From
Bill Deibel, Õ55 Course II wdeibel@alum.mit.edu
(Seattle)
*******************
Here is
the Obituary that the MIT Alumni Association sent to
me................
Ed Margulies
Bobbi
Renae Swan
|
Death Date |
20181226 |
|
Notification Date |
20190114 |
|
Preferred Mail Name |
Ms Bobbi R. Swan '52 |
|
Year of last known address |
2011 |
|
Last Known Home Address |
17757 Edloytom Way |
|
Last Known Business Address |
RETIRED President |
Obituary (Source: Dignitymemorial.com (no
pub.
date given))
Bobbi Renae Swan 1930-2018 It is increasingly acceptable in
this era of social media to use the pronoun "they" to identify
a person. For Facebook users, it is largely a matter of
convenience. In the case of Bobbi Renae Swan, it might be
justifiable for matters of accuracy, for her life transitioned
not only from male to female but also through countless roles,
many cloaked in professional and personal secrecy essential
for a groundbreaking career that helped launch what today is a
multibillion-dollar drone industry. Bobbi died Dec. 26, 2018,
in Novi, Mich., of complications from pneumonia. She was 88.
During this life, some knew Bobbi as a son, a husband, a
father, an uncle, and a grandparent. In professional life,
some knew her as a driven, award-winning engineer who earned
the nickname "Mr. Drone" for pioneering, top-secret work
during the Vietnam war, the Yom Kippur War, and tenuous times
in Iraq. In 1978 some knew her at the bottom of a battle with
alcoholism that starte! d her on 40 years of sobriety and
recovery. Later, some knew her in the deeply closeted world of
the transvestite lifestyle. And for the past 16 years some
knew her officially and openly as Bobbi Swan, after gender
reassignment surgery at age 72. "I think people talk in
either/or terms, right? Before transition and after," Bobbi
said to the authors of "To Survive on This Shore," a 2018 book
that tells the stories of older transgender and gender variant
people. "But to me, it's really development. I'm proud of both
lives. I'm proud of both mes, if you see what I'm saying. And
I feel it has been a remarkable thing to have happened to a
person." Bobbi was born in 1930 as Robert Rowland
Schwanhausser in Buffalo, N.Y. He was the second son to Edwin
J. and Helen R. Schwanhausser, 10 years younger than his
brother, George. As a teenager and an Eagle Scout, "Bob" was
fascinated with flight. That set him on a path to the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's aeronautical
engineeri! ng program, where he joined the Theta Delta Chi
fraternity, ed! ited and managed the Voo Doo humor magazine,
and was commissioned as a lieutenant through the Air Force
ROTC program. Upon graduation in 1952, he was assigned to work
on a Q-2 Firebee target drone project in New Mexico. That
assignment initiated a decades-long relationship with Ryan
Aeronautical Co. of San Diego, which was a leader in the
development of drones. It was the time of the Cold War and the
Cuban missile crisis, when Russia shot down and captured U-2
pilot Gary Powers and was building missile bases in Cuba, just
miles from the United States. On the face of it, the need was
obvious. The military needed to take surveillance photographs
without risking the lives of pilots. But this was a time when
the pilots' "air jockey" culture resisted the idea of
pilotless vehicles, and the Defense Department shut doors on
experimental programs time and again. It was against this
backdrop that Bob was put in charge of a nine-person team at a
top-secret "skunk works" in a small Sa! n Diego warehouse to
develop a reconnaissance drone in 1960. Together, Bob, his
teams, and Ryan overcame engineering setbacks and bureaucratic
resistance to develop 36 types of drones and employ 2,500. The
company's success translated into steady promotions, with Bob
rising to executive vice president of international programs.
In 1971, the American Institute of Aeronautics and
Astronautics honored Bob with its Outstanding Contribution to
Aerospace award. The Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems
gave him its Pioneer award in 1984. He also became a central
protagonist in "Lightning Bugs and Other Reconnaissance
Drones: The Can-Do Story of Ryan's Unmanned `Spy Planes'" by
William Wagner, and "Fireflies and other UAVs" by William
Wagner and William P. Sloan. "My work on his team at Ryan
pioneering the use of unmanned vehicles for the Air Force was
a highlight of my career," longtime friend and associate Gene
Timmons wrote in a condolence note. "The leadership,
innovation an! d drive your father gave to the success of the
drone operations during ! the Vietnam era certainly set the
stage for the widespread use of these vehicles in our military
operations today." Bob's alcoholism ended this heady chapter,
however. He was forced out at what was then known as Teledyne
Ryan in 1974, tried to start a company with a longtime friend
and mentor, then took a job in 1977 with All American
Engineering in Wilmington, DE. In 1978, he was divorced from
Mary Lea Hunter, his wife of 25 years and the mother of his
two sons. He nearly died of an overdose of alcohol and
lithium. Hitting bottom started Bob on the road to sobriety
and to resurrecting his career. In 1979, he married Beverly
Bohn Allemann, whom he had met in rehab. He rejoined Teledyne
Ryan in San Diego (1979-1982), was promoted to Teledyne Brown
Engineering in Huntsville, Ala. (1982-1983), and was appointed
president of Teledyne CAE in Toledo, Ohio, in 1983. Under his
leadership, CAE's profitability strengthened as it put one
engine into full development and two into full-! scale
development contracts, and it shed production costs by opening
a manufacturing plant in Gainesville, Ga., that generated $45
million in sales. In 1987, Ohio Citizens Bank appointed him to
its board, and the National Management Association gave him
its Gold Knight Management award. It was while he was living
alone in Delaware, though, that another secretive side of
Bob's life began taking shape. He delved into cross-dressing
and wrote for publications in this guarded world. His second
marriage ended when Allemann discovered his secret. Following
his presidency at CAE, Bob moved to Grand Forks, N.D., and
served as vice president and general manager of Sioux
Manufacturing Corp. Bob briefly married a third wife who owned
a business that catered to cross-dressers, and he retired to
live in Clinton Township, a suburb of Detroit. Retired and
unmarried, Bob weighed what to do next. He decided to act on
long-closeted feelings that he was a woman trapped in a man's
body. After ! three years of hormone therapy and living as a
woman, at the age of 72 ! he flew to Thailand for gender
reassignment surgery in 2003. When a San Diego Union-Tribune
reporter asked in 2007 why she had not taken this step
earlier, Bobbi said, "Priorities. My priorities were airplanes
and getting established in the airplane business. Obviously,
that was a man's business." In a 2009 column in TG Forum,
Bobbi painted a picture of continual transition into life as a
woman. She wrote about dressing with femininity "as my mother
would have insisted in her day and times," developing
friendships with a circle of women friends, welcoming the
curiosity of doctors and nurses, and of coming out to his
cousin Audrey Peters, a longtime actress in soap operas "Love
of Life" and "Guiding Light." "We had not seen each other for
years, and Audrey first asked if I was in the Witness
Protection Program," Bobbi wrote. "She knew a lot of my
background and spooky travel." Upon learning of Bobbi's death,
Peters spoke of her as being a "little sister." In an
interview for! "To Survive on This Shore," Bobbi said, "I'm
grateful. You can't just become a woman with a knife or a pill
or anything like that. It takes a whole combination in a
sequence, in a formation. You've got this time span, it's a
learning experience, it's a little bit of everything."
Bobbi is survived by her two sons in California, Robert H.
(and Sherryl) Schwanhausser of Escondido and Mark P. (and
Karen) Schwanhausser of Pleasanton, five grandchildren, his
cousin Audrey Peters of Los Angeles, and nephew Richard (and
Carolyn) Schwanhausser of Roanoke, Va. Bobbi requested that
her cremains be buried at her parent's plot at Fairview
Cemetery in Westfield, N.J., with "Robert 1930-2018" added to
the headstone bearing the first names of his parents, brother,
and three extended family members.
In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to an
organization that supports transgender rights, such as
National Center for Transgender Equality, GLAD, or Transgender
Legal Defense & Education Fund. ARTICLE LINKS "To Survive
on This Shore" in New York Times, 2018: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/lens/older-transgender-people.html San
Diego
Union-Tribune, 2007: http://legacy.sandiegouniontribune.com/uniontrib/20070617/news_mz1c17gender.html TG
Forum https://tgforum.com/wordpress/whatever-happened-to-bobbi-swan/ National
Center
for Transgender Equality https://transequality.org/ GLAD https://www.glad.org/ Transgender
Legal
Defense & Education Fund http://www.transgenderlegal.org/