Lawrence "Larry" Fagel

Lawrence (Larry) William Fagel of Lincroft, New Jersey

February 27, 1932 February 25, 2026

Mr. Fagel was born in Montclair, NJ in 1932, grew up in East Orange, NJ, graduated from Clifford J. Scott High School in 1949 and later from Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ in the top four percent of his class earning the degree of Mechanical Engineer with Honor and then from New York University with the degree of Master of Mechanical Engineering. He was a licensed New Jersey Professional Engineer and a member of Tau Beta Pi, universally recognized as the world's pre-eminent engineering honor society. He was also a licensed airplane pilot and had been president of the Stevens Flying Club when he was an undergraduate. He served in and received an honorable discharge from the US Air Force during the Korean Conflict. He and his family had resided in Parsippany, NJ as well as in a waterfront home on the shore of Great Sacandaga Lake, NY and moved to Lincroft, NJ in 1984. He was a communicant at Saint Leo the Great Roman Catholic Church in Lincroft where he had been an usher for 30 years.

Most of his career was with Bell Laboratories. During his early years as an engineer he focused on the fields of seismology, earthquake-risk determination, structural vibrations, and earthquake-resistant and nuclear-weapon-resistant structural design. He had published the results of his research in the Proceedings of the World Conference on Earthquake Engineering, the Shock and Vibration Bulletin of the Naval Research Laboratory, the Bell Laboratories Record, the Bell System Technical Journal, and the Journals of the Structural Division and of the Engineering-Mechanics Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Because of those publications,

He was recognized as a Semantics Scholar and that organization can provide access to his documents.

Mr. Fagel also had been involved in the planning, design and construction of AT&T's communications facilities located at the top-secret NORAD military facility at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, which was built to survive a near-miss nuclear-weapon attack and to continue to function afterwards. Later, during the 1970s Mr. Fagel joined AT&T's overseas operations, Western Electric International, and while living in the Saudi Arabian open desert for two years was the Senior Engineer in charge of what was at that time 100-million dollars of construction of microwave-communications facilities distributed over routes that extended 2,000 miles throughout that country. That project provided Saudi Arabia with its original nation-wide telephone network. In addition, at a different stage of his career, Mr. Fagel also had been a

systems engineer and a project manager of development and deployment of data- communications networks. As a consequence of all these accomplishments he was awarded the Bell Laboratories Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff title, an honor achieved by less than ten percent of Bell Laboratories entire engineering staff.

Following his retirement from Bell Laboratories, he joined the Naval Research Laboratory at Lakehurst, NJ as a consultant and returned to his earlier-in-life interest in aviation to provide the software requirements for simulators of the on-board nuclear-aircraft-carrier computer systems that facilitate launching and recovery of Navy jet aircraft. These simulators are used to assist Navy-pilot training,

Larry was a loving husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather. He was predeceased by his wife Inez (1933 - 2006), his son John (1962-2004), his parents Lester and Martha, his sister Marilyn Corona, and his brother Donald. He is survived by his daughters, Elizabeth (Dave) Hancock of Columbia, TN and Alice (David) Payne of Lincroft, NJ, by his grandchildren Vianna (Steven) Munoz, Bryce Fagel, Christopher Payne and Marissa (Dan) Ferrante, and by his great-grandson, Percy Munoz.