Walter H. Meer

Meer, Walter H. HOOSICK FALLS Walter Henry Meer, 92, passed away peacefully at home on Tuesday, September 25, 2012 surrounded by his loving family and under the care of Community Hospice. Walt was born at home on October 1, 1919 in Cincinnati, the same day and location (as he liked to recall) as the first game of the infamous World Series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Chicago White Sox. His parents, August Bernhard Meer and Marie Luken Meer, who met in Cincinnati, were both immigrants from the same small town, Freren, in West Germany. Walt was the second youngest of seven children. He grew up in Camp Washington, the meat packing district, where one of his favorite pastimes was herding swine down the street with a small 'pig stick.' The loss of one eye from juvenile glaucoma at age eight excluded him from military service during World War II, during which he worked long hours operating the new 'computing machines' at Wright Aeronautical, manufacturer of the powerful Cyclone series of aircraft engines that made long-range strategic bombing possible during the war. Walt got in on the ground floor of computing when, after graduating from Western Hills High School in Cincinnati in 1937 and being unemployed for a few years during the Great Depression, he got into a training class offered by IBM. In 1941, he was offered a job with Wright using IBM machines for inventory control. The machines were about the size of a cow and performed functions similar to a calculator. In 1947, he was offered a job working directly for IBM in Cincinnati. As a troubleshooter, he was so good at responding to customer needs that he was promoted to salesman, and worked from 1951 to 1959 in Columbus, Ohio, where he made the prestigious IBM 'Hundred Percent Club' seven years in a row. Walt married Josephine Louise Strane, a registered nurse from Canfield, Ohio, in 1947. They had two daughters, Jennifer and Elizabeth, both born in Columbus in the late 1950's. In 1960, Walt was promoted to market planner and transferred to IBM's Glendale Lab in Endicott, N.Y. The family moved to nearby Endwell, where Walt and Jo lived for the next 46 years with the exception of one year each at IBM's offices near Boblingen, Germany and Winchester, England. Walt retired in 1975, after 28 years of service and went back to school at Broome Community College to study computer programming. For the next 25 years he worked as a computer consultant to villages in the southern tier of New York and northern Pennsylvania, including Endicott, Owego and Lisle. He loved his work, and though he cut his hours back to parttime and went to Florida for a month each year, he worked until he was 85. Walt had a great zest for life, and was known for his love of good conversation and dry sense of humor. He deeply appreciated art, good food, sailing and spending time with family and friends. He was a talented amateur oil painter, specializing in scenes of sun-soaked beaches, sailboats and weather-beaten outdoorsmen. He had a deep love of nature, especially water, and was an avid sailor and canoeist most of his life. He loved the quality of light late in the day, especially in summer, a special effect he always referred to as the 'evening oleo.' One of his most cherished memories was visiting Paris in the 1960s with his wife, Jo. They walked around the city after dark and had "the best food of my life," French onion soup served at a market near the Gare de L'Est after midnight. He also relished other family trips, including visits to Istanbul, the Canary Islands, the lake country of England and happy vacations spent with the family of Jim and Jean Gow of Endwell and his youngest brother, Bob, and wife, Odetta, of Cincinnati. For the last five years of his life, he lived in the Greenbush Terrace apartments in East Greenbush near the school of two of his grandchildren, where he attended many drama and music shows. He moved to Hoosick Falls in June 2012 to live with his daughter, Jennifer, and her daughters. In the last few years of his life he was lovingly cared for by his wife of 65 years, Josephine, with much appreciated help from Meals on Wheels, visiting nurses, and a wonderful weekly housekeeper, Gayle Camponeschi, who passed away suddenly in December 2010. Since February of this year, he has been cared for fulltime by his daughter, Jennifer Rawlings of Hoosick Falls, with invaluable assistance from his wife, Jo; daughter, Beth and son-in-law, Andy Beers of Nassau; his four grandchildren, Elizabeth and Catherine Rawlings of Hoosick Falls and Gus Beers and Althea Meer of Nassau; the Eddy Visiting Nurses; Community Hospice and Dr. Mark Oldendorf. He will be sorely missed by all who knew and loved him. Those wishing to honor Walt may send contributions in his name to the Community Hospice Foundation, 295 Valley View Blvd., Rensselaer, NY 12144, communityhospice.org or the New York Office of the Nature Conservancy, 195 New Karner Road, Suite 200, Albany, NY 12205, online at nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/ northamerica/unitedstates/ newyork/