Goodbye Dad

2020-03-21

My father was born in 1941, right at the start of world world 2. He passed on 3/21/2020 at 645pm.

He was able to meet Charlie Mingus as the president of his university jazz club only to see the whole band get food poisoned by Johns Hopkins staff at the time.

Was it intentional food poisoning? Most likely Mingus would have thought it was, his music wasn’t exactly popular anywhere south of NYC.

My dad was in that tiny generation in between ww2 vets and the boomers. He was drafted before we got into Vietnam and served out his time in Germany rather than Indochina. He was a court reporter for the army at that time.

My favorite time, when we had a major power outage and he couldn’t go to work, extra time to bring out the old dungeons and dragons, my dad was an amazing dungeon master.

He worked his whole adult life for the army corps of engineers. He got a master’s in public policy and even though he was a life long republican became a big fan of Obama until he was unable to be a fan of anything besides the tv shows shown over and over on the tv at the home. He believed in data driven government, analytics and using science rather than violence to solve problems.

He’s not dying from the virus, he developed dementia around 10 years ago. Which is becoming more common especially in polluted southern california. Its a long slow death now he is finally coming to an end to being imprisoned in a broken body and his spirit can find freedom and the ecstacy of the union with OM. But we will miss him badly we have been missing him the whole time as he went into decline.

He always loved music, had one of the best vinyl collections outside of say somebody like Richard Branson who was rich and in the industry. Sadly his collection degraded from lack of play after he got his career going.