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WebTV : Rosemary Stasek, Joel Black, more. Josh Allen. (Camilo Viniegra, Renée G, Emily W). Ashton Treadway. Noel Morrison and the blood bankers, (Zonker Harris, Art Bobroskie, Brava services, Neil Laughlin, Lennart Lovstrand, Paul Erickson, Ray Hill, Mike Richman, T i m o Bruck, Neal Tucker, CJ Silverio, Jenny Wilder, Sharon Frinks, and Brian Bock). Sai Suresh. Jet V. Lisa Lee. Paul R y b i c k i. Heather K. Karen W. Hilary H. Steve Wasserman. (Steve K r o l l, Mark A r m s t r o n g, Kieca M., Archie C a m p b e l l, Don L o u v, Robert S t o n e s). Christiane Petite
Pomona College: Amanda V. Gwen M. Benjamin L i c h t m a n. David Menefee-Libey. Tom Borcherding, Mike Kuehlwein. James.J.McKenna. (Ann Oelschlager, Anna Mariz, Deborah S, Evan Bilstrom, Hope Neighbor, Leslie Pollner, Gordon Stott, David Good, Jessica and Harriet Berman, Dax Oliver, Muzy Huq, Petrina Grube, Ray Newell, Chris McCamic, Dan Lavery, Roy Speckhardt(TIA), Nancy Treser-Osgood). Erica T (KSPC radio), more. Tasha D. Jano Cabrera, again. Becca S. Layne M. Abigail Al-D, Genevieve Lee. Paul M a r i z. Padgett Arango.
Alaska: Joni Whitmore. Dave T h o r p. Brad Chisholm. Sam Trout. Thea Agnew, Ken Brower.
Video: Fear of a Black Toessel by Yun Shin Photos: here, there.
Cyber colleagues and acquaintances: (Karen Kotoske, Ron Woodall, James Ownbey, Greg Balch, Beth Candy) .
Family friends and childhood friends: Matt Schwab. David Lumley. Kate P. Matt Riggs. Andrew Long. Christina Rosas. Caryn Huberman. Rom Leidner. Edward Sugimoto. Larry Flechner. Lauren (Half) Warren. (Anonymous, Carol Morley, Jamie Rector, Chuck Sword, Julia Baskett, Jan Lieberman, Misa Nishio, Dave Nichols, Susan Orr, Stew Levin, Yilmaz family). Bill Beaver. Katherine.
Family: brother Andrew (movie) and Amy. brother Martin. grandpa Nate. cousin Tess. cousin David. aunt Kathleen. aunt Lorna and uncle Cahir, second cousin Beverly.
Jos started at WebTV in Aug 1997. We hired him from Brain Trust where we hired a lot of people at the time in Customer Service (CS). I was working in CS -- there's Hilary over there. We were managing the email team, people who got to answer emails from our wonderful customers.
Some guy named Matt, who was an emailer, recommended a friend of his and it turned out to be Jos, so Jos comes in one day and immediately starts calling Hil, "Hil-Bopp" for the Hale-Bopp comet that was around at that time.
He immediately starts calling me [Kieca] Kiecalicious. This was the first day he was working here.
And I just found out an emailer who was hired at the same time who just sent us an email saying that Jos used to call him "Scotty Buns." He did say he never called Jos, "Josie Pie" back, even though he would have liked it.
So Jos started doing email and we knew that's no fun. We've all been thru it, and shortly thereafter, probably less than a week after he started, our Previews Group needed someone and Jos turned out to be the person. Part of the reason is that we knew that if you had to do email for more than a week or two, you'd probably just get fed up and quit, and Jos actually knew JavaScript and stuff. So we were like, "Send him to Previews".
About a week after he started here in August 1997 he went to our Previews team working for Matt Dingy so I got to be part of all of Jos's antics on the Previews Team.
I was going thru the email. I found some emails from his first day at WebTV. Granted that they weren't totally Jos'ed out yet because it was his first day and he probably didn't know how far he could go.
Most of them were very sweet. I found one where he assured a girl. She was worried that she would lose her email when she turned off her WebTV. He wrote back, "Any email that comes into your account is stored at our computers here in Palo Alto which we never turn off." [laughter] I thought it was nice of him.
Somebody else wrote in and said they "played that game" -- this is typical user speak -- "I played that game and entered my selection and all the response I got back was that 'You have found the SPAM'. I don't understand why they wouldn't thank me instead." Jos wrote back, "Dear Allan, I will thank you myself. Thank you for finding the spam". [laughter].
A user named golf4food, wrote in, "How do I change my email address?" and Jos wrote back, "Dear Kevin, What? You've gotten sick of golf4food? Seriously, you'll have no trouble changing your email address."
This was all on his first day of working for us, I thought that was pretty amusing.
He started in Previews at the time and he started working on our LC2 product with Kyle and Steve and Daryl and Camilo, Jennifer.
He had a special user named AppleU that he was really really enchanted with. AppleU sent us over 400 emails. There were 400 tickets which means there were probably way over 400 emails. This guy would send us some email every 2 minutes -- like "I saw something funny on a web page; here it is." or "When is WebTV going to be in Guam?" like anything that popped into his head he was writing in.
Jos answered a little over a third of them, he had like about 105 of them he did answer.
In the beginning of the emails he would answer, "Dear Apple U, Thank you for writing in. Here is the answer. Feel free to write back if you have more questions ".
As time went on he was like, "AppleU, No that's not possible. Jos" You could tell that he was a little tired. AppleU actually is part of the inspiration for the Jos-O-Matic for days when Jos wasn't there that people could actually be him.
Also during that time he was out on the web, he got onto the Mr.T sites, the Mr.T ate my balls site, the Mr.T whatever site. He made a site named Mr.T versus the P[Previews]-Team which involved our building catching on fire, Mr.T coming, CMR blowing everything up, Steve Perlman [company founder] came in and had to save the day, and Mr.T saved the day. It is an amazing piece of work. It involved a lot of cut up photography and creative special effects.
Also the Duncan sound catalog is also on the web. He was always trying to keep busy. We had a parrot in the office. We had a lot of parrots in the office. This parrot was especially prolific and would imitate pretty much anything that came down the road. Jos decided he wanted to catalog all these sounds. He went to Radio Shack, bought a cheap microphone, and dangled it over the cube wall so he could tape the parrot as it was saying things. He made a web page devoted to the parrot -- put all the sounds on the web -- named them all, catcall1, catcall2. There is the evil chirp that got the parrot banned from the building after a while.
In between all this he was actually doing work too.
The other thing he brought to the P-team was the orange couch. He decided at one point that the Previews people just needed a couch. They had this big empty room. He and Camilo went out to the Good Will. and they got this lovely orange velvet couch that sat there and everyone would come in and sit on it, even our boss who would come in and say. "Errr. I hate that thing. It's really ugly," but then she would sit on it all day anyway.
But he loved that couch. He actually wore it to Halloween one year.
He worked there from Aug 97 to Jan 98 and moved to service quality engineering (SQE) group under Joel. I actually worked with Jos in this capacity because our team was the team... he was our escalation person. When the group at Customer Care got a lot of problems and didn't know what to do with them, didn't have technical skills or time to know what to do with them, we would go to Jos and he would figure them out for us and work on problems. He would tell us that he didn't have enough information and make us cry.
He used to do something called the Service Quality Engineering Report every Thursday. It was actually very exciting. Maybe I had no life at the time because I actually used to wait for these things to come out because they were so funny. I know I shared an office with Steve Kroll at the time and I think Steve will remember this one in particular. We actually talked about this a lot.
Basically these reports were just a rundown of the week:
these are the problems we saw, here is what we are doing to fix them,
these were the things that I couldn't figure out.
At one point there was a problem with the WebTV box.
And here is how Jos described what happened to the box:
A box happily going about its business doesn't realize that it was cursed with a rather bad A-prom chip in its infancy. Now after a life of dings and some other indignities, whenever this box gets in a certain state, let's say it reaches a certain temperature, one of the little ROM pins will lift up. Think of a rom chip as a many legged roach fused to a circuit board, (legs equals pins) and the box will freak out thinking that it no longer has a A-prom. Unfortunately, it's going to say "I'm going to go and get an update," when really they should be saying, "Man, I'm hosed. I'm going to make some calls. Why don't you go out for a beer?" We are trying to get some of these boxes back and see if this is actually the case.Steve and I used to say that over and over again, every time the box would do something weird, "Man I'm hosed". We were going to print it out and put it on one of the boxes.
In this escalation report he signed it "Jos Claerbout, trying to stay out of trouble." He had a little quote at the bottom of every one.
During this time he wrote reports, he took escalations from my group; he was sort of the renaissance man. He would take care of any sort of problems anyone had, whatever came down the road, he would figure it out.
He would hang out in the WebTV news groups; make friends with the users; find out who was trying to hack into the service; and then get ahead of them.
He spent a lot of time keeping up with the Jerry Springer titles. In fact this escalation report was signed, "Dumped for a one night stand".
Here is another one called, "TWA hates me because of the color of my browser." He actually called TWA to see what the deal was and here's his translation of what happened:
WebTV: I'm calling on behalf of WebTV and we have noticed that your customers cannot access your site on their WebTVs. We'd like to help you fix this to improve your customers' satisfaction.
TWA: Our site is only compatible with Netscape and Internet Explorer.
WebTV: I understand that you have done that. I'm trying to explain that there is no reason for you to block the WebTV browser.
TWA: But we are not blocking any browser.
WebTV: But you just told me you are only allowing only two types of browsers into the site.
TWA: silence
TWA: If your customers want to access our site, they need to down load Netscape or Internet Explorer.
WebTV: Our customers cannot down load Netscape or Internet Explorer.
TWA: We have several customers who have accessed our site using Internet Explorer on their WebTV units.
"This is the point where I employed the convenient mute button on my phone," Jos says. "Today's Springer title was, 'I escort for money'."
He always told us, if you need any help, give Joel Black a call. He gets lonely once in a while and he'd probably love to hear from you. He also knows some stuff.
I also used to commiserate with Jos a lot on the problems he used to see. I remember one time -- our WebTV users get lonely too. Late at night they sometimes go out on the web. There was once a problem and Jos had to contact the manager of xxxxxxxx.com, because one of our users was having a problem getting into the site.
Jos was very proud, remember there are 8 x's in that title, not 7, not 6, but 8 x's.
One thing that I thought was funny, we had a problem with a chat site called Chatopolis. WebTV users would go to the site and they wouldn't be able to use the site, and there was something up on the site which said:
"WebTV sucks. If you cannot use Chatopolis, call them at 1-800-GO-WEBTV or email them and tell them that you want to use us."So of course we were getting flooded with calls and we were like, "Jos, can you help us with this problem so we don't get killed with these calls and make this guy take this off his site?"
He actually did write to the guy at the Chatropolis site. He has a translation of what the email that he sent:
Hello there, I'm at WebTV and I'm working on your site. I'm having some problems and I wonder if you could tell me who the correct technical contact would be so we can work them out.
So he gets this curt reply back, "It's me and I can guess its your proxies not handling our pragma header, signed Michael Ludwick"
So Jos came to me and said, "What's this?"
So he wrote back, "Michael, thanks for the reply. What makes you think it might be the pragma header?"
The guy writes back, "because WebTV is Satan and I am Jesus and I say it's a proxy problem". [laughter]
So at that point Jos says, "I think he is 14; he lives in New Jersey; and he is running a chat site; and I think that's what we're stuck with."
That's just an example of the kinds of things he had to deal when he worked on escalations for us.
He was really good at helping us find out the information. We were very appreciative of it.
My first Jos story has to do with his environmental outlook when it came to really all things, but specifically how it manifested itself with the plastic eating utensils used in the WebTV cafe.
While the rest of the employees would throw away their plastic forks and knives with each meal, Jos would carefully clean his and place them in a Ziploc bag for safe keeping until his next meal. I happened to be eating with him the day the knife finally gave out. While sawing through a particularly tough hunk of something or other, it snapped in half. The look on Jos' face can only be defined as incredulous. He was crestfallen, but true to Jos' nature, not defeated. He grabbed the half knife, (the sharper half naturally) and continued to fight to cut his food.
I do recall he did throw the broken half away after the meal but the point was made. Jos got a few months use out of one plastic knife, keeping the landfills of the earth just that much less abused.
I'm going to start to cry in a minute.
The other story -- this is real simple: Camilo and Jos used to bush their teeth there everyday. We practically lived there all the time, sleeping on the floors. Camilo and Jos carried their toothbrushes all around. Jos came back to the desk with a brand new toothpaste. It was Tom's-of-Maine toothpaste cinammon. He came in with this look on his face and he said,
"Man! this is one ANGRY toothpaste."[laughter]
He was just incredible in the way that he could do that. He could go up to anyone and he could get them to help him understand a problem and he could get them enthusiastic about helping him understand the customer issue so that the problem could be solved. I think everyone here had him come to them at some point and say,
"Look at this thing. How do we solve this thing?"Whatever it took, Jos would do it. He'd lick your bald head... he'd give you a back rub.... That was one of the things that was really special about Jos. He just had a way of making everyone feel really good about what they were doing. When I think of Service Quality Engineering, I think of him as the ideal person. He just got everyone engaged and made them feel good about it.
He was always really good about turning something into an analogy so that even if you didn't know the technical end of it, even if you didn't know what was going on, it would make sense to you. He would compare it to something you knew. There was one time where our box was going to a site, and there was all this Javascript on it, and DHTML and SSL. Our box just freaked out. We didn't know what was going on; he even admitted it.
"I don't really know what is going on yet, but it's like this: you get home from school; your mom wants you to clean your room; your dad wants you to cut the lawn; your dog wants to go for a walk, and you are still trying to open your bag of Cheetos. That's kind of what's happening to our box right now."Later I wasn't as close to him. He wrote a lot of stuff for developer that I found on-line. He worked as a web engineer, webmaster, from Sept 98 till February, and since then he just started doing writing, not worrying about the web site. In the beginning he did a little bit of everything. He wanted to focus more on the actual writing. I have a list of articles he wrote. He wrote a ton of them.
Oh Jos! Oh my God! Look at this portion of the site! We've got to do something about it!He'd be able to write something even if he didn't understand it. He would just investigate it, and we would just get it done.
One of Diane's favorite stories --
he was working on a tool,
it was called the Color Picker.
He was doing a new version of it
with some new Javascript
that he had just learned
and he was so excited about it.
It would make it work a little bit better, faster.
I believe his father Jon helped him on it.
One day he was having a really tough time with it,
kind of pulling his hair out.
Then he'd just chill out, come back tomorrow,
come back the next day.
So he came back the next day. Of course it was early in the morning.
Are we going to have fun today? Ahhha. [belly laughter] You know. I've been thinking, you know I think you're right.
What's that?
I think I am just menstrual.
So I said, "Hey, just great, have some chocolate. What can I get you?"
He was able to wake up that day and know just the perfect solution, and know how to work around it. That was one of the funny stories, just one of them.
The whole team had a great time working with him, just [with me?] on corporate web site
Oh my gosh! What are we going to do! So you and me, we'll work on it together. Enter it into BugFlash.He was great. He was a jack-of-all-trades. He will be greatly missed.
Speaking with Jos was always an exceptional experience, because he actually shone the full beam of his attention on you. He did three things that are rare.
"Why does he want to know all this?"This is the question I'm left with. It's very simple: Jos was interested in other people. Not because he wanted to exploit them, humiliate them, intellectually overpower them, or make himself look good by feigning interest. He was just interested. And since his intellectual faculties were such that his attention was accompanied by a penetrating curiosity, his attention could be difficult to handle.
I miss it. No one makes what I say seem as important as Jos did. He is such a lively presence in my memories that I miss him as I miss my friends back in Arizona. Honest to God, I always expect to see him whenever I'm walking through downtown Palo Alto. A big part of me refuses to believe I won't.
Jos had just come and joined us in the QA team. As a long-time member of the QA team he came to me for advice. He asked, "Would it be appropriate if I brought a massage table to my cubicle?" because he loved giving back rubs. "Come by my cube. Get a massage. Get a back rub."
"Well no Jos, it's a work environment, you really shouldn't." but he really wanted to. It was that kind of giving that was really amazing about Jos.
Matt was telling me what his one memory of Jos was. We all went up to the Christmas party in SF. It was at the time of Monica Lewinsky and I remember so many car rides with Jos going on about President Clinton, and the Lewinsky trial. Matt just remembers Jos laying on the bed for hours talking about that, the Drudge Report. He just knew so much about it.
I couldn't believe it. I couldn't remember what was going on at work, let alone remember all the details of the Monica Lewinsky trial. He was just amazing like that. Then he'd turn around and tell you about massage technique in the next breath. I thought like, whooa.... So that's the history.
Emily, I know you sat on the orange couch.
Webscissors, we claim we don't support it. It is a translator he created which allows users to type in the address of a web site they like, and it let's users rip off all the pictures there. Of dubious legality maybe, but it's great, and it is something they love.
I was writing instructions for it, and I had a couple questions. So I emailed Jos and he emailed back, and he added, "as a bonus, here are the 200 most popular sites that have been webscissored from, to distill these down to wrestling, porn, and right-wing Christian sites" [More about webscissors.] I kind of feel sleazy now for helping them better understand this tool.
This is the article for ClubWebTV newsletter that I wrote. It is shorter than I would have liked to make it, but we are limited in space -- I could go on forever -- so I didn't.
I started writing this on the train the other day and it had a somber tone and then I stopped for a moment; and suddenly I had a vision of Jos towering above me looking down at me and shaking his head and saying,
"Wilska, what are you doing?"
It is a little more light hearted now. [Emily reads her article.] Thanks for everything Jos, you will be missed.
I had what I thought was a good enough excuse not to give blood that day. The next time the Stanford people came around he asked me again. I went with him.
I often wondered, besides the good reasons for giving blood, saving lives and such, I thought, "why does he do it, for the cookies, for the juices? No, I think he just likes talking to the nurses."
The last time we gave blood together he was lying on his table and I am lying on mine and I guess I wasn't bleeding fast enough because the nurse comes over and says to me, "Squeeze your hand a little". So Jos says to me,
"Oh come on Stonesy! You can bleed a little faster than that."and so we laid there together, and we bled there together, and I'm going to keep going back, and it is going to be for Jos.
The entire WebTV family will never forget Jos. He is larger than life. As a way for us all to remember, and to have him in our life every single day here at WebTV, we have a tree that we want to present to the family. That tree is actually outside this door. We are calling it the Toessel tree. It will be replanted here on our campus. It will have a plaque.
Hopefully all of us will be out there either reading, or just having lunch, or just visiting.
So that is our way of saying that he will always be here; and he will never be forgotten. So we invite you to look at it outside.
He starts in easy on them. "Jot a note to your future roommate that tells something about you." [Andrew reads Jos's answer.]
And so here is another one of those questions they give you. If you could spend a year pursuing any activity, all expenses paid, what would you do? Be specific, and describe why your choice is meaningful to you. .
That was the gist of the his Stanford essays. Here is what Stanford wrote back:
During the application process we asked you to think and write boldly about who your are. You did. [laughter] Clearly, you thought and worked hard to become the person you are. [laughter]He got in. He sent applications to eight universities, much along those same lines, and he got into all of them.
You all know about his Weekly World News postings in the men's room. He used to write his own tabloids. That was at age 13.
How lucky you were to get him here at WebTV because there were numerous other options, let me tell you.
You wondered what was he going to think of next.
We were always wondering what was he was going to do next.
All through his life he was coming up with one life plan after another. He was going to go to Memphis with his massage table. He was going to reconstruct the South, one massage at a time. I don't think I can remember them all. He wanted to be come a minister at the drive thru chapel in Las Vegas. He just wanted to go and do it; he didn't want training for it. When that fell thru he wanted to become a blackjack dealer.
He had picked out a beautiful apartment over a bar in Eureka, California, and he was convinced the paper mill really needed him there. He could talk anybody into anything, but he could not talk my parents into this. You were lucky to get him here or he would have been there, entertaining them all at the pulp mill.
I'd like to add a little about his massage table. There was a time in his life when he had left college. He had gone to Alaska. My parents were worried about him a great deal. They told me he has all these cockamamy ideas about taking a massage table all over the US.
I talked to him on the phone. I said, "You don't seem interested in college."
He said, "I'm not really interested. I'm not getting what I should be getting from it." He was really sincere. He wanted more from college than he was getting from just studying.
We were talking about the idea of him going around America giving massages to people. With him the ideas were just coming and going.
At that time he hadn't got his real [technical] introduction to the web yet but he had the idea about setting up a massage home page. We knew that if he had a home page, it didn't really matter who we were. If we called it the "Massage Institute of America", who would know? Having that home page set up, he could could contact and visit massage people all over America. We seriously talked about setting that up. Seriously, well, not so seriously.
He was going to ask people to write things up for his home page, and then he would have the opportunity to visit them in their neck of the woods, when he'd travel around.
He didn't do it. He went back to college.
On the first essay I read to you, you can see them thinking, "he is really clever and nice." So then Jos had to go in a little harder on them. I'll pass these next essays on to Martin.
Despite that, Reed was delighted to offer him admission.
Jos certainly left us laughing.
Then he had a stint in Washington DC. His mother and I thought, "this is the real Jos, he'll really do his stuff there." We were deeply disappointed that Washington really didn't work out for him either. Some college friends had ideas why it wasn't his fault, but we were still deeply disappointed.
He continued college and he finally did finish up. We were really concerned about him. His friends were getting wonderful jobs in Seattle working for Microsoft. He couldn't land an $8/hour job as web site manager for the county parks.
Jos decided to make a new life in Eureka, California. He went there and arranged to rent an apartment above a tavern. Then he planned to look for a job. At this point, I said,
I'm not going to sign your lease. So there. If you really have to go there to work, why don't you go up there and live in a campground until you find a job?He took it graciously. It slowed him down. Before he could cook up another goofy idea he found his job in Customer Care at WebTV. That led him on a path that was wonderful beyond any of our reasonable expectations. Jos had really found himself.
At WebTV our mixed-up child totally flowered and grew. He really found himself. He was just so happy here. WebTV was the best thing that ever happened to him.
The first experience I really remember witnessing Jos was a meeting in the lobby of the Mudd-Blaisdail Hall. We were all waiting for the meeting to start. He was hitting on all the short women. That is what he was interested in that month. He was sitting there on the couch and he had one girl on each knee. And I just thought,
I'm too tall. [laughter]
I cannot remember the definitive moments that made us really good friends. He went away to Alaska. I went away. We came back. He found me in a registration line and poured his heart out to me and told me how much he missed me. He asked,
Was I single?
Unfortunately, I was not. Anyway, we were good friends and we had a wonderful year at school that year together.
Another very fond memory I have is that he went to Las Vegas with a bunch of friends. One of them was under age, so they had to go to all the kiddie casinos. They did very well because they came back with a carload of stuffed animals. I came back to my dorm room and there were all these stuffed animals with Circus Circus tags on them. He had named all the animals and gave them each a personality. So when he came to my room, he did a little show for me, explaining each of them.
It is funny to hear about his experience in Alaska and not being able to eat. Pomona really did have a very good cafeteria but it was the same food, day after day. He finished up the year after me the last spring break he called me and said,
I want you to come down from Portland to meet my parents. I'll split your plane ticket.He started listing all the activities we would do. He filled the days with activities. Most of the things he wanted to do involved eating. Seventeen kinds of food. What was this obsession with food, I wondered? Then I realized he had been eating in the dorm.
He introduced me to pho, which is a Vietnamese beef noodle soup. He brightened up the day of the young man behind the counter at the Pho shop, saying
Hello, fine young man, we'd like two enormous bowls of Pho!"
He really appreciated people who served him food. He made them feel that this was the best thing they could do with their lives, selling him a bowl of soup.
He befriended all of the people who served him food. There was a new food service company that was going to come to campus. There was some upheaval in our dorms about the quality of the food service, and whether or not the existing staff would lose their jobs. He researched what this was all about, and he wrote article or two in the newspaper about it. He must have been one of the few people who really cared about that. Most people don't even know the people they are getting their food from.
I have so many stories, and a lot of them were very complex, and about Pomona. They may not make very much sense to you.
I know it was hard for him to be at Pomona College. He was very flighty in his early years there. After he came back from Alaska, it really settled him in.
I witnessed the most intellectually curious person that I had ever met. He knew more about everything than anyone I had ever met.
He was frustrated by lack of intellectual curiousity and people who jumped to conclusions. The profs who were less good at their jobs, he let them know. He really pursued his work relentlessly.
And he was brilliant, just brilliant. I never met anyone like him.
Oh my God, how big were the others?have I given birth to a 23 pound giant? and I said, "Amy Joanna!" and he said, "No." We had expected a girl despite all evidence to the contrary.
He was practically unweanable. With two older brothers you discover that the only time you are going to get your mother is when you are nursing. He just wouldn't give it up. As a result he was nursed until he was almost four.
It didn't matter what I was wearing. As soon as the phone rang, I'd sit on the chair by the telephone, and he'd jump up. We used to joke, he'll go into the army and they'll have to give him a deferment to nurse.
Even at age 4, everything was a big adventure, the most wonderful thing in the world. He'd jump on his big wheel and go round the block. He'd return and tell me of all the wonderful friends that he'd met. I'd say, "Maybe you'd like to invite them over."
And he'd say, "Well, maybe you'd like to play with them more."
He'd be picking up women in their 60's and 70's and they all adored him. Right from the get go, he just loved women. He had a baby sitter; he wanted her to come for a sleepover. I said, "you can have sleepovers with your friends, but Sally is a little too old for that."
His thrift store habit -- he came by that naturally. When he was young I volunteered in a thrift store run by Family Service Association. We worked together and at noon, Jos would go over to the next door Pizza restaurant and order pizza for us. One of his great joys in life was to go over there and order pizza and bring it back.
In all, he was just a rare delight. Not to his all his teachers though. He had a wonderful teacher in England but then he came back to Palo Alto and the teachers were rather elderly and not used to his sense of humor. I was always going to back-to-school night, and the teachers were always telling me how sorry they felt for me.
These last two years at WebTV.
These were the most wonderful two years
he had in his entire life.
He was SO HAPPY HERE.
He was always bubbling over.
He called us the last week of his life. He called us early in the week. How he had scored this great coupe getting two cubicles. He was so thrilled about that.
Please don't lose touch with us. It is very important to us.
Thank you for everything you have done in the last week which has been hard on you as it has on us.
If anyone can remember any more experiences, please send them to us -- claerbout @ stanford . edu. It is never too late.
[People write notes to Jos; attach them to helium balloons; go outside to release them; and watch them gradually disappear.]
|
by Rosemary Stasek |
When WebTV posted the online invitation to the Farewill-to-Jos gathering, the title of the webpage was "Project Lovebunny". This is in reference to early 1999 when we ran into a problem with domain names within the Microsoft network. Our internal website is http://webtv. Because there is also an NT domain of that name on the internal Microsoft network, folks in various parts of the world and some in [corporate HQ] Redmond could not see the website. We needed to come up with an additional name as an alias for alternate access. I took a poll and came up with ms-webtv, mswebtv, webtv-intranet, wni, webtv-1, webtv-web and Jos' suggestion: lovebunny.
The final decision was ms-webtv, but lovebunny was so popular, that it became the project name for my huge, massive project to clean up the intranet sites. My whiteboard in my cube for months had in big letters "Home of Project Lovebunny". The project is just about finished a year later, but the project name is never going to go away as long as I'm here because all of the online documentation used in connection with the intranet has Lovebunny in the title. In a sense, our whole intranet is Project Lovebunny.
========================================
Karen Kotoske:
I thank God that I knew Jos.
He illuminated my dental room whenever he walked in
and when he walked out he left a great deal of joy in the room
that I carried with me the rest of the day.
We have thousands of patients and I know thousands of people
in my work with Amistad in the Third World,
but I never did meet anyone like your Jos.
He was a true Singing Heart.
The impression he left with me
was that there was
no one who wasn't worth getting to know,
and nothing in the world that wasn't worth learning about.
He should have had 150 years to fulfill the innumerable things
he could have contributed to the world.
Memories are comforting
but they are but a gray shadow of what should have been.
I was thinking about Jos today,
remembering how he saw the world,
though the lightest, most lovely, lens of humor.
But paradoxically his way was more often than not the deepest way;
for Jos's way guides us all from taking ourselves too seriously,
away from self centeredness,
from despair even.
I remember him for that and thank him for that.
Ken Brower:
We several people whom Yost (Jos) guided through the mill
agreed afterward that it
was extraordinary how much he had learned about
the building.
I remember thinking that he was either some kind of
genius, or an idiosyncratic fascination with the old mine gave him geniuslike
qualities.
What Jos did, in researching and interpreting the building,
was what we try to do in literature.
He had fashioned a great poem to the mill tower,
and if there were a Pulitzer or Nobel for mine guiding, he would have won it.
(more details from the notebook
of Ken Brower)
[Picture taken by Jos.
The thin white line looks like the glacial river bed. -Popster]
Beth Candy:
I appreciate your taking the time to let me know what
happened to the guy I only knew as AJ.
AJ was more than a guy I met online.
His spirit was able to transcend
the written word and just grab your heart.
I thoroughly enjoyed corresponding with him.
It could have been about
WebScissors -
it could have been about the weather.
Whatever he had to say it was large -
it was human, it was spirited and enjoyable.
Thank you so much for putting my name on that.
I'd be so darn proud if you put my full name - Beth Candy.
I'm proud to know JOS and so so sad that he is gone.
Even though our correspondence came to a sudden halt,
I never felt as though he had turned away from me.
Sometimes you lose touch with someone when a project is over
and you know you were only part of that pigeonhole of their life
and sometimes you lose touch with people
but you know that you are still carried in their heart.
JOS gave me a glimpse of his heart and he was so genuine,
so honest and caring that I didn't mind losing touch
because I knew he had a large life and
whenever I would hear from again would be okay with me.
Greg Balch:
I'm a developer at QVC (the TV shopping people),
and I first got to know Jos via e-mail while we
were tuning our corporate web site to work with Web TV, back in 1997 or
1998. He really helped me a lot to understand how WebTV worked, and how
to fix our site so it looked really nice when using WebTV.
We really appreciated all the help Jos gave freely to us, and he had a
way of explaining stuff that
even web neophytes like us at the time could understand.
I finally got to meet him last April when we visited WebTV to discuss
some new opportunities for QVC,
and Jos had several ideas and possibilities for us. Meeting Jos was the
highlight of my visit, as we
had exchanged a lot of email over the months that we'd been working on
the site. I really enjoyed working with him, and he made our lives
brighter by knowing him.
James Ownbey and Jasmine Merced:
Jos established a web hosting account with us for his domain,
webscissors.com, in July of this year. My partner/wife and I corresponded
quite a bit with Jos during his decision process and during his inital setup
of the web site. I know you won't be surprised when I tell you
that Jos was an absolute joy to work with.
We value the personal relationships that we develop with our customers,
and we don't have a better relationship than the one we had with Jos.
He was appreciative of our efforts, patient with our shortcomings, and
always brightened our day with his humor. I wish I had known him better,
and it saddens me to learn that I won't have the opportunity to fulfill that
wish.
Ron Woodall, Oxford-on-Rideau, Canada:
I
had occasion to work with Jos under
enjoyable and pressured circumstance. I considered him an
honourable man in spite of his youth, a rarity in today's
world at any age. His body of work was extensive for the
short time he had with us and leaves us with an enviable
legacy. His spirit lives on as will his memory in our hearts.
But Jos could not dance.
He was good at faking it, but every time we were
partners in dance class, I always ended up more
confused than I started off. Then again, that could
have been because of all the attention he was
lavishing on me. Little did I know that I was one of
his projects! At the time, he told me that he was
taking ballroom dance to learn how to dance, but
looking back, I can't help but suspect that he might
have had more .... immediate social reasons.
Definitely the best Valentine's Day present I have
ever received was the one Jos gave me that Spring
Semester of 1997. I received a note in my mailbox
that I had a package waiting for me at the dorm desk.
What did I find but a knitted cap! I used it the very
next day to go skiing and it has accompanied me on all
my winter trips since. No one believes me when I tell
them that a former boyfriend knitted it for me for
Valentine's Day, but they all agree that he would
definitely be worth dating.
That year, I finished all my exams early and since
Jos, as a senior, had Senior Week before graduation,
we decided to drive up to Eureka to check out job
opportunities at the local paper mill. Or rather, he
somehow persuaded me to drive him up there in my car.
I had stayed up all the night before finishing a paper
and was sick to boot, so I doubt I was the best
travelling companion. But Jos made up for any lack of
energy on my part. He babbled on about how great
paper mills are and all the things he could learn
working in one. I was skeptical, but didn't say
anything because at the same time, I knew that if Jos
did work for a paper mill, he would be bored by the
first week and would start secretly alternating the
procedure to produce revolutionary bubble gum flavored
envelopes.
One day we decided to drive up to Humbolt, the town
north of Eureka, where Humbolt University is located.
While walking through a beautiful old redwood forest
near the edge of town, we stumbled upon what appeared
to be a convention of former
hippies-now-turned-semi-bourgeois in the middle of a
clearing. A band was playing music on a small stage
and groups of families were scattered about on the
ground in front of the stage. Nary a sneaker was in
sight. It was sandals, socks, and bare feet as far as
the eye could see. Mud-splattered children resembling
mini barbarians with long straggly hair ran about,
occasionally quenching their thirst with their
parents' beers. And Jos and I wandered about this
chaos, just staring at it all. Neither of us could
figure out the source of the celebration. That is the
only time I can think of that Jos didn't immediately
start chatting up strangers and joining in the fun. I
think the hippies surprised even him.
I think one of the things I found so amazing about Jos
is that he worked at so many levels simultaneously.
You never had simply a conversation with him.
Talking to Jos was like four things at once:
As we were saying goodbye the day he left Pomona to
drive back up to Stanford, I asked if we would we see
each other again. He had just graduated and was
tackling the Real World while I still had only two
years left at Pomona and then I would probably return
to the East Coast where I grew up. He just smiled and
said, "Oh, I always manage to find people I care
about." And I think even now he will still reach out
to each of us to remind us to think positively, love
fearlessly, and give generously because the rewards
are immeasurable. I can only hope to live my life
half as energetically and passionately as Jos did and
I thank God that I was lucky enough to call him my
friend.
p.s.
I remember his
Culture Wars site
very well.
While I would work on my papers in the computer lab, he would
work on his website and occasionally update me on the
latest news or his newest contact. He was very proud
when Yahoo added his site to its search engine.
to The Life of Jos
to Memories of Jos
======================================== 
Amanda V:
I am one of the women lucky enough to have dated Jos.
As I am sure you would guess, he was always a perfect
gentlemen and very attentive. Although we didn't date
for very long, our relationship was a positive one --
playful and fun.
I met Jos in the spring semester 1997 when I decided
to take an introductory dance course at Pomona. The
big joke at Pomona is that all the introverted Harvey
Mudd students come down to Pomona to take this
particular dance course in the hopes of finally
meeting some girls. Judging from the huge pile of
unicycles outside the ballroom door every Wednesday
night, I would have to say that it is not far from the
truth. So, naturally, someone as effervescent and
gregarious as Jos completely outshone all the
sweaty-palmed engineers. Factor in his height and his
lack of coordination and he was quickly known among
the girls as the crazy one. Jos is one of the most
brilliant (and I mean that in every sense of the word)
people I know. As everyone else has already said, Jos
had the incredible ability to pick up any hobby in
weeks. He was very well read and extremely articulate
-- to the point where I would just introduce him to
people for the sheer entertainment of watching their
reactions as he started to work his famous charm.
You felt flattered, intrigued,
amazed, and amused all at once. He completely charmed
me and I knew that I had a friend for life.
to The Life of Jos
to Memories of Jos
======================================== 
In Costa Rica we went to Park Manuel Antonio at the end of a very bumpy road on which Dad drove about 15mph for an hour or two. Sure glad we didn't have a flat tire.
In the nearby town of Quepos we found a nice little grocery store calling itself a Super Market. They also sold a simple baseball cap emblazoned with the words "Super mas" [Super more]. This cap was too plain and simple for any young Texan or Californian and so Jos immediately recognized it as a prize not available at home. He purchased this cap and waxed so enthusiastic about it that Dad was soon moved to express regret that Jos had gotten the last one.
Lots of beautiful birds were here near our second floor porch.
Click on the picture for an enlargement.
========================================
|
|
|
My oldest memory of Jos is when I was in kindergarten, and Jos must have
been about two. It was the only day in my life so far that it ever
snowed right in Stanford. I hurried Jos outside and made him a snowball.
He looked at and began to cry, despite my efforts to get him to play
with it.
Very young, Jos had a pet goldfish named Target. I never knew why he chose that name.
For some reason, I can remember a tiny poem that Jos composed when he was very young. "Butterflies, flutter byes, the greatest thing since man learned to sythesize". I remember at the time thinking that he probably didn't even know what sythesize meant. I probably barely did. But when did a detail like that ever slow him down?
It was Mark Byer who so mispronouced Jeremy, by saying
Germy, that I think planted the seed for the name change.
I seem to recall that we played together a lot as kids, before I got into my troublemaking teenage years. We loved lego's, matchbox cars, wooden blocks, star wars toys, and GI joe. He had a big collection of GI Joe stuff and we watched the cartoon together.
We used to have some nicknames for Jos. Around age 12 we called him Pear, as that was the body shape he had then. When we lived in Hawaii he was conscripted onto the swim team for many long hours , and that was the end of the pear. But before that, we had already taken to calling him Pi. That was actually a name that Douglas Byer had started calling me on a boy scout trip to Pinnacles, but I quickly passed it on to Jos.
Jos played on a super winning soccer team as a kid. I can't remember the name, they might have worn blue. I remember attending one game where the score was some 22 to 0. None of us have even been big on team sports, but that had to be the winningest team in all Claerbout history.
Jos was always one to appreciate things in poor taste, and one of his
favorite places in Hawaii was the "International Marketplace", a pseudo
mall with many many stores, kiosks, and carts of touristy junk. One of
his favorite items were the barrel people. This was a wooden carving of
a man wearing a removable barrel. When the barrel was lifted, an
oversized spring loaded penis popped out. He often admired, though never
purchased, this fabuous piece of Hawaiiana. Available in many sizes.
Jos and me in front of Policlinico Kennedy. Is it in Macara?
Jos loved superlatives. He once told me that when you run out of english
superlatives, you can switch to foreign languages to add some real
emphasis.
At Martin's wedding on Oahu, we stayed at a fancy condo at the Turtle Bay Hilton. There was a large golf course there, and Mr Ishii wanted to play golf, but had no one to play with. Jos, with his usual complete confidence and enthusiasm, was ready to tee off for 18 championship holes with Mr Ishii, despite the fact he couldn't even remember the last time that he had played miniature golf. At the wedding he also gave a complicated and touching toast saying nice things about Martin, which I am sure we have on tape somewhere.
We see Jos in his favorite multicolored shirt at my wedding. It is the shirt he wore the day he died. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
| Finally we see Jos and me towering over parents, each with our feet in our characteristic attire. The picture doesn't show that he is taller than I am. That's because he is snuggling into Mom. |
|
Ashton Treadway:
Jos Claerbout was an extraordinary human being. I was privileged to work
next to him for some months at WebTV, and to model a toessel upon his
urging. His cube was always full of energy and vibrating with creativity.
Jos wasn't simply extraordinary. He remade reality; or, rather, reality
refocused around him, with him at its center. This wasn't through any
intention of his; it just was the way of things. Jos became the foreground
when he entered a space, just by dint of his sheer exuberant energy. He
didn't just do things. He embarked upon expeditions; he dispatched himself
upon inquiries about anything and everything he found curious in the
world. He lived, in the grandest sense.
And that's what's worst about a world without him. There's a sense of mass
and direction lost, of lost opportunity. Of the things dreamed of and
hoped for becoming ever so slightly more unattainable. With Jos in the
world, it seemed easier to hold out hope for all of us. Surely this
magical giant, this conglomeration of intellect and humor and pathos and
striving, flaring genius, would make Everything All Right In The End.
A lot of us, more than I think would freely admit, were, before we met
Jos, tracing and retracing paths we'd set years before. Perhaps some of us
had accepted the cynical notion that things were as good as they would
ever get, that the mysteries of childhood had given way before the
mundane, spiritless day-to-day trudge. Jos changed that, permanently and
irreversibly.
That was one of his great gifts, with which countered the cynicism, and
the drudge, and the slog. That is one of his legacies, however pale and
insubstantial an imitation of him it might be. Jos took nothing for
granted, and nothing as written. He was infinitely possible, and inspired
all those with whom he came into contact.
With great sorrow, great respect, and great thanks . . .
Becca S:
1993
Back to December 1993.
Below is Jos relieving himself on the beach in LaJolla
in his sophomore year.
We vacationed there with his folks in a beachfront apartment.
Noel Morrison:
Jos was really a terrific teacher. I worked closely with him when he was
working for Joel Black handling escalations from Customer Care. I was his
main contact in Customer Care, so I would talk to Jos about problems our
customers were having with web sites. He taught an HTML class for some of
us in Customer Care, and he tutored me on the details of certain aspects of
the WebTV browser.
He has had such a wonderful impact upon me personally. His joy and
happiness was utterly contagious, and not only did he breathe limitless life
and creativity into WebTV, but into everyone's world outside of WebTV. I
see Jos as a model for how life is meant to be lived -- with intense joy, and
always to its fullest.
Jos was really interested in "racing" as many people as possible at the
WebTV blood drives. He was always encouraging people to give of themselves,
and making it fun at the same time -- Just one of the countless special
aspects of his personality.
It was the first time in a while that I had given blood, and I was feeling a
little nervous. Jos and I happened to be giving blood at the same time,
and, being Jos, he turned giving blood into a race to see who could fill the
bag fastest. I was so distracted by trying to bleed harder than Jos, that
all my tension went away, and it ended up being a lot of fun. (I think he
beat me by a few seconds...)
One of the many things that Jos helped teach me is that there is always an
opportunity for laughter and joy.
Anonymous:
With recent gatherings of friends and co-workers,
I've been constantly reminded of the 'big heart'
that Jos had, and how he shared that heart with
the people that he met.
But I was reminded recently, by my blood bank,
that Jos *gave*, as well as he shared.
I used to donate regularly on my own, but Jos
was a vocal advocate for the company blood drives
here at Web-TV. Because of his enthusiasm, I
changed my schedule, to take part with him and
a growing gang from the building he worked in.
The last drive in April was my first through
Web-TV, and he let me know how glad he was to
see me there. :-)
Since I hadn't been donating regularly at my
blood bank, they called me, to see if I could
come in (since I have one of the rarer types).
Because WTV hasn't had a drive since April, I
was eligible, and I gave blood this morning,
about the same time as Jos being at the gym
last week.
If you are looking for a way to honor Jos's
memory, and to have a positive effect on other
people's lives, let me suggest donating blood
through your local blood bank as one way to
do this. I'd be happy to discuss the positive
experiences I've had with the curious.
Thomas Borcherding:
It is impossible for me to conceive of a youngster as vital and full of
himself and the world as Jos Claerbout has been taken from us so early,
and by wholly natural causes. I am not a believing man so I will not
offer any sort of religious pieties about divine meanings. I do know,
based on some losses I've realized over a lifetime, that the bumper
sticker "shit happens" is empirically correct and needs no ontological
foundations.
I recall his great interest in how social norms work, how important
they are for a functioning society, the role of evolutionary forces in
social and biologic development, etc. pretty speculative, long-hair
stuff. i loaned him books which he returned, and had read (fast too).
You and your dear wife are suffering the loss of losses that thank
goodness I have never known. The death of a child, I can imagine, and you
are not the first I've witnessed who has borne this burden, has just got
to be the keenest suffering. They are meant to bury us, and then wipe
their tears quickly away, and worry instead about making the mortgage,
paying for our grandchildren's braces and tuition, and keeping their
marriages working. If we did not love them so much -- because of affinity of
genes and from the closeness of parenting -- the human race could not have
walked out of the Olduvai Gorge to the point where we spend a decade of
work just getting two kids through a first class school.
Though it is cheap consolation, 25 years of having Jos was a gift of rare
value, and I am so pleased I had a little to do with his development into
a thinking, caring, good humored young man. He would have been a
wonderful husband and father and an ornament to his world about himself in
two more decades. Though that was not to be, like Housman's poem about a
young and gifted athlete's death, we are left with only memories of
triumph and joy in Jos's short life and few if any defeats. I will cherish
those good memories and only wish I had known him even longer and better.
Mike Kuehlwein:
I was his economics professor in the spring of 1997.
He actually found my course pretty challenging,
but he was wonderful to have in class.
He had great energy and curiosity and a terrific spirit.
I still remember his smile.
We gave Jos the part the villain, Mr. Green.
I can still hear his rich,
deep resonant voice reading Green,
and Jos quickly transforming this bad guy into Mr. Charming.
I thought to myself, we'd better re-write it
so the audience doesn't fall in love with this character!
Jos always had a way -- whether on the phone, or
when I stopped by to work on some project with Diane --
of making me smile, laugh, feel totally happy.
When Jos was in the room,
the room was filled with love and crazy, crazy fun.
His sweet and playful teasing of his mother--was boyish,
zany, and gallant all mixed up in one.
I think Jos loved seeing his own mother blush like a young girl
when he complimented her or gently teased her.
The other nice memory of that play-reading day was seeing Jos
and his father in the kitchen--he tall and slim, handsome--towering
over his dad but their heads leaning towards one
another--talking and talking and talking.
It was a lovely father-son time of intimacy and closeness within the social
time of the reading.
The two had carved out a space to be close and to talk
while the rest of the gathering flowed around them.
I sensed a lot of love flowing.
The connection of parent to child was enormously strong
for Diane too. Jos clearly adored them both and
knew of the joy they took in him and with him.
He lifted each of us.
He lifted me out of the ordinary and into the extra-ordinary.
That was a gift he gave to everyone he touched,
every moment we were with him.
I am among the hundreds, thousands, of people,
both women and men,
who loved Jos and still love him and think of him daily.
He set an example of how to be alive.
It is an example I try hard to emulate.
Brad Chisholm:
Jos fished with me [on the Omega] during June and July of 1994.
Early in June, Jos came by my boat in the dryland boatyard
and asked if I needed help.
I did and I hired him to fish with me.
This was in Homer.
Jos, along with two other men, Unice Forozin and Mike Bonner were the crew.
So we got the boat in the water and started fishing around the end of June
and fished until the end of July, when it seemed that the season
wasn't going to be that good in Cook Inlet.
Before Jos came to Homer,
he had stopped in Seward and met Perry Buchanan and fished halibut with him.
The boat was the Dolly B. named after Perry's wife.
Then he came to Homer and fished with me.
We fished right out of Homer and it was a poor season.
I think the crew [of three] earned $2000 to $2500 [a third each]
for their efforts.
Being inexperienced Jos didn't always know the correct procedures
but he could always come up with some way of accomplishing the job.
He was a great worker and very easy going throughout the trip.
He asked a lot of questions about fishing and I explained as best as I could.
After he fished with me, he and Mike went and fished with Mac McCroskey.
I believe they flew to Dutch Harbor and fished out there
and helped return the boat to Homer.
======================================== 
1998
1998
Here we are at the Pulgas water temple in 1997.
Touch pic to see our friends including Mathew Shelhamer,
who introduced Jos to WebTV.
========================================
========================================
======================================== 
Caryn Huberman:
As a close friend of Jos's mother I've known him for many years.
My most vivid memory is him at our play reading.
His mother and I had written a play.
Before producing this play we gathered a group of friends,
each to read one of the actors.
He teased me too.
It's been quite a while since I was forty (40---ahh, 40!!!).
Jos made it seem perfectly natural when he
announced to all the play readers that
"Caryn is the most beautiful 40 year old woman in Palo Alto."
Of course, I loved it!
How could a 24 year old come up with that?-- and why would he?
I'll never forget it.
Even now, Jos is with me every day,
particularly when I laugh at something
quirky or outrageous.
======================================== 
======================================== 
Christiane Petite:
Jos had a nickname of sorts for me - in addition to the numerous
endearments he bestowed on me and others, men and women alike,
when he used my name, he always called me "Miss Petite."
I was realizing today that when I'm not sharing fond and wacky memories
of Jos among friends who knew him,
I'm sharing him with new friends and admirers-in-the-making.
I am so fortunate to have known him.
Although it is sad and difficult to be without Jos
and the delight he brought to us,
every time I think of him, I have to smile.
Every time.
He's here in those memories and smiles and
I treasure them as a gift that he continues to give to me.
We definitely need to get out and have some adventures --
and in typical Jos fashion, even if he can't join us,
I know he's cheering us on the whole way.
========================================
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 17:26:36 EDT
To: news@blackhatrecords.com
From: TFBSaxman@aol.com
Subject: Jos Claerbout Coast to Coast Radio Memorial
Greetings,
As many of you undoubtedly remember Jos Claerbout left us on August 20 1999,
he was only 25 years old. (http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/) I
wrote a song on my most resent album "Statements" about that day and how it
effected me. It is called "Early Exit." I have spent last week organizing
radio station across the country to play that song as a memorial to Jos on
the 20th. From KUSF 90.3 FM in San Francisco to WVOF 88.5 FM in Fairfield, CT
with, hopefully, many in between.
All of you can join in this memorial thanks to Noel Morrison, a friend of Jos
and DJ at KUSF, who gave me the time he plans to talked about Jos and spin
the song.
'You can count on me playing "Early Exit" just after 8:00AM on the 20th.
--Noel'
Since some of you won't be able to tune in to KUSF 90.3 on your radio you can
hear the station on the web by copy & pasting the URL below in RealPlayer or
iTunes or Media Player or use the .PLS I enclosed.
http://www.live365.com/play/294306?membername=&session=kusf%3A0&SaneID=172.173.163.182-102912829313&lid=100-usa
I would like to thank Don Louv is also helping me try to get KZSU at Stanford
(where Jos was a DJ at one point) to join in. And of course Jos' parents who
gave me the idea to try and do this.
Please send this to all of Jos friends that you know of I have lost contact
with many like Joel Black and Robert Stones. Thanks for helping me spread the
word about this event so we can all remember what a great person Jos was.
Michael Cooke
http://www.blackhatrecords.com/
========================================
Jos went through a period of massive entertaining and sociability
in our freshman year in high school.
He was the mover behind a series of evenings
that brought many people together -- often to local restaurants,
then back at the Casa de Claerbout for a fun evening of flicks and hot tub time.
One particular evening I remember was our homecoming dance. We went on a double date, he was with a classmate of ours, and I with a guy from another school. We had pictures taken at his house, and eventually went on to a dinner at Sundance, a local seafood restaurant. It was an amazing scene, young teenagers eating at this solemn restaurant, cutting up with Jos jokes, roaring with laughter so loud we held the attention of the whole room.
AirWair with Bouncing Soles:
The Original Dr. Martens --- oil, fact, acid, petrol,
alkali resistant.
I got a matching pair, without the steel tips.
And then we walked from Haight to the concert,
which was almost over,
and because the buses were so packed after the concert,
we walked all the way back to the train station,
running at some points,
breaking in our new purchases.
We caught up on the facts of our lives,
but for the majority of the time we just floated together,
around the willow trees dipping into the water, being silent.
Eventually we headed back to shore.
Navigating around the beginner sailing lessons just beginning,
Jos made three new friends as we took the boat from the water.
Just an ordinary day,
made extraordinary by Jos.
========================================
When Jeremy was 5 years old our family went to England
for the year. Jeremy became very interested in knights.
Piece by piece he persuaded his mother to purchase one of each kind
of toy knight sold in the shops. The shields and breastplates
of his knights were finely decorated with lions and with
crosses. Their hands could hold battleaxes, maces, pikes and
other ancient weapons. Some knights were on horses. He said
the knights wearing black armor were the Turks and that they
were the "bad guys". The toy knights had daily joustings on
his bedroom floor. Not only did he play with them, but
somehow by age 5 he managed to learn more of their lives and
myths than I ever learned. One day while passing a village
cemetery I called his attention to the fact that some of the
stones were white and others were black. "Do you think the
black ones are for the Turks?" I asked.
... Six months ago Jeremy read Dostoyevsky's
Crime and Punishment
and was deeply moved by it.
He did not like the epilog,
however, so he wrote a revised version.
to The Life of Jos
========================================
I remember the day he started speaking Spanish about age 7. The cleaning lady came to his bedroom and he instructed her, "No cleano my roomo!"
One day I drove to the local high school to pick up Jos. I arrived to find him at the main entrance amidst a flock of beautiful young maidens: [ pool photo, beach photo, track team photo ]
"Hey guys! Here's my Dad. Would you believe I sprung from those loins?"
One summer Jos went off to Ecuador to visit his brother in the Peace Corps. The photo shows me greeting Jos on his return. He always took special care to get nice gifts for his mother and me. He knew I would like this Ecuadorian hat, and I really do. He knew my size. He kept a pretty good diary of his summer.
In high school, he enjoyed track. He liked long distance running and was a "500 miler". He gave up extensive running when his feet began to bother him and fancy shoes didn't help. Here is a track team photo where we see that Jos has the girls.
Jos liked to come up with ideas for inventions and then build them immediately. He was concerned about wheel-chair people going up slopes. They need to PUSH forward on the wheel rings. Jos wanted to design a wheel chair with the more natural motion to PULL to go forward and up. We talked about gears and belts. Finally we got the idea of a chain that would be crossed. To test it, we crossed a bicycle chain into a figure eight. This bicycle would need to be peddled backwards to go forwards. It worked pretty well. The chain hardly rubbed at all where it crossed itself at the center of the eight. It was easy to ride and the bike lost little speed or power. I used that bike to go to work for a couple weeks before we uncrossed the chain to get a normal bike again.
When he graduated from high school, I asked what he would like
as a graduation present.
He selected the "Complete Works of William Shakespeare".
True, he had been studying it in school and he enjoyed quoting
a verse from memory whenever it would fit the conversation.
On the other hand, I knew how quickly his enthusiasms develop
and how quickly they became overrun by new enthusiasms
so I was afraid that I'd fork over the $50 only to have
him lose interest and have the book cluttering up his room
gathering dust.
But I thought to myself, "How many fathers would be thrilled
beyond imagination to have their son request
a graduation present of such fine quality?"
I bit my tongue; and I purchased Shakespeare's Complete Works.
It's here now.
One day I helped Jos and Camilo move to a new apartment. We had to disassemble and reassemble the fancy space-age console desk and the ergonomic chair he was so happy with. "You know, Popster, you once gave me this advice, 'be tight-fisted, except on things you use a lot'. This desk and chair I use a lot."
I remember Jos being born. We had expected a girl; and we had run out of boy's names. A few days after we left the hospital, they phoned us and said we had better choose his name now because if we didn't, we'd have to visit the courthouse when we did. So we rushed into the name "Jeremy" which he never liked.
When he was little, one of his big brothers would usually be in his
bedroom while the other was usually away with his friends.
But Jeremy's first choice of things to do was to jump on my lap
and talk. I had a nice deep barrel chair,
orange, and in a sunny spot.
It was always a pleasure having Jeremy on my lap in the chair,
but sometimes I would try to convince him to get off
and play with his toys for a while.
He introduced us to television programs that we would not otherwise have watched. I liked Simpsons and King of the Hill. Mumsie liked Buffy.
He brought home a video "Six Degrees of Separation" that he said meant a lot to him. I couldn't see why. He said he identified with the hero, a black man with a lot of grace and charm who pretends to be someone he is not.
Mumsie has many happy memories of Halloweens and birthdays, because she was the organizer and Jos was the organizee.
Being the oldest of the group, I always thought a generous
a restaurant tip was a full 10% of the bill.
Mumsie would insist on 15%.
After Jos worked at Pepper's Restaurant in D.C. he'd advocate 20%.
To avoid having this discussion every week,
I paid the bill and Jos left the tip.
The picture shows Jos bicycling in Alaska the summer before he graduated from high school. We sent him to summer school to learn about college life by studying Japanese language for six weeks. Although he didn't write about the bike trips he enjoyed so much there, he did write about his part-time job in a bike shop.
He accepted our ten year old Toyota and kept it working fine and useful in his life. A glitzy car was not for him.
There is a Schwinn bicycle (with big handlebars, no gears, balloon tires) parked outside my window. It is like a "Pee-Wee Herman" bicycle, but not so grand that anyone would want to steal it. It has no gears. It's got the biggest, highest handlebars Jos could find. Riding it feels like gliding thru the air. He rode it to work.
| to The Life of Jos |
|
to Memories of Jos |
Eighth grade was a very special time between Jeremy and me. We were on sabbatical in Hawaii and the two of us went snorkeling nearly every day for three months, trying to get the best possible fish pictures. We last snorkeled together in Maui three months before he died. I could write many stories of our snorkeling adventures but most of it would interest only him and me. Maybe someday I'll do it. He liked Hawaii's Big Island the best. Mother and I had shopped around there for the perfect place to live but we couldn't seem to find it.
He always enjoyed introducing us to the young ladies
in his life, and we enjoyed meeting them too.
The nearby picture is the occasion of the high school prom in '91.
One of his high school summers he began working with Mr. Rosas,
a heavy equipment broker.
He was only about 16 but on the telephone
no one would realize how young he was.
One of his first jobs was looking for a second-hand bulldozer.
Somebody needed one with a "ripper".
Sometimes the soil is too hard for the scoop of a dozer
to get anything loose.
A ripper is a big sturdy spike behind the driver
that can be lowered to begin ripping up hard earth.
Later he had a job looking for a good sized ship for a customer in Peru.
The ship needed a rear deck that could be outfitted
as a sardine seiner with a big net spool.
Jos was telephoning every
west coast harbormaster from Alaska
to Chile to find out about the availability of such a ship.
He was sending and receiving FAXes and FedEx parcels at
a furious rate.
He knew about layers of brokers and how they all get their share.
I was in awe of how someone so young
could get into
the heavy equipment brokerage business
so quickly and so effectively.
He took the photo on a bike trip in Alaska. In the last year of his life, he took much joy from a beautiful road bicycle now in the garage. I'll never sell it. I can't use it either because of the toe clips and the required skinny tire maintenance. This bike was for serious touring around the peninsula -- too good for commuting to work. I am wishing I could better recall him recounting those journeys which he enjoyed so much. I don't know if this was the bike he dreamed of riding to Vermont with Joel. When driving in the nearby hills, I cannot drive past a bicyclist without checking the face -- to be sure it is not him. We nominated a bicycle-related charity to honor him.
When Jos was at Pomona and in Alaska, he often told us his most recent "epiphany." After moving to WebTV, he never used that word. Now I cannot recall any of his epiphanies, nor has anyone recalled any of them for me.
The summer he fished in Alaska he didn't make much money and he really got quite hungary. Never-the-less, we did receive a telephone call from Federal Express that a refrigerated parcel from Jos in Alaska awaited us and we should pick it up immediately. We did. It was some magnificent fresh salmon, a lot of it. It was wonderful.
After we bought an inflatable boat, he bought one also to join us. His boat, now in the garage, reminds me of the happy times we had on the Lexington Reservoir, the Steven's Creek Reservoir, and the Elkhorn Slough. He gave us an intricate lecture on the vendor inconsistancies of the html IFRAME tag. He explained it so clearly that Mumsie understood it (and she's never written any html!). At our WebTV pool party I got out his inflatable boat. It had a leak that I patched later. I couldn't go near that boat without having tears streaming down my face. I still can't.
Jos could run out of patience. We all recall the delightful children's stories by Dr. Seuss. Jos on his toessel site in his tale of Sairam does mimic the Seuss style. One day I found the delightful Seuss adaptation of Gene Ziegler. I called it to Jos's attention. He didn't want to pay any notice. I thought it would be fun to try to figure out just how does one mimic Dr. Seuss? Who better to teach me than Jos? So on another occasion I said, "let's go over your Sairam story." I don't know if this was the third time or the fourth time I brought up the topic but Jos told me in no uncertain terms that he was happy with his Sairam story the way it was, and I had better not bring it up again. So I never did. He was normally so light and cheery that I was taken aback seeing him severe. I guess he had too many other projects consuming his resources.
In May we
went to Maui
to try to prepare
the way for his brother's return from Japan.
Jos wouldn't agree to come along with us until the last minute.
He and his WebTV loaner PC struggled
with the archaic condo phone system.
We moved to another condo where it worked great.
Jos had visions of telecommuting to Silicon Valley from the Big Island,
from Vermont, and from Alaska.
We took a Molokini snorkel outing where he pumped our guide
for info to help brother Martin find a job,
and for info for himself for an easy way to upgrade his diving skills.
We decided to give that guide an extravagant tip when we debarked.
Jos palmed it over so smoothly that the transfer was invisible
to me watching for him to do it.
He was a wonderful traveling companion!
We were lucky he would agree to travel with us,
but we felt he should instead have been with some young lady.
An odd coincidence on Maui: I sometimes purchase the quarterly "Foreign Affairs" though not often because I consider it a little expensive. When Jos and I got on the plane to Maui, we found that each of us had purchased the same issue of Foreign Affairs.
In July, brother Andrew and I agreed to travel to Grandma's cottage on Lake Michigan. Jos wouldn't agree to come until the last minute (I secretly paid the premium fare again). He insisted on paying for a rental car upgrade to a full sized Oldsmobile. After we found nifty ancestral photos, he figured out how to purchase a scanner so we could scan them onto the internet. I basked in the warm relationship he had with his brother, my mother, my sister, my aunt, and cousins. He had found out about House on the Rock, and wanted to go see it. We had not time and so we decided to postpone it for a later trip.
I tried to talk up a family reunion in Homer, Alaska for the summer of year 2000. He was reluctant, but my feeling was that he would come around if I could convince his brothers.
He thought Mumsie and I should not purchase a vacation condo in Maui. We figured he would grow to enjoy it and bring his WebTV friends and some day his lady friends. I thought that if the Alaska family reunion didn't work out, Maui would.
His financial affairs were neatly organized. He had a few high fliers, eBay, Sega. He experimented with E-trade, became annoyed, and settled on Vanguard.
There is a box of letters I will peruse. He seems to have saved everything. Jos's box of letters contains two noteable letters from me:
There are home videos.
Mumsie, what's this R.F.B. on this coffee cup? That stands for "Reading For the Blind", one of his high school volunteer activities.
Jos lived with a roommate, Camilo, in Mountain View.
After Jos died, brother Andrew (with Brent, Amy, Kate, and Gwen)
moved his things back to our home,
to the garage and to his childhood bedroom.
Here is his snorkel gear.
These things all trigger a jumble memories, still unsorted...
His keyboard: From magazines or advertisements he cut out decorative letters of many colors and taped them on the keys. No need, he was a fast touch typist. Didn't those snips of paper interfer with typing? Today they remain a bright symbol of his joy in life. I fight against time itself for taking my dear Jos and changing him from reality into merely a dream, a joyful dream. To fight this separation I play with his keyboard which brings him back to the present.
His bedroom. his bedroom. No, we won't go in there now. There are too many memories in there.
The family photo album will trigger many stories of earlier days. We can capture those later. Now we must capture the present with his friends before they disperse.
...
| to The Life of Jos |
|
to Memories of Jos |
My earlier Jos memories [0, 1, 2] were mostly about Jos. Now we come to stories of Jos and me together.
I have trouble pulling up memories of Jos
from second grade to seventh grade.
As Mother says, I was always at work.
Also, during those years, the house was
dominated by his two older brothers.
He was simply the cheery little one,
always interested in people and things, always in good spirits.
We didn't realize then
how that would come to define him in later life --
that he would do that better than anyone.
And how wonderful that would be.
His congeniality concealed a seed of genius which would grow. I'll write more about that later.
I remember Jos clearly in
first grade and eighth grade.
I was on sabbatical those years.
When he was 5 years old in first grade,
we were in Cambridge, England.
He rode to school on the back of my motorbike.
His big brothers rode their big bicycles.
I got him a little two wheel bicycle and he did well --
except for the proximity of the rose bushes. Ouch!
He had a few playmates there on Gough Way,
like Adam Squires two doors away.
I wrote some early Jos stories.
The story of the year though, was that Jos was
in love with his kindergarden teacher, the young redheaded pretty Miss Jacobs
at the Newnham-Croft School.
In 1987-88 I had a sabbatical year in Hawaii. Jos was 13 years old in eighth grade. He liked to play with our Macintosh computer. I recall him playing a game called Sim City where you simulate the growth and collapse of cities. Another game was more like a graphic arts tool; you could make a tiny movie.
Our rental house included cable TV. Jos liked watching World Wide Wrestling and he refused to believe that it was faked for entertainment purposes. When we got home from sabbatical I got cable TV for him (and me) and bought a large screen TV. Now mother uses it with the WebTV.
Jos and I had eight months of frequent snorkeling expeditions
directed at taking pictures of fish.
He was better at it than I was.
Oahu's famous
Hanauma Bay
was only about three miles from our house and we knew its secret
nooks and crannies.
Sometimes Andrew came along, especially
when we journeyed further.
If Jos were here now, below is what I'd say to him.
We always relived our big experiences.
(Others might want to skip this.)
Remember the three scribble file fishs that circled us?
Remember we saw that fish that wasn't in any of the books;
we called it the Sargasso Wrass? It looked like a leaf
and flopped around like one, about 4 inches long.
First at Shark's Cove and later we found one in the deep water at Hanauma Bay.
We tried so hard to get a decent picture
but he would hardly let us get near enuf.
I just looked again at our picture (your shot?).
Maybe it was a juvenile lion fish. What do you think?
Gee we could dive deep and stay down long then.
I was wearing eight pounds of lead.
I'll bet we were 20-25 feet down.
Remember the time at Crouching Lion,
we swam a long ways out to the barrior reef
and then we couldn't get over it?
Too shallow and rough.
Started to swim around but it was too far.
Neil says sharks hang out there.
Anyway we got a good picture of a giant box fish.
Then there was scuba.
And the day you got your certificate,
remember the near disasters out off Niu Valley?
Then there was that night with Andrew at Black Rock...
For a moment now I jump to later memories:
And our night dive on Kauai'i...
And the night squid on Bonairre and the aggressive moray.
At Keauhou on the Big Island was that quirky humuhumu who circled us;
and the clear deep water at Captain Cook, Napo'opo'o with brothers.
Lastly Maui, the catamaran to Molokini and "Turtletown",
later by car south past Wailea with Mother,
our last snorkeling trip together. Forever.
***many tears***
In seventh and eighth grade, Jos was chubby.
Some of the photos of these years have been put away.
These were the height of
his television watching years.
Because of his overweight
I insisted on taking him to swim team practice
which he strongly resisted.
Hawaii Kai swim team practice was grueling.
They swam steadily for two hours every day.
He got me to compromise:
I agreed that he could skip the swim meets (irking the coaches).
Then he started growing taller at a rate of about an inch a month.
When I realized he would soon be taller than me,
I started calling him "Shorty".
Being in eighth grade,
he started noticing girls,
and he began a lifelong attention to fitness and diet.
Jos told me one day at the Niu Valley school there was a tremendous noise,
bang, crash, bang, bang.
A bulldozer had rolled off the cliff above
demolishing itself upon landing near the school.
In student government Jos became a star performer. He was chosen to represent his school in island-wide student government conferences and retreats. Being a haole (non-native) he felt discriminated against in competitions. But he won some anyway because of his performance, enthusiasm, and extraordinary good humor. The school had some big Samoans who liked to fight. Jos could usually distract them.
Jos was a terrible procrastinator. His standard reply to me to delay any action was, "Hold on." Eventually, I caught on to him so whenever he said, "Hold on." I repeated "Hold on!" and a kind of nagging merriment ensued.
He liked his shop class. After we returned home, he would often work with tools in the garage or yard.
Jos and I often drove Andrew to college in Colorado. These trips were a great joy t
