Wil Baden, 10 June 1928 - 9 November 2016.

This is the man who, as a boy, lived in Hollywood and was an extra in a crowd scene in an "Our Gang" episode about a birthday party.

This is the man whose father took him to the World Science Fiction Convention, in 1939.

He took the bus to visit John W. Campbell Jr. at Astounding Science Fiction magazine's offices. While at Princeton University, he had tea with Albert Einstein. (Which wasn't unusual at the time, all the incoming freshmen did.)

He was always good with languages. One day, a man from the government asked the head of the languages department if he could be introduced to the students who were especially good with the following languages? Which is how he ended up spending a summer translating Russian mathematics papers.

He was active in the New York lodge of the Masons. He was a performer -- he was part of a comedy troupe called the Rusty Brothers. His favorite bit was where a mason who'd been away from the lodge for a while is trying to remember the correct secret handshake. It illustrated that you could do comedy without speaking a word.

He learned Hebrew, and translated the news from Israel into English for the lodge newsletters to benefit the Jewish readers.

He worked for a private detective firm for a while, doing secret audits of New York drive-in movie theaters. At the intermission he'd walk down the aisles between the cars, with a mechanical counter in one hand and his date's hand in the other. He'd click the clicker for each car he walked passed, and for each time his date squeezed his hand for one on her side. He saw a lot of movies.

As a computer programmer, he was active in what we would now call the Open Source movement. He was a big fish in a shallow pond. The users group for mid-sized IBM computers was called "COMMON" (named after a Fortran statement), and he was active in that group for many years. He ended up on the Fortran '77 Standards Committee, which is when the Fortran language added "structured programming" to its library. (Before, with Fortran '66, implemented on IBM as Fortran IV, we only had IF, GO TO, and DO loop constructs. All those { } you see in modern languages? We didn't have them back then.)

When the family moved to California, he would answer the door on Halloween in his black cassock, white makeup, with the lights out and tall candles burning... and demand that the kids do a "trick" to get a treat. This was something he learned from being a kid in the Depression -- you don't get something for nothing. You could whistle with a mouth full of peanut butter, or sing Pumpkin Carols, or do a cheer routine or somersaults -- anything, really.

When his four kids were at College Park Elementary School, he'd come and read The Hobbit and Charlie & The Chocolate Factory at school. Decades later, the school librarian still remembered him fondly.

He was active in the "FORTH" programming language world, and was invited by the Chinese government as part of a group of Western computer scientists to come and give lectures. So he learned Mandarin, to be able to give his speeches in Chinese. He was invited back, two or three years later, and did it again.

He'd bring us into his work on weekends, and we could play Hangman on the computer. No video monitors, each move resulted in another sheet of paper printing out on the huge line printer. I asked him how it was possible for a computer to play a game. Because of that question, I have a career.

He took me to the very first convention I ever attended, a "COMMON" conference in Minneapolis. (At the Leamington, which was later home for Minicon for many years.) We flew on Northwest Orient Airlines. I remember it was spring, and there was snow on the ground, and I ordered a lemonade in the bar and charged it to our room.

For awhile, he worked for the Arabian-American Oil Co. (ARAMCO) in Houston, staying for a week or so and flying home. TWA, the airline, actually issued him a wooden plaque acknowledging him as a frequent flyer. There was a possibility of him (and all of us) getting relocated to Riyadh, so he learned Arabic. The course at Orange Coast College was short on students and in danger of getting canceled, so some of us in the family joined him there. Our Arab teacher told us that each word in Arabic has four meanings: its primary meaning; the exact opposite; something obscene; and something to do with a camel.

He learned about the Doctor Demento radio show on KMET, four hours each Sunday night, and we all started listening to it. He and mom performed Tom Lehrer's "Irish Ballad" at a church talent show once, along with "There's a Hole in the Bucket."

When he was recovering from a medical procedure about ten years ago, at a nursing facility, he brought along his old Spanish grammar book so he could communicate with the Spanish-speaking staff. They called him El Viejo.

He had a life-long interest in shorthand, both the handwritten kind and alphabetic abbreviations. The system started by the telegraphers, back in the 19th century, was something he worked on updating and expanding.

In the last few years, as he was going deaf and his eyesight was failing, he started studying Esperanto.

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Tim Behrendsen writes: My condolences, Charles. He was definitely a unique character. I have two programming-related memories of him that stick in my mind. I was probably a freshman in High School:

1) I was on the phone with you for some reason, and I was arguing against putting code in subroutines if there was just a single usage. It seemed pointless. You passed along my comment, and he replied through you, something like (paraphrase): "Your main loops become shorter and your code will be easier to understand." But it was phrased a bit more elegantly than that, and I just remembered being stunned as the Truth of what he said was self-evident. That one experience literally shaped how I write code to this day.

2) The other, earlier memory was coming to your house and meeting him for the first time, and he apparently knew I was into programming. Out of the blue, he asked me a programming question (again paraphrase): "Say you had a program that took program text as input. It translates all the variables into new names, such as i1, i2, i3, etc. How do you handle the case where one of the original variables was already named one of those?"

Puzzled, I answered, "err.. wouldn't those variables get translated just like all the others?"

Your dad just nodded and walked off without a word. You looked at me and said, "You passed the test."

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Maria Rodriguez writes: He accepted me as part of the family from the moment he met me, long before I was able to believe it. And he was always convinced that I was smarter and better than I thought I was. I hope I can live up to what he saw in me. He will be missed.