2003-05-18
GEORGE ``ED'' UHRICH
May 12, 1910-May 6, 2003
George ``Ed'' Uhrich was born in Sequim, Wash., on May 12, 1910. His mother came west with her family on a covered wagon to Oregon. Ed's father died while the children were young.
With his brother and sister, he moved around a good deal in their early years, attending schools in Bellingham, Woodinville, Seattle and on the Olympic Peninsula. He did farmwork while in primary school and was largely untouched by the Depression, working on farms of friends and relatives on Orcas Island and around Puget Sound.
With financial incentive from an uncle, Ed attended the University of Washington, taking special interest in Mathematics and the Sciences and playing pool. He made room and board by doing kitchen duty at a sorority house, and took his BS in Math in 1935.
Ed met Anna Marie Kinnel and married in 1939. They headed out across the new Lacey V. Murrow floating bridge, relocating to Boulder, Colo., where she worked in the college library, exercising her new BA degree, while he worked for a Master's in Math.
After receiving his MA and teaching a few quarters, the school noticed that both were on the payroll. They were told one must quit.
Their future at that point was decided by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Ed chose the Navy and upon completion of the ``90-day wonder'' officer program, was assigned to teach Target Recognition to Navy gunners.
His stations kept him stateside, in Norman, Okla., Coos Bay, Ore., and Sand Point in Seattle. At Sand Point, he met a fellow naval officer named Scott Crossfield, who later made history test-flying the X-15.
Ed left the Navy with the rank of lieutenant commander.
After the war, he returned to the University of Washington for his Ph.D. in Math, while Marie took work with the Seattle Public Library System. Upon finishing school, Ed accepted a teaching appointment at then-Montana State (College, Bozeman, in 1950. They settled into a life of raising three children.
While teaching at MSU, Ed was loaned in 1955 to the Navy for a summer Riverside, Calif. There he did theoretical work relative to satellite launch and orbit characteristics.
While at MSU, Ed started an astronomy club with a small group of his math students, which led to the establishment of a for-credit class in astronomy, the first at MSU. He was also instrumental in obtaining and placing the first computer on campus -- endless rows of frames, covered with wires and filled with vacuum tubes, with one keyboard and one ticker-tape station. It filled the Ryan Lab Building in 1958.
In 1959, the Boeing Co., lured him away from mainstream academia and brought the family back to Seattle, where he went to work in the Theoretical Math Group. Ed assisted engineers with their ``unsolvable'' equations until Boeing ran into difficult times in the early 1970s.
Over those years, the group grew to more 60 members and shrunk to two or three before Ed took early retirement in 1973.
All during the time he was with Boeing, Ed taught an evening class at the University of Washington: Math for Engineers, Advanced Differential Equations, 424, 425, 426. His classes filled each consecutive quarter, from 1959 to 1982, when he was told that the department had lost funding for its evening programs.
Few, if any, other evening lecturers can boast such unbroken longevity. His classes were largely populated with foreign students due to the care and time he took to keep everyone's understanding. After class, he never left the room until every question was individually answered.
When Ed left Boeing, he took a position at Bellevue Community College teaching Physical Sciences 101. He lectured during the day on topics that had fascinated him throughout his life: electricity, tectonics, friction, inertia.
At BCC he shared an office with Will Gere, believed by many to be the father of color television. They became fast friends.
When Ed's granddaughter first confronted personal computing in her fourth grade school lab, he began a new career as Elementary School Computer Lab Assistant. This work lasted for five years, until the retirement of the teacher with whom he worked and earned Ed -- called ``Grandpa Ed'' by his students -- a local TV spot and a selection for President George H.W. Bush's ``Point of Light'' award.
Through his 1980s, Ed was seldom seen without a Rubik's Cube or pocket calculator in hand.
After a series of small strokes, Ed succumbed to a variety of worn out parts at the age of 92.
George ``Ed'' Uhrich was preceded in death by his wife Anna Marie, son Jacob and daughter, Margaret Davidson.
He is survived by his sisters, Clara Lopthien of Port Angeles and Etta Lisifka of Rockaway Beach, Ore., and by his son Steven and daughter-in-law Gail Stone of Bellevue and granddaughter; Melissa Davidson of Renton; and grandson Christopher Uhrich and daughter-in-law Cindy Uhrich of Olympia.