Features

Robert Purdy 1920-2005 By MARGOT SMITH

Friday September 16, 2005

Robert Purdy, 85, a World War II veteran, ex-P.O.W., hero, and activist, died in Berkeley on Sunday, Sept. 11 after a short illness. 

The son of Elinor and Harry Purdy, he was born in Wisconsin and raised in Detroit. He began work as a machinist and tool and die maker in the auto industry. He worked for the Marchant Calculator Company, became an educator at the East Bay Skills Center and Southern Illinois University, and was a manufacturing engineer for SKS Die Casting until his retirement.  

In 1942, he and his two brothers enlisted in the Army Air Corps to fight Hitler’s fascists. He was a B24 pilot in Italy, where, after 17 missions, he was shot down and captured by the Nazis who sent him by boxcar from Vicenzia, Italy to Stalagluft I in Barth, near the North Sea, where he spent 18 months. He was freed by the Russians on May 1, 1945. Much to his sorrow, his brother Harry was lost over England. 

On his return, he settled in Detroit working in the auto industry, where his daughter Laura was born. After his marriage ended, he moved to California. In 1961, he and his friend Lionel Martin, a journalist, decided to go to Cuba to support Fidel Castro’s revolution. They arrived shortly after the Bay of Pigs invasion. In Cuba for nine years, Bob became the head of a small industry where he taught the tool and die trade to Cubans, was a member of the  

National Tool and Die Nomenclature committee, working under the Minister of Industry, Che Guevara. While in Cuba, he married and had his daughter Maida.  

In 1969, he returned to California and taught the machinist trade at the East Bay Skills Center for several years. He married Margot Smith and moved with her to Illinois for two years, where he taught engineers at Southern Illinois University.  

In Berkeley, he began to build a Veri-Easy foam fiberglass plane designed by Burt Rutan, and finished it in Illinois. He and Margot flew it across the country several times. They returned to Berkeley in 1980.  

After retirement, he took up video production under the tutilege of film maker Judy Montell. His best known videos were Canada’s Single Payer Health System: A Model for Reform (introduced by the late Senator Paul Wellstone) and Democracy in the Workplace: Three Worker-Owned Businesses in Action (about the Cheeseboard, Rainbow Grocery and Inkworks). They were shown on many local PBS stations. 

He was active in the peace movement, the Berkeley Gray Panthers and Democratic Socialists of America. As a youth Bob was a member of the Communist Party and was an ardent union member. He left the communist party when Krushchev revealed the abuses by Stalin in the USSR. However, he always believed that Socialism was a way to achieve a fair and just society and continued to work for a socialist America. 

His survivors include his wife, Margot Smith of Berkeley, his daughters Laura Purdy (married to John Coleman) of Ithaca, N.Y., Maida Purdy Salinas (Alejandro Salinas) and grandchildren Olivia and Alex of Havana, Cuba, and step-children Walter (Carolina), Peter (Nancy) and Larry (Maryellen) Smith and Janet (Bob) Linney, and their children. 

He is also be missed by his brother James (Lois) Purdy of Santa Cruz and the Santa Cruz clan, his brother Alan (Jo) Purdy of San Diego, and many nieces and nephews. His family would like to thank brother Jimmy and niece Catherine Cavette, nephew John Muster, and their daughter Cassy for their support in his final days. 

A memorial service in celebration of his life will be held on Sunday, Oct. 9 at 2:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarians, 1924 Cedar St. Contributions in his memory may be made to the Berkeley Gray Panthers, 1403 Addison St. For information please call 486-8010.