Sometimes people just want a place to sign their name and write a condolence. This is a page where you can do just that.
Others may prefer to write a memory, a story or a note somewhere in the blog in a section where they knew Kurt (workplace, college, high school, childhood, family….) There’s large areas of a person’s life where different people play a role as coworkers and friends who have memories that the rest of us never were part of, so did not share. Any photos you may wish to add (can be of you when you knew Kurt or recent) can be sent to me (Suemeadowbrook@yahoo.com) and I can upload them. I have also added a “Subscribe to comments” if you wish to see who else also commented on a page or post.
If Kurt touched your life in a good way, please tell us.
More to come, but basically I considered Kurt to be a good friend (of 40+ years) who was a truly good man and an incredibly bright person interested in Just About Anything you can imagine ( engineering, tech, music, politics, people..) driven by an insatiable curiosity and sense of wonder.
I have years of EMAILs going back at least a decade which I’ve been reviewing over the past few months and plan to post in some sort of organized format (or at least searchable).
I will miss interacting with him a LOT and had hoped to work with him on some of his projects and he on mine along with some other TI friends.
Hope you’re healing well on the other side, Kurt.
Sue,
Watching the CoL, the breadth of Kurt’s effect on others was moving. All his friends and long time acquaintances really helped explain how the ‘smart guy’ was so one of us too.
It was nice to finally put a real person to the name of Kurt’s Thai brother, and it was clear he loved Kurt very much.
Kurt always impressed me in many ways but most especially how he could be totally serious, but also a complete goofball, or nerd out at something new he was exploring. I know I’ve said it to you before, but he really impressed me as being your partner in life. You two were so kind and good to me and he was simply another brother, and never an outsider in my mind.
During that celebration I can see Kurt just standing there with a grin on his face holding either a beer or a mixed cocktail telling us all to enjoy one another and enjoy life.
I first met Kurt in Sept. 1972 at T C Williams H/School. We became instant friends from then on. The stories and adventures continued until his (temporary) passing, as I believe he is still with us. From the garage band in high school, fast cars, and fast times and all the music and good/bad movies, he was my best friend. He introduced me to the love of my life, another Susan, in 1972. Sadly, she got away from me in 1982. But, after I visited him in 2019, to fix my locked up IPhone, which of course he fixed, and told him how much I missed her, he found her and connected us again, and we are now back together, forever. Just the tip of the iceberg, as he was just so full of life and made everyone else’s life better. One example, he knew I liked Formula 1 racing, and in 1984 he found out there was going to be an F-1 race in Dallas Texas where he was working for Texas Instruments. He invited me to come down there, and we had a once in a lifetime experience. The food, the racing, the beer, the heat! 120+ degrees, and we loved it! Another, 1974, we went to the Alexandria Roller Rink to see 2 of our favorite bands, Blue Oyster Cult and Kiss. Kiss no showed but BOC played until we had to leave, we were teenagers with a curfew but hooked on them from then on! Funny, but the last concerts I went with him were all 3 of the final Kiss reunion tours of 1996, 1998 and 2000! In between, just lifetimes of living, from skipping school to eat lunch at Tyson’s Corners to everything else we did, we always enjoyed each others company. Another. In 2009, Kurt asked me about getting a fun car to drive that was quick, but interesting to drive, as I was working for VW. I recommended a used 2004 VW R-32. He checked my info out and found a mint one with 20,000 miles on it and proceeded to put another 150,000 miles on it, and he told me he had a blast with it. The last time I saw him was in the summer of 2019 when he fixed my IPhone and we went for a long drive and had many reminisces that brought our lives together full circle, priceless. I was soo looking forward to getting together when we retired but that will have to wait until our next lives. More to follow after I can.
Captain Hoodel, you are truly missed from all of us, Fast Ffreddy.
P.S., I was there when you got your name, but that is another story!
I first met Kurt at George Mason Elementary School in Alexandria, Virginia. It was around 5th grade that we became really good friends. We were even crossing patrols together, getting to school early in the morning and standing on opposite corners talking to each other while helping the other kids cross safely. By 6th grade we were really close, but also slightly disruptive in class. Once, I had to write on the chalkboard 100 times, “I will not jump out the window to go to recess.” Kurt got in trouble for something else (talking to me as I recall) and his desk was moved to the front of the room for the year to isolate us. We often walked home from school together and we had plenty of high jinks away from teachers. Following are just a few memories of our escapades.
Kurt loved dangerous things when we were kids. We made our own gunpowder once from charcoal, salt peter, and sulphur that we bought at the Bradlee Shopping Center hobby shop. The ensuing explosion burned holes in his good pants and his mother was not pleased. We also enjoyed launching model rockets that we rarely recovered due to overcharging the propellant. Kurt also liked magic tricks. Once in his backyard he put lighter fluid on his right hand and said he could light it and put it out with a swish of his hand. That didn’t work and resulted in second degree burns. To conceal the mishap from his mother he ate at the dinner table with his left hand for a week until the burns subsided.
By the time we became freshman at George Washington High School we decided to take Russian language together. That required getting on a bus before the last period and being taken to T.C. Williams High School, closer to our homes, to take the class. It was a tough class but we were in it together. We would eventually finish our junior and senior years at T.C.
One of the themes of our high school years was a love of fast cars. I had a 1965 GTO, Fred Mayer had a 1968 GTO and Kurt was driving a Chrysler Newport, a big boat of a car. After totaling the Newport from driving too fast, Kurt got a 1973 Javelin with a 304 engine and a stick shift. It wasn’t a fast car per se, but it was fast enough for Kurt to total one night, I think on “Rollercoaster Road” in Franconia.
Kurt went in search of another car and I accompanied him to Washington, D.C. to look at a 1974 AMX that had a bad automatic transmission. Kurt bought it from the lady and found a four-speed manual conversion set up to replace the broken transmission, all done in his driveway with help from friends. With a 401 engine that car was fairly fast and I remember being terrified one time when Kurt took me for a ride down Cameron Mills Road (25 mph speed limit) and we were doing about 60. As I recall, Kurt, ever a lover of speed, wrecked that car too.
Wrecks seemed to be a constant theme in our friendship. One day I was giving Kurt a lift to somewhere in my dad’s 1964 Corvair. We were driving down Duke Street and it was a wintery day so the roads were icy. We were sitting behind a stoplight waiting for green when we saw a car on the other side of the concrete median spin out of control and land on the front of our car. Kurt, seeing the need to be helpful and uplifting said, “You bought it!” Lucky we weren’t injured or killed but the Corvair was totaled. Kurt walked away from another wrecked car.
College saw us go to separate universities, Kurt to VPI and me to George Mason University and eventually the University of Georgia for a PhD. I visited him once at VPI on my way from Georgia to Alexandria via Blacksburg (or Bleaksburg as Kurt liked to call it).
When I got married in 1986, I asked Kurt to be one of my four groomsmen, with my brother, former brother-in-law, and Bob White, another of our friends from T.C. I was glad that he said yes. The last time I saw Kurt was at the T.C. Williams Class of 1975 40-year reunion at Fort Hunt Park. It was great to catch up with him there. We spoke by phone one time after that. I was saddened to hear of his passing. He was one of the best friends I ever had and we had a great time growing up together.
If my math is correct, we would have been recognizing and celebrating Kurt’s 65th birthday – and his eligibility for Medicare! – coming up next week. It’s been a while since we’ve lost our friend (or family member); I doubt any of you know me, but I wanted to post a few of my memories of Kurt in tribute to him as one of the nicest people I ever knew.
I met Kurt at age 14, when we were both enrolled in a Red Cross life guard class that was being held on the campus of Fort McNair in Washington DC during the summer of 1971. I had just finished my freshman year at a junior high in Bethesda MD, and Kurt, a year and a half younger than myself, was about to begin his in Alexandria VA. Anyway, we kind of hit it off. He was the first ‘boyfriend’ I’d ever had, and we spent some time getting to know each other in and out of those life guard training sessions. One of our favorite things to do, aside from swimming and other pool activities (he loved to show off his dives), was to take walks around the beautiful Ft. McNair grounds, which has fantastic views of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. I thought he was funny, really smart and cute, too; we were both well-travelled with international living experience and we had a lot of fun together. But, since neither of us was of driving age or had a car, going on a real date was close to impossible. Kurt’s adoptive older brother from Thailand took us on a double date once and with some very complex logistics, we were able to get together a couple other times in the upcoming school year, one of them a dinner/dance at his Mormon church. I was totally ignorant of that particular branch of religion at the time and thought he was taking me out to a ‘steak dinner’, not knowing what a ‘stake’ was! But it was mostly phone calls and letters, and occasionally meeting up at the Fort McNair pool. Anyway, by the end of that following year it all turned into a friendship and we kept in touch on and off by phone or mail.
When I found out we were being transferred to Singapore (my father was at the State Department, as a foreign service officer), I was just starting my senior year in high school. When I let Kurt know we were moving far away, he made a point to take me out on a special farewell dinner date, driving me there in a Mercedes that he’d either borrowed or inherited from his family. That evening was one to remember for its quirky and hilarious moments. Before we could even go out, I had to assist my parents getting my grandmother (and her wheelchair) to the airport. The flight was canceled, so we had to make a second trip out, which meant Kurt was kept waiting an hour for me to get back.
It also meant me feeling completely grubby, because there’d been no time for me to clean up when I got back – I just threw on this long dress I had because Kurt said he wanted it to be a dressy, formal evening. Little did I know that he’d show up in a full tuxedo(!) for our drive down to a restaurant in Georgetown. To add to the evening’s drama, after parking the car he produced a white dinner jacket from a hanger in the back seat and swapped it for the black one that went with his tuxedo, after which we walked on to the restaurant for dinner. To our utter surprise, the restaurant was almost completely empty. Several underemployed waiters hovered near our table while a band played to nobody but us. I think we ended up dancing to one song, but I was feeling so self-conscious with all of this attention focused on us when there should have been another 20-30 patrons there to share in the experience.
It was a funny and weird evening, which ended on an even funnier note when it came time for the return trip. Driving down M Street, we were stopped at a red light. Suddenly Kurt put the car into Park mode, put the emergency brake on, then jumped out and ran over a couple cars ahead of us to knock on their window. “Utah!! You guys are from Utah!” he shouted, “and that’s where I’m from too!” Meanwhile, drivers behind us were sounding their horns to make us get a move-on. Kurt was beaming when he came back, satisfied he’d introduced himself to some fellow Utahans and made a couple potential new friends.
When I returned from Singapore the following year to attend college in Ohio, I remember making a trip to the DC area and Kurt and one of his friends picked me up from the airport, as I was traveling through on my way to a summer job. They were so funny, going on and on about some car Kurt was going to go check out once I was off on the next leg of my trip.
But that was Kurt: always friendly, always looking for humor in each situation, always open to new experiences, meeting and making new acquaintances who might turn into friends, and always looking for the best in everyone. — Jenny Grant Prileson