. Torrance police would later review footage from the bookstore’s security camera. The video showed Dietz leaping in front of the runaway vehicle and moving his grandson away from its most brutal point of impact. 

“The way the police officer said it is that he threw himself forward so that he was able to push Charlie out of the way,” said Carrie Dietz Brown, Pat’s youngest daughter. 

His grandson survived, albeit with several broken bones. Dietz died from his injuries in a hospital two days later. 

His swift act of sacrifice on that day was not surprising. A tragic and devastating shock, of course. But in keeping with the swath he cut through life. In his exit, as in his life, he was somehow both true to himself yet selfless, decisive, watchful, and above all else fiercely protective of those he loved. 

Carrie, who worked for 20 years alongside Pat at what he called “the family farm,” Dietz Brothers Music in Manhattan Beach, often referred to him as “The Mountain.” It was a weirdly apt description. There was something large, placid, and seemingly immovable about him. He created, more than his own weather, a highly specific yet immense topography. His oldest daughter, Kelly, captured some of this in her eulogy:

“My dad loved to tell the same jokes over and over, and had a pact with his best friends that they were allowed to tell each other’s best stories as autobiographical. He loved people who could tell a good story, and people who would listen to his. He loved to stop by for a visit, he loved to eat chocolate chips together late at night in the kitchen while we took turns cracking each other up, and he’d cry with you in a parked car somewhere when life was hard. When he laughed, you could see all the way back to his molars.

He held all babies with their stomach against the inside of his forearm and their head in the crook of his elbow. He loved teenagers, and considered himself still 19 at heart. Somehow, he also made being a real adult look interesting, and possible. 

He shuffled his feet when he walked, and had his same huge Birkenstocks resoled and re-corked every year. He loved P.G. Wodehouse’s novels and William Stafford’s poetry. He drank coffee any hour of the day or night, and he never passed anyone down on their luck without slipping them some cash.

When a hummingbird stunned itself on his window, he rescued it from the neighborhood cats and stayed up with it all night, feeding it sugar water and playing it Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. It was strong enough to be released by the next morning, but it visited him in his backyard for months. He followed the adventures of the Santa Monica mountain lion P-22 for years, and cried, hard, when it died last summer. 

He loved Lucinda Williams and Bob Dylan. He sang his kids and grandkids Sweet Baby James and Prairie Lullaby and Jambalaya. After we blew out our birthday candles, he’d improvise a dozen versions of Happy Birthday in different styles — baroque, atonal, ragtime — until we were all laughing and it seemed like music could have been invented again just from that one melody. He loved figuring out which songs would get people up dancing the fastest at a party, and he loved teaching guitar lessons. He played so many gigs around Southern California over the years that he joked he’d been on a lifelong world tour of Los Angeles. If he said another musician was “a very fine player,” you knew they were someone special. After the last concert we went to together, he found the guitarist to tell her she should check out McCabe’s Music for an LA gig, and told her that he had taught Hazel [his granddaughter] how to play the song Lowrider the day before. 

I started working on a story about Pat in the months after his death with a list of 20 names to call. The list could easily be 10 times longer and each conversation would yield nuggets — a tall tale, a bawdy joke, a kindness bestowed, a lesson taught. But after a half dozen interviews, the mountain part of the undertaking became apparent. How can you possibly tell the story of Pat Dietz? 

The difficult part isn’t the tragedy. I’ve written a lot about people who died. Beyond the obituaries that are every reporter’s sometimes task, my work has often led me deep into the stories of the lives that have just been lost. In the past, when asked what I write about, my half-joking response was, “Love and death.” (And thousands of council meetings). Love and death are inevitably connected. Loss is baked into life. 

But it’s hard to write about people you know. As a reporter, it means there’s too much material, and in death, too much weight. And Pat was rarely, if ever, heavy. Of all the lines and stories people shared with me, something said by his then four-year-old grandson, Francis, would likely be Pat’s preferred summation. 

A small party was underway at the Dietz home. It was mostly older people. Francis was the only kid there, and it wasn’t one of those gatherings at which conversation was flowing very well. A pregnant, somewhat awkward pause had descended upon the room. 

“Conversation was like going nowhere fast,” recalled Carrie, who is Francis’s mom.  “And Francis, being a Dietz, seeing an opportunity to get a little attention, being a little show-off, out of nowhere, he said to this older couple, ‘You know, the thing about my grandpa, he’s more of a joker than he is a thinker.’” 

“I’ve never seen my Dad be more proud of someone, and more flattered,” she said. “He was so proud of Francis for saying something like that. And he said, ‘I can’t think of a better compliment.’”  

But Pat was also well acquainted with loss, beginning with the loss of his much-loved sister, Judy, in a car accident when he was only 13. 

My brother, Brian, died about two months before Dietz. Pat never owned a cell phone, and only reluctantly used computers. Like a farmer neighbor, his preference was just to drop by. But since I no longer lived locally, he photographed a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay titled “Dirge Without Music” and emailed it to me. 

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—

They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled

Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

The best is lost. And so on the second anniversary of Pat’s death, I know better than to think a newspaper story can capture the Mountain. So instead, this is a small beginning to a larger story. His was a life extraordinarily well-lived. He married the love of his life, Carol, when they were both very young, and stayed vibrantly in love for 48 years of marriage. He raised a family of four (three daughters, and a son, Erik, who now owns and operates Dietz Bros Music) and an extended family of hundreds, both through the music school he and his brother John founded 49 years ago and through the many of his children’s friends who at times lived in the house in Manhattan Beach that Pat built by hand with his own father, Merle, when he started his family. 

“It’s incredible, just the vastness of the way he lived his life, the calmness, the fun, the music, the art, the everything,” Carrie said. “Who wouldn’t want to get in on that? My sister Kelly put it really well. She said our house was a sanctuary. My dad built our house. Growing up, I remember thinking it was a big house. But when I look back, that was not a big house for six people. We all shared rooms. And there were people living with us constantly. All of our friends, when they would have a fight with their parents or get kicked out, would come live at my parents house. There were times when [My sister] Robin had moved away to college but her friends would still be living at my parents house. We had Sunday dinner every week and it was legendary. There would be like 20 to 30 of the fucking wildest children in the South Bay between the ages of 14 and 30. And it was mayhem. And my mom made dinner for us every Sunday. There were food fights. On my 15th birthday, my dad and my friend and my cousin scaled the back gate into the neighbor’s house that was getting torn down and went swimming in their pool. Robin woke up the next morning with a hard boiled egg in her bed. I don’t know how that got there. It was radical. And there was music, constant music.”  

Pat gave the gift of song to untold numbers, both as a teacher and a musician. He knew many hundreds of songs, from cowboy ballads to Dylan to classical pieces, and played over 6,000 gigs. He would have been able to tell you the exact number, and that he was only late for one gig, on account of daylight savings, for which he carried his only abiding hatred. He also would have been able to tell you, on most days, the exact day of his life it was. If you asked him how he was doing, in fact, the response might be pretty good, considering it was his 23,144th day on Earth. But he didn’t take that measurement too much to heart, because as a musician, artist, and wise man/joker, he knew there were better ways to experience time. He understood the infinite within the finite, “Our endless numbered days,” as songwriter Sam Beam put it. One of his great accomplishments was that he had taught his grandchildren how to answer the question, “What time is it?” with the elusive yet exact answer, “It’s right now.”

His final day, it turned out, was his 24,936th. It was a Monday. For decades, ever since Pat actually started taking one day a week off from work, he and Carol would meet up in Santa Monica for a date. Often, he would bicycle, she would drive, and they would meet at 3rd St. Promenade, encountering each other as if for the first time. On this Monday, Charlie, Kelly’s teenage son (who by the age of 8, when I first wrote about Dietz Bros, was already yet another in a long line of thumping multi-instrumentalists in the family) went along on the date. Carrie and Robin and their families lived in Old Town Torrance, where Pat and Carol had fairly recently moved, all within blocks of each other. Charlie was hanging out with Carrie while his grandparents had gone home. They were talking about the AP History class Charlie was taking, which curiously ended in August 2001. Pat arrived at the doorstep in order to pick up Charlie. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go get a book.” Carrie tried to engage him in conversation, hoping to get Pat to come inside for a hang. 

“I am like, ‘Dad, we are just laughing about how Charlie’s AP History class just goes until August of 2001,” she recalled. “What the hell? Why are they not including September 11? That’s wild.” 

“My dad is on my front porch, and he gets this look in his face. It’s like he’s smiling but his eyes just look so sad. And he just goes, “Impermanence,” turns around and walks down my stairs with Charlie behind him. I probably got the phone call 15 or 20 minutes later.” 

Well-lived lives offer lessons in how to live. As a writer, I have noticed that we often don’t see the narrative arc of a life until it comes to a close. His family continues to unearth songs, documents, notebooks, poems, letters and stories. Pat wrote everything down, by hand. One of those notebooks was illustrative. It was a list of more than 50 loved ones, on graph paper, with categories about the last action taken — a call, a visit, a letter — and planned future actions. (I was on that list. Years back, I was going through some tough times, and either every Sunday or Monday night, just around sundown, I would hear Pat Dietz’s footsteps on my stairs as he arrived, unannounced but so perfectly announced in what his daughter Kelly described as his “dailiness,” the rock steady rhythm and reliability with which he lived). In the yoga tradition, living with intention is a much-elaborated topic. Pat did indeed do his own very specifically Dietzian kind of yoga, but in a way he’d been practicing this kind of intentionality since he was a child. 

Not long after Pat left us, I received an email from Peter Carreiro, who’d been friends with him since 7th grade at American Martyrs. 

“In eighth grade Pat was President and I was his running mate,” Carreiro wrote. “My dad thought the banner that said Dietz for Prez, Carreiro for Vice was amusing. Hours spent at the house on John St. stapling egg crate cartons to soundproof the garage. Some of us would say let’s hit the beach. Pat would always say, I’ll be down later, I gotta practice. And he always would come down later. Somehow, even then he would get it done. Music and life.” 

The reason he wrote to me was that in the wake of Pat’s death, nothing but tone deaf news stories had been written. He wanted me to write a real story. 

For several years, I tried to convince Pat to co-write a book, but to do so in a genre we both despised, that of bestselling business books. This one would be called The Book of Dietz and would offer some actual business advice — because Pat was an astute small business owner with thoughts on the matter — but mainly would be an excuse to put on paper his many oft-repeated tales. He always laughed along at the idea, but in one of our last conversations, actually offered an idea for the book he really wanted to do. A book about work. It would be told in a form in which each chapter was about a worker — mostly his employees — and the lessons were what could be learned from terrible workers as well as good ones. 

Now that Pat is gone, that book cannot be written. But the Book of Dietz has just begun. 

This is the first in a series.  Please email stories about Pat Dietz to mark@easyreadernews.com.