Reid Anderson Cameron, Jr.
Marriages
Helen - August 17, 1946
"Official marriage"
Burial Details
Obituaries
Grand Junction Daily Sentinel page 3D Obituary - February 17, 2019
Dad’s shoes will be really hard to fill. After all, he wore a size 17. We imagine he probably designed and built his own baby crib. Forever an engineer, there was always some project he was designing, whether it was a dining table, cabinets, or a nuclear reactor. One could never talk about what one was doing without Dad designing something for it; sometimes even designing something to make the other something he originally planned to make. He could make even the simplest project complicated! Born and raised in Chicago, he grew up speaking Spanish and English, surrounded by his mother’s musical, Latin-American family. Thenceforth, everything in his life was done with music. We never heard our dad say, "Turn that Music down!" No trip to go skiing nor vacation was begun without music to wake us up and get us going. When WWII broke out, he enlisted, but had to wait eight months for a pair of boots his size (17) before being sent to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to work on the Manhattan Project. There he met Helen, also in the army working on the Project, and they secretly married a few months later. No one knew of that marriage until they spilled the beans to us just a few years ago. Their second "official" wedding took place months later on August 17, 1946. They were married just short of 70 years. Dad returned to college after the army for a degree in mechanical engineering, and subsequently joined the team in Idaho Falls that built the first nuclear reactor to make electricity. Because the mechanism for proving the production of electricity in 1951 was a string of light bulbs, later in 1966, when President Johnson came to dedicate the reactor as a historical site, the bulbs in the storage room had to be fingerprinted to find the originals. Subsequently, Dad worked designing and building various types of nuclear reactors. Because of that experience and his love for and connection with people, where he spoke their language or not, he was eventually hired by GE to manage reactor outages all over the world. He and Helen traveled to live and work in India, Japan, Taiwan, and Spain. Any time off was devoted to projects - his or anyone else’s who happened to mention an idea to him. Speak and he’dbegin designing. When he lost most of his eyesight, he simply designed and built a tool or structure to help him build what he couldn’tsee to build on his own. Nothing like a blind man using a table saw! Following retirement, Dad and Mom moved to Colorado to be near their children, Mercedes and Rid. Their home at the base of the Monument became the Shangri-La to which family and friends would visit for the next 30 years, drawn by his love of parties and people. His memorial service will be April 13, 4:00 p.m. at Okagawa Farms, 281 29 Road. For further information email: info@ laddercanyonranch.com. We toast him and know he’s toasting us. !Salud, Papa’!
Grand Junction Daily Sentinel page 4B Obituary - February 20, 2019
same obituary as Daily Sentinel, February 17, 2019, page 3D
