Dick Pas passed away on Tuesday, March 24th, 2015. While his death was rather sudden, Dick did have a history of coronary incidents.
Some day, when someone is confronted with the task of summing up my own days on this planet of ours, they need only use Dick’s life as a reference point; he was everything that I am not. This is to say that he was enthusiastic, passionate, jovial, caring (yet seemingly, at times, carefree, if that not be a contradiction). Reference is often made regarding a person’s glass as being either half-empty or half-full. Dick’s glass was forever, it seemed, in overflow mode.
Dick was a dreamer perhaps. The reality of a situation did not diminish his enthusiasm for a cause. During our college years, I was a rather typical New York liberal, and Dick’s politics were perhaps an inch or two to the left of Barry Goldwater’s. (Dick, please forgive the exaggeration.) There was a marked transformation, call it, in Dick’s ideals over the years. Dick recently completed his term (actually, terms, I believe) as Chairman of the Waukesha County Democratic organization. This is a county, by the way, that is not exactly a hotbed of liberal sentiment.
Dick was a guy who took delight in the accomplishments of others. I oftentimes wished that I’d assigned Dick the task of preparing my resume because he always managed to stretch my relatively-short list of achievements into something a good deal more notable.
Dick was, above all else, a family man. He and Gerry were college sweethearts, and she knew him better than he knew himself. Gerry always had a way of laughing off the couple of quirks that might have annoyed a partner of a different disposition. Theirs was indeed a model relationship.
And nothing brought more joy to Dick than his daughters, Emily (Williams ‘98) and Carolyn, and his five grandchildren.
I spoke with Gerry this morning. She informs me that they are planning a “remembrance event”. The tentative date is April 19th. The time and venue have not yet been announced.
There was one word that Dick used in at least every other sentence. That word was “super”. I’ve known others to use that word or words like it almost flippantly. Dick genuinely meant it every single time that he used that word. Everything in his life was “super”. What a wonderful perspective on life!
Truly, a SUPER life.
Warmest regards,
Stu Rosenthal