Dave Puls né David Frederick Puls

He was born in 1952, in Rochester, New York and grew up with three sisters, Carol, Janet and Barbara. (ph.1)  After graduating from Monroe High School he attended college briefly before riding his bicycle 600 hundred miles to Chicago. (2) He spent the summer there living with his sister, Carol and volunteering on week long camping trips provided for the teenaged patients from the Indiana State Hospital.

This led to him getting a job as a health aide at the Rochester State Hospital. Later he had a career as a counselor for nine years there. (3) Some of his favorite times were when he led sing-alongs with the clients.

In the late 1970s he studied the Old Master’s techniques with Philip Jacobson. (4) Through his independent studies he was able to earn his B.A. in Fine Arts at Empire State College.

He ran two different coffeehouses and brought a vast variety of musicians to perform there in the 70s.

He played in the New Cotton Hollow Band for years with Mike Smith and Doug Irish. (5) Later in the 1980s, he decided to focus more on performing solo and got back into doing more songwriting, which he had started doing in 1971.

In 1982 he met his best friend Luann and they started their lifetime journey together. (6) Her support for his deep investment in his jobs and artistic ventures was a priceless addition to his life. He never failed to appreciate her lasting love and encouragement.

He was laid-off from the hospital in 1991 and then attended a summer program at the Animation School at Animatus Studio, where he later would become an instructor. He then joined Fred Armstrong, owner of the studio, and he would become the Creative Director there for 15 years. (7) He directed many animated commercial and supervised dozens of young animators in the making of the Derf the Viking trilogy.

He worked as a teaching artist for more than 30 years in the schools and recreational centers. (8)

His independent shorts were screened at more than 70 film festivals around the world and he received Best of the Fest recognition at 5 of them. He had a rare opportunity, in the mid-1990s, to show a couple of them on a PBS show with famed movie critic Jack Garner.

His Depression era film about the life of his mother, Kathryn Puls, also had screenings and he was able to take his 92 year mom to a few of them for Q&As. (9) During the two years of interviewing and producing “The Girl of the Finger Lakes” (10) he was able to spend a lot of quality time with her before she moved to North Carolina. She lived there until her death in 2020 from COVID at 100.

His father, Frederick Puls, was a hard worker in a factory and with all the overtime and demands of a second job as a church sextant there was limited quality time spent together. (11) Working with his dad doing church chores for an allowance was a regular activity together.

He wrote more than 900 songs and produced 25 CDs with 20 or more songs on each one. (12) He also produced 500 independent music videos and made 10 DVD compilations. He produced a number of Inspirational Lives mini docs in memorial for people who had influenced.

He created a DBA in 2004 for Fresh Toones and used his singing worms logo for the rest of his life. He created a website where he shared just what he was attempting to convey with his Fresh Toones. “Fresh Toones are any creations that have resulted from an honest attempt to detect and call upon the universal vibration or thread that connects all of us.”

In 2007 he set up the YouTube Davesfreshtoones site and began posting many of his Fresh Toones videos. After 16 years of posting more than 500 self-produced videos he had been viewed more than 600,000 times. He had never had been motivated by the numbers, but was hopeful that he could make some healthy contributions to our overall evolution.

He would go on to write four books. His “Book of Stories” inspired a number of “True Life Stories” videos. (13) His “Songful Poems 2021 –23” book of over 200 poems would end up inspiring hundreds of new Fresh Toones songs.

He joined other volunteers in 2014 to help get Rochester Free Radio on the air. A decade later he was still producing his hour long Fresh Toones Show with a vast variety of different themes.

In 2018, after close to three decades of having only limited time spent with painting, he reconnected with an instructor from the early 1980s, Bunny Goldstein. Her classes in egg tempera allowed him to again enjoy his love for painting. (14)

Since the age of 20 he had envisioned a time when he could work every day on his creations. At the age of 55, after living a frugal life, he was able to retire and do just that. For the rest of his life he continued to have a loving relationship with his partner and to work on his creative ventures. A favorite thing at the end of his life was to melt into listening and watching the Fresh Toones that had revealed themselves over his many years. (15)