David Vogt's tribute to his Father
Erich Vogt --> Personal Memories of Erich Vogt --> here
Thank you all for being here today for this celebration of an exceptionally unique, brilliant, and loving man. My siblings Susan, Lisa, Jon and Robert have honoured me with sharing a few words on their behalf.
Our father would have been the first person to agree that he had a wonderfully fortunate life. This isn’t to say that he was lucky, although he would agree with that as well. It is more that wonderful fortune was something that he very purposefully pursued in life. My thoughts today will address this facet of his nature.
Our father was fiercely proud of his prairie immigrant origin. He considered it his greatest blessing. As with his beloved tomatoes, he believed in fertile soil and good seed stock, both of which were abundant in tiny Steinbach, Manitoba. His sense of the natural and cultural inspiration available in his home village verged on the magical.
In his diaries, I found a long letter he wrote to himself on the occasion of his sixteenth birthday, right at the end of WWII, where he assessed his life progress so far and admonished himself to work even harder. In this letter he set a remarkably simple formula for the rest of his life: to be driven by wonder. Specifically the wonder within nature, music and poetry.
He nourished his wonder in nature by coming to BC and embarking on countless mountain hikes, driving holidays in the Rockies, and excursions in the rainforests and beaches of Tofino. He nourished his wonder in music by becoming an expert on the lives and works of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bach and others. And he nourished his wonder in poetry within the mathematics, symmetry and abstractions of nuclear physics.
That focus on wonder almost certainly brought him his first overwhelming fortune in life: our mother. Why else would a refined girl from River Heights in Winnipeg agree to go out with a country boy? They shared a love of intellect, culture, travel and children. It was a fortuitous match.
Our mother was also our father's ticket out. He knew his world was beyond Manitoba, and knew he would need our mother's refinement and partnership to get where he wanted to go. My elder sisters were born in Princeton, NJ, I was born in Birmingham, England, and my younger brothers were born in Deep River, Ontario, all before we eventually came to Vancouver. As children we couldn’t realize how unusually cosmopolitan our lives were with international visitors, knights, ladies, and laureates being regular visitors to our home.
For such an exuberant and extroverted individual, our father was also an intensely rational and private man. And yet he was also capable of acts of staggering endearment. Just one example, which he did every morning at precisely 7:00 am outside my bedroom door, was to shout at the top of his lungs, "Wake up, you lazy bugger!" It brings tears to my eyes even now...
One day, when I was an undergraduate, and he was a UBC Vice President, he happened to cycle by in his characteristically slightly-rumpled attire, whistling the signature tune from Don Giovanni. He didn’t notice me, and the classmate I was walking with, who didn't know him, spontaneously commented, "There goes a happy janitor!" He was indeed an innately happy and good-natured man.
A defining example of his unique humour from this same period was when he wanted to take a large group of visiting Chinese dignitaries on his favourite hike to Garibaldi Lake. Solely for this event, he took the time out from his already hectic schedule to get a bus driver’s license, driving them all to Whistler entirely for the delight of demonstrating to his amazed communist visitors that Canada was a worker’s paradise, where a university vice president could also be a bus driver, and vice versa.
One of our father’s favourite movies was a 1998 Danish film called, "The Celebration", where a family gathers to honour their patriarch's birthday and the entire event implodes as the eldest son reveals the patriarch's chronic abuses. Such dark human comedy appealed to the rich, low-German part of our father’s humour.
I can't offer similar revelations at this celebration of our patriarch. He loved us immensely. However, he did spend even more time with his other beloved family at TRIUMF. Anyone who knows Erich will remember his scathing opinions of politicians, bureaucrats, etc., but I never heard him utter a single unkind word about any member of his TRIUMF and Physics family. There are so many of you here - he loved you well.
And he nurtured other families through the Vancouver Institute, Science Council, Science World, the Vancouver Roundtable and organizations around the globe. While he was not religious in any way, he seemed to subscribe to the Jewish theory of creation, where order in the Universe wasn’t something to be discovered so much as created through sheer force of will and personal energy. Innumerable people and projects have benefited from the sheer productive force of his attention.
Perhaps his greatest love beyond our family was teaching first year physics. He invested enormous creativity in courting the wonder of young scientists; that same wonder that propelled him. He taught his last class only a few short years ago when he was 80. He said he wanted to quit while he still had the best teacher ratings in the department! Perhaps it wasn’t a fair contest: how many other physics teachers could say that they’d known and worked with the legends of their field, including Einstein, Bohr and Dirac?
Yes, our father was competitive about everything. In the last years of his life, while doing the research for his family history and memoir, he said often that he aimed to live longer than his own father, who died at 89.
Well, he lost that one, but he won the battle of achieving a wonderfully fortunate life. He lived large and he loved large. If knowledge were money he would have been one of the wealthiest humans to have ever lived. We his children and grandchildren are wealthy and fortunate in turn.
First Nations peoples believed that when people die they become stars, so that we can always look up to them. There is a rare, dazzling and very colourful new star in our human firmament tonight.
Thank you.
