Deceased January 8, 2018
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In Memory
Eugene died Jan. 8, 2018, from complications following a routine surgery. Eugene was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and immigrated in 1939 with his family on the steamship Vulcania. Eugene graduated from the High Mowing School, in Wilton, N.H., which remains the oldest U.S. Waldorf school in the country. Eugene completed the five-year combined Amherst-MIT program to earn his master’s in civil engineering through the AFROTC competitively awarded scholarship program. He was a political science major during in his Amherst years.
Always first and foremost an engineer, Eugene had domestic and international engineering projects over his career. During his AFROTC service, he earned two patents—the first on fusion bonding to non-metals and the second for NASA on the re-entry vehicle leading edge. He then worked for Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton (TAMS). He went on to start a private engineering consulting firm where he served on a multi-year project in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to improve road and bridge infrastructure. Years later he took his engineering skills into real estate development. At the age of his death at 84, he remained self-defined as a self-employed engineer with no eye yet on retirement.
Eugene is survived by his wife, Kendra Kaplan; their daughter, Whitney Wolf; his first wife, Gael Grant; and their three children, Susan Friedrich, Belinda Abouaf Friedrich and Scott Friedrich. Susan ’80, his oldest daughter, graduated from Amherst College with the first class which admitted women. He is survived also by six grandchildren, as well as his older sister, Anne Friedrich Roos.
A proud hobby of philatelic study of his birth country Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) held keen fascination, down to the smallest detail of a watermark.
He rests at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge, Mass., and received full honors at his graveside.
The Friedrich Family