FRIENDS SAY GOODBYE TO MAN NOBODY KNEW

Friends and strangers gathered yesterday at the heating grate to say goodbye to the man they knew only as Wolfman.

Two dozen people, mostly young, formed a arc around the long, narrow heat vent at 21st Street and Virginia Avenue NW opposite the State Department. A small basket of flowers sat in front of a photograph of a barefoot man with matted gray hair and beard.

One man held a small box containing Wolfman's ashes. There was a prayer, some scripture, a few verses of "Amazing Grace." The 10-minute service ended with a blessing of the grate.

For years, perhaps as long as three decades, Wolfman -- also known as Willie -- had lived atop the grate. He rarely spoke. And when he died Oct. 31, no one knew his real name.

Earlier this month, using his fingerprints, the FBI identified him as William F. Dryburg, formerly of Pittsburgh, said Carol Fennelly of the Community for Creative Non-Violence.

Dryburg was traced through prints supplied to the FBI after he was arrested in 1958 in Pittsburgh for drunken driving, Fennelly said. Through police and court records there, she found that he had been a worker at a Westinghouse plant in about 1958 and 1959.

"When he was arrested, a woman put her house up for collateral," Fennelly said. "So there was somebody who loved him." The woman's last name was not Dryburg, she said, and she could not find the woman or any other friends and relatives.

Offering the service's lone eulogy, Fennelly said she and her companion Mitch Snyder met Dryburg on his grate in 1976. For two years, they visited. "We'd take him a hamburger, a cup of coffee, a pair of socks," Fennelly said, but he never spoke. "One night he stood up, shook hands and told us thank you."

Although conversations with Dryburg were rare, Fennelly said, when he did want to talk, she would crawl onto the grate with him. One of the last times she saw Dryburg, she took with her a photograph of him that now hangs on her bedroom wall.

"I didn't know how long it had been since he'd seen himself," she said. "He wasn't always going into bathrooms with mirrors like us."

" 'Huh. Didn't realize I was getting so old,' " Fennelly quoted Dryburg as saying after seeing the image of himself.

Dryburg had just turned 60 last fall when he died. Fennelly, who was then in the midst of what was to be a 48-day, water-only fast, hadn't seen Dryburg for a while, but his photo on her bedroom wall offered constant encouragement.

She looked at the photo often -- it was on the side of the bedroom she faced when she lay in the only position that didn't make her throw up.

"There were a lot of myths about Willie, including that he had been a lawyer with the State Department," Fennelly told the small group. "But he was just a very ordinary man."

The Rev. John Myslinski of Annunciation Catholic Church, took a small silver vial from his pocket and sprinkled holy water on the grate.

"We are simply people, following the example of this simple man," Myslinski said. "God bless you, Willie."

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