Ride For Life

By Matthew Miller
Lansing State Journal

Robert McAlvey's friends say that he was a strong man.

Not just physically strong, though he was a state champion wrestler in his youth, but strong in his convictions, strong in the way he cared for those around him and strong in the face of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, the disease that took his life Monday.

McAlvey, a captain with the Meridian Township Fire Department, was 46 years old.

Meridian Township firefighter Lt. Monty Nye knew McAlvey for 15 years.

He said that when McAlvey was diagnosed with ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, in 2004, he "met it head on."

"He kept setting goals, time goals for himself, and he kept meeting those goals," Nye said. "It was first a son's birthday, then getting his house built, a son's graduation. He continued to set goals and push and hang on and fight the disease."

Nye said McAlvey had been "one of the most highly respected officers we had in the department," a guy people would turn to with questions, who stood up for the underdog, someone who treated others as he would have wanted them to treat him.

Watching him fight ALS, which slowly robbed him of his ability to move and speak, "was one of the toughest things I've ever done in my life," Nye said.

Ben McAlvey, the oldest of Bob McAlvey's five sons, said that experience "tore me apart sometimes."

He remembers his father as "an amazing dad, very encouraging, very supportive, behind me and my brothers when we failed, and behind us still when we were doing well."

Even after his father got sick, he said, "You could just see that there was so much he wanted to do."

The project that occupied the last years of McAlvey's life was building a house - his dream house - on 42 acres he owned northeast of Haslett.

McAlvey wasn't able to do the work himself. Rather, Jim Dimmitt, a licensed builder whose wife, Jill, is McAlvey's cousin, offered to "act as Bob's hands."

Friends, fellow firefighters and members of First Christian Church in Lansing, which McAlvey attended, pitched in to get the work done.

"One day, we had 37 firefighters out there, setting the trusses on that 2,500-square-foot house," Dimmitt said. "It was like a good old-fashioned barn raising."

People's willingness to help "just shows what kind of person Bob was," he added.

"He had people's respect. He just was a wonderful person, and it was really sad to watch that disease take him from us."