The Life of George Rahe
George, and Patricia with Kathy
—adapted from the eulogy by his daughter, Theresa Rahe Sidrow, MPH, RN
The life of George Anthony Paul Francis Rahe is proof positive that God has a sense of humor. George was born in LA in 1929, to forty year old parents, the last of 5 children. He spent his high school years at a minor seminary in Missouri, where he learned this short Latin prayer on awakening: Deo gratias. “Thank God.” He said this prayer every morning when he got up.
George entered the Marine Corps as a reservist and drilled monthly for five months. He never went to boot camp. When discharged, he never bothered to pick up his discharge papers. When the Korean War broke out, the first thing the government did was stop distribution of discharge papers. George found himself back in, on a troopship and headed for the Inchon landing, Choisin Reservoir and the Yalu River.
Once home, George re-entered college, this time at City College of Los Angeles and later at UCLA. Like most electrical engineers of that time, he worked on the space program, in his case specializing in the abort and escape mechanisms. He owned a copy of Wally Schirra’s book “Schirra’s Space” inscribed by astronaut Schirra himself, “to Dr. George Rahe, thanks for the return trip of Apollo 13! Wally Schirra”.
In 1954 George married Patricia Laubender. He always said, “God gave me a great gift when he gave me your mother.” Together they worked unbelievably hard until he had a Ph.D. and a full professorship at the Naval Postgraduate School in beautiful Monterey. He always said that he could not have accomplished these things without his wife. Dr. Rahe dedicated his life to education, first his own, then that of others.
In 1954 George developed type one diabetes. It was the dark ages, when diabetics owned one needle and sharpened it on a rock. Mean life expectancy was ten years. But Dad went on as if he would live forever, camping, hiking, sailing a sailboat, riding a motorcycle and raising four children.
Despite a crushing nicotine addiction, he quit smoking after thirty years, and lived the next forty years as a non-smoker. It would be ten years before the cravings ended for good.
In 1985 Dad cheated death for a third time, surviving a stroke caused by thrombocytopenia (plt 6,000) and a month in a coma. Rehab and a changed life followed. As usual, he did not let untoward circumstances get in his way. He retired and went back to college, 40 years after he had first started. He learned Spanish and took math classes. Mom and Dad traveled to Alaska, Australia and New Zealand. They lived the cattle rancher’s life at our ranch in Nebraska. They enjoyed grandchildren’s graduations and marriages. And after losing our precious Kathy in 1981 he helped start a scholarship program for aspiring nurses at SDSU.
In 2002, a man who had spent his entire adult life fighting the Soviet Union in the Cold War easily opened his heart to accept a Russian orphan as his grandson. That’s the kind of guy he was.
When asked shortly before his death if he would have preferred to have died at the time of his stroke, he emphatically said that he preferred to have lived the last 26 years as he did. “THIS” he said, referring to the wheelchair, “is just an inconvenience.” That’s also the kind of guy he was.
In the 1950’s his internist told him that he would give Dad free medical care for life if he reached the age of 35. He died on January 26, 2012, at the age of 82, after 58 years of type one diabetes.
And so as we contemplate his life of great challenges and great accomplishments, we say with him, Deo Gratias.