Orson Lolmaugh
Known to his friends as “Lolly,” my father was smart, funny (with an abiding love for puns and shaggy dog stories), and curious about how things worked. He traveled the world for his employer, with a knack for explaining engineering nuances to management and practical lay considerations to engineers. (He especially enjoyed the people of England, Japan, and Israel, although he visited many more countries, proudly receiving a million-mile plaque from TWA).
He loved working with his hands, and was a highly skilled carpenter (he designed and built exact ⅔ models of our kitchen appliances for my playhouse, as well as an exquisite wheeled teacart), bricklayer (studying patterns on his trips to England, then duplicating them at home), electrical engineer (he built our first television in the garage), all-around handyman, and so much more.
He was a natural and patient teacher. I never feared mathematics in school, since on our nightly walks he taught me about everything from alternate counting systems – duodecimals, I’m looking at you – to basic algebra and plain old math; he would feed me a steady list of numbers and operations, keeping a running total in his head to see if I came up with the same total. He taught a neighbor’s child to sound out written words using phonetics. Along with my mother, he kept me up to date on schoolwork when I was out of school for a full semester. While my parents divorced in my teens and my father and I drifted apart for many years, we reconnected in the late 70s, and he walked me down the aisle at my first wedding in 1980. Three short years later, I was his caregiver during his final weeks following a diagnosis of lung cancer, and he died not too long before his 65th birthday.
I’m grateful and blessed to have had Orson Bernard “Lolly” Lolmaugh as my father.