Nick Konkler was a young man of few words.

Until tires, camshafts, cars entered the conversation. Then eyes flashed and confidence soared.

“My whole life has been around cars — first my grandpa, then there’s my dad’s friend from high school who has his own business working on them,” the then 14-year-old Konkler told the Auburn Reporter in 2012. “I’m a car nut.”

Up to a few weeks ago the 17-year-old Auburn Riverside High School student was still looking forward to attending WyoTech in Sacramento, Calif., where he’d learn all about cars. Fabricating car parts, that was his dream job.

But on Feb. 23, the cancer that had plagued Konkler from his fourth year, the cancer he’d fought so hard to beat and to which so many in the community had contributed to help him beat, claimed his young life.

In the rearview mirror, years of remission from a brain tumor, years past the bone marrow transplant that had checked his lethal secondary leukemia.

Neither Nick nor his parents, Vince and Christina Konkler, ever forgot what all of the money that caring people poured into leukemia research did for him.

Every year since 2011, the family prepared for The Leukemia Lymphoma Society of Western Washington’s “Big Climb” in Seattle’s Columbia Tower. The annual, all-day event raises money for research and provides support services for families whose loved ones are suffering from leukemia. He also took part in the Ride for Kids.

His father Vince Konkler’s coworkers in the City of Auburn’s Maintenance and Operations Department, calling themselves “Nick’s Flight Crew,” helped him ascend those 69 flights of stairs, 1,311 steps, 765 vertical feet in all. The team raised thousands of dollars to fight cancer and plans to continue its efforts.

All along, his high school classmates fought alongside him, putting on numerous shows of support. In 2014 they named him homecoming king and proclaimed Wear Orange for Nick Day on the Friday after his passing.

“The only way to prevent this from happening to other people’s kids is research,” Nick’s mother, Christina Konkler, told the Auburn Reporter in 2012. “If we can’t find a cure, kids are still going to get sick. Lots of kids have more side effects than Nick does. It’s just a horrible, horrible disease for kids and parents, and the only way to stop it is to find a cure, and that takes money.”

Weeks Funeral Home of Enumclaw is in charge of arrangements.