Mourning the loss of a colleague and friend
If you’ve watched feature stories on local television, you’ve seen the work of Dave Forstate. For 50 years, Dave was a photojournalist — a cameraman — for KDKA and WQED.
Dave died this week after a difficult year fighting pancreatic cancer.
For the past 10 years, he was my work buddy, working at my side and behind the camera lens for countless documentaries and shorter stories I produced at WQED. More than just a photographer, he was a true collaborator who approached every story with a producer’s eye for detail, beauty and fairness. Pittsburgh media will not see the likes of him again.
Dave takes with him decades worth of institutional knowledge and understanding of the communities he captured on film. Name a hamlet three counties away and he’d been there, did a story there and could name a good place to get lunch there. Dave knew where all the good bakeries were. He had an atlas in his head, and an encyclopedia to go along with it.
The people at work become our siblings. On all our travels to film sites, a thread connected us we unspooled with the stories of our children, our homes, or lives away from work. Like siblings we sometimes got on each other’s nerves — I more on his nerves than the other way. But also as with family, we had a shorthand of language and gestures that made our collaboration seamless. Dave knew how to get exactly what I’d need when we took the project to the edit room.
Dave was on the team that produced “The Great Ride,” the film about the bike trail from Washington, D.C., to Pittsburgh that I produced at WQED in 2019. I can still see him carrying his heavy camera as he climbed the treacherous stones to reach the top of the Paw Paw Tunnel. Well into his 70s he would scale any hill, scramble across any field and fold himself into any pretzel to get the shot.
One of the last stories we did together was about Kraynick’s bike shop in Pittsburgh, a charming neighborhood place where the workers will not just repair your bike but show you how to fix it yourself. It’s a small place, and it was sweltering in there as Dave maneuvered his camera gear among all the bikes. As I fanned myself downstairs, Dave climbed the wooden staircase to get the perfect shot.
It’s easy to think I had Dave all to myself, but Pittsburgh is filled with producers and reporters who have their own good memories of working with him. Such was Dave’s work ethic and focus -it always felt like mine was his only project.
Me, I’ll remember Dave as my gentle, humble and talented colleague. More than that, I’ll remember him as my friend. A morning or two every week, Dave would call me while he was walking his beloved Lady. We wouldn’t talk about work; instead, we’d talk about travels with his wife, Judy, we’d talk about his two daughters and son of whom he was so proud, and of his four grandchildren, who delighted him.
This feels a bit selfish right now, but Dave’s passing feels like the final sentence of the long story of my own career. Not long after Dave’s diagnosis, when cancer treatment kept him away from work, I lost my job in a large layoff. First, I mourned the loss of my work, and now I mourn the loss of the man who was at my side for it. The sense of loss is just so tangled up right now.
Dave made everything I did, better. Yes, I miss the work, but right now, the sadness is more than that.
.