Martin O. Hufham, better known as Toby, passed from this world yesterday morning, just a couple of days after his 83^rd birthday. His faculties, both physical and mental, were failing him, and I’m sure that if he were given a choice between going as he did, peacefully and without pain, and enduring any of the foreseeable prospects, he would have chosen to go.

But that doesn’t lessen the sadness of his family and friends. I’m convinced that the sadness that we feel and the tears that we shed are not so much for the departed as for ourselves and the hole that the departure has left in our lives.

Toby and I went back more than half a century. In the late 1960s, we, along with a television director named George Wearn, made up most of the creative staff of a local advertising agency. We were young, probably full of ourselves, and convinced that we knew more about advertising than anybody who didn’t make ads. (That particular conviction got Toby and me banned from the executive floor of our largest client in separate incidents.)

All three of us left the agency, George to Georgia Public Television and Toby and me to form a creative boutique called The Seventh House. We did some good work, had a lot of fun, and screwed the business all the way into the ground in three years.

Although we went our separate ways, they weren’t very separate. For the rest of our working lives, we were sometimes partners, often collaborators, and always friends. After we both quit working for a living, we were just friends who sought out good places for lunch and good subjects to argue about.

Toby and I had a lot in common, the most obvious being that we were both married to people named Linda who were probably smarter than we were. Another commonality was that we loved the creative process and were happily willing to shed blood for an idea, preferably someone else’s blood. (One memorable instance occurred during the short life of The Seventh House. We had acquired Phipps Plaza as a client, and Toby and I were having a creative conference. Evidently, the noise level got so high that our young secretary thought we were going to kill each other and ran from the office in tears. Toby and I resolved the creative questions and went across the street for pizza.)

There were a lot of opinions, beliefs, and concepts that we didn’t share, which led to energetic discussion, much like the Phipps Plaza creative conference. Sometimes, the discussions got so energetic that the people at the sushi house would slide down in their seats, and the waitresses would try to remember the number for 911. We’d finish the discussion and the lunch, walk out, give each other a hug, and plan another lunch.

Like most people in advertising, Toby won a few and lost a few. One of his big wins was Crosstalk, a fledgling software company that he helped grow into the dominant telecommunications software of the explosive PC era of the 1980s and 90s. He held the account from its beginnings until it was sold to DCA, and it made a name for him and his agency in the technology market. Most of his work after that had to do with people who dealt in bits and bytes.

Toby liked to make things; his creativity went way beyond ads. He created a recipe for banana bread that was coveted by a number of wives, including mine. He built furniture and gave it to his children. He spent the better part of a year building stone pillars under his deck and the better part of another year getting over it. He painted, he cooked, and he read.

But more than anything else, he loved his family and made sure he cared for them. He was, as the Bible says, the husband of one wife. He was also the father of three children and the grandfather of two, all of whom will miss him terribly, as will his friends. And he had a lot of them.

One of the interesting things about Toby was the loyalty he inspired. He had more old friends than anybody I’ve ever known, people from high school, students from his time at Atlanta School of Art, clients and colleagues from fifty years in advertising, and sometimes just people he’d run across.

All of those people—family and friends—have had an important part of their life torn away and are the sadder for it. But, all of them are left with memories of times when their lives were made better for having known Toby. And when we depart, that’s what we want to leave behind.