Mike - a great tribute for sure. He ended up at Clarkson College in Potsdam, New York - up near the Canadian border - and he did marry a woman he met at the marina - Heather. They had two boys together. I found out about his death from his younger sister in 2005 or so.

Bob and I were best friends during the last two years of HS (’69 through ’71). He was Technical Director of the Staples Players, and I was the Audio Director, with both of us working on the productions during that period. Players is where we met. We had many interests in common, from skiing on trips to VT or to my girlfriend Suzanne Carreker-Voigt’s family’s little cabin in NH (where he would join me and Suzanne, accompanied by his girlfriend Claudia Munsell-Cook), to playing with his old tube stereo equipment, or trying to get his lawnmower engine-driven 6’ wide, doped-canvas DIY flying saucer hovercraft to skim across the huge field in his parent’s backyard. Many HS adventures were had. He helped me paint my $200 retired 1963 Studebaker Mail Truck a bright Halloween orange with black headlight trim – a color sure to get a teenager stopped by the police every day in 1970 Westport – which I was. Bob was technically very handy. Especially with power tools, where he seemed to be the master of anything he touched. In Mr. Georgis’s science physics class for our senior project, we built a ‘talking flame’ loudspeaker using a sodium-seeded oxy-acetylene welding torch flame, modulated with a very high voltage power supply (yikes!) and audio from Bob’s Sony tape recorder. It worked just fine. How many high schools would let two 17 year-old kids bring in big pressurized tanks of combustible explosives – which we lit on fire - without asking ‘What the hell is going on here?’ Permission? We don’t need no stinkin’ permission! Georgis thought it was grand fun, of course. Bob knew all about that technical stuff. It was in his comfort zone. He was also very resourceful in other ways. As a sixteen year old, he had approached the owner of Bozak Loudspeakers (an early 1960’s national Hi-Fi brand out of Norwalk) to ask for donations of audio equipment to the Players, thereby securing a now extremely coveted Marantz Model 9 monoblock tube audio amplifier. Along with Bob’s own Fisher tube stereo amp, we used that beast all through our ‘careers’ at the Players to amplify sound effects for the stage productions (e.g., Ondine, or Time Of Your Life’s pinball machine noises), using speakers we hid around the set. Somehow he also scavenged up an old Viking tape recorder, which we used as the source for our taped theatrical sounds. (There was an adventure in ’70 when we used that equipment to tap into the Auditorium’s campus-wide main intercom/PA system to play back a funny and weird announcement during homeroom period, but that’s another story for some other day…). You could often find Bob up a ladder on stage between classes, monkeying with the Fresnel lights hung from the lighting grid. He really loved his responsibility, and he was good at it. Unlike me, I don’t recall that he played a role in the actual productions (such as the script-following Lighting Director during the plays), but he really enjoyed his ‘backstage, pre-show, make it happen’ duties. Pia, Matheson and the other overlords gave us students a lot of freedom to explore, discover and create, and Bob and I certainly stretched that to an extreme. To wit: We both had access to the catwalks above the stage, where we could crawl across the Auditorium ceiling to adjust lights or run speaker cable. We could also get up there from the little cinder-block audio booth hidden in the ‘stage right’ balcony classroom closet, or from the main lighting/projection booth. That was a capability I used to good affect when I’d sneak into ticketed concerts (enter the building, go upstairs w/o approaching the ticket takers at the lobby entrance doors, use my key to get into the audio closet, crawl over the ceiling, climb down the catwalk ladder backstage, and walk out into the Auditorium through the wings), or secretly record many of the rock concerts produced at Staples during that period. Very sneaky. I wonder what my parents – or the school’s admins - would have thought if they knew we were 40’ above the floor, able to collapse through the ceiling with one misstep? Sadly, we lost track of each other after graduation. I went off in ’71 to Ohio University and he went to a small school in upstate NY to study engineering. I transferred to Syracuse in ’73 to be closer to my Westport/Dover Road buddies (Brian, David, Walt) attending the music program at Ithaca College, or at Cornell, at which time Bob, Claudia (also at Syracuse) and I briefly met up again. He thereafter dropped out of school and we lost touch as I went off to conquer the music production world in California. Bob was a very smart, hands-on type of guy, but college’s mathematical exercises were not for him. I later learned that he had returned to Westport, where unfortunately, working at Norwalk Marina, he lost his life in an accident. I knew little of the ensuing history leading up to that event. A marriage, a divorce, his work life, what he did for fun…? Bob was a great guy, a skilled technician, a creative builder, dedicated, helpful and giving, funny, and a very good friend. I hope he was happy during his time among us. – Mike Joseph, Lenexa, KS