my dad

dad would have been 89 today.
he was born in Newcastle, Indiana on January 18, 1918.
he died June 11, 2002 from injures from an auto accident.
he was 84.
my mom, his wife of 59 years, died in the crash a week before Dad.
she was 81.

i was blessed with very good parents.
i was doubly blessed that dad and i got to be great friends in his later life.

i am rightfully proud of my dad for many reasons.
one is his early adoption of computer technology.
dad was a computer enthusiast and advocate from the earliest days of consumer computers.
he was the leading innovator in our family, when it was very rare for the older generation to be so advanced.

by the time we, at my house, finally got on-line in 1995, dad was way out ahead of all of us.
and the internet hooked he and me up for a marvelous and delightful correspondence.
i would send him books and we would read and debate them.
we shared an interest in physics and an admiration of Richard Feynman.
and we liked mathematics.

the double tragedy for me is that i lost my dad And my best friend.

whenever i see the latest advances in cosmology or particle physics, i miss him.
he would have loved all this.
he was so skeptical.

i miss my old man.

(jack kennedy (b. may 29, 1917) was older than my dad.)

happy birthday, Dad.
Love, james


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