August 05, 2002
Death and the Tomb

My father-in-law, Bill, died today at 5:30 pm. He spent his life as a mechanical engineer for the military, and lived all but his last 4 days at home. His father worked for Edison and Steinmetz, and Bill spent time as a child playing in their laboratories.

My father, Joe, died in 1992 at age 62. He was in college when the transistor was invented, and immediately chose to become a ceramic engineer. I grew up near Washington, D.C. in the 50's and 60's, while my Dad worked on the space program. One evening he brought home some of the first freeze-dried meals - "astronaut food" - for us kids to try. Joe built his own color TV. He had a furnace for growing crystals and gems on the carport. A ham radio enthusiast and computer hobbyist, he taught himself machine language programming after his first heart attack at age 48. He almost lived to see the internet bloom.

I spent 20 years in all the television networks, a pioneer in the crash-prone world of nonlinear editing, until I lost my nerve and my drive towards heart failure. In 2001, I split for the jungles of Mexico. There I had the honor of assisting the team in Palenque, by fishing a video camera inside the Temple XX tomb. We still know very little about the great man who was buried there. But we know that not all great men are forgotten.

Posted by Dave at August 05, 2002 09:19 PM | TrackBack