Richard Carroll Zahn

My Life in Four Paragraphs, by Dick Zahn (Florida, 2015)

I was born in upstate New York on June 2, 1931 and went through K-12 with the same wonderful classmates (whom I remain friends with to this very day), taught by terrific teachers, guided by a keen principal. I lived on the Oneida river and my kid brother Bob and I swam, fished, and rowed a boat every day outside winter. I was an altar boy, a newspaper delivery boy, a Boy Scout; played the French Horn in the school band, center field on the baseball team, guard in basketball, and left wing in soccer. I was elected class president twice and, in the yearbook, was voted Nicest Legs (for a boy) and Most Intelligent.

I was an electronics Petty Officer on board a Navy destroyer (DDR-833) in the Korean War, awarded 8 medals (not the hero kind, just evidence of being there) and a combat action ribbon. I've been a freelance cartoonist published in numerous national magazines, was a Field Engineer then Export Manager for a well-known electronics test equipment manufacturer where I organized and led a government-sponsored trade mission to South America and made business trips to the former Soviet Union and bloc countries before they collapsed. Then, my wife and I designed and built an executive golf course on the banks of Lake Champlain in New York and later, with a British-born partner, co-founded and was CEO of a technical sales organization that marketed world-class electronic instrumentation throughout the southeastern US.

I've been married to Beverly Williamson, the prettiest girl in our high school and girl of my dreams, for 63 years and helped her raise our three lovely and fascinating daughters: Kathy, a Social Worker in the public school system; Colleen, a Medical Technologist; and Tracey, a Registered Nurse. We have lived in the southwest (California), the northeast (upstate NY, and Montreal and Toronto in Canada), the northwest (Oregon), and, for the past 39 years in the southeast (Florida), and have been in every State of the Union except Alaska. We've built homes in Baldwinsville, NY, Beaverton, Oregon, and Tarpon Springs, Florida, a cabin on the Williamette River in Oregon and a stilt-house on Cudjoe Key in the Florida Keys with our business partners, and have vacationed in Hawaii, Mexico, the Bahamas, Costa Rica, and collectively, England, Germany, Italy, Monaco, and France.

I have written my Reminiscences, three novels, a cookbook, and scads of short stories and song lyrics -- not to mention creating board games TiddlyLinks, Waterhole (a chess-like game with Apache, Navajo, and Comanche pieces) and The Export Game. The subtitle of my reminiscences is One Thing I Have Never Been is Bored. Maybe you could put that on my tombstone.

Richard Carroll Zahn, age 93, passed away on May 27, 2025.

A memorial service will be held at Sarasota National Cemetery at 11:00am on Wednesday, June 25, 2025.

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