Few of us are allowed to have a REALLY good friend who is so close that you can draft a book together without killing each other. I was so blessed with Charlie Barringer. There were times when I did pick up the odd Belgian Block with the intent to do bodily harm to Charlie for his obstinacy but, in the end, we worked things out.
Charlie was a sure and certain backstop to my impetuous musings on Zeiss lore. Now, he is gone, and so poor Simon Worseley is going to have to step up to keep me in line. Yes, Charlie and I disagreed on a lot of points. As these got resolved, he was more often right than wrong, though, well, I held my own on some points.
I am very surprised at how upset I am by his death. I know that Charlie is now seated at a table with Heinz Küppenbender and Hubert Nerwin and Ernst Wandersleb and Hans Sauer, all of them with a stein of good Belgian beer in front of them and talking about all the questions Charlie took to his grave. Now he has the answers. The rest of us will have to wait a while! But I feel a gap in my life and a real sadness.
I will have to make some phone calls over the next several days to folks without 'Net access who knew Charlie to tell them of his passing. This will be a sad business, as two of them held Charlie in the highest regard.
Charlie deserves a grand obituary, but I feel too sad at the moment to do the task justice. He was a giant of a man and a giant of a scholar. He was pig-headed and obstinant and often wrong. But he always threw himself into a project of enquiry and he always applied that wonderful and febrile intellect to the issue at hand. He possessed a scholar's mind and a scholar's approach to questions presented to him. It might take him ten years to get back to you once you asked him a question, but he would get back to you, and generally with more information than was necessary. That was Charlie in a nutshell.
I hope I am wrong in the saying of this, but I doubt that we shall meet his like again in our lifetimes. He was an ace in so many regards.
Yes, I once had a friend .... Marc msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir! --- Rollei List - Post to rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx - Subscribe at rollei_list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'subscribe' in the subject field OR by logging into www.freelists.org - Unsubscribe at rollei_list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the subject field OR by logging into www.freelists.org - Online, searchable archives are available at //www.freelists.org/archives/rollei_list
