Bill Hadji

Everyone who knew my dad knows of his adventurous, intellectually curious, and mischievous spirit. My mom once told me that she decided to marry him after he sketched on the back of a napkin how they could move to Mexico and live on beans and rice. Shocked, I asked "Really? What?" and she said "I knew he would never be a stick in the mud." That was quite the understatement. (Edit: I was charmed to find out recently that this occurred in the coffeeshop of the Cloverleaf Bowling Alley!)

Bill and Elaine’s sense of adventure took them all over the world, from Miami, where they met as kids and eventually married, to Mexico, then San Francisco, where they planned to make their lives together but ended up staying less than a year, to Crete, to the Caribbean island of Antigua, to Mexico (again!), Libya, Spain and eventually back home to Miami, Austin, and eventually settling in California.

Mom and Dad met in high school, and as part of the same Greek-American community in Miami, their families became close friends. Dad lost his mom very young, at 18, and my mother's family welcomed him and his sister as their own. Dad regaled us with hilarious stories about growing up together in this big meshed Greek clan, and his best friends for decades were my mom's first cousins Dean and George Vezos. Uncle Dean even hosted their wedding at his Ft. Lauderdale motel in 1965.

It wasn't one job that moved us around like that; it was Dad's constant seeking of something new and interesting to do. His childhood love of HAM radio was furthered in the US Army, where he enlisted in the 1950s to avoid being drafted so that he could choose his own field. That field, of course, was radar and radio tech, and with that background, he was able to find interesting work all over. Out of the army and back in Florida, he started his own electronics school in Fort Lauderdale, basically on a wing and a prayer and lots of loving support from Mom's family (much of it in the form of Ranch House cheeseburger platters). In Greece and Antigua, he worked in radar and tracking on the Apollo Project, including the 1969 moonwalk. His graduate studies in philosophy took us to Mexico, and then on a lark, he took an electronics job in Libya. Once back in the US, he was always doing something different and interesting, working in electronics and teaching philosophy.

My dad was the best I knew at everything. He and Mom could and did build a house from the ground up. Before you could buy an RV large enough for a family, they made one out of a 1956 Chevrolet delivery truck (the famous Silver Snail!). He loved machines and how things worked, and could resurrect even the oldest, most worn electronics and machines. He loved nothing better than to turn what someone else thought was garbage into something useful. (Worried the automatic transmission would go out in a Datsun we had in the ‘80s, he threw a chain over a tree branch, hauled the transmission out, and replaced it with a manual one.) His ideas for inventions never stopped; even when dementia began its toll, he still came up with ideas to help him overcome the limitations he faced. Oh, and he was magic; anyone who can remember being three years old around my dad knows about the mousie he kept in his pocket. That naughty mouse would always try to jump away, no matter how much you petted it and asked it not to.

My dad loved many things: children and their playful nature, traveling, his Greek-ness, being the best host you can imagine, eating and drinking and dancing and enjoying being with people. But most salient of all was the fierce and unambiguous love Dad had for his family: children, grandsons, sister, nieces and nephews, and above all, his wife of almost 56 years, Elaine. Dad’s better place was always at her side. In my dad’s eyes, nothing in the world was as beautiful as my mom. That love and the love we have for him will persist in all of us.