Spring Break
A daugther remembers
Linda Holmstrom Keesling
Issue date: 1/23/08 Section: News
Fred Holmstrom
Born: March 31, 1927, in Salt Lake City, Utah
Died: Jan. 14, 2008, in Reno, Nev.
He is survived by his wife, Sherri Holmstrom; two daughters, Laurie McCrea of Salt Lake City and Linda Keesling of Fort Collins, Colo.; three sons, Mike, Matt and David Holmstrom of San Jose; 12 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
The son of Swedish immigrants, Fred grew up in an extremely impoverished one-parent family in Salt Lake City. Being sixth in a family of eight children made him extremely inquisitive and inventive as a child. At the age of 13, he bought and restored his first car. After that his mother let him rewire the house, dig a full basement, and build cinderblock walls under the house by hand. He went through secondary school at West High in Salt Lake City and worked in a gas station at the same time.
Fred served as a missionary in Stockholm, Sweden, from 1947 to 1949. He started college in 1949 at the University of Utah and majored in engineering but later changed to physics because he liked it so much. As a graduate student at the University of Utah, he found his first calling to become a teacher. He built a cyclotron, a radioactive particle counter, for his doctoral thesis that remains functional even now. The findings of his experiments are still cited in scientific papers written today. During his summers at the University of Utah he contracted for the Navy in California, helping to build the first Doppler radar. He graduated with a doctorate in physics in 1958.
After graduating, Fred moved his young family to San Jose, where he worked for IBM. In 1961 they moved to Northridge, where Fred could work for Rocketdyne, which built the engines for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecrafts. Physics did the calculations for structural strength and thrust. He always said engineers build things but physicists tell you whether they can fly. He also taught physics at Cal-State Northridge. His students and colleagues there encouraged him to move forward with teaching.
Born: March 31, 1927, in Salt Lake City, Utah
Died: Jan. 14, 2008, in Reno, Nev.
He is survived by his wife, Sherri Holmstrom; two daughters, Laurie McCrea of Salt Lake City and Linda Keesling of Fort Collins, Colo.; three sons, Mike, Matt and David Holmstrom of San Jose; 12 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
The son of Swedish immigrants, Fred grew up in an extremely impoverished one-parent family in Salt Lake City. Being sixth in a family of eight children made him extremely inquisitive and inventive as a child. At the age of 13, he bought and restored his first car. After that his mother let him rewire the house, dig a full basement, and build cinderblock walls under the house by hand. He went through secondary school at West High in Salt Lake City and worked in a gas station at the same time.
Fred served as a missionary in Stockholm, Sweden, from 1947 to 1949. He started college in 1949 at the University of Utah and majored in engineering but later changed to physics because he liked it so much. As a graduate student at the University of Utah, he found his first calling to become a teacher. He built a cyclotron, a radioactive particle counter, for his doctoral thesis that remains functional even now. The findings of his experiments are still cited in scientific papers written today. During his summers at the University of Utah he contracted for the Navy in California, helping to build the first Doppler radar. He graduated with a doctorate in physics in 1958.
After graduating, Fred moved his young family to San Jose, where he worked for IBM. In 1961 they moved to Northridge, where Fred could work for Rocketdyne, which built the engines for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecrafts. Physics did the calculations for structural strength and thrust. He always said engineers build things but physicists tell you whether they can fly. He also taught physics at Cal-State Northridge. His students and colleagues there encouraged him to move forward with teaching.
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