February 13, 1960 – March 8, 2016
A few thoughts from his older brother:
In 1967 I joined an international singing group called Up with People for 3 years then a mission to upstate New York so I was not home much while Robb was growing up.
My father taught me that we use very little of our powerful brain, stressing that if we could use more of our brain that we could accomplish great things. I am sure that he had similar conversations with Robb as he was growing up.
Later, when Robb was 12 years old or so, I returned home for a while. Robb and I had some fun building hot air balloons made out of tissue paper, balsa wood and piano wire. They flew thousands of feet in the air, day or night. Each flight drew crowds of spectators to witness the colorful balloon that had fire in it. Once a small airplane out near Tooele circled around one to see what it was. We envisioned creating a company with a flight theme called Western Aerial Dynamics Company – WADCO. (Note: Just a few years before his death he mentioned to me that we never did start our company, Wadco.
When I was attending the University of Utah, Robb, Sherrie, a friend and myself took a drive to Yellowstone Park. We had very little money, so we didn’t eat much, but I enjoyed showing Sherrie and Robb the place I worked and loved during the summer between my Junior and Senior year of High School. We had a good time seeing the sites, but mostly we enjoyed playing practical jokes on our friend.
A few years later when Robb was in high school he became very interested in computers when his older brother introduced him to the new desk computer he was selling. It was called the Adam computer by Logical Machine Corporation. This was in the days before desktops and small business or personal computers.
The Adam used a large disk that was inserted in a drive through the top of the desk. The disk was larger than a large reel of 16mm film with a top handle in the center of the disk to insert the disk. The desk had to come with the computer because the disk drive was so fragile. The desk/computer system cost a mere $35k (that’s $35,000.00). It had a small black and white tube monitor (white letters on black background), no color or graphics capabilities with 64k (later it came with 128k) internal computer memory with 2 meg on the huge disk, 1 meg for the program, 1 for data storage. Each 1 meg data disk cost several hundred dollars.
(NOTE: The Adam computer was trained to understand 6 word commands! It was such a revolutionary concept that it was flown to New York City to do it's thing live on the today show.)
We would spend hours on the computer playing a word only adventure game. It had no graphics so you used your imagination like reading a book, except this was interactive with the reader.
Robb took an immediate interest in computers and read everything he could get his hands on. Several months later he took a class at the University of Utah while he was going to Cottonwood High School. One day the professor asked him to stay after class when he then told Robb to drop out of the class! Robb said “Why? This is my life interest!” The professor said "because I can not teach a student that knows more than I do”.
Later Robb was sent to upstate New York to teach IBM suits about an aspect of a program that he was in charge of for his job. He had long curly hair with no suit and tie. I spoke to him while he was in New York and he told me that the IBM suits had a hard time getting along with this 19 year old with long curly hair.
My dad told me once that Robb had a photographic memory. Dad said that he would turn to a page in a large technical manual and read the first few words of the page and Robb would read the rest of the page from memory, almost perfect. I asked Robb about it and he chuckled, saying that he seemed to remember everything if he was interested in it. He was definitely interested in computers and computer programming.
Before laptops we had the Atari and Commodore 64 personal computers that we attached to our televisions and maybe an expensive cassette data player. I had the Atari and Robb had the Commodore 64. We got our little computers before games and programs were available so I had to manually enter hundreds of lines of programming copied from a magazine just to do a little pong game. Robb got his 64 when they were new and there were no ready to download games available so he quickly created a little space themed shoot-em-up program which were sold across the country and for a few months Robb received royalty checks in the mail.
Once he was visiting my home in Las Vegas and he sat down to my little Atari computer, typed a couple of commands and up popped thousands of numbers (like in the movie “Matrix”) on the TV screen. He appeared to understand what it all meant. I stood there in amazement as he scrolled for a few moments through the guts of the computer.
Years later I visited him at his house in Kent, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. He showed me one room that had a large table with 9 computers, all turned on and appearing to be doing different computer tasks. These were in his house because his job was very important to the banking industry and if there arose a problem during the night he could immediately address the issue and solve it at home.
That visit Robb and his friend, Debi took me to dinner at a beautiful restaurant overlooking the Seattle harbor. I remember a wonderful evening and the best alder wood cooked salmon ever. After staying the night we left the next morning for Portland in his large motorhome with his small truck in tow. I had a trade show to go to in Portland and I flew to Seattle instead of Portland so that I could see Robb.
It wasn’t too many years later that he was taking helicopter flying lessons when on his last lesson before he flew solo his instructor said, “Robb you know this, yet you are having problems”. Robb told me he was attempting multiple touch-n-go procedures, where you barely touch the tarmac then take off again, and was having problems repeating the task correctly.
He soon felt the rapidly onslaught disease called Parkinson’s and later identified as Lewy Body Dementia. Less than 2 years after flying a helicopter he couldn’t tie his shoes or put on a shirt without help.
At first we had hoped he could take medicines to cope with Parkinson’s that would help his quality of life for many years or decades. This was not to be.
He was my little brother, with problems like the rest of us, but unlike the rest of us he used his brain in a much different way and it was a disease of this wonderful brain that caused his demise.
I look forward to the day that I will see and embrace my little brother again.
