Pitts Jarvis - In Memoriam

In memory of Pitts Jarvis who died suddenly on October 10, 2003 in Palo Alto, California
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Monday, October 20, 2003
12:14:44 PM EDT
Newspaper notice

J. Pitts Jarvis, III

J. Pitts Jarvis, III, died suddenly of a heart attack on October 10, 2003, in Palo Alto, CA.

He was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas, on November 3, 1946, but lived in many other states with his family before he set off for college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he joined the Epsilon Theta chapter of Sigma Nu and formed many life-long friendships.

He graduated from MIT in 1969 with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and went to work for Project MAC at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. In 1975 he moved to California to study at Stanford, where he worked at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and received a master’s degree in computer engineering in 1976. He joined the new Systems Development Division of Xerox in Palo Alto, a group that was chartered to commercialize the office computing innovations of Xerox PARC, and became a member of the Star development team. He subsequently joined 3Com Corporation to work on its first Ethernet products and later worked as a computer scientist at Adobe Systems. An advocate of open source software, Jarvis maintained an Internet site for fellow programmers who needed new implementations of XEmacs for Apple Macintosh computers.

Jarvis served nearly a generation of Palo Alto soccer players and parents as a volunteer coach and referee. He was an avid fan of Stanford sports, especially baseball. Friends and family will remember him as a devoted father and as a gentle and principled individual with a fondness for good jazz, good companions and a particular view of the ocean from Cape Cod.

He is survived by his wife, Katherine Schall Jarvis; their children, Verity Jarvis of Palo Alto and Benjamin Jarvis, who recently moved to Atlanta, Georgia; his mother Marguerite Fletcher Jarvis of Tucson, Arizona; his sister Margo Burwell of Oracle, Arizona; his nephew Brooke Burwell of Tucson, Arizona; his extended family of uncles, aunts and cousins in California and Utah; and many in-law family members in New England.

Donations in his memory may be made to MIT c/o Elizabeth Garvin, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139; KZSU Sports, P.O. Box 20190, Stanford, CA 94305; KCSM Jazz at www.kcsm.org; or the Truro Conservation Trust, P.O. Box 327, North Truro, MA 02652.

Private services will be held in Arizona.

(photo is online at http://amandrai.net/%7Eegouillart/emilyimages/family/pitts.jpg

Written by lauragou . (Link to this entry)
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