Ralph Olsen
Ralph Andrew Olsen passed away at his home in Santa Barbara on April 14th.
He was born on January 31, 1931 in Cleveland, Ohio, to Norwegian-born parents, Andreas Elias Olsen (second son of Ole Solvaag) and Camilla Hansen Olsen. One of five children, he was the only brother to four sisters: Eleanor, Marion, Janet, and Marguerite. Although the family spoke English at home, Ralph grew up in a community of Norwegian aunts and uncles, and had fond memories of yulekake, krumkake, butter cookies, and the annual feast of lutefisk, which he recalled his father cutting up with a carpenter saw and soaking in lye.
Andreas was a freighter captain on the Great Lakes, and worked long 9-month shifts away from the family until the waters froze in winter. As the boat’s captain, Andreas was permitted each year to invite his family aboard for one week, and as a boy Ralph would spend those trips parked in the Pilot House watching the crew.
Ralph was a promising high school student and active in the Boy Scouts, attaining the rank of Eagle Scout. The University of Michigan was one of the few universities with a program in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, and Ralph began his studies there in 1949. During the summers he returned home to Cleveland to work at the American Ship Building Company as a draftsman.
On a fateful blind date his junior year, during a picnic with friends in the Arboretum near campus, Ralph met a freshman from Kansas named Barbara Scott. He described their meeting as “an instant match,” and Barbara completed her studies a year early so they could marry in 1953. Last August, Ralph and Barbara celebrated 70 years of marriage.
Following graduation, Ralph enrolled in the US Navy. He and Barbara moved first to Key West, where he served as an Engineering Officer on a destroyer escort, the USS Saufley EDDE 465. When the ship was dry-docked for substantial repairs, they were restationed to Charleston, SC, where their first child Karen was born in July 1954. After his discharge from the Navy, Ralph took a position at Reed Research handling classified defense contracts. He and Barbara moved to Washington DC, where their son Eric was born in 1956.
With two small children, they wanted to be closer to their families in the Midwest, and moved once more, this time to Detroit, MI, which had bottomless demand for engineers. Ralph worked initially at Chrysler on the Redstone Missile project, but ultimately found his career home at Ford Motor Company. He worked on the F-100 and now-classic 1966 Ford Bronco in the Light Truck Division, leading a team of engineers and registering half a dozen patents over the course of his career.
Ralph and Barbara raised their family in Grosse Pointe Woods, where they enjoyed a close knit community. The kids could walk to school, and during the winter Ralph would freeze their entire backyard for skating. Their family travels included memorable trips to Norway, Egypt, China, Jamaica, and Expo 67 in Montreal.
By 1979, with both children graduated from the University of Michigan and embarking on their own careers, Ralph and Barbara came to California. He took a job at Ametek in Santa Barbara, working on the design and testing of underwater robotic submarines. Santa Barbara became their permanent home, and a city that Ralph considered one of the world’s most beautiful.
In retirement, Ralph remained an active Santa Barbara resident. He volunteered for many years as a docent at Sansum Clinic, guiding new arrivals and assisting waiting patients. A passionate gardener with a large and carefully cultivated front yard, Ralph was a longtime member of the Men’s Garden Club and gave tours of the legendary gardens at Lotusland. In his later years, he devoted his hobby time to drawings and watercolors of flowers.
An engineer by profession, he was always exceptionally handy and inclined towards building and fixing things himself. As a young teenager, he and his friends built a fort in his backyard, complete with log walls and a skull and crossbones emblem. As a grandfather, he carried on this tradition by designing and building a two-story wooden fort beside a sloping oak tree in his Santa Barbara backyard, where his five grandchildren enjoyed many hours.
In his free time, Ralph was perpetually working through one doorstop-sized history tome after another. He had a particular admiration for the life and writing of Abraham Lincoln, and read expansively about early America from the Revolution to the Civil War. His library includes biographies of American greats like Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Franklin, and Teddy Roosevelt, along with histories of Rome and Greece.
Ralph also had a lifelong love for dogs and cats, which began in childhood with a puppy named Stubby and a cat named Caesar. Over his adult life, he and Barbara welcomed a parade of four-legged family members, including a series of dalmatians (Barney, Lucky, Lady, Sparky, Star) and a diabetic cat who had been misnamed Candy. In later years, they made it a point to adopt rescue animals, such as Grace, a grey cat that Ralph found sheltering in the wheel well of his car during a routine grocery trip.
He is survived by his wife Barbara Olsen, his children Karen MacDonald and Eric Olsen, his five grandchildren, and his three great-grandchildren.
Ralph will be deeply missed by his family, who are grateful to have had him as such a formative influence in their lives. We celebrate the kind, capable, and inquisitive man we love so much.