Bernie was born September 30, 1927, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He grew up on five acres outside the town of Wayzata, not far from Lake Minnetonka. There he helped his dad, Frank, milk the cow and collect eggs from the hens, but quickly discovered his true passion, science. Bernie tinkered with his chemistry set, setting off an explosion in his bedroom—Rose, his mom, was not pleased. He built radios with his best friend, Chuck Nelson, and he constructed electric circuits that were quite handy for delivering shocks to his hapless sister, Elaine. After high school, Bernie spent two years in the army, faithfully lugging his thick copy of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics with him in his army-issue duffel bag as he traveled from Texas to Hawaii to Korea. At the University of Minnesota, Bernie studied physics and fell in with a gang of science geeks, sci-fi fans, and writers. And here at the “U”, Bernie also fell for Jane Tynan, marking the start of the Bernie and Jane story. When Bernie landed a job in China Lake, California, he and Jane decided they would have to go their separate ways. Bernie devised a systematic break-up based on dazzling logic: they would see each other only every other day, then every fourth day, then every eighth day, and so on. The system backfired, and the two were married in China Lake, California in 1951. They had son, Kam, in 1954 and daughter, Patty, in 1958, while living in Wayzata. Bernie’s work as an aerospace engineer at Lockheed-Martin took the family on many adventures, from three years in pre-Silicon Valley Palo Alto, California, to four years on the white sands of Makaha beach on the island of Oahu, to crossing the Pacific and Atlantic aboard the Oreana on a journey from Hawaii to France. The family spent a year rolling across Europe in their red VW bus, exploring castles and caves as they went. They then drove the red bus from New York City, through Wayzata, and back to Palo Alto, where Bernie and Jane settled for the next fifty years. Anyone lucky enough to visit Bernie and Jane on Louis Road in Palo Alto will tell you that their house glittered with a certain magic, filled with the voices of friends chatting about the big bang and the ultimate fate of the universe, the search for extra-terrestrial life, the Riemann Hypothesis, the beauty of prime numbers, over-population and the consequent unraveling of the environment, evolution and the rise of consciousness, the weirdness of existence, the meaning of life and love. The house became a haven for many of Kam and Patty’s wayward friends, who all considered Bernie and Jane as just part of the crowd. While Bernie worked in aeronautics, he also earned a master’s degree in Applied Mathematics at Santa Clara University. Towards the end of his career Bernie was able to turn many his science fiction dreams into reality with his work on the Hubble Space Telescope team, a telescope that a quarter of a century later is still making new discoveries, from extra-solar planets to the expansion rate of the universe. Bernie was an avid bicyclist, commuting to work on the tough streets of Palo Alto, cycling up and down the California coast, and across both the Sierra mountains and the Nevada desert. He loved camping and hiking, having trekked across smoldering Hawaiian volcanoes, over the Kings Canyon range, and through the Indian Peaks wilderness, where one star-studded night he watched Venus and a quarter-moon fade in the eastern sky as dawn stole over the Continental Divide. After their retirement, Bernie and Jane journeyed to many places together, from the hot springs of New Zealand to the glacier bays of Greenland, from the Maya ruins of Chichen Itza to the midnight sun of Norway. Bernie’s warmth, humor, intelligence, friendship, his love and the spark that is him will be forever missed.