Brushes with greatness...

We attended a memorial service this last weekend for a man whom we'd met at Christmas brunches and the occasional Thanksgiving dinner at a friend's over the last 6 years or so. He died last November at the age of 86 but for various reasons the family had put off the service until now.

I'd had a few conversations with him at those events we attended together (I am terrible at engaging people in small talk), but never anything of substance and certainly never anything that would have clued me into the fascinating character that he was. I talked to his wife more. She was a woman of Japanese descent who had been interred as a child during World War II in Idaho, after being relocated from Seattle. Later she attended the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and was one of the first woman to graduate from there, and had done so while simultaneously pregnant with at least one child. Despite her diminutive size, this was clearly a very strong woman.

Our connection to them got slightly more interesting as it turned out one of the couple's daughters had married a gentleman from SW Iowa and their son was looking to attend ISU's architecture department. I'm not sure what influence we had on any of this, but they were certainly always forthright in thanking us about whatever that role had been and to tell us the latest news from their grandson. Also interestingly, the other grandson had attended West Point and was serving a tour of duty in Afghanistan, but only interesting in the sense that the military trajectory is not one you'd expect from such a family (though it gets more interesting).

But back to the gentleman who had passed. The impression I'd gotten from him over the few interactions we had was one of a lovely gentle soul, but nothing by way of his history or even much about what he had done as a profession, though I'd gotten the gist that he was some sort of engineer or physicist.

I learned vastly more from the memorial service, including some probably more important details about his interactions with others and his remarkable nature, but the story of his life was fairly mind blowing.

• He was the son of a renowned classical pianist.
• After spending one year at the California Institute of Technology he was recruited by the army to be part of the Manhattan Project, for which he first got a year of special training in PA before moving to Los Alamos at roughly the age of 20 to be part of developing the atomic bomb. This had a profound affect on him (as it seems to have had on most involved and as you'd expect) and was not something he apparently talked about much.
• While later working for the Army near Boston he started two companies to develop speakers. KLH where he was the H to Henry Kloss' K and Advent, both names that my run ins with stereo equipment had planted in my head.

My point here is not to drop names or wow anyone with my fortune of having known this man. It's really a wistful lament that my lack of social skills meant that I missed out on learning what such a man could say about the world, and perhaps a bit of realization about the things hidden in unexpected places.

Carry on.