@Bodyne .....
Good ole' Lone. He was quite the character, no doubt. Such great tales....and an all around good person.
I never met him face to face but we shared a lof of "stuff" via mail/etc. I first had interaction with him when he was still in Texas...pre bust....just before and then all through the "plan B" time period. (Vegas was a good cat as well and shared freely with me) After that i lost touch (with both)...heard he got popped...moved to OR....and then, sadly, heard through the 'vine that he had passed. Last i talked to V his son had just died...and the wheels were falling off for him badly inside. the guy still insisted he send me seeds...and sent me a copy of damn near everything he was gonna release with Lone before they had their falling out. Now that I've lost a son as well...I think back on that convo...and where he must have been at the time...and how little the whole "weed' thing truly matters in the true scheme of it all... and it all still blows me away when i think about it.
How we first connected was classic Lone. At the time the TRC packs were RAPIDLY gaining popularity. I think it was something like "Chili peppers" or some such thing that first tipped the $300 a pack mark. Before that...TRC gear was $75....or less....and i remember very early on hearing of "Monkey Balls" and a few others and seeing those seeds just sit there. Then they were gone...got popped...and the talk started to build...
Those $300 packs blew my mind. I just felt it was gouging......and so...on my first email to Lone...i basically told him that...straight up.
Being Lone....a class act...he didn't come back at me with a Fuck you....he came back at me just SOOOOO respectful it was crazy. I guess I hit HIS respect button by me simply being totally upfront with him. I didn't attack him...i just told him he was fuckin the little guy bad, that there was no reason for such pricing when a fuckin plant could drop thousands of beans, and that I wasn't gonna play. He said most other guys would have started a thread on the forum and bad mouthed him like he wasn't there...
And that started our friendship. I was retailing hydro gear at the time....so i was always sending him nutes/new stuff I'd get as promos/etc....and he would send me seeds here/there in return. One day I got a package with 3 "Sharon widow" clones in it. Evidently....I was told...he trusted me....and I was one of a handful of folks backing things up...just in case. All-in-all though...he said he just wanted to repay my friendship and blow me away at the same time...which he did.
I grew that cut extensively. Not THE best pot ever (being honest 'cus he liked that)....but it was solid bud for the time, for sure. Along the way he sent me seeds from his private stash....and gave me a green light to F2 the "Mary Jane" clone he also sent me later on....just before "the family" broke up and everyone scattered/went their own separate ways and i lost touch with him.
Still have some of those handwritten packs he said we from his own stash....and a buncha f2's of MJ I made..... gotta be almost 15 years old now. (These were some of the only beans that didn't get tossed a month or so ago when I made the big decision to clean out the seed bucket of shit i had no intention of growing again/etc. and was just not gonna fuck with trying to get to germ/etc. (all of which were reg seeds....some 20+ years old)
Prolly won't grow em....but as i touched em I had the thought/feeling/the past roll over me and I felt that I shouldn't chuck em out of respect. Somebody might want to though...no guarantees of course...
RIP Lone. We're still at it here....
