Obituaries

Frederick Neal Eddy died peacefully in Altoona WI on December 4, at age 91. Born on September 23, 1933, in Springfield MA, Neal had an itinerant childhood (Springfield, MA, St. Paul MN, Raleigh NC and Cambridge MA) as his parents taught at various colleges and his father got a PhD from Duke University before becoming chair of Sociology and General Studies at Boston University. The family was not wealthy: mother, father, sister and dog Calina lived in a small camper in a friend’s driveway during their time in North Carolina and 5-year-old Neal would frequently fall off the top bunk.

Apparently, he didn’t sustain any brain damage. Young Neal read voraciously and astonished his parents by calculating the length and flare of metal tubes to produce specific pitches. After graduating from Cambridge Ridge and Latin High School, he entered Harvard University at age 15. As a college student, he continued his tinkering and acoustic studies and took on work fixing radios and in a musical instrument repair shop.

Neal left college to join the army during the Korean War. After being honorably discharged, he took a job at Raytheon where he met his future wife, Winona Taylor Nile, who was working as a technical writer (Winona also had a fondness for poetry and knew much of Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas by heart). The two were married in 1958, moved to Belmont and then Weston MA and raised three children together. She died of ovarian cancer in 2006.

After leaving Raytheon, Neal worked on magnetic digital storage at LFE (Laboratory for Electronics) and later at the MITRE Corporation where he worked on Over-the-Horizon (OTH) radar. He became a principal engineer for a team of PhDs despite never himself having graduated from college. He fondly remembered scaling a palm tree in Puerto Rico during a storm to convince a skeptical boss of his theory—the measurements confirmed his predictions. In the course of his career Neal was awarded 18 scientific patents.

Neal played flute, clarinet, and French horn; was an avid museum-goer and art historian; fixed his own cars and collected discarded microwaves to experiment with. An autodidact with wide-ranging interests, he read books in German, French and Russian as well as English. When Neal retired to California, he sold his personal library of 40,000 books.

After the death of his wife, Neal developed a loving relationship with Eva Lukacs, a Hungarian refugee and licensed structural engineer designing water and sewage treatment plants in the US and abroad. They lived in Chestnut Hill, MA and then the Rossmoor retirement community in Walnut Creek, CA for almost 2 decades before dementia forced Neal to move to the Midwest to be closer to his children.

Neal was preceded in death by his parents, George Norman Eddy and Ruth Mae (Garland) Eddy; his sister Jeanne (Eddy) Nichols; his wife Winona (Nile) Eddy and his son Jonathan Eddy. He is survived by his daughters Jennifer Eddy (Mark Gideonsen) and Heather Eddy (Stephen Klassen), and grandsons Oliver Eddy and Nathaniel Gideonsen.