Dave Mason was born in Tucson in 1959, the oldest of four children of an Air Force father and a hardworking mother. In the early years of his life, the family moved what felt like nearly every year, to Orlando, back to Tucson, to Honolulu for a few years, to Tucson again and then to Washington D.C. He started looking after his younger siblings early. Even at six, he was out tightening the bolts on their playset.
By the time the family reached Washington, their father was no longer around, and Dave, at about ten, stepped in as the man of the house. His siblings admit he was a bit of a tyrant about it. One night he roused Michele and Steve at two or three in the morning so the three of them could clean the house as good fairies before their mother woke up. When Steve complained that Dave wouldn't share the sled, their mother told Dave to let him have it half the time, so Dave rode it down the hill and let Steve haul it back up. He could torture his younger siblings, but no one else could. He always wanted to protect them.
Washington also gave him the Redskins and the music that stayed with him for life. The Masons were the only white family for a few square miles, and Dave grew up on James Brown, the Temptations, the Jackson 5, Kool and the Gang, Stevie Wonder and Earth Wind and Fire. The funkier the better, and it needed a mean bass line. He picked up bass guitar in junior high and long dreamed of being an R&B and funk bass player. He shared the music, too. Michele would never have discovered George Benson, the Doobie Brothers or Sly and the Family Stone without him, and to this day Stevie Wonder brings her brother straight to mind.
The family settled back in Tucson for good in the early seventies, near the airport at first. Dave and Steve would wander over to the fence and watch the planes come in just above their heads. One day they spotted some old Navy Corsairs parked by the hangars and slipped through the fence for a closer look, sure they were about to get caught. Instead, the men working on the planes asked whether they'd like to sit in the cockpit. There were bullet holes in it. After that the boys went back to the airport every chance they got.
Money was tight, but the house was cozy, and going without taught the kids to appreciate what they had and gave them an independence they might not have found otherwise. The children cooked their own oatmeal or cream of wheat in the morning with the radio playing, because television didn't start that early. Dave was still the one watching out for everyone. At fourteen he fixed his mother's Volkswagen so she could get to work, figuring it out as he went, and from then on that Bug was his to maintain, hot rod parts and all.
Later the family moved to Tucson's west side, where the desert served as a playground and Dave kept an eye out for parts cars. One night around ten or eleven he drove Steve down a gas line road to an abandoned Bug he had spotted and, being the older brother, sent Steve, then ten or eleven, out alone into the headlights to see whether it was worth the trouble. Steve dashed out and dashed straight back. On the drive home David Bowie's “Fame” came on the radio, and to Steve the cactus along the road started to look like skeletons running beside the car.
The west side is where he met Tim, who lived in the nearby trailer court, and Victor, two houses down. The three went to Cholla High School together and remained close for the rest of his life. Around 1975 or 1976, Victor's father Frank, a jazz pianist and sports car man, pulled up in a new rotary powered Mazda RX-2 and declared it better than his Alfa Romeo. That settled it for Dave. An RX-2 of his own soon followed, then an RX-4 and eventually an RX-7, and he kept up with Mazda rotary racing for the rest of his life. Frank may also have nudged him toward jazz, and by the late seventies he was listening to fusion players like Stanley Clarke, George Benson and Ronnie Laws, provided the bass was strong. At that stage in his life, his hero was Mark Donohue, and his favorite book was Donohue's The Unfair Advantage. He learned photography while working at Monument Camera and went out shooting auto races with his friend Jerry.
He left Cholla a few months short of graduating in 1977 to take a job washing dishes and busing tables at the Tucson Racquet Club alongside Tim and Victor. He also washed dishes at Coco's and spent a stretch resurfacing tennis courts with Tim. When Steve was twelve or thirteen, Dave brought him to the Racquet Club to lift weights with the men, then sit in the steam room and hot tub. It was the first time Dave had included him like that. They rode home afterward in the RX-4 with jazz on the stereo, Steve so worn out his whole body hummed. Once Steve began competing in sports, Dave showed up to cheer, loud enough at high school football games that Steve could hear him from the field.
Dave met Gina in 1980 at a party, through mutual friends. A few months before, he had been in a motorcycle accident, and he was still on crutches. While they were dancing he toppled over and accidentally pulled down Gina's skirt. Thankfully nobody noticed. That was how they met. He later proposed over the phone, simply by saying, “Hey, we should get married soon.” He converted to Catholicism to marry her, and they wed in 1982 and stayed married for forty three years. He was sentimental in his own way, showing it more through what he did than what he said. He was Gina's personal technology consultant and mechanic, and he did everything he possibly could for her. When he did put it into words, he called her a living saint, and sometimes an angel. His hard headedness surely tested her at times, but everyone knew he always had his family's best interest at heart.
He and Michele had butted heads as teenagers, but when she was pregnant with her daughter Rachel, the two of them bonded right away, and when Rachel was first born, Dave and Gina took her in. As adults, Michele treasured sitting with her brother and talking through deep subjects.
Computers entered his life at Radio Shack in the early eighties. He sold Tandy machines there and, as customers started needing help, became the one handling technical support, teaching himself as he went, just as he had with cars. Around 1986 he struck out on his own as a consultant. Gina once said he could have been the CEO of a company had he wanted to, but he preferred being his own boss. He enjoyed helping people and easing their anxiety, and because the work often felt more like being a doctor or a counselor than a consultant, he gave himself the honorary title Dr. Dave. It was a perfect fit. The work let him help people, answer to himself and be there whenever his family needed him.
Whenever something caught his interest, he went after it. In his thirties, never having been a cyclist, he decided to ride El Tour de Tucson, went in with almost no preparation and finished. Then he came home, eased into a hot bath and cramped up in severe pain, with Gina there to witness all of it. Radio began in much the same spirit. In the late eighties he was listening to KNST, a Tucson talk station, and concluded that the guests they brought on to discuss computers weren't very good and that he could do better. He called and asked to come on as a guest, and the station agreed. Before long he realized he needed a show of his own, pitched one to the program director, and in 1991 ComputerTalk with Dave Mason went on the air.
Around 1994 Steve signed on as call screener, worked his way up to producer and board operator, and became Evil Steve. The program grew from one hour on Saturdays to two and ranked among the top weekend special interest shows on KNST, under a tagline that promised Guaranteed Geek Free Radio.
In the late nineties the brothers also landed a spot on Access Tucson, the local public access channel, and did a television version on Friday nights for a few months one summer. Michele pitched in, and the three of them ate dinner at Coco's before every show. Steve came up with a shark puppet. The sound was so poor that they couldn't hear the callers, and some took advantage of it to say rude and explicit things on the air, which Dave handled with ease. When one called him a snaggletooth, he decided it would make a great name for a production company, the way David Letterman had Worldwide Pants, and Snaggletooth Productions was born. The show was really bad, but it was fun, and they learned a lot. Michele counts those nights among the best times she ever shared with her brothers.
When the 2000 presidential election refused to resolve, KNST asked the brothers to cover it, and they stuck with it for the full thirty seven days in what they called History on Hold. Afterward they asked the program director how to take the show national, traveled to New York for the Talkers convention in the summer of 2001, and within about a year ComputerTalk was nationally syndicated on more than two hundred stations, coast to coast, border to border and galaxy wide, as Dave liked to say. Along the way the show moved from KNST to KVOI.
In 2009 the brothers relocated the show to what they called the ComputerTalk Bunker, at an undisclosed location in the sunny Southwest, otherwise known as Dave's home office, and took over the entire production themselves. Come sickness or health, they did it, sometimes flying by the seat of their pants, and it was always the two of them. Eventually technical problems and the rest of life caught up with them, and the last show aired in May of 2015. Dave carried on working for the clients he had served for years, many of whom had become friends.
All the while, the family at home had been growing alongside the show. Lee was born in 1991 and Nick in 1997, and in all the years they were growing up, the boys never once saw their father insult their mother, speak badly of her or so much as have a small argument with her. They never heard either parent raise a voice at the other. The two of them were consistently kind and respectful to each other. He truly loved Gina. He seldom said so, but it was plain to anyone who knew him well. He often brought her flowers. Whenever she struggled, with bad dreams, trouble sleeping or something as ordinary as bad muscle cramps, he was ready at the drop of a hat to help her, comfort her and be there for her. To Lee he was strong and caring at the same time. Steady. Both boys learned how to treat a woman, and what to be in their own relationships, by watching how he treated her every day.
At home Dave could usually be found on the couch with a computer in his lap, working or reading, the news on and a Gatorade, a Dr Pepper or a Pepsi within reach. Around the house he wore short shorts the family dubbed his Magnum P.I. shorts, because in them he looked like Tom Selleck. He talked with his children about current events and what he believed, and he spoke to them as if they had something to contribute, even when they were small. That made for some memorable drives to school, including one morning's lecture on Watergate as a deep state operation and, on the ride home, another on how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had taken the idea for the Mac from Xerox.
Saturdays at the station were a high point of the boys' week. They could sit in the control room with Uncle Steve or in the studio with their dad, roam the building exploring, and every Saturday pizza from Chariots arrived at the booth. The show never seemed like work. It sounded like two best friends doing what they loved on a Saturday morning, and laughter ran through every episode. When Nick was small they asked him to record something for the ad breaks, and he said, “My dad will be back in a jiffy,” in the silliest voice he could muster. They loved it and played it on breaks for years. Lee joined the broadcast now and then to do interviews.
The show took about three hours, and the rest of the day belonged to the three of them: football on television, yard work, a run to pick up something from Craigslist, or a car to work on together. That routine continued after the show went off the air for the final time. Along the way he taught his sons that they had a duty to do whatever they could for family, not because anyone would repay them and not to the point of being mistreated, but because that is what you do. He practiced it himself. When his sister Linda needed help in Washington State, Dave, Steve and Michele drove up from Tucson and brought her home, and he was forever at his mother's house repairing something. He urged his boys to take on as much responsibility as they could handle, to tell the truth because a lie is always worse than whatever really happened, and to remember that no job was beneath them.
Lee took after his father in many ways. Both were intense, Gina used to say that being around the two of them was like having Dave on stereo, and Lee inherited his father's knack for telling family stories. Their relationship could be contentious when Lee was younger. “When I was struggling, he didn't yell,” Lee says. “He'd sit me down and help me think it through. He was always, always there for me.”
In high school Lee wrestled, and he often came home eager to show his father a new move. Dave had a background in martial arts and enjoyed it, usually answering with a counter of his own. One day they were at it in the middle of the dining room when Lee took his back. Dave turned quickly to face him and threw a Wing Chun strike, pulling it short as he always did. What he didn't know was that Lee was moving forward, and as the fist came around and up, it caught Lee in the mouth. It didn't hurt and didn't even sound bad, but before Lee could register that he had been hit, his father had his face in both hands, turning it this way and that and asking loudly, “Are you okay? Are you alright? Open your mouth, are you okay?” Looking back, Lee can see how worried he was. Lee was fine. He hadn't even noticed the smallest of chips in one tooth. Dave felt terrible, and Lee told him again and again that it was okay.
He never missed a game, a match or a concert, and Lee can't remember him ever missing a holiday or special event. Michele believes her brother became the father that he and his siblings had all needed, and that it was God's blessing out of their own hard childhood. You could tell what kind of father he was by looking at his kids. “They're his mirror,” she said.
His humor could be sharp and sophisticated one moment, dry and sarcastic the next, and then land somewhere around the level of a five year old boy. It was never crude. He couldn't stand potty humor, and when Gina, who rather enjoyed it, made that kind of joke, he rolled his eyes like a prude, which the family found every bit as funny. If one of the boys came to him with a question and then forgot what it was, Dave would declare that it must have been a lie. A sign over his office desk read, “To err is human, but it takes a computer to really screw things up.” When something went wrong he said c'est la vie, his reminder that bad things happen and you keep going, and he liked to say that slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
He never met a stranger. Once, at a concert in Tucson, he wandered off and somehow ended up on the tour bus chatting with Jerry Only, the lead singer of the Misfits, and he wasn't even a rock fan. By the end of the night they were on a first name basis. Among family, at birthdays and holidays, he was the one everyone gathered around, telling stories, cracking jokes, being goofy and playing with all the little kids. He told his sons that most families weren't like theirs and that they were very blessed. His favorite cake at family gatherings was pineapple upside down, but he wouldn't say no to any cake.
Faith came to him early and settled slowly. As a boy in Washington he always wanted to go to church, and he rounded up the neighborhood kids to come along, everyone crammed into the family's 1969 Volkswagen. As an adult he wrestled with belief for years, because it needed to make sense in his head as well as his heart. Michele once told him that God simply wanted to give him the gift of salvation and all he had to do was accept it. He thought there should be more to it than that. A get it done man, he wanted to do something, and it was one of the few times he had no smart aleck answer ready. After Steve received Christ in 2010, the brothers began sharing their faith, and it kindled a new desire in Dave to know more about God. Dave and Gina went on to join Calvary Chapel, where he was baptized alongside his family. He read and listened to John Lennox, Voddie Baucham and John MacArthur. In his last years nearly every conversation with Steve turned to God and what comes next, and he quoted 2 Corinthians 5:7, “For we walk by faith, not by sight,” so often that Steve bought him a shirt with the verse on it.
His sons were grown by then and still called him about everything. Lee often went to him for advice when he was frustrated by difficulties or decisions at work. Dave often told him, “Lee, you're right, but that doesn't matter.” He said it so many times that Lee lost count, and it took Lee years to understand what he meant. In time Lee came to see it as the heart of the Serenity Prayer, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” The lesson stayed with him, and he carries it daily and shares it with others when he can.
Nick called just as often. When he was stuck on one of his own cars, Dave might be at a client's house and say he couldn't talk just then. Then, while still there, he would track down some obscure old schematic and send it over with an explanation of how the part worked and how to fix it. He told Nick never to feel bad about calling, because if he couldn't help, he would say so.
In his later years he loved simply being around Gina, and he never stopped fixing things. Washers, dryers, plumbing, kitchen appliances, air conditioners, televisions, cars and computers all passed through his hands. As Gina put it, if Dave couldn't fix it, it couldn't be fixed. He restored antique radios and old cars, because, as he often said, they were built better back then, and he had a gift for turning up information about old things that almost nobody else could find anymore. Not long before he died, when the pool pump failed at the house he and Gina had bought, he set out to learn everything a person could possibly know about pool pumps from twenty years ago.
Then came the grandchildren, and Papa Dave. He wrestled and played with them, ran around, pretended and danced. Not one to say outright that he missed them, he invented reasons to visit. There would be a sale on bar clamps at Harbor Freight, and he wanted to drop some off. He would hand over the clamps and ask where the babies were. Other times he would text that he was heading to the store and ask if anyone needed anything. “He was no longer stoic,” Steve's wife Gloria said, describing him around children. “Everyone would be talking around him, but his focus was on them.”
On October 15, 2025, Dave died suddenly while working to help a client. An hour earlier he had been on the phone with Steve for their daily call. “That's how he would have wanted to go,” Steve said. “Not in a hospital. Still active. Still doing for others.” His ashes rest in one of the antique radios he loved. He was on the radio, the family says, and now he's in the radio.
His computer still has a reminder set for every Friday. It says go see the babies today.
He is survived by his wife Gina, sons Lee and Nick (wife Kiana), his three grandchildren, Marliegh, Hutchinson and Penelope, as well as siblings Michele (Gabe), Steve (Gloria) and Linda (Stephen), and countless family and friends who loved him dearly.