There were tears, no surprise.

Smiles and laughter, no surprise.

A story of addiction, plenty of goddamns, and a stuffed armadillo.

But since it was a memorial service for Bob McAllister — poet, teacher, carpenter and Bainbridge’s celebrated “Beastmaster” and “Mad Priest” — who could be surprised at the adoration, the appreciation and the embellishments offered at a packed gathering Saturday in the commons at Bainbridge High?

McAllister, a fixture on the island since 1968, passed away Aug. 18 at the age of 73. He was an iconic figure, known to a generation of students at Bainbridge High, where he taught English and drama for 35 years, and in local theater, as the producer of more than a hundred stage productions.

The high school was jammed with hundreds for his memorial, an event that he helped put together before his passing. It was a large crowd, a crowd the size that would make a fire marshal do some quick mental math: Is this space large enough?

Merry McAllister, his widow, welcomed the massive crowd, but joked that her husband would have been adamant that the celebration start on time.

Rick Stafford, who was the technical director for the BHS theatre club that did 20 productions with Bob McAllister over the span of a decade, recalled a man eager to listen to the ideas of others.

“But if he didn’t agree with our vision he would very sensitively say, ‘Your genius and mine differ in this respect,’” Stafford recalled.

On the job with Bob

Stafford remembered the summer 11 years ago when McAllister had coaxed him to a job site where he was working, with the promise of teaching him how to be a carpenter.

It was a restoration project at a home on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, and Stafford recalled one lunch break they took during their first week on the job.

They were sitting in the sun on the back steps of the house, eating and talking.

“Bob was leading a discussion around an article he had read the night before by Stephen Hawking. We were comparing Hawking’s philosophy with other philosophers, poets and rock stars,” Stafford said.

The homeowner came out, and, leaning against the back doorjamb, listened in. After 15 minutes, he broke in with a “No! No! No, guys!”

“Really, this is all wrong! You are contractors, you should be discussing last weekend’s monster truck rally, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, next weekend’s big game,” the homeowner said. “Instead you’re sitting here discussing Western intellectual history and the meaning of the universe. You are just too sensitive.”

The workers looked at each other and shrugged. McAllister, though, immediately named the group “The Sensitive Carpenters,” and for the rest of the summer, they tried to come up with a motto.

The suggestions included “Our handkerchiefs are always freshly washed and pressed” and “If you don’t like our work, we’ll cry.”

Oh so sensitive

McAllister, Stafford recalled, kept the joke going.

When one carpenter would descend a ladder to get the next piece of soffit, McAllister would pipe up, “Good job!”

“At lunch the next day Bob looked in his cooler and said, “I got a note in my lunch, did you?’” Stafford recalled.

He remembered how at the end of the summer job, McAllister threw a party and “grandly revealed jackets he had ordered for us.” Each one was embroidered with “The Sensitive Carpenters” and their names.

A true character

Dave Richards remembered how he first met McAllister five years ago.

Introducing himself to the crowd as one would at a support group meeting, he said he became hooked on the “drug known as Bob McAllister.”

“It happened on a rainy winter night at the Island Grill,” Richards said. “While my friend and I waited at the bar, I looked through the window as a vintage green Jaguar pulled up. A man in a Marlon Brando-esque leather jacket climbed out of the car and hustled into the restaurant. My friend said, ‘Dave, I’d like you to meet Bob McAllister.’”

“It was all there: The tousled, silver hair. The impish, naughty grin.  The eyes brimming over with mirth and mischief,” he said.

“I remember thinking, ‘Who is this cool cat with the easy swagger?’

‘Who is this cheeky, 60-something dude who acts like he’s 29?’

‘Who is this Shakespeare-quoting, martini-swilling guy with the devil-may-care attitude?’

“I was immediately hooked,” Stafford said.

Now, McAllister is gone, but addiction remains, Stafford quipped. But he offered others who also still needed a fix some advice: Don’t give up your addiction to the man, nurture it by following the examples he set.

“Be compassionate toward your fellow man. Be curious — never stop learning. Live in the present. Keep your sense of humor,” he said. “Have fun.”

The celebration — orchestrated by Steve Stolee — included moments of pure performance.  During the Requim presented by Mark Nichols, a line of friends walked onto the stage and Dennis South, dressed in a big fur coat, pulled items out of a steamer trunk that represented the life of the poet and carpenter and teacher. Each person then raised the item high above and formed a line at the back of the stage.

A circular saw. A power drill. A pair of Converse tennis shoes. A pack of Belair cigarettes with its trademark blue sky and puffy clouds. A stuffed armadillo (a white elephant gift from a BHS staff Christmas party more than 20 years ago).

McAllister’s daughters also shared their memories; Anna McAllister, Kristin Larson, Heidi Jackson and Molly McAllister.

Into the dark

His daughter Heidi recalled how he calmed her when she was 4, afraid of the dark and begging for the hall light to be left on.

“You taught me to live with the dark. You went into the dark with me and showed me how to survive it and love it madly,” she said.

“You came to my room in our house on Sunrise and sat with me on the window seat you’d built, and put our hands together into the pitch black and said ‘See? It’s only air.’ It’s an image I keep; our hands together touching dark.”

Later in life, as the new and exhausted and self-doubting mother of twins, he helped her through the dark again, she said.

“You called me almost every day or I’d call you up bawling, ravaged by hormones and exhaustion and dark and you’d talk me through. You helped me grow into being a woman, a mother, showed me how to be a wife by how you were as a husband to Merry,” Heidi McAllister recalled.

“You came to visit me and sat with me while I endlessly nursed, rocked and walked your new grandchildren and to lighten the mood, and because you were excited about it, you put on the DVD of you in the film ‘Jurisdiction’ where you played a murderer with half a face. The death scene.

“‘Hey, we’re here in the dark, here’s some more,’” she remembered with a laugh. “I love you for that.”

There were so many memories, so many good memories. Some just as simple as being together.

“I remember gunning it on an island back road with you singing our guts out and pumping our fists in your truck to Sly and the Family Stone’s ‘Everyday People.’ I remember telling you I wanted to do my crazy dancing for you the last weekend I saw you in August. ‘Do it,’ you said, and I did, awkward again in the parlor corner, afraid of making you laugh too hard but I know now you let me do it for me, because I had no words left to say but ‘I love you’ and ‘thank you’ and sometimes the body can do what the words can’t.

“I dance for you, Papa. I punch the air for you when I run to the ocean and hurl my gratitude and grief for you in to the water.”

He’s still here, she told the crowd, just as he said, as the contrails in the sky he said to look for.