Owen Robert Bird Jr.

Owen Robert Bird, Jr. Owen Robert Bird Jr died quietly Friday, August 27, 2010, in Santa Rosa, while watching a tennis match with his oldest daughter, Beverly, thus carrying to the last moments of his life a love of sports that can be traced to his earliest childhood. At one point his father, Owen Sr was a sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times, who compared the USC Methodists to Trojans, thereby handing them the name they still carry. Owen Jr was born January 27, 1921, at the old Methodist Hospital on Hope Street, LA. He was irritated all his life by the mindless cliche "nobody is from LA." There seemed nothing unusual about his birth to him. He and his sister, Eunice were true children of Jazz Age Los Angeles. Their socially well-connected parents threw lively parties, and lived in various neighborhoods in LA. Bud, as Owen, Jr. was known half his life, has unique memories of LA in that era: the silent film star Antonio Moreno, a neighbor who befriended the 6-year-old boy, cardboard-box sled rides down the grassy slopes of the undeveloped Micheltorena Hill; war stories from his father, a veteran of the Western Front and the 1916 campaign in Mexico, and a gifted dog named Don, a vicious killer of anything it could catch but an adored friend to little Bud. He attended John Marshall High School in Los Feliz, class of '38. Playing football at Marshall created a lifetime passion for the game. After graduation he found employment at Haas-Baruch wholesale grocers, fell in love with Virginia Keech of Long Beach, and in a strange accident of timing that forever after made it easy to remember their anniversary, drove to Las Vegas in 1941 to be married the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Spending three years in the Navy, he relished his position as Chief machinist on a landing craft. In 1946 he returned to his wife and daughters, Beverly and Patricia. Owen and Virginia settled into the classic 50s life and had two more children, Laurance in 1951 and Ian in 1952, bought a "ranch house" in east Long Beach, and he found employment with North American Aviation. During his career there he was most proud of his work as a project engineer on the historic Apollo Space Missions. Remembered for his great love affair with cars, which began at an early age, he was already driving by age 12. During the 50's, he bought a Jaguar roadster, in which he made a number of trips to Monterey for sports car races with the best friend of his life, his brother-in-law, Dick Keech. Owen and Virginia's marriage became, in late-20th-century America, something awe-inspiring, when she died in 2006, they had celebrated their 64th anniversary. Owen was unfortunately unable to fully appreciate the wonder of that, as his mind was by that time blighted by dementia. Shy by nature, he found joy in his family and moved to Sonoma County in 2006 to join them. The highlight of his final years was the numerous country drives with family, taking in Sonoma's breathtaking beauty. He is survived by his four children, five grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. The family is planning a memorial bench to honor both their parents.