Peter Erik Norquest

1936 - 2022

Peter Erik Norquest
August 4, 1936 - February 7, 2022
Boise, Idaho - Peter Erik Norquest (who went by his middle name Erik and was also known to his family as 'Rikki') was born in Edinburg, Texas on August 4th, 1936, to Carrol and Lydia Norquest. He was the second of seven children; he was preceded in death by his younger brother Mark and is survived by his older brother Carrol, Jr. (Kelly) and younger siblings Marie, Ingrid, Dixie, and Neil. Raised on a family farm, he spent his childhood helping with the cotton harvest and working with his siblings alongside the Mexican workers whom his father hired for seasonal help. The Norquest family was very musical, and formed a family orchestra in which he played the cornet. After leaving home, Erik would still play with the orchestra when he returned to visit, and the family was well known for their performances throughout the Valley.
Erik was always fascinated with flying, and he joined the Civil Air Patrol in 1952 at the age of 16 where he learned introductory flight skills until leaving home to join the United States Air Force in 1957 under their Officer Cadet program (by then he graduated from high school in 1954, after which he attended Pan American College for a year). He met his wife, Karen Christine Norquest, in Boise, Idaho while stationed at Mountain Home Air Force Base. They were married on April 21st, 1967, and had a son whom they named Peter Kristian Norquest on August 31st, 1971. Erik had left the Air Force as a First Lieutenant in 1961, and crop-dusted for a living until he chose to become self-employed in 1976 and began developing an ultra-low head hydro turbine of his own design. He worked on this project for several years, building a working scale model of his turbine and filing and receiving a patent on it. He eventually took a job at the Idaho Department of Water Resources, where he worked until his retirement in 2007.
When Peter became a Cub Scout and then joined a local Boy Scout troop, Erik founded a new Boy Scout troop (Troop 45) sponsored by the Boise Friends Church where his family attended. He acted as Committee Chairman, and participated in several projects including establishing a new Boy Scout summer camp at Quaker Hill in McCall, Idaho, organizing paper drives during which the Scouts would collect newspapers and other recyclables to fund their activities, and building an innovative troop trailer which carried all of the camping gear for the multiple Scout camping trips every year. Erik paid special attention to the boys in the troop who came from disadvantaged families and were in need of basic essentials, and he often went out of his way to give them rides to activities and make sure they had enough to eat. In his last years, several of his former Scouts visited him at his home to thank him for the positive impact he had made on their lives.
Erik was also a prolific writer, and enjoyed writing short-story accounts of his time in Boise with his wife Karen after his son Peter left home to attend college in Oregon. This continued a tradition which had been established by his father, Carrol, who wrote similar stories about his own family in Edinburg, and Erik compiled these stories while adding his own introductions (Carrol had also published a book entitled The Rio Grande Wetbacks in 1972). Karen herself enjoyed writing poetry, and Erik and Peter collaborated in 2019 to self-publish a collection of her poetry, Karen's Korner.
Erik was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2012, and he began to develop symptoms which he was largely able to regulate with the help of dopamine agonists. However, in 2017 he was diagnosed with Guillaine-Barré syndrome after receiving a series of quadrivalent flu shots in the preceding few years, and his health began a slow but steady decline as a result of the continuous degeneration of his nerve pathways. He became fully bed-ridden during the summer of 2020, and was cared for by Karen until he began his final decline during the first week of February, 2022. He passed away in his sleep during the night of February 7th and was cremated on Wednesday, February 9th.
Erik is survived by his wife Karen, his son Peter and daughter-in-law Grace Norquest, and his granddaughter Vivian Wei Norquest. He was a precocious child, a daring aviator, a gifted inventor and a loving husband and father. He was honest, loyal and giving, and will be greatly missed by his entire family and others whom he touched through his attempts to improve the lives of those less fortunate than himself.