He had been seriously ill for a while, and was trying to make it through to his 68th birthday. Which he did.
He died the same day.
I don't know a whole lot about Trevor Wheeler. I met him only once.
But his record It's Now Or Never/Please Don't Tease was the first New Zealand record I bought, back at the start of the '60s, and the first DUNEDIN record.
There were very few Dunedin releases back then, and all of us who bought rock'n'roll 45s were ridiculously xenophobic.
Why buy a local kid, who sounded even younger than he was, singing Elvis and Cliff Richard when you could get the original for the same price?But the thing was, Trevor Wheeler was a great singer. And that was one terrific little single. He made his name in Joe Brown's ''Search for Stars'' talent quest, and Joe whanged him on to the Miss New Zealand tour. Trevor was always described as pint-sized and dwarfed by a giant guitar, which he played exceedingly well. And then he disappeared from the entertainment pages.
In 1997, Otago Settlers Museum head Michael Findlay lashed together a band of local music lovers to assemble a retrospective exhibition on 40 years of Dunedin popular music.
My brief was to fill a CD of Dunedin music, which became the Yellow Eye triple CD, But I Can Write Songs Okay.
I had Trevor Wheeler as the opening track from day one. He was perfect, his voice not yet broken, but he was just starting out, as was Dunedin popular music.
But then we struck it lucky.
Longtime Joe Brown associate Chick Stevenson discovered a huge cache of reel-to-reel tapes in Joe Brown's son Dennis' garage, and went through them all, looking for material from an era when there was so little available.
Not so much a labour of love as a labour of insanity. And there he found Trevor singing the Cliff Richard hit A Voice In The Wilderness, live at the Miss Canterbury leg of the national Miss New Zealand tour.
Neil Collins knew Trevor pretty well and told me some stuff: how incredibly modest he was; how he married Joe Brown's daughter Linda, and after they had had a few children, they decided to adopt a few more; how Trevor was there for all of them every day as was his way.
Neil played me a CD from the Radio Dunedin library, Trevor singing country gospel, recorded seven years ago at Wheeler Studios, Trevor's house.
The voice, nearly 50 years on, was still wonderful, natural and assured.
Just before the 1997 exhibition opened, loyal Dunedin emigre Jim Mora from the Holmes show rang, wondering if there was a story.
Trevor seemed the obvious one, so I went out to Mosgiel to meet him, to see if he was in that appalling category, good telly.
He was almost pushed towards me by his workmates, terribly embarrassed a journalist had come all that way just to see him.
Pint-sized still and with a smile that never went away, he was as humble as humble could be.
He wore blue overalls, and on the breast pocket was the word TREVOR.
I thought if they threw in A Voice In The Wilderness, hearts would melt.
The Holmes show decided instead to showcase the Dunedin Sound, which they had never heard of, even though it had surfaced 16 years before. But you get that with good telly.
There were some touching tributes to Trevor in the ODT Deaths columns last week.
One, from Kaitlynn and Charlotte, listed some special things for ''one special granddad'' - guitars, runny cream, midnight toast, pickled onions, beanie, cheeky grin, cows, gumboots, Nana's fruitcake, Skippy stories and ... overalls.
Neil played A Voice In The Wilderness on his show last Wednesday, the day of the funeral.
I sat in the studio and heard it again. Differently. And I thought of the overalls, and the smile.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
