I’m going to cheat today and post something I wrote before I started this blog: my father’s obituary. He died a bit more than a month ago.
I have two friends who I consider to be exceptionally good writers. One of them, my wife’s brother-in-law Tom, wrote obituaries for both his parents (and even wrote an entire book about their lives together), so I asked him to send me his father’s obituary so I could use it as a model. (Thank you, Tom.) This was the result.
David W. Knight, a retired machine tool engineer, died in hospice Friday, April 24, at his home in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He was 94. The cause was complications from dementia.
Mr. Knight is survived by his wife, Marian Knight, née Newton; son and daughter-in-law Paul Knight and Jennifer Guy of Lawrenceville; son Richard Knight of Schuylerville, New York; daughter and son-in-law Elizabeth and Greg Hildebrandt of New Milford, Connecticut; brother and sister-in-law Stiling and Delphine Knight of Huletts Landing, New York; and grandchildren Kolleen and Alan Knight of Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Emily Fedorko of Bishop, California.
David Winthrop Knight was born September 2, 1925, in Passaic, New Jersey. He was the first of three children. His family moved to Springfield Gardens in Queens, New York, where he began elementary school, then moved to Huletts Landing, New York, when David was in third grade. He finished elementary school at the one-room school house in Huletts Landing, then graduated from Whitehall High School where he was awarded the Rensselaer Medal for achievement in science and mathematics.
After high school Mr. Knight joined the Army Air Force and served as a flight mechanic during the final years of World War II. After his discharge in 1945 he enrolled at Hobart College in Geneva, New York, on the G.I. Bill and earned a BA degree in three years. He then moved to Albany, New York, took a job as a car mechanic, and attended graduate courses in science and engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He also joined the choir at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church where he met Marian Newton in 1949. Mr. Knight subsequently took a job as an engineer for Simmons Machine Tool Corporation. He and Mrs. Knight were married on June 28, 1952. Their three children, Paul, Richard and Elizabeth, were born in Albany.
In 1958 the family moved to Stratford, Connecticut, where Mr. Knight took a job as an engineer at U.S. Baird Corporation. He worked there until his retirement in 1997, earning several patents for his innovations in machine tool design. Mr. and Mrs. Knight moved to Lawrenceville in 2017 to be near their son Paul.
In the 1960s Mr. Knight built a summer house in Huletts Landing on Lake George on property he inherited from his grandmother. He subsequently inherited from his father additional property on the lake and four additional houses, two of which were built in the late nineteenth century. For much of his adult life, Mr. Knight personally did most of the work of maintaining and renting these properties.
Aside from his family and his work, Mr. Knight’s great passion was science, in particular geology and physics. In the 1960s he began developing a contrarian theory about the origins and development of the planet earth, which he described in the book Expanding Earth, Constant Mass, published in 2018.
The family asks that, in lieu of flowers, memorial donations be made to the Fund for Lake George.
