Eulogy for Leo Cirino
Eulogy for Leo Cirino
It’s really tough to tell you about the man we gather here to celebrate today. Dad was a dreamer. Dad was a visionary. Dad was an engineer, a builder, a craftsman, and a teacher. Dad shined his light upon many people, and you knew it when he listened to you, spoke to you, guided you, or even consoled you. We don’t have time to talk about everything, but let’s take a moment to remember some of his life.
Born in the wake of the great depression, he learned to rely on his family, his friends, the people he trusted, his church, and himself. While dad was a very hard worker in his own right, he didn’t believe in doing it all himself. He was always reaching out to people, some of you are here today, to figure things out, and together, make dreams real.
If he didn’t know how to do something, he didn’t wait. Instead he began researching it, talking to people, reading, watching video tapes. He joined our early rocket program in a time of fear, as Sputnik circled over our heads, with capabilities unknown. The team he joined - they didn’t know how to put satellites in space, but they were going to figure it out, and he had nothing but admiration for the great minds he felt privileged to be around.
When the internet came, he embraced it wholeheartedly. He often said that email was one of the greatest inventions of our time, being able to write to anyone anywhere in the world, for free. He wrote to everyone - engineers, journalists, scientists, and even fellow stamp collectors. He organized his thoughts in small notebooks, graph paper, and little books he made. To him, everything was waiting to be discovered, and he raced against his fading eyesight to absorb it all.
But he didn’t learn things to capture knowledge and lock it away. He offered it to everybody, eventually even becoming a certified teacher to make it his job. Dana likes to say that he lit up the room with his personality. He wanted to make sure he could offer something to everyone, from how a light worked, to the deeper questions we all face of what to do in the world or just being there when you needed someone to talk to.
I’m not going to tell you much about how he met mom - I wasn’t around for that part. But they met at Norden in the 1970s, while he was an engineer, and mom was an editor, and they remained together for the rest of his life. While dad’s mind was lost in dreams of orbiting the earth or identifying targets on unknown battlefields, Mom provided a ground for dad to return to and reminded him that unrealized dreams will only ever stay that way without coming back to this world and visiting occasionally. They fused these thoughts together for our upbringing, balancing dreaming big with being present and facing the challenges in front us.
Jenn calls him a modern Renaissance man, and I think she’s right. He had a deep love of the sea, joining two local power squadrons, first mastering navigation by the stars and later becoming a commander. He spent every hour he could up in the Thimble Islands. He founded an electric car club right here in Westport, finding like minded people, running club meetings, hosting events, and even working with the town to add solar to our train station. He called the postal system the Victorian internet, a cheap way for people to connect around the world, while taking several journeys at home, through stamps of royal observatories or ancient Chinese post offices. He even organized an event about the Philatelic Artists of Westport. Just across the street at the Historical Society, he worked to restore the Wheeler Barn, helping the people there pull together the town’s history while giving everyone a place to see our past.
Dad lived as a luminary, shining his light into dark places, never letting apathy or stagnation get in the way of building a better future. He leaves us now, with the world a better place than he found it, and I am deeply honored to call him, “Father”.