My Brother Michael and myself (David) have lost more than a friend in Andy, he was true brother. Andy always gave us encouragement when times were the most difficult, and we know he will help us in spirit thru this tragic time of loss.

The Following was Written By a True Friend of Andy's, Rick Odioso

ANDY KINDLE

It’s been a tough weekend here as, for the first time since we started doing this, we will be deleting an email address permanently.

Andy Kindle, a big-hearted friend of some of you, had his big ol’ heart give out over the weekend.

For those who didn’t know Andy, he was a director of live television. He was big man who sometimes was mistaken for Mike Holmgren.

He was enthusiastic and his favorite saying was not that something was “good” or “great”. It was always “beyond belief.” And in many ways the life of Andy Kindle is beyond belief.

His first love was NFL football and he directed it for either CBS or FOX for 22 years. If you knew Andy for a couple of days, you’d know that he directed the Fog Bowl playoff game in Chicago between the Bears and the Eagles on December 31, 1988. He worked with just about everyone at one time or another and he helped start the careers of many of today’s FOX personnel.

For the last 10 years, I was with him on the NFL preseason football packages of the Chiefs and Vikings which he not only directed, but executive produced. As he should have been, he was very proud of those broadcasts which rivaled a network telecast. I learned a lot from Andy and we all had a lot of fun because Andy lived his life in living color with a live television camera running.

He won a bunch of Emmys (18, I think, but Andy would know for sure) – not only for the NFL, but for riding around France with John Tesch on the Tour de France. He did the Olympics, NCAA basketball, Tigers baseball, a lot of drag races and other sports.

Andy produced a documentary for the Discovery Channel called “Alaska Turns 30” which if my math is correct would have been in 1989. He did a gymnastics video with Bela Karolyi, directed an M.C. Hammer Special for CBS and in recent years traveled to China for a video on lamp-making.

Andy had a very interesting life - and he found it very interesting. So as dinner moved along each week in August, the conversation would invariably turn to Andy’s favorite subject (sure we egged him along because he was so much fun).

So we know about his upbringing in his beloved Centralia, Illinois and the family farm nearby that he owned and often visited (where the cell phone only worked if he went outside).

We know about his service to his country in the Armed Forces in Taiwan – or as much as he was allowed to tell us without killing us. Something about surveillance aircraft. He still found time to befriend Candace Bergen when she visited for the filming of “The Sand Pebbles” and he swore he had a bit part in the movie.

We know about college at Southern Illinois and local TV in Detroit and Washington.

We know about all the people he worked with, about being Phyllis George’s producer and working with Pat Summerall, Merlin Olsen, Lindsay Nelson, Jack Buck and Hank Stram. We think we know about how he arranged for John Madden’s first bus to cover a boxing event in Las Vegas and how he gave Artie Kempner – now FOX’s lead director – his first job as a runner at a swim meet when Artie was a student at the University of Florida.

He always had something going on and he was always thinking about the next big project. We laughed about the water deal in Colorado, but BIOTA is in stores today.

He always was dreaming of new productions for Albey Park Productions (which was him). He wanted to do cooking shows and travel shows and shows about all kinds of sports. He did do cheerleading shows and beauty pageants.

In recent years, he had been a driving force in the creation of the High School Basketball Hall of Fame in his beloved Centralia – along with a then-Illinois state legislator named Barack Obama.

He loved live television. He lived in a condominium with a Monitor Wall in the living room – a collection of big TV screens (eight maybe, nine, ten?) each tuned to a different channel 24/7 - to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and whatever else caught his fancy.

But, lest you think it was all about Andy (and we’ve left a lot about Andy out for space limitations), we know how much he loved other people. He wore his emotions on his sleeve and if you were a friend of Andy J. Kindle, you knew it. He was completely genuine and very generous.

He loved his friends in television – especially the other directors like Sandy and Joe Aceti and Artie. In his later years, he watched all their work avidly on the Monitor Wall.

He loved his mom, his children Ryan and Allison, he loved his ex-wives, he loved his four grandchildren. He cheered all of them on in their endeavors.

As I said, Andy didn’t hide his emotions. Like all of us – maybe more than most of us – he wanted to be loved. He was – and his passing leaves a void in our world.

And now he’s gone – and before we return to today’s NFL news – we wanted you to know about our friend Andy.