David Caulfield was the ultimate do-it-yourselfer
Do-it-yourselfer excelled at many technologies and talents
To call David Caulfield a do-ityourselfer acknowledges that when he needed something — a computer, digital piano, scalemodel railroad engine, seismic sensing software or a comfortable religion — most often he built it himself.
But the term falls woefully short of describing the brilliant, busy man who was born in Tenafly, N.J., in 1935.
He earned a degree in engineering and a master’s in physics, served as a civilian on U.S. navy submarines chasing Soviet subs during the Cold War, worked on sonar technology at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and with the U.S. army Corps of Engineers, earned a pilot’s licence and the nickname “Iron Fingers” for his prowess at the piano, wrote at least one work of fiction and several research papers on sonar and seismic technologies and was deep into his sixth consecutive decade of computer programming on the day he died at age 77 on his Devon acreage.
“Especially for people who may not have known that much about the science, he did seem like a mad scientist out there in his trailer on his acreage,” Caulfield’s son Case said.
“But everything he did wasn’t crazy; it’s all based on real stuff. He really did work for the U.S. navy. And that’s the thing, a lot of people just had a hard time believing some of the stuff he did, but he really did do it.”
Caulfield died of a heart attack May 26, leaving behind wife Thomasina; sons Case, Tim and Sean from his first marriage to Ruth, who predeceased him in 1989, and their families; as well as Thomasina’s children Lesley, Lanne and Reid and their families.
“He would still put in 10, 12 hours a day,” Case said. “I’m in the oil and gas business. I have my own company. Every now and again I think to myself, ‘What am I doing working in five different countries, spread out all over the place, doing 12 hours a day?’ And then I go, ‘I know exactly what I’m doing, I’m doing what I grew up with.’
“My dad did the same thing. And my brother Tim, he does the same thing, working 12 hours a day writing books, giving lectures, travelling all over.”
Tim is a law professor at the University of Alberta, where Sean is an art professor. Case is a geophysicist based in Calgary.
“I guess we all ended up with mixtures of his personality,” Case said.
And that’s a funny thing, because Case admits to them being mortified by their father’s behaviour when friends visited their Sherwood Park acreage.
“All three of us were highly embarrassed by him, growing up. But he was a great man. He taught us independence of mind. Being willing to go out and do that crazy thing, no matter what anyone thinks.”
In that Sherwood Park home, built at the bottom of a slough, it meant fending off Mother Nature each spring.
“One of the really central things in our childhood was battling the flooding of our house,” Case said. “A lot of people would have hired someone to fix it. Not my dad. We had to fix it ourselves. So we dug trenches and built pipe systems, had pumps all over the yard.”
And each year, Tim’s basement bedroom flooded a little less. The annual battle added to an atmosphere “that lurched from exciting to disastrous,” Case said.
“Our friends loved it, they loved coming over to our house. More than one time in my life I’d come home and there would be one of my friends talking to my mom or my dad.”
His gregarious father was also famous for bringing guests “of dubious character” for dinner, to his mother’s annoyance, Case recalled. Some would become business partners, with disastrous results.
“He lost more money than most people make in a lifetime. Because as soon as he did something and had some success, he just had to try something else.”
Case figures his dad started about 10 companies, most of them in the engineering field. He also worked with famed musician and former senator Tommy Banks on a digital piano in the 1970s. Caulfield had first envisioned a digitized means of identifying the characteristics of hit songs, but the project changed.
“I said to him what would really work is if we could use that same kind of technology so that it would become a digital or electronic musical stenographer,” Banks said. “So that when you played a tune into the piano, it would simply notate it properly on paper or on a screen.”
Caulfield made a prototype but Roland beat them into production. The two had worked together for about five years and became good friends. Banks was amazed by Caulfield’s brilliance.
“He was a good musician, which is really common in Silicon Valley and places like that because the synapses are welded the same.
“He was way ahead of the game in many, many different areas. He came up with a thousand ideas a week, of which three were sensational and the other 997 were really good but, are you serious?”
Caulfield’s stepdaughter Lesley, who loved his open-minded and humble nature, and the great stories for which he was famous, said their relationship was centred on philosophy. She recalled a book he wrote and asked her to read, called The Pilot.
“I know he was the main character. He was flying his little Cessna plane up there and all of a sudden there is an entity that’s talking to him and engaging him in all of these deep theories and concepts. He doesn’t know what to call the entity — and that’s probably Dave’s way of working his way between Catholicism and Buddhism and whatever other spiritual beliefs he was playing with — and so he just called the entity N for energy and that tied it back into his whole scientific thing.”
Science helped him make sense of the world. He was raised in an Irish Catholic household in New Jersey and educated by nuns. He came to question his faith after the death of a close friend in Vietnam, an event that had a profound impact on him. Over time, Case said, his dad found a better fit.
“By the end of his life, he had sort of made his own version, just like he made everything else, a religion that combined Catholicism and Buddhism.”