12/10/09

Death of a Classmate - David Philip Milnor



David Philip Milnor Passed away on November 19, 2009. Born in 1931, he grew up in San Francisco but went to high school in Wilmington, N.C. He entered the Naval Academy, graduated and accepted a commission in the Air Force in 1954. After graduating from Navigation school in Houston, Texas, in 1955, he was assigned to Germany in 1955. He studied at the Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton, Ohio, 1958-59, receiving a Masters in Electrical Engineering. After assignment to the Air Force Missile Test Center at Cape Canaveral, he flew many missions to South America, Africa, and the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans. He left the Air Force in 1963 and spent several years in graduate school, including two years at Cornell University in the field of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He returned to engineering and began work at McClellan Air Force Base in 1973. David retired from the Civil Service in 1996. He married Gloria Pantoja of San Salvador, El Salvador, on May 21, 1988, and they visited Central America several times, though their home remained in Sacramento. He had an interest in poetry most of his life, but did not try writing until 2006, when, inspired by a family member, he found all the various forms of poetry both challenging and appealing. He wrote more than 70 poems, several of which have been published, in the Rattlesnake Review and Midweek Musings Anthology of the Hart Center's Wednesday Poetry Workshop, receiving an Honorable Mention for a poem in the 2008 California Federation of Chaparral Poets, Inc., contest. David's brother Eric predeceased him in 1992, but he is survived by his wife Gloria, his younger brother Andrew and his sister-in-law Catherine, by his two beloved nieces, Kristine Milnor of New York and Erika Clark Hale in Connecticut, and his brother-in-law Jose Pantoja and wife Janet from Seattle. Memorial services will take place on December 5, 2009, at noon, at El Sendero do la Cruz, 1401 Florin Road, Sacramento. Interment will be at the Sacramento Valley National Veterans Cemetery, Dixon, Calif. He will be surely missed by family and friends, for his brilliant mind, his intense interest in the world about him and his spiritual commitment.

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