I was thinking about Jack and Trish and found this obituary on-line. It was a shock and I am so very, very sorry that Jack is no longer here on this earth. This world needs his type of kind and funny heart in addition to his big heart. I worked with him at NAPP/Lace Engineering. Two of my favorite Jack stories are:
1) Trish snuck the mannequin she had purchased for her sister's store in South America into their bed one evening.  She waited to see what Jack would do when he came to bed.... Jack, being the fast thinker he was, decided to flip the joke and started making love to the mannequin....
2) Jack stole a leaf off of the fake plant in the reception area every day to see how long it would take for Dallas Durrell to notice. His version was that the plant only had like two leaves left on it when Dallas caught on to what he was doing!
My condolences to your whole family and know that Jack is being remembered and celebrated.
Blessings,
Penny Leone (formerly Penny Unger)

3-19-19
Two years have passed since my brother died. There are so many questions I wish I had asked, so much I missed out on, so much I miss about him now: his humor, spot on observations, political thoughts, book critiques, family time. Jack, I wish I had told you more often that I love you. Your family misses you.

Jack Burns was my roommate my last year at UT -1969. He was working on his Masters and we had lived in the same apartment unit before we became roommates. We were both ME's. He was such a fun guy, we would go sailing after he got his boat at Lake Travis after work. I also had the honor of being run over by him in the sailboat. Another of our roommates and I were visiting at the end of May and were wondering where Jack was and I was so surprised when I googled his name today and found out that he had passed. I am so sorry for your loss and would like to touch base with the family. I live in Temple, Texas.  I am glad to have so many good memories of him in my life. Love, JW

I met Jack when our sons, already friends, were still only crawling on their knees in nursery school. Then our next children, both girls, became each others best friends as well. And so our families were joined all the way, continuing even beyond all of the children's college years. Over the decades that made for lots and lots of memories, but the one that comes first and foremost is the memory of Jack's round, gentle, beaming face, that smile that found pleasure in everyone and everything around him. It was always there and will always be whenever I think of him still.

My condolences to the Burns family for their loss. Jack was a special guy who left an impression with everyone he me. He will be missed by many.

Jack and I met in the Spring of 1964 at a UT P.E. tennis class where we were paired together because we were both lousy tennis players and spent most of our time chasing balls. We found out we both grew up in south Oak Cliff very near each other and I would ride with Jack on our occasional home visits.
We kept up intermittent contact through our Sophomore year until I left for seasonal employment on trail crew at Glacier National Park in Montana. Meanwhile Jack continued in school, since he had previously amazed me that he knew he wanted to be an engineer since the age of eight and I was to only figure out what I wanted to be at twenty-five, I shortly went into the Navy to avoid the draft and see the world, which became Viet Nam on a hospital ship. Our next get-together was a trip in December of 1968 in Jack’s Beetle with another friend of his to four different ski basins in Colorado. Our first try, since none of us had ever skied before, was at low-cost Rocky Mountain National Park with rope tows, which his friend nicknamed “the mechanical enema.” On these contraptions we all failed miserably but kept at it and spent most of our time rolling in the snow and laughing about it. Our style hadn’t improved much at the remaining resorts but we had fun.
Two years later our next adventure was with Jack accompanying me on the trip to my seasonal Park Ranger job back in Glacier by way of North Cascades National Park in Washington. We stayed with my previous year’s Glacier ranger buddy who was now the Hozomeen backcountry ranger on the Canadian side of the park. We then high-tailed it to Glacier on the trans- Canadian highway and Jack to the airport and back to his job back at Tracor. After this compatible two weeks together we continued to cheer each on for the next year with “Backpacking through Europe staying at youth hostels in ’71.”
That day came the following May by securing a ride for us to Syracuse, New York with a fellow student of mine. We celebrated my graduation ceremony the best way I could imagine-in absentia headed for an adventure of a lifetime. I remember being amazed that Jack could talk politics with the driver like he had grown up there and the endless drive straight thru was rendered less boring with his frequent entertaining.
We arrived at Grand Central Terminal by bus after being warned by one of our hitchhiking rides from Syracuse that we could be ticketed for that on the New York Thruway. We must have looked hopelessly out of our element trying to get our bearings at the terminal because an affable older gentleman who looked like Santa Claus offered to join us and direct. On our walk thru downtown New York, with him as a tour guide describing the landmarks, he told us that he had built PBS’s Big Bird and took us to the studio and let us put Big Bird over our heads. He finally directed us to our destination, another Glacier ranger’s college dorm at Columbia where we resided awaiting the departure of our one-way “hippie airline” Icelandic Airline flight to Luxombourg.
Since our two-month Eurail passes in Europe weren’t to begin for another two weeks, on our arrival in Luxembourg we promptly started our hitchhike to Yugoslavia (as it was known at the time) to visit my college girlfriend Yelena’s parents in Belgrade. Our first ride was with a friendly German, not much older than us, who was instrumental in the creation of the European Common Market. His grand prix driving style thru the mountains to Vienna with us rolling around in the back seat like watermelons prompted Jack to whisper that he was showing off his driving skills with his BMW.
Outside Vienna we caught a ride with a group of Arabs who were transporting several used Mercedes Benz automobiles in a convoy from Munich to the “orient” to sell. The english- speaking leader told us they could take us all the way to Istanbul,Turkey which wasn’t even in our remotest dream itinerary. Why not a chance like that? We agreed! We later assessed that they must have thought that we were with the two girls who were hitching just ahead of us and were a package. The girls went into the leader’s car and we went in the car behind. The non-
stop ride seemed interminable but several times they would stop, open up the trunk and set up a tablecloth and bring out all this ethnic food of theirs and imploring us to try everything, which we happily did. Somewhere in Yugoslavia at night our driver got extremely frustrated with me for cajoling him to avoid driving so close to all the pedestrians commuting on the side of the road. All vehicles came to an abrupt halt with our driver raging to the leader about me and we were, almost apologetically, dropped at the next nearest town. We realized that we had probably lost some of our cachet since the girls had departed somewhere previously for a different direction. We caught the next local train and stayed the night at a village hotel amidst an ethnic wedding and we were invited to join in the celebration with music, dancing, and warm inclusion.
We arrived at Yelena’s parents, the Markovic’s, home in Belgrade, which was actually their three-story villa where they inhabited the top floor. On the way up the stairs we had to pass through and were angrily glared at by the many families who lived below. The Markovic’s had been forced to house them under their current communist rule. The Markovic’s spoke hardly a word of english but by this time in our travels gestures were sufficing. They took us out on a tour of Belgrade in their car and her dad pointed out various sights in his Serbian tongue. He pointed to the Danube River numerous times since, I guess, that was one word we could agree on. Jack relished the relating to others afterwards about Mr. Markovic’s attempts to host us by tuning in the only english speaking radio station he knew which was a christian evangelist screaming away at his radio flock.
On to Greece which became the worst hitchhiking ever encountered in our lives. So bad we actually considered walking across the highway and hitching in the other direction just to get out of the place we had been for most of the day. Finally an old guy came by in what amounted to a golf cart with a truck bed and we euphorically crawled into. That night, after no more rides that day and darkness upon us we bedded down in an agricultural field among the towering crops. Jack’s famous rejoinder was, “If you’re tired enough you can sleep anywhere “ which I guess was a state I had never reached in life but I learned was true. Hours later we were awakened by cow bells from every direction and realized we were surrounded by a whole herd of goats foraging in the fields. We weren’t trampled, however, and after we stood up the goats eventually moved on but a restless sleep followed. Finally, we arrived in Athens and the first youth hostel where we stayed for several days, visiting the sights of Athens.
Ready to leave the city for the islands we departed from the port of Piraeus for Mykonos. On arrival there just before sunset at the youth hostel on the village outskirts we found it full for the night. We continued beyond to a remote raised thumb of the island above the cliffs with the waves crashing on the rocks below-a truly romantic place. We built a fire and proceeded to revel in the bottle of Yugoslav wine Yelena’s father had sent us off with. The more we drank the more Jack began crying-out repeatedly and in increasingly plaintive sounds and emotion that I had never heard out of Jack before. “I sure do miss Patsy” (his girlfriend back in Austin), “I sure do miss Patsy.” On and on and on. Finally it morphed into “When we get back to Athens I”m going to call her and ask her to marry me and come to Europe and travel with me. This he did immediately on our return and her euphoric response was, “Yes, when?” And she was there in Brussels, Belgium three weeks later with a backpack on. I was happy for Jack, even though I knew I would be on my own from there on, since this was something we had both been pining for all throughout our friendship.
The postscript here was that afterwards I had gone to the village of Girindelwald, Switzerland as solace to hike and climb. On one of my day trips back down to the city of Interlaken there coming at me with their backpacks were Jack and Patsy who had come from their marriage days before in Munich, Germany. I promptly invited them to the campground in Grindelwald
where they tented for a couple days and we hiked the alps together before them leaving for the rest of their tour.
Here’s to Jack Burns and all of us who have so loved him. Don Wolff, Denver Co. June 14,2017

I shall forever miss my funny, delightful brother.

Jack was a good friend, and a coworker of a few years. I share my first patent with him. We often disagreed on philosophical, political, and religious points, but our debates were always enjoyable. Neither of us ever convinced the other to change our mind, but there were never hurt feelings, and I believe we each left with some points to consider. He was a great thinker, with a good heart, and a wonderful sense of humor.

I'm Yutaka Nakanishi from Japan.

I worked with Jack and met him on 2012 at Austin Texas. He was a very nice and friendly man.
My condolences to his family..

Yutaka Nakanishi