bigbananaslug

One of my best friends, in fact a man who in many ways was a surrogate father to me, passed away last night after a two year battle with his last enemy, cancer.

"I am not really scared, Walter," Nels Tyring said to me this summer, when I visited him for the last time. "This is just the next adventure. It is something I have to do."

Nels Tyring was a great man. He was a modern day Viking, a larger than life character who was so full of life that it is difficult to imagine him gone.

He served in Korea, where he met and eluded Mr. Death successfully at Chosin Reservoir. "I'm not afraid of death," he said. "Every day since Korea has been a bonus day." For years, when he spoke of it, he could only cry.

Once a Marine, always a Marine...Nels epitomized the traits of a successful Marine-- honesty, bravery, intelligence, organization and determination. In the many years I've known him, he let nothing stop him from doing what he wanted to do, whether it was to bicycle across Wisconsin for his 65th birthday, or sail as supercargo on the Beagle for his 70th, or to advance, unafraid, across the divide that separates the living from the dead.

Nels was for many years the conscience of ISA, the International Society of Automation, where he served as both a District and a Department Vice President. With his friends, who both preceded him in death, Ray Molloy and John McCamey, he successfully created a publications department for ISA that continues to be one of the best sources of information in the field of automation and controls.

Nels also was commonly considered to be the father of the profession of control system integration, and was one of the founders of the Control System Integrators Association, CSIA. It isn't every day that you get to be the founder of an entire profession. Nels was proud of that, and proud of the system integration business he has left in his daughter Linda's capable hands.

Nels was married to Joan for over 50 tumultuous but loving years, and is survived by Joan, his daughters and a whole passel of grandkids.

I'm running out of ways to say this. Nels was a mentor, a friend, and a terrific human being.

May God receive him with open arms.