Drive down Second Avenue through Hazelwood and you'll see a billboard for McDonald's, another for a law firm, a third for "The Nutcracker," and on and on through "Don't Let Minors Drink" and "Pregnant and Scared."

It can be a withering stretch with most of the messages hardly registering; I only know these because I jotted them down on my last drive. But for several months last summer, there was a pair of billboards for the late Glen Dixon Sr. that commanded attention.

"A heart of gold stopped beating," a poem began beside a photo of a man. "Two willing hands at rest/ God broke our hearts to show/ He only takes the best."

A reader who took that stretch daily was captivated and wanted to know more.

"The billboards are still up and I continue to feel the love for him that emanates from them," Theresa C. wrote.

So the afternoon before Thanksgiving, I visited Rena Dixon at her home in Hazelwood, just up the hill from Second Avenue.

Glen and Rena Dixon met cute, as they'd say in Hollywood. She was a barmaid at the High Rollers club in Homestead in 1990 and he was a chef Downtown at what was then the Vista Hotel. Glen would leave that job and come to the High Rollers to spin records, and after a while Rena was telling him he couldn't always be late.

One night the manager put a record on, and Rena told him, "I know that song. That's the Caprells!" When she was about 10 years old, her older brother, Flint, a bouncer at a club in Beltzhoover, had let her in to see The Caprells, a family band that was Pittsburgh's funky answer to the Jackson Five.

The manager laughed at her reference.

"You don't even know who they are," he said. "Rodney and Glen and Joyce and Mickey. You work for The Caprells."

She'd had no idea the Dixons, owners of the club, were the Caprells. Nor had Glen Dixon ever let on that he was one of the owners. When she later asked him why, he just told her none of it was important. He was nothing but kind.

They became friends, fell in love soon enough, and in January 1992 they flew to Las Vegas to get married. They became inseparable.

"People didn't say Glen's name without saying my name."

In 1998, Glen couldn't shake a cold. He went to a string of doctors ending with a lung specialist who diagnosed him with sarcoidosis. Tiny lumps, called granulomas, were on his lungs. He took steroid treatments for a year to shrink them.

He was in seemingly perfect health. He never missed work, never smoke, drank or ate meat, took his vitamins and, as a singer who cared for his voice, would never be in the same room with anyone doing so much as spraying deodorant. Some scientists think sarcoidosis is a response to something in the environment, and Glen had spent most of his life living near the coke works in Hazelwood. But the Dixons weren't overly worried about this disease that can be treated but not cured; they'd been told the mortality rate for sarcoidosis was about 2 percent.

About 3:15 a.m. last Jan. 31, Rena, who never awakens during the night, sat straight up in bed to find her husband taking his last breaths. She screamed for her daughter, Lanaina Graham, a medical student at the University of Pittsburgh, to help, but neither she nor the paramedics could save him. He left four adult children in the family that he and Rena had formed: Lanaina, Will, Glen and Angel. An autopsy showed Kenneth Glen Dixon Sr. died at 54 of cardiac sarcoidosis. The disease had spread to every organ in his body.

Rena put the billboards up in time for what would have been Glen's 55th birthday.

"I needed to see him every day, going to work and coming home."

She launched the Heart of Gold Foundation for Sarcoidosis, www.heartofgoldgd.org. Dr. Kevin Gibson of UPMC spoke to her education and support group this month, and the group will meet again at 6:30 p.m. Dec. 20 at the Hazelwood Presbyterian Church on Second Avenue. She hopes to have a walk/run fund-raiser in Schenley Park in April, with proceeds going to the Simmons Center for Interstitial Lung Diseases at UPMC.

She's not bitter. She just knows what Glen would tell her: "Rena, do everything that you can do."