Quiet and reserved, yet polite and welcoming.
While I’m at it, I might as well throw in intelligent but not pretentious. And, perhaps most of all, Dick Baertsch was a very giving person.
A Minnesota native and long-time Glenville resident, Baertsch passed away suddenly in February at the age of 87. His family and friends will say goodbye at a memorial service scheduled for Sunday at 2:30 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Society at 1221 Wendall Ave. in Schenectady,
I knew him as a tennis player and as president of the Schenectady County Tennis Association throughout much of the 1970s and ’80s. His wife at the time, Diane, was one of the best women players in the area, and while you wouldn’t have been able to say that about Dick, he was a solid player who continued to love the game and was out on the court at Sportime/Schenectady just a few days before his sudden passing on Feb. 6.
More importantly, when you’re talking about the kind of man he was, Baertsch was still volunteering at Habitat for Humanity up until two days before he died. He had been working with the group for more than 20 years now, and his commitment and contribution were quite substantial.
“He was a compassionate man who wanted to help these families live better lives, and he would always go the extra mile to make sure things were perfect,” said Madelyn Thorne, the former executive director of Schenectady’s Habitat for Humanity. “He was a very kind person and the families he helped absolutely loved him.”
Baertsch wasn’t the kind of volunteer that might show up once or twice a week to help out. He was what the group called a house leader, and once oversaw the completion of four houses in a single year.
“He had an amazing encyclopedic knowledge of every building project he had been involved in,” said Thorne. “He knew where the water lines were, he knew all about the heating system. I was the executive director so I showed up, to put it bluntly, for the photo-ops. Dick was right there from the start until the closing, and sometimes he would show up two weeks later with a lawn mower to give to the new owners. He had such empathy for people. He was a great guy.”
Bernie Witkowski, who like Baertsch worked for the General Electric Company, was also involved in Habitat for Humanity and was well aware of Dick’s passion for helping others.
“I started volunteering after I retired, and there were a lot of guys who would bring their own tools and stuff, but Dick had an old beat-up Honda with a trailer, and he’d show up with tools, blue prints and sometimes an old lawnmower to make sure the lawn was being mowed while we were building the home,” said Witkowski. “I volunteered on Wednesday and Saturdays, but Dick was the most dedicated volunteer we ever had, sometimes showing up seven days a week. He really put his heart and soul into it.”
Building homes and playing tennis weren’t Baertsch’s only passions.
“I’d be wiped out after working all day, and he would say how he’s got to get ready to play tennis that night, or that maybe he was going skiing the next day,” remembered Witkowski. “He had a season’s pass to Bromley and was still skiing quite a bit. There wasn’t anything that seemed to slow him down.”
There are some men and women out there who can probably match Baertsch’s urge to volunteer and help others. It is a wonderful thing that such people exist and the world is a better place because of them. But the truly amazing thing about Dick Baertsch and his limitless capacity to help others is that his story also has a tragic side. Despite experiencing the most heart-breaking loss any parent can have — the death of a child — Baertsch responded not by sinking into the depths of despair, but by living a life dedicated to serving others.
In January of 1985, 9-year-old Laura Baertsch, a fourth-grader at Pashley Elementary School in the Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake District, was skating on Lake George with her family when she broke through the ice and drowned. I was one of the hundreds of mourners who attended the calling hours the night before her funeral. It was nearly unbearable, and I can’t fathom how someone can regroup, lift themselves up and begin serving others after experiencing that kind of grief.
“I never heard him mention it except for one time when we got some news that some other person had lost a child,” remembered Thorne, who didn’t know Baertsch until the late 1990s. “Dick just turned to me and said, ‘It changes you.’ As giving as he was, he was such a private person. For him to say something about it surprised me.”
Baertsch was born in 1937 on a dairy farm in rural Minnesota, was an excellent student at North Branch High School, and eventually got his PhD in electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota. He came to the Schenectady area to work for the GE Research Lab in 1964 and was awarded 25 patents while also publishing 40 technical papers. He and Diane also had another daughter and a son, and included in all the tennis, skiing and various other outdoor activities that went with being a part of the family, Dick ran two New York City Marathons.
Although his first marriage failed and Diane moved to California before passing away in 2001 at the age of 62, Baertsch reclaimed some happiness in his life. He married again, welcoming his second wife, Mariko, and her son into his Berkeley Road home in Glenville, and he became a member of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Schenectady, serving for several years as the chair of the church’s Investments Advisory Committee.
So, despite the grief and difficult times and now Dick’s sudden passing, this story does have a happy ending. He was playing tennis, skiing and enjoying his family and friends right up to the end. For that we can be grateful, and feel good about celebrating a life that was indeed, very well lived.