NOW March 25, 2019

 Rolf and Carole at Carole's birthday party, February, 2018

 Remembering Rolf

Yesterday more than a hundred people gathered at Carole and Rolf's house to remember this great wonderful man. From every speaker I learned something new about him. Some, like me, only knew him after the dementia had taken hold. Others, like Mike Davis,

 and his colleague and neighbor Jerry Giles worked with him and had known him for years.

I knew he loved music - I spent many evenings with him listening and watching music videos on YouTube - but I didn't know he was a music prodigy, played a number of instruments (guitar, piano, violin, accordion, steel drums) and taught and tutored music students. He was an amazing dancer. He was a mathematician, a physicist, had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. In high school he listed favorite subjects as trigonometry, English, and history. Talk about whole-brained!

His scientific accomplishments are as many and as varied as is the rest of his life. There are so many! Many of them are unintelligible to a humble life-form like me. He worked on classified ionosphere and radar research. He was part of one of the very first satellite data communications systems. He traveled all over the world building ground stations for satellite-based communication systems. Not only did he work at the Observatory in Arecibo (about an hour or so east of us), he helped design and build two major antenna systems. While at the Observatory, he calculated the actual orbit of the planet Mercury (it is not a circle, it is an ellipse. The sun is not at the center but closer to one end). He also did radar mapping of the moon and research into the orbital and rotational behavior of Mars and Venus.

Rolf was never an ivory-tower, isolated academic. He had an incredible sense of humor, apparent even in his later days. He was warm and kind and loving and giving. He loved swimming and sailing and steam locomotives. Carole adored him, and right to last he adored her.

My Rolf story: I didn't get to know Rolf really until after the hurricane when we started going to their house every night for dinner. By then the dementia was pretty well established. He spoke very little and frequently struggled with speech. I carried a little notebook with me to jot down ideas I wanted to write about in my journal, the writings that were the basis of the hurricane log on this blog. One evening Rolf and I were sitting outside at the table; Carole and Elaine were making dinner. I got out my notebook and started writing. Roff looked at me, watched what I was doing. I said, "Rolf, I'm writing things down so I don't forget them." He looked up at me and said, "Maybe I should do that."

I am truly honored and privileged to call Rolf my friend. I believe he would call me his friend as well.