By Joseph Rubano with the help of several friends
Born: March 31, 1929
Died: March 5, 2020
Oldest of four children — one brother and two sisters
Richard was a gentleman; soft spoken, deep thinker, kind, caring man. He was interested in the life that goes on below the surface of most people’s awareness — he was interested in spiritual realities. As a high school student he sensed there was something below the surface that inspired and animated his favorite teacher. This lead him to his spiritual path. Also in high school he became interested in the work of government agencies that worked beneath the surface of public awareness. This led him to his first job and opened his eyes in a new way.
Richard was born in Monroe, Wisconsin, a small town farming community of about 1000 people in southern Wisconsin. Many residents were descendants of Swiss who came to this country after a famine in Switzerland around 1845. His father was a clergyman in the Town of New Glarus. They moved to Indianapolis where he became pastor of an old style German Evangelical church. Both Richard’s maternal grandparents were from Germany.
Richard started High School in Indianapolis with 1000 students in the Freshman class. The teachers were excellent. But Richard’s aunt had a friend, Beulah Emmet, who had founded High Mowing Waldorf High School in Wilton, New Hampshire in 1942 and she needed some boys to join the class. His aunt approached Richard and he was game. Richard transferred to High Mowing when he was in the 11th grade. There were only 5 students in the class, Richard made it 6. He went home Christmas traveling by trains and buses. This was the beginning of his independence and love of traveling.
To him it was a special place. And it was here that he was first exposed to Anthroposophy. He made a special connection with his chemistry teacher, Hermann Poppelbaum, asked him the kind of questions that led him to give Richard and his friend, Fred Moyers, information about Anthroposophy. Thus a seed was planted for the future.
Upon graduation Richard and his cousin were accepted into Harvard where he majored in history and literature. The department didn’t offer classes in the modern period from the French Revolution (1789 to 1939), so Richard had to design his own course with a tutor. He met with his tutor once a month and was required to graduate cum laude — if he was going to study what he wanted to study, Richard had to do well, and he did. During that time he also completed an intensive Bible as Literature course and began reading Steiner on his own from books he got out of the library.
Richard graduated from Harvard in 1951. He wanted to go to graduate school but he did not have the money. He wanted to work for the State Department in the foreign service as a Diplomat. He had been interested in this type of work for years. While still at High Mowing, he had written to the State Department and was sent literature and an application. But when he was finally able to apply he did not have the money that was needed to get the preliminary requirements fulfilled for the Foreign Service. Instead he went to Washington D.C. and applied for work with the CIA and the NSA. He heard from the NSA first, passed the security test and was offered a job. He was going to accept, but the day before he was to go to the NSA the CIA offered him a job. He was happy, he preferred the CIA over the NSA which is an agency of the Department of Defense.
Richard worked for the CIA for about four-and-a-half years and traveled to a number of countries in Europe. He would not say what he did in the CIA; he has never told anyone, not even his wife. He was a private man and could keep a secret. All Richard would say is that he performed covert operations. He admired the people he worked with; he had fun and loved the work. Still, he knew that he did not want to make a career of the CIA because he was uncomfortable with not being truthful and having to hide so many things. He did, however, say one thing about his work. Richard was trained in the Hungarian language for a number of years, so he was involved in some way with questioning Hungarians trying to escape Hungary’s political environment.
After leaving the CIA in 1957, Richard moved to Manhattan, where he readily joined the Anthroposophic Society. After 2 years he met Ehrenfried Pfeiffer who introduced him to the First Class. He jumped right in.
Soon afterwards, Richard met his wife, Danilla who was teaching at Rudolf Steiner School in New York. In Manhattan, Richard worked for one or two years as an assistant editor of Encyclopedia Americana. He worked for nine months on the encyclopedia and three months on the Encyclopedia’s Annual where he worked on contemporary issues, which he especially liked. He recalled that it wasn’t so hard to get a job then. He had answered an advertisement, and the hiring managers were easily impressed by a graduate from Harvard!
After that Richard worked in public relations and marketing for a number of companies — small businesses as well as international corporations. At some point, he and Danilla moved to Spring Valley, New York where she worked as a grades teacher. The school needed teachers, and Richard agreed to teach for two years. Two years was enough; clearly it was not the right career for him.
Eventually, Richard and Danilla moved to Wilton, New Hampshire, where she worked with Ann Pratt to develop the Pine Hill Waldorf School and where their daughter, Chara was born. They bought a house and had a lovely lady taking care of Chara while Danilla worked. Richard commuted to Andover, Massachusetts, where he worked for a subsidiary of General Electric Corporation (GE). This was in the early days of computers when a computer would be the size of a whole room. In this position, Richard spent about 40 percent of his time traveling overseas as a GE representative to various European countries and Saudi Arabia to help with the computer situation. He traveled to Germany, Milan, (which he loved), Rome and Venice. Once he took an ocean liner from Italy to New York. He remembers an organization party in Germany where colleagues got up and danced on the tables — it was a wild party. Richard was not a wild party type but he could appreciate the celebration of life in the people. Richard also found time while in Wilton to be the Business Manager for High Mowing School (1971-1973).
After a while they moved back to Manhattan. Once there, Danella decided to go to Dornach to further her studies and training and Chara attended pre-school. Richard visited them in Dornach. He remembers going with his High Mowing classmate, Fred Moyer, to hear their favorite teacher, Hermann Poppelbaum, lecture in Stuttgart. They even took a hazardous bus trip to Obergugle ski area, the highest village in Austria, where he skied for the first time.
Richard, Danilla and Chara eventually moved to Oceanside, California in 1994, where they purchased a home in a new development. They chose that location because it had a rural feeling with plenty of space around them and a view of the mountains to the north-east. That feeling of space didn’t last long as building boomed and they were soon surrounded by many new houses. But there they were and there they stayed. Once in Oceanside he found the other Anthroposophists who lived in North County and was part of a study group that met regularly twice a month. During those early years in Oceanside, Danielle worked in the Pasadena Waldorf School. She spent the week up there teaching Eurythmy and returned home on weekends. Meanwhile Richard got involved with Toastmasters International in 1999.
Eventually, Danilla became ill. Richard took good care of her until she died. Then his daughter Chara became ill and he also cared for her until the end. No one ever heard him complain.
An excellent speaker and storyteller, Richard was an active member of Tick Talk Toastmasters in Carlsbad, California, from about 2000 to 2018. As one of the members said: “Richard is an excellent writer, a skilled wordsmith whose professionalism is legend in our organization.”At various times he served as the Public Relations officer, secretary, web master, and head of the mentorship program. Richard made many friends there and mentored new members, who appreciate greatly how much he helped them become better speakers. He himself often gave talks on various aspects of Steiner’s teachings.
Richard was a prolific writer and reader and for many years was the editor of the Newsletter for the San Diego branch of the Anthroposophical Society. We always looked forward to his book reviews and his inspired writing about work being brought into the world by spiritually awakened individuals not connected with Anthroposophy. As a member of the Social Science section of the School of Spiritual Science he has been especially connected to Steiner's social endeavors and to the ideals of the Threefold Social Order.
In the last ten years of his life, inspired by Steiner’s Threefold Commonwealth ideals, Richard formed a company called I Control Communications. His goal was linking the organic food world, farmers, consumers and others: “By efficiently and appropriately linking one with the other, as a result of this sharing, a higher consciousness (awareness) of others develops among participants. A community of mutual interests, a conscious interdependence forms, whereby the whole becomes greater than the parts.” “He worked very hard for years to bring his associative company idea to earth, teaching himself how to write a business plan and coding a web page,” said Stephen Vallus, a friend and business associate. Richard was still seeking seed money for his company when he became ill.
He also championed the idea of a flat tax and offered free presentations on the Fair Tax Initiative to organizations in San Diego County. As his friend Christopher Houghton Budd, an economist, author, and lecturer, remarked via email: “I always respected his fidelity to Rudolf Steiner’s social ideas, but especially his tenacity regarding the subject that most people stay away from—taxation,” said Christopher. “In fact, it is almost impossible to achieve three-folding if the tax regime remains as it is, so with Richard’s passing we have lost an important colleague. Maybe, Richard, you can have more success from where you now are or are going.”
Richard cared. To the very end when you visited him he cared enough to ask about your life, about your projects and your family. When you left his bedside you did not leave sad or depressed but somehow grateful and enlivened by the gentle openness, the deep thankfulness, the quality of the meeting, the quality of the giving and receiving that moved back and forth between you and him.