Loss

I usually keep this blog pretty light, but I would like to take a slight departure this week to mourn the loss of one of my former neighbors, Professor Gary Balas. I was informed of a memory book being compiled in his honor, so I decided to write in with a short story of my own. I wanted to type a short excerpt of how Gary had offered me an internship and helped me along my way from college to working in the 'real world'. I truthfully did not expect the amount of emotion that came over me and all the other stories and memories that flooded my head as they started to flood my eyes. I made sure no one saw me choke up in my corner , drank some water, and finished my little story up. I have shared the same email below. You will be missed Gary.

Gary and his family moved into my neighborhood when I was young and I grew up knowing that we had a rocket scientist just down the street, which is definitely one of the coolest things that you can tell your friends. It it a fairly tight knit neighborhood, so everybody knew at least a bit about each person. Through my parents (and some very high pitched alcohol powered engine noises) Gary found out that I played with R/C cars in the neighborhood and we would chat every once in awhile about math and engineering and his autonomous vehicle projects at the U; usually it was at the Balas/Steele hosted soup nights. I went on to study engineering in college at ISU and Gary would ask me each summer if I would intern for him and help out with the model planes some of his other students were working with. Although it wasn't really my field he felt that my R/C knowledge would help and that my engineering studies provided a good base. I turned him down year after year to work at a Boy Scout camp instead each summer, but finally in my last year of school I agreed to be a summer intern. I had shifted my focus from M.E. to Industrial Technology, but I still tinkered with my R/C monster trucks regularly. The projects at the U had also shifted and he asked me to start on a new project based on the supercavitation research being done. Needless to say I jumped on board and got a 4 and half foot long gas powered R/C boat to get started. I almost learned more about project management than I did about engineering or supercavitation that summer (almost), and Gary was a great resource as well as a great teacher and mentor through all of my successes and failures in the short 10 week time. It was a phenomenal experience, I learned more than I ever thought I would, got loads of stories to tell at gatherings from casual to formal, and being my last year of college it was a star in my resume that I always looked forward for people to inquire about. I made sure to catch up with Gary for at least a few minutes each year at the annual 4th of July bash. Always genuinely intrigued and ever supportive, Gary was truly one of a kind, and the most down to earth genius anyone would be blessed to know. 

This message turned into something a bit longer than I intended, and now I feel like I have so much more to say. It turns out Gary was not just the local rocket scientist down the street; he was my friend.

Info about his memorial and memory book can be found here, and local paper's obituary here.