Deceased January 18, 2020
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In Memory
Rich Ferguson and I were roommates in Seelye House our senior year. We had been assigned two single rooms, but we decided to pool our resources and instead have a bedroom and a study room. It worked out extremely well, maybe because of his peace-loving Quaker upbringing.
Rich played baseball as a catcher. At one point, I wanted to test whether or not I would be a good pitcher and asked Rich to catch a few balls and give me his opinion. He quickly dashed any fantasy I might have had of being a pitcher, as I learned from him that I telegraphed all of my throws.
After Amherst, Rich went to Göttingen, Germany, for his graduate studies in physics. I visited him while traveling there in 1961. After that, we lost track of each other until 1968, when I joined the economics department at UC Riverside. Rich had joined the physics department at UCLA. We were both in Southern California teaching in the UC system, not too far away from each other. Hence we got together from time to time. After I left UCR and the U.S. and came to Nicaragua, we lost touch (no Internet, texting, Facebook, Instagram back then). I finally contacted him via email and learned that he had become a winemaker in California. We saw each other again in 2013 when Deanna and I went to Oregon and California, looking for a suitable college for our daughter Cristina. We joined Rich and his wife at a very good restaurant called Barndiva in Healdsburg, Calif. Rich brought a bottle of his own red wine, which we enjoyed thoroughly. Regrettably, our paths never crossed again.
Pedro Belli ’60
Rich Ferguson and I became good friends during our freshman year on the third floor of Morrow. Although we joined different fraternities, we remained good friends through many long discussions of politics, religion and girlfriends while at Amherst. He lived in State College, Pa., just 150 miles south of my home in Rochester, N.Y., so we made some trips together in my distinctive red and white 1956 Pontiac station wagon, visiting sites and girlfriends in the region.
For those of you interested in unlikely coincidences, during senior year, I went to Philadelphia for a March visit to the University of Pennsylvania and parked my car in front of a bar during a light snow. When I came back to the car, someone had written in the snow on the windshield "Heckel, go home!" It took me a little while to figure out who it might be, and a few days later after I knocked on his dorm door with a big grin on my face, he said “You weren't nearly as surprised as I was when I walked out of that bar and saw that car and found the Amherst College tag on the license plate!”
Rich went on to get a doctorate in physics at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., while I got my doctorate in geology at Rice in Houston. The last time I saw him was when I stopped by his place in St. Louis on one of my long Rochester-to-Houston drives (before interstates), where a Rice buddy slept and I on his living-room floor (as the other beds were filled by his first wife and child).
We then lost contact for many years. Just a few years ago, I contacted him in his retirement home in Boonville in northern California, through the Amherst alumni network. Thereafter, we had several long telephone and email discussions about politics, life experiences and wives/girlfriends. After St. Louis, he taught physics at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo and eventually became involved in environmental work. In 1990, he became research director for a nonprofit advocacy group that he and others started in Sacramento, called the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies (CEERT). His job was to ensure that their people had good, honest, scientifically-derived data to use at proceedings before the state’s Energy Commission, Public Utilities Commission, etc. In the process, he met Glynnis Jones, his surviving wife, who was VP for a company that provided energy-efficiency projects for electric utilities. They soon married and ultimately left Sacramento for retirement in Boonville.
As Rich explained in emails he sent me, California has made a serious commitment to renewable energy, and one of the major roadblocks was the need to modify the high-voltage transmission system. CEERT was hired to coordinate the initial transmission planning process. The first contract involved the wire needed to access wind energy in the Tehachapi region of southern California. That process worked well, as the plan that the group developed was approved and is now mostly built. Based on that success, California decided to assess all the renewable energy areas in the state and what transmission would be needed if the resources were developed. Coordinating all the utility people, environmentalists, agency staff, etc., was like herding the proverbial cats, but the eventual plan was also declared a success by the folks who hired them. Rich ended his career with the notion that he had accomplished something worthwhile. California’s governor has recently declared a goal that 50 percent of the state’s electric power come from renewable resources by 2030 (up from 33 percent by 2020, which will be met). This achievement would not have been thought feasible without the work that CEERT did. Over the past three decades, Rich had been doing the type of work that the entire nation and world need to be doing over the next several decades, if we are to save the world from the increasingly familiar climate-linked environmental catastrophes.
His CEERT obituary noted that as its “technical director, Rich helped sort through the myriad of economic and technology issues we needed to master in order to effectively and credibly advance the cause of renewables. When presented with a new technology or scientific claim, we had a simple review process: ‘Ask Dr. F’ He never steered us wrong.”
Phil Heckel ’60