Bernard Carey, 83, passed away in Flagstaff, AZ on December 16, 2024.

He was born on February 28, 1941 in an Irish Catholic enclave of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the second of Bernard and Madeline Carey's five children. The city was a soot-choked industrial colossus making steel for the American war machine. Children rode electric street cars for a nickel and were taught to stay among their own kind.

Bernard was a curious and diligent child who got high marks from the nuns at St. Paul's Grade School. His brother Michael was only 15 months older and neighbors called them "Irish twins." They roamed together through the nearby Carnegie Museum and Library, and served as altar boys at St. Paul's Cathedral. Although he eventually left the church, Bernard always remembered the echoing phrases of Latin mass.

In high school he was taught by Christian Brothers who, like the nuns, were more than willing to enforce discipline with the rod and fist. Contact with girls was limited to coed dances on Saturday night. If a couple moved too close together, they were warned to "leave room for the Holy Ghost." He ran cross-country in Schenley Park and became a competitive swimmer in his senior year, working in a grocery store after school.

Academic scholarships led him to the nearby University of Pittsburgh, where he studied electrical engineering. In the afternoons and summers, he worked as a lab technician at the Mellon Institute. The university designed the engineering curriculum so 90 percent of students would fail. He passed, and got a job straight away in the fast-growing Los Angeles aerospace industry. With $200 and a suitcase lent by his Aunt Helen, he went west.

After a few years, he enrolled in a PhD program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he helped build one of the first nodes of what became the Internet. He met a schoolteacher and recent Peace Corps volunteer named Linda Moore, and was compelled by love and providence to propose to her six weeks later. When he brought Linda home to Pittsburgh, his family was shocked by his good fortune. They had three children--Kevin, Stephen, and Kathleen--and were married for 58 years.

A computer science degree in hand, he took a faculty job at the University of Connecticut. He, Linda, and Kevin made the cross-country trip to Storrs in an old VW bus. They rented an apartment on campus, then bought a yellow Cape Cod nearby with a yard full of fruit trees next to a maple forest. He split logs to heat the home in winter, tapped the trees to condense sap into syrup in a huge outdoor cauldron, and built stone walls in his spare time. Bern and Linda's young family grew from three to five.

The private sector came calling in the 1980s and the family moved to a suburban split-level near General Electric's Corporate R&D center in upstate New York. After a successful if pressure-filled tenure at GE, he was recruited to be chair of the CS/EE department at Northern Arizona University. He and Linda both worked as professors until they retired and became active volunteers at the Wupatki National Monument. He developed a strong interest in the archeology of native populations who lived there centuries ago. After careful study, he concluded that the conventional academic wisdom about their habitation was all wrong.

Pittsburgh in the 1940s was so polluted that Bern's father had to bring an extra clean shirt to work every day and change at lunch. That may be why Bern was always drawn to clean and open spaces. He rode his bicycle all the way across the Rocky Mountains with his brother Tom, and with Kevin through the mountains and rivers of Idaho along with his brother Dan. When each of his children turned 13, he took them on a week-long adventure in Arizona to share the southwest landscapes that captivated him. He loved to hike and exercise, and was happiest standing in front of a hard-earned vista, the majesty of nature in front of him and family by his side.

He was an engineer by training and inclination, one of the many hard-working, practical, and focused people who created the great technological structures of the 20th century. His career could be summarized by saying he built computers that controlled machines. Some of them performed invisible, prosaic tasks. Others did much more. In the late 1970s, he helped design  software for NASA's Galileo mission. Accident and disaster delayed the launch until the probe finally reached Jupiter in 1995, where it orbited until September 2003, when the spacecraft fell into the great gas giant and a small piece of a Pittsburgh boy's consciousness merged with a heavenly body that sits above us among the stars.

He loved to read. Over the years he built a world-class shelf of Dad Books, including the novels of Wouk and Steinbeck and many thick volumes of Civil War history and tales of polar exploration. He enjoyed fixing things and had a vast patience for figuring out what made this and that work. He had a strong chest and back that were perfect for bearing the satisfying thump of his children running and jumping up to greet him when he came home from work on cold New England evenings. He valued integrity and curiosity in other people and returned those qualities in kind. In his later years, he and Linda loved to explore new places, always striking up conversations with the people they met along the way.

He is survived by his wife and children, three siblings, and four grandchildren whom he doted on in his retirement, along with a large extended and chosen family. They all bear the gift of his example and are diminished by his passing. This fragile human world depends on people who live with honesty, obligation, and kindness. Bernard Carey was one of them.

A Celebration of Life is being planned for early 2025. In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to the Hozhoni Foundation in Flagstaff.