FOWLER, Frederick

Fred E. Fowler Sr., 84, Delta, died November 9, 1999 at his home. Services were held November 10 at St. Andrew’s Orthodox church in Delta. Burial was in the Delta City Cemetery. Mr. Fowler was born January 7, 1915 in La Junta, Colorado to Lena M. (Trent) Fowler and Earl J. Fowler. Mr. Fowler was an electronics engineer who served as a radar instructor in the US Navy during World War II in San Francisco and Chicago. He married Margaret E. Fairbairn in San Francisco in 1942. She survives. At the conclusion of the war Mr. Fowler returned to Colorado as a member of an engineering group at Heiland Research Corp. of Denver and developed, built, and tested an airborne magnetometer and associated navigation and tracking systems for geophysical exploration. Mr. Fowler subsequently submitted a proposal to Harvard University Observatory to design a system for precisely guiding a solar telescope. He designed, built, and tested the prototype on the coronagraph for High Altitude Observatory at Climax, Colorado as a member of the research staff of High Altitude Observatory of Harvard and University of Colorado. Mr. Fowler was responsible for the electronics instrumentation group at HAO that built related solar guiders for an Air Force observatory at Sacramento Peak, New Mexico and for a solar eclipse expedition to Khartoum, Egypt, as well as related instrumentation for the study of other solar phenomena. Two technical papers describing these projects were later published in “Electronics” magazine. Mr. Fowler founded Mt. Sopris Instrument Co. in 1951 in Boulder, Colorado. An airborne spectrometer from this period which was designed by Mr. Fowler is in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and a magnetic susceptibility measuring device of his design received a product of the year award from “Mining World/World Mining” during this time. Mr. Fowler reestablished Mt. Sopris Instruments as a one man company in Delta, Colorado in 1962. Over the next twenty years Mt. Sopris grew to fifty employees and supplied geophysical instruments to customers in more than sixty different countries, many of whom came to Delta. Mt. Sopris was acquired by EG& G of Wellesley, Massachusetts in 1982. Mr. Fowler remained active as an engineer and at the time of his death was involved in designing an instrument to determine groundwater quality. A man of keen intellect and intense interests which ranged from gardening to Orthodox Christian Theology, Mr. Fowler was responsible for the establishment of St. Andrew’s Orthodox Church in Delta. Though gifted in many ways, he led an unassuming life characterized by anonymous philanthropy, and above all love for his family, faith, and fellow man.