Edwin Rearick

Ed Rearick, died December 1, 2025 at his home in Boise. He was 84.

Born Edwin James Howe in Santa Fe in 1941, Ed was the second of five siblings.

Their mother, Jean, changed her kids' last names to Rearick after their dad died and she remarried a man with the last name Rearick.

Ed attended high school in Durango, Colorado before joining the Navy at age 17. This helped him to discover a much wider world and a love of travel and music.

He met his first wife, Lynette, when he was in the Navy through a mutual friend and, after leaving the service, enrolled at SUNY Buffalo (near her hometown) in Electrical Engineering. He wanted to major in computers, but that major didn't exist yet. They married and relocated to Nashua, NH where he took a job with a defense contractor. They had Whitney, their only child, in 1969. They later divorced.

Ed helped first engineer, then sell, mainframe computers. As mainframes became servers, IBM (which had acquired the small tech company he'd worked for) laid him off in the late 1990s. He never worked again and moved from Burlington, MA to Denver, then to Boise in the early aughts.

Ed had a lifelong curiosity about science, music and the arts and loved photography. He read science fiction, mysteries and nonfiction voraciously.

Though COPD and other health issues had shrunk Ed's life considerably in recent decades, his curiosity about the world didn't shrink. From his apartment on the Boise Bench, he followed the news closely and became fascinated by the Gaia Hypothesis, the theory that the world is a single living organism. He also tried to understand why people believed falsehoods – or simply why they voted for bad people.

There will be a memorial event for Ed in Denver next year.

Ed is survived by his daughter Whitney Rearick and siblings Harriet Huddle and Tim Rearick.