EnolaGaia's Necrolog entry is in the current issue of the FT (429). For those who don't read the mag, this is my obit for him.
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Necrolog – Randy Whitaker
The term Renaissance man is hugely overused, but in the case of Dr Randall Whitaker it can be used with absolute justification. An engineer, draftsman, professional musician, television cameraman, editor and lecturer, Randy was a polyglot polymath with an astounding breadth, depth and scope of knowledge from the mundane to the bizarre – indeed there seemed to be nothing that he knew nothing about.
Born in 1951 in Bristol, VA, he was a straight A student at school, earning a College Scholarship and spent his late teens and twenties in a variety of roles whilst studying, a mixture of the technical and artistic, or whilst a draftsman both. According to his friend Tom Rotenberry he was also a very talented musician playing keyboards with a number of bands. He was never idle: his academic career led him to Sweden in the late 1980s, where for a number of years he worked first as a Systems Analyst at The Swedish Agency for Administrative Development and eventually became an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of Umeå . On his return to the US, he became a technical and development consultant for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at, of all places Wright-Patterson AFB (yes, of course I asked him, and no, he didn’t) also working with Northrop Grumman. His CV read like something from Tom Clancy.
In 2004 he joined the then young and fresh-faced Fortean Times Message Board with the username EnolaGaia – this in itself was a pleasing pun, which later transpired to have a deeper significance than any of us hitherto realised (his father had been involved with the Manhattan Project). It soon became clear that he was an absolute goldmine of knowledge: what marked Randy out more than anything was his ability to relate context to anecdote to evidence, his career in academia having given him a rigid sense of discipline particularly in relation to sources and chain of evidence. This and his comprehensive technical experience marked him out as a potential moderator which he happily became in August 2018, quickly becoming an invaluable member of the team playing an integral part in our migration to the CFI later that year and running much of the technical side of our admin (perhaps surprisingly – actually, no, not surprising – he was also a moderator on the truckers’ site the Toyota Tacoma Forum, performing the same functions.)
Perhaps his greatest Wild Talent was his ability to find things. According to Tom Rotenberry:
“He was known to show up at a gathering of friends where everyone had been searching in tall weeds for hours trying to find a lost item of value and he would walk straight to it and pick it up. He found my high school class ring on eBay. It had been lost for 50 years.”
On the board, this talent manifested as finding citations: his skill was unparalleled and even a cursory glance at the forums today will turn up myriad examples of requests from others for lost evidence followed in short order by an immaculately composed reference from EnolaGaia, usually delivered not with a triumphant “found it!” post but rather with a rather understated “Is this what you were maybe looking for?” manner. Of all the denizens of the fortean net, he was always the most Jeevesian.
Towards the end of 2022 he had been admitted to hospital, in his own, entirely characteristic words “I realised I was compromised”, but was nonetheless shocked to learn that he had suffered multiple heart attacks within one day. Two weeks of in-patient treatment followed, returning to his Ohio home for Christmas where he sadly suffered a relapse over New Year, and passed away. The subsequent outpouring of shock and condolence on the Forteana Forums is testament to his popularity, his kindness, his wisdom and his knowledge. And on a personal level, though we never met in person, I will deeply miss a very good friend and colleague. Farewell, EnolaGaia: Finder of Lost Things.
Dr Randall D Whitaker, MSc, Phd, born October 1951, died Jan 1st 2023 aged 71.
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