Paul Joseph Jacob (Jake)

Paul Joseph Jacob (Jake), an imaginative and gentle man, died Sept 5, 2021, just as the last purple of the evening’s sunset faded to darkness.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pa, in 1945, he was the youngest of the four children of Earl Philip Jacob and Marguerite Francis (Hubert). He spent his childhood in the Pittsburgh suburb of Verona exploring his neighborhood with pal Don, enjoying his mother’s peanut butter and dill pickle sandwiches (a lifelong favorite) and playing in the woods at nearby Long Vue Country Club, where Don’s father was CaddieMaster. Later, friend George was included, and he and Paul worked as caddies – George skilled, and Paul mediocre with poor eyesight.

Paul graduated from Penn Hills High School in 1963 and attended Penn State, later the University of Pittsburgh and, urged by intrepid high school friends, Joe and Phil, he moved to Thisted, Denmark to study at New Experimental College. Once there, he convinced Dorothy Ann Affalter, a Penn Hills girl with whom he’d fallen in love, to join him, and they subsequently married in Aalborg, Denmark.

The newlyweds returned to Pittsburgh after briefly touring Europe and settled in Painted Post, NY, before realizing they did not want to live in the snow and ice. After pleas from friends in California, they packed up their Saab, sailboat and cat and drove across the country to Berkeley, CA. There they enjoyed the cosmopolitan, diversity of the university city and raised their two children, Henry Max Jacob and Sarah Gretchen Jacob.

Paul was a loving and devoted father with an adventurous spirit, and he fostered his children’s interests in sports, including archery, skiing, basketball, track and field and sailing. An early unrealized ambition was to live on a boat and travel the world. Instead, he settled on building his children a massive tree house that nearly overwhelmed the tiny urban back yard, and outlasted the neighbors objections until the footings began to rot and it was removed.