Eulogy for Charles Dennie Kidder delivered by his son Dwight Kidder, June 29, 2025
He was not a natural parent. That is NOT saying he was a bad parent, he just was never wired to the concept of parenting. I think he lived his life not expecting to have a kid in it, until at the age of thirty-seven, suddenly he did. I think he had grown up fast, and was mentally an adult way before he needed to be. So when this kid comes into his life, he treated it like a small adult, as he had no instinct for anything else. He had reasoning, he had screaming, and he always used those before he just could catch himself and let the parental instinct out.
Catie's favorite story to retell about me is me being a 5-year old idiot. Too many cartoons had convinced me that what goes up will probably not come down where I was, and I proceeded to hurl a rock up in the air, and it went squarely back down on my forehead. Now Catie, what you missed about that story, what everybody missed is what my dad did after he found me. He was assembling a rock garden at the end of the driveway, and I was just over on the side, and then I fell over. And he turned around, and found me with a bloody head and he sprinted and swooped me up and carried me all the way up that driveway and threw me in the car to take me to the ER. They thought I had knocked myself out, but I was awake for that whole run. And I remember him doing that, scared out of his wits that I had tried something crazy and he was doing everything he could to make sure that I would get out of it all right. It was maybe the first time he had let his instinct to be a father happen.
I think we had an understanding after that. Never really had to say things like I love you for years, because I knew he'd run up that hill with me in his arms if it ever happened again. But of course, I should also never try that sort of thing again. Make all kinds of new mistakes, but don't repeat them.
My father was once a ten-year old, and he once told me about the stupid things he did. A few of you in the family have heard this story, or lived through it, but this is the version he told me, and I know he's stuck enough myth into this story over the years. He happened to live on a street that that summer was getting water and sewers put in. And so there was this big trough down the side of the road. And one of his friends' parents worked for the local telephone company. It was being bought out by Bell and he had a bunch of junk equipment in his office that was going to be scrapped. So he figured, let the kids play with it, maybe they'll learn something. Well they did. They figured out how to lay that lines down in the trough where it wouldn't be seen by the sewer workers, and connect the lines into their houses, and for a couple of months they had their own private line between all their houses. At least until they showed the phone company president what they had done, and everything had to be very quietly, but very emphatically, disconnected. And that he should never try that sort of thing again.
Now unlike a lot of the stories he told, he only told me that once.1 He waited to tell me that story when I was forty, and I immediately responded with "how the hell were you not in jail?" I knew there had to be a couple dozen telecommunications laws he broke with that thing. And he just laughed, because he knew how ridiculous the enforcement of that would have been.
But that was what he was, he was never happier than when he pulled off something like that, twisting the system into knots. The achievement of a thing like that was good, but the bending of the rules of the system right up to the point of breaking but not crossing that line, that was what made it great. Even in these last years, he was trying to get away with it, put one over on the world, get back from the facility to the house, or slide his money to us to get out of inheritance taxes. He was the orneriest man you've ever met.
That guy from the phone company also gave him a great idea. That idea to let the kids play with it, maybe they'll learn something. There's a bunch of you who got that opportunity from him. How many of you out there got your first computer from him? I may have gotten most of the attention from him, but he gave a bunch of future geeks and techs their start. That was a way he learned to be a parent, by being a mentor. There's a few things in this world that exist because he gave someone the opportunity to learn from something he gave them.
Catie, when you were just coming up to the house the first couple times, do you remember coming downstairs following him and me? You were playing with crayons upstairs and I tried to show you light green versus dark green? And you came down and after a couple of minutes you came in where we were talking about you, and you said "light green" and then ran out of the room? We kept talking, and about ten minutes later, we walked out and saw what you meant. My dad's shelves in the basement are full of music, and one of the prize items he collected was the Great Men of Music vinyl sets. And on the ground, pulled out from the shelf and spilled out, was the Vivaldi album and its light green cover.
Now seeing that, I'm...terrified. If I had done that at her age I'd have been chased out of that basement with bloodthirsty screams. I'm thinking the child is dead already, just doesn't know it yet. And I turn with this horrified face, and he's laughing. He wasn't angry, he didn't scream, he was amazed she could reach that shelf, and pick out the light green one. Seventy years in, and he was finally getting the parental instincts right. That's how I knew you would always be okay with him, Catie. He may not have always kept his temper with you or with us, but you were a reason for him to try to be better.
He wasn't perfect, he yelled, he sulked, he tried to get one over whenever he could. But he also loved us all, even if he didn't quite know how to demonstrate it sometimes, or he let his anger flare up. Some of my best actions as stepfather and husband have just been taking what he did and reversing it. But he also taught me all the skills I use to be a success at my two jobs2, and he gave many kids the chance to learn skills they still use as adults.
As I said to many of you, if you want to honor his memory, teach someone to use some technology that they'll never learn in school. I think he'd appreciate that, and he'd appreciate the bending of world that will follow.3
I didn’t his most public-facing accomplishment in the eulogy: one of his company’s products, a 1985 memory board, which processed the signals received at Jet Propulsion Labs from the two Voyager probes. He pulled the wires and cables through the ductwork to connect the board into the system, and it was working well into the 2010s, as it wasn’t like you needed faster processing for the signal. This led to a lifelong interest in the probes, with a large set of slides of each planetary visit in our basement. At least once, Voyager fulfilled the role of the more successful sibling as he mentioned it after I said something about our software being used to test a satellite. If I had thought of it, I would have slipped the current telemetry readings into the casket, after all, I didn’t think they’d outlast him.
After the service we had a meal/wake at my his house: I cracked my last 2012 bottle of red wine from Kidder Family Wineries of Lodi, California, which is now gone, and we split the bottle over 18 guests, mostly of the Kidder line, for a final toast, which I delivered:
“The first known case of the name Kidder is in a cemetery in Oxfordshire, dated 1308 to Simon Kidder-at-Hole4. Hole in this case refers to a cave system in the area that people used as housing. So today we see off Dennie Kidder, another member of that proud lineage. So let’s drink to my dad, and the long line of at-Holes of which we are part.”
I have always believed that to be significant. There are lots of stories of his life he told repeatedly, or stories I heard from multiple people. But this was something he never brought up to me before or again after that. In the run-up to the funeral, I learned this was somewhat of a known thing among the older relatives, where it had become flexible in detail, taking place at various ages, moving between North Carolina and Florida, and with the reaction of the president ranging from shutting it down to giving him a switchboard. My chance to figure out the whole truth of it is gone, but it’s a hell of a story.
I know how to spot a system beginning to fail, and I know how to spot a business beginning to fail. If you can sense a system falling apart, you can get out of the blast, or prepare for what is to come. While he didn’t completely understand what NAQT was, he did know that the playbook I used to beat our competitors for our first 25 years was a straight copy of what he used to beat his competitors in the 1980s.
While several of the people there and online have already done this, I was asked to give some non-technical guests a charity they could target. After some jogging of memory, I recommended Matt’s Maker Space, which was founded by the family of another Ansys employee, and would be fitting. But it will probably be easier and more meaningful for you to show someone what you know yourself.
A completely true statement verified by two relatives from separate visits.