I'll be posting the speeches from the funeral

As I get them, I'll post them up here for anyone who wants to keep them. Here is my uncle Rob's speech, which he and my aunt Deb put together.

Our brother Rick was wedged between the two of us in birth order. Deb and I look like each other and something like our parents, and there are behavioral traits that seem to point us toward our parents. But Rick was different…he didn’t look like any of us, and in so many ways he seemed to be from another sector. He was incredibly brilliant, to the point that I said that he used up most of the family brains and there weren’t many left over in the gene pool for me. And Rick’s intelligence was in the range of “scary smart” to the point that neither one of us were ever willing to play card games (or much of anything else) with him at home because he would always win!!! And his talents…in music, in humor, in his quick grasp of any subject…put him in another league.

Rick was born with a heart defect that haunted him his entire life. He was diagnosed with this defect at 4 months old and made his first trip to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore at 10 months. He had open-heart surgery to repair the heart defect when he was almost 13 in 1968 at Johns Hopkins amidst the burning of Baltimore during the riots created immediately following Martin Luther King’s assassination. With the miracle of modern medicine, we got to know and love Rick for not 10 or 20 or 30 years, but we are thankful that we were blessed by Rick’s presence in our life for 52. We wish would have kept him longer.

Rick was always smiling as a baby. Our mom remembers that he was incredibly happy and incredibly busy. He was into everything. Rick was very interested in sports as a boy, or you might say obsessed, but not able to participate in much because of his heart condition, which disappointed and frustrated him. Mom & Dad remember that Rick was born tactful – he never, ever wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings. One of his first jobs as a teenager was as a first base umpire in Little League, which didn’t work out at all because that’s a job where someone’s always going to be upset with you…. So that job didn’t last too long because it made him too stressed. I can always remember him taking the sports page of the daily paper first everyday and reading it front to back. Knowing him, he probably memorized all the box scores.

Being five years younger than Rick, I was a pest to him. But he certainly wasn’t an angel either. I mouthed off…he busted me in the mouth. In fact, Rick was the one who removed my front teeth when I was about six. I deserved it. He would punch me when my parents weren’t looking, and I would stuff the underside of his pillowcase with weeds, so while he slept, they would exacerbate his already-horrible hay fever. I looked forward to the day that I would grow taller than Rick and really clean his clock, but when the day came, he was awfully nice to me and I didn’t see the point.

We found out many years later that on every Christmas Eve, Rick would go downstairs in the middle of the night, open everyone’s presents, rewrap them and act surprised at what everyone gave and received a few hours later. And one Christmas, when I was about four or five, he emptied my Christmas stocking early on Christmas before anyone got up and filled it with switches. I was devastated. Mischievous, quick-to-laugh, brilliant, devoted, kind to a fault. That was our brother.

I can remember night after night of Rick blowing into his various collections of saxophones. There are musicians and then there are musicians. Rick was in that rare collection of those who go to the highest level of their talents, first excelling by winning everything available to win at the state level in high school, then excelling at Furman, where he met his wife Jeannie and where he received a degree in music education. Finally he went on to the big time at Indiana University, where he received his Masters in Music Performance. We were all so proud of him.

He loved his family so much: his wife Jeannie who he was married to for 29 years, and his two children, Erin and Michael – they were the joy of his life.. And as much as he loved music, he loved his family much more and changed careers when he realized that he would have a hard time supporting his family in his chosen field of music. Rick was so smart that he could just change what he had done for years and learn something completely new. You must understand that Rick could have chosen anything, ANYTHING, and he would have excelled at it. He grew in his career but Jean and the kids were always number one.

My one regret is that Rick and I stayed so busy in our careers that we didn’t spend that much together in adulthood. We stayed in touch electronically but didn’t get together much. For years we gently teased each other over e-mail. I can remember his admission to the hospital about 15 or 20 years over a heart issue. I called him while I was on a business trip to Brazil and told him some jokes I had heard down there and he laughed so much that I thought it mess up all the contraptions he was hooked up to. So I eased up on the jokes. The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with his heart. They all threw up their hands. Rick got on the internet, read medical journals, and self diagnosed his problem. They treated him and it worked. That’s our brother.

Although Rick was born with a heart that didn’t function properly in the physical sense and had to be repaired, his heart worked exceptionally well in a non-physical way. Rather than letting his health concerns make him focused on himself, Rick’s heart seems to expand in kindness to others. He was probably the most tenderhearted person I’ve ever known.

So we are thankful for having him as a brother for all these years. He was a joy to us as I know he was to all of you. But we are going to miss him terribly. The world is a lesser place without him. We love you, Rick.