We Remember Rudy, W6OWI

The oldest station log entry as Mountain View ARES was on March 20, 1989. Only one ham on that log entry is active in Mountain View ARES as of 2020: Rudy Bahr, W6OWI.

A brief biography of Rudy, W6OWI

Thanks to Jean, Rudy's Daughter, for this biography.

Rudolph Bahr Jr. (Rudy) was born on June 19, 1923 in Brooklyn and passed peacefully on May 11, 2021 in the house he had owned in Mountain View since 1957. He grew up in New York, graduating from Brooklyn Tech HS in 1941 and from Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken NJ) in 1945.

He was commissioned into the Navy in the summer of 1945 (having been a member of the naval reserve starting in early 1942 (during college) and spent about a year on active duty travelling to San Francisco, Hawaii, Kwajalein and Guam.

Following his discharge from active duty he joined Sylvania-Bayside Physics Lab in NY working on transmitter design, participating in field engineering at White Sands NM, and developing a 40 MCIIF amplifier using printed circuit techniques (which I gather were a new thing then as he presented papers on that work at a couple of IEEE conventions). In 1952 he joined Bell Labs as a technical staff member.

He married Jane Watkins in 1953 and their daughter Jean was born almost a year later in 1954. Rudy returned to Sylvania in 1955 when he was offered the chance to move to the Bay Area. He had fallen in love with California during his short stay courtesy of the Navy in 1945. He continued with Sylvania (which later became GTE, then Verizon/General Dynamics) until his retirement in 1993.

He was based in Mountain View but enjoyed international work with extended stays in Italy, England, Japan, the Marshall Islands, the Philippines, Germany, Israel, and Cyprus. He and Jane also enjoyed trips before and after retirement to Spain, New Zealand, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Scandinavia. They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary on a cruise to Alaska with their daughter. He and Jane studied Italian, German and Spanish in adult education classes and Rudy served for many years as part of the Mountain View Los Altos Adult Education Community Advisory Committee.

Rudy often said that one of the keys to living a long life was to keep active. He began commuting to work by bike in the mid-1960s and continued to ride his bike until he was in his early 90s. In retirement he became a regular hiker in the many parks and open spaces of the Bay Area. He particularly enjoyed the annual desert and Sierra trips with his hiking group. After his wife Jane passed in 2009, he became a regular member of the "coffee society" of GTE retirees and he arrived early each Sunday before mass to make coffee for the Thomas Merton Community in Palo Alto. He enjoyed visits with his daughter Jean in Madison, Wisconsin and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Their annual trip to the Santa Fe opera was a highligh in both of them.

Rudy first became interested in amateur radio in high school and continued to be an active member of the ham community through the final months of his life. He enjoyed weekly check-ins on the local net, providing support for bike and running events, and being a member of the El Camino Hospital team. He became an Assistant Emergency Emergency (AEC) of Mountain View ARES around the 2000 time frame.

He served in the Naval Reserve until his retirement as a Lieutenant Commander, participating in the Navy MARS net as part of his regular reserve duties. He had a garage full of ham equipment, most of which he built himself. During his travels, he enjoyed meeting in-person a number of hams that he had contacted previously over the air. He was frequently welcomed into homes in other countries when he knocked on a stranger’s door to ask about the antenna that he had noticed on the roof.

Jean M. Bahr
Professor Emerita
Dept. of Geoscience
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Madison, WI 53706