| Graduation Year | Class of 1943 |
| Date of Passing | (unknown) |
| About | June 3, 2016 BOURNE Bourne High School Class of '43 loses a fine mind. Richard F. “Dick” Daly, a member of the Bourne High School Class of 1943, recently died after an engineering career at Raytheon, summers at Sagamore Beach, and a life well lived. When Dudley and Vivian Jensen throw their annual mid-August party/reunion at their Marsh view home above Back River to celebrate the Bourne High School Class of 1943, one smiling and pleasant face will not be there. Richard F. “Dick” Daly died last month. The retired Raytheon engineer -- who went ultimately to Bates College after catching the end of World War II in Japan and after he had left BHS as a junior to finish high school with Rhode Island Jesuits -- was an accomplished man. Soft spoken and engaging, Daly came to represent the Class of ’43 in more ways than can be imagined. Put simply, his engineer’s mind was always working. Especially if he could invent a device that would help the handicapped among us get into the ocean. His was a life lived well. Daley grew up in Buzzards Bay, across Bourne’s Pond from classmate Richard “Ricky” Eldridge, who retired as a Navy captain and was the skipper who fished Alan Sheppard’s space module out of the Atlantic. Both men were in military uniform and overseas before they donned a high school graduation robe. They are gone now. On a rainy Memorial Day afternoon, Dudley Jensen recalled his last encounter with Daly. It was during Eldridge’s burial service at Massachusetts National Cemetery on Joint Base Cape Cod. Now, Jensen said, there are but five remaining 1943 BHS grads out of a class of 43 members. Daly was not filled with the nostalgic "Where have the years gone?" sentiment. Approachable and always smiling, he seemed a man of all seasons late into his life. He enjoyed most, perhaps, the inter-generational get-togethers each August on Jensen’s deck. Talking about interesting things. Celebrating life. And summer. No thoughts about autumn. “You’d never realize in casual conversation just how brilliant Dick Daly was,” Jensen said. “His mind was always working. On some invention that was unfolding, something he thought would help us. It’s the way he was in many respects. “In later years, when he was down at his cottage in Sagamore Beach, we’d interact and remember the old times, especially when one of us needed a lift to the doctor,” Jensen said. Daly, during his career and later, lived elsewhere. But from May until November, Sagamore was his favorite place. “Flowers in the spring,” he noted in a reunion update. “Herbs and tomatoes in the fall; a little golf. A lot of reading. And a swim, - well, a dip – most every day.” Daley also recalled his time in a BHS basketball uniform. It was 1942. There was a four-day weekend trip to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket with three games. The Bourne team stayed in island players’ homes and dated the hometown cheerleaders. Still in uniform and after Japan, Daly sailed with a Navy carrier task force to Tsingtao in northern China “to discourage Mao from taking that city. He did so after we left.” Then it was on to Shanghai and Hong Kong. Then the Pacific islands. Then home in August 1946. MIT was somewhat unsure about Daly as a post-war student. Bates was not. Off to Maine he went. Daly was of the generation that did not talk about war and its aftermath, its let-down, and its impact on those who fought and returned home to reclaim their lives as quickly as possible. When his Navy ship was in the Inland Basin at Hiroshima, Daly and his shipmates spotted an abandoned torpedo factory among waterfront buildings. They had baskets installed and organized basketball games, perhaps the very first in Japanese history. At Raytheon, Daly directed all the firm’s Air Traffic Control Systems Programs. This took him across the world, including Russia. When he retired in 1992, he worked as president of small firm developing a system called “Personnel Rapid Transit.” It was an $80 million program full of new technology far ahead of its time; it is still on the shelf. Daly’s daughter Pam lives in Charlestown. “My father was a progressive thinker,” she noted in a May 22 letter to Jensen. “His mind was flexible and his reasoning broad and creative. He didn’t get stuck in a belief system that would discourage him from others. He worked hard to find the goodness in everyone, even the most trying of people. And he could delight in the most ordinary of things.” Dick Daley was always a reader. He came to running at age 45. “I began to feel old and tired and started jogging at night to ease the day’s problems and build up endurance. It was the beginning of a 20-year endurance.” In the end, he figured, he ran 15,000 miles. |
