Jack Inslee, an electrical engineer, was interested in everything from geology to gardening, building sets for plays and writing poetry.
Inslee died of cancer on Father’s Day, June 19, at age 81.
There will be no service.
After college, he worked for the RCA research labs in Prince ton, N.J.
He was on the NBC research team that developed the first television sets, said his friend and brother-in-law, Harold Bowen of Jefferson County.
Inslee moved to Colorado and decided to go into sales of cleaning products.
“Of all his many talents, sales was not one of them,” said his wife, Dori Marx.
He worked as a systems analyst for Storage Technology at Broomfield.
“He was a genius and delved into whatever interested him to the nth degree,” Bowen said. “But he was totally unpretentious.”
Always inquisitive, Inslee was 5 years old when he completely took apart a toilet in a New York City hotel. His parents had been out for the evening, and his father insisted he put the toilet back together. He did.
Inslee was involved for 20 years with amateur theater when he and his wife attended Ascension Episcopal Church. He built and designed the sets and acted.
“He couldn’t carry a tune, but he sang anyway,” said his wife.
The Inslees got interested in the Eastern Plains “because I’m from Nebraska,” his wife said.
She wanted to find people interested in her paintings of the Plains. That led to a 20-year involvement with the town of Limon and its annual Limon Heritage Days. He was the barker, announcing the various events.
“He liked everything and had a childlike spirit” about life and learning, his wife said.
After the Inslees began attending North Presbyterian Church, Inslee taught English as a second language to Latinos and often helped with repairs at the church.
Inslee was an amateur photographer, played in a Balinese percussion group and wrote poetry, said his daughter, Lucile Williams of Aurora.
Even in his last days, he was studying geology “because he was interested in learning all kinds of things,” said his wife.
John A. Inslee was born on Aug. 21, 1929, in La Paz, Bolivia, where his American-born father, Joseph Inslee, was a mining engineer.
He went to boarding schools in Chile and New Hampshire.
He and his first wife, Elinor Pastore, had four children. They divorced, and in August 1974, he married Dori (Doris) Marx, an artist and chemist.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Yale University in Connecticut and a masters in the same field at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by two other daughters: Mary Ann Facente of Baltimore and Catherine Inslee of Redwood, Calif., and a son, Joseph Inslee of Lancaster, Pa.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
