Obituary - George Bowen Wood Shaw 1917-2003

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Webmasters note: These are the words spoken by Bowen Shaw, Jr. at his father’s funeral. As I understood it, he and Mary Shaw wrote this together. Richard Brownlee got a copy to scan for the clan because he thought it was very well done.

Dad was born in a small town in Rhode Island in October, 1917. He grew up in Washington, D.C., when it still had the rhythm of a small southern city. In the late 1930's Dad graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in Electrical Engineering; at a time when electrical engineering was still considered to be an exotic occupation. After his graduation, Dad worked for Potomac Edison, the power company, for a short time. In his youth, he undoubtedly harbored an adventurous spirit because in 1941 he took a job in the Caribbean island of Trinidad as a civil engineer, where he helped to construct a base on land ceded to the United States by the British. Here, also, he and some friends bought a 38 foot sailboat that they sailed for many hours around the island. It pleased him that he was the only one who did not get sea sick. After the war started, Dad immediately flew back up to the United States to join the Army Air Corps. He had tried to join after graduating from the University of Maryland, and had actually been the head cadet of his high school ROTC program, but the service had rejected him for being underweight. After the war started, the services were not so particular. During his time in the Air Corps, Dad's degree in electrical engineering was put to good use. He became an expert in a new, important, detection system called RADAR. He was put to work developing and testing RADAR systems for the Air Corp, as well as writing instruction and maintenance manuals for its operation. Dad chaffed at this, of course, and was constantly volunteering for other duty, including a parachute drop into Italy, but the Army had plenty of airborne volunteers, and very few who then understood the esoteric workings of RADAR.

Dad separated from the service in 1946, and immediately went to work for the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where he remained for the rest of his working career. There he worked with early missile guidance technology that was used in the Navy's Terrier missile program. We remember him making several trips in the early 1950's to an exotic place called China Lake for the missile tests. Later on in his career, Dad became a leading expert in precision time and frequency technology, which was to have later application on the GPS satellites that are so crucial to our nation today. Dad was a very quiet and modest man, we did not know until very recently that he had made important contributions to the international definition of the second.

Mom and Dad met while taking night law school classes in Washington, D.C., and were married in January, 1949. It was a union that would last almost 55 years. Our childhood is remembered as a time of security and stability during a time when it was in short supply. In 1955, the family moved to rural Maryland so that Mom and Dad could raise us in a better environment than the city. It was a sacrifice for Dad, a long drive to and from work every day, but we never heard a complaint. And it did give Dad a chance to exercise some of his passions such as astronomy, photography, and shooting. As youths, and even more as adults, my sister and I came to regard Dad as a renaissance man. He was interested in everything, and if he was interested in it, he pursued it until he perfected it. Dad made his own telescope for observing the planets and the stars, which, of course, he could identify and relate to you at length. He could shoot a flea off of a dog's back at 300 yards. He could take stunning color photographs of flowers, which he would then develop in the dark room he had constructed in the laundry room. And he would always take the time to carefully instruct you in anything that you wished to know.

Dad was kindness, patience, and love, the very embodiment of James 1:19 "Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath:"

Dad, we love you, we will miss you, and it is with great joy in our hearts that we look forward to seeing you again in the kingdom.