My Dad

If you’ve noticed just a touch of heaviness in recent postings – Death in Venice musings, etc. – it might have something to do with the fact that my father has been quite ill over recent months, and passed away on April 7th.


Young PECO engineer, Henry F. Raufer

My dad was truly an engineer’s engineer – completely at home in the mechanical world, with a fundamental understanding of the way machines worked, how to keep things running, and how to fix them when they didn’t.   After graduating from Drexel U. in the early 1950s, he started out as an electrical engineer at the Philadelphia Electric Company (PECO), working at the Schuylkill Station (the photo is from a company newsletter at that time) — and he was  quite pleased when I too worked at that site in the 1990s, helping to bring the fifth generation of combustion technology with the Grays Ferry Cogeneration project (please see the website’s ‘power plant’ page).  In the late 1950s he moved into the metallurgical field, working at Inductotherm (a company which makes electrical furnaces for the metals industry) and later at Consarc, a subsidiary company which specializes in vacuum technology (i.e., for making high quality specialty alloys).

But such a technical history hardly begins to describe his life….   or his profound influence on me.  Remember those Philadelphia row houses in the movie Rocky?  That was similarly my dad’s early life, before he joined the Navy in WWII and fought in the Pacific.  He then raised a family of eleven children (I’m the oldest), and even more amazing than its size was the fact that he moved that family overseas — to both England in the 1960s and Brazil in the 1970s — and proceeded to take us on world travels and explorations that you might have noticed in recent postings (e.g., my boyhood trips to Florence and Venice).

He used his wonderful technical skills, and created a world for his family that was rich & vibrant & loving – and when growing up, more than anything else in the world, I wanted to be just like him.  I will miss him immensely!