July 10, 1942 - May 29, 2026

It would be difficult to summarize a life as wide and curious as his in a few paragraphs, but those who knew him would recognize him immediately in the attempt.

Born in Medicine Lodge, Kansas on July 10, 1942, he came of age in a family of bakers who moved from town to town, opening shops and moving on - a childhood that instilled in him a lifelong ease with new places, new people, and new ideas. That restlessness of spirit would take him further than most dare to go.

He volunteered and served two tours in Vietnam with the United States Navy, serving as a navigator in the F4 Phantom jet and finishing as Lieutenant Junior Grade. The war left marks that never fully faded. He lost his best man, David Morehouse, and several close friends and roommates to traffic and aviation accidents over there - losses he carried quietly for the rest of his life, and which he spent his later years trying to honor in books he worked on with patient determination. He named his son David after the friend he lost, and that name carried the weight he intended. David Morehouse also introduced mom and dad to each other!

After the Navy, he earned a PhD in Oriental History from the University of Arizona, a degree that took his young family to Taiwan and set the course for a remarkable second chapter as a linguist with the NSA, where he put to professional use his hard-won fluency in Japanese and Chinese. A posting in Tokyo with GTE followed in 1983, adding yet another chapter to a life already rich with geography and experience.

He returned home when his father passed in 1984, and with his wife Gail - a devoted registered nurse who would later, with characteristic stubbornness, put him on a vegan diet after a series of heart attacks in the early 2000s and quietly purchase him an additional twenty-three years - he settled into running a convenience store in the mountains near Winchester, Virginia. It was a quieter life, but no less full. He coached baseball, went to every Little League game he could, took his kids camping and mountain biking, and read voraciously. He was deeply politically engaged, a devoted follower of current events, and held his convictions without apology - among them a thorough and unapologetic disdain for Donald Trump, a position he would have wanted noted here, and which his son is proud to honor. If dad ever had bone spurs, we never knew.

He had a sharp and delightfully absurdist sense of humor, passed faithfully to at least one of his children. He was the kind of man who appreciated movies like Airplane! And Blazing Saddles, and shows like Mystery Science Theater 3000 at their proper worth - which is to say, deeply and with belly laughs that could be heard throughout the neighborhood.

In what others might call retirement, he earned his Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer designation in his sixties - a fact his family mentions with the particular pride reserved for things that shouldn't surprise you about a person but somehow still do. He worked in IT at the Roof Center, applying the same intellectual seriousness to his new field that he had brought to everything else.

Mom and Dad built a cabin in Romney, West Virginia, where grandchildren played in the pond, hiked the trails, and splashed in the stream. In 2014 he traveled to Orioles Dream Week to watch his son play, and came home quietly wishing he had gotten out there himself. Later he and his wife moved to Leisure World in Maryland, where he spent his final years in the company of the news programs and Bob Dylan records that had long kept him company.

Among his greatest blessings were his friendships. Don and Carol Reynolds, and Jim and Terry Burridge were not merely friends - they were family in every way that matters. Jim Burridge preceded him in death, and it is not hard to imagine the two of them already arguing about something worthwhile somewhere (for example, Jim asking “why were you sitting at my desk when I came back from vacation?....Dad was assigned his job while Jim was away). Funny how lifelong friendships can start!

After his wife's passing, he faced Lewy body dementia with the same stubbornness he had brought to every hard thing in his life, fighting it for just over three years before passing on May 29, 2026 in Frederick, Maryland, at the age of 83. The vegan diet had done its job. He lived long enough to see his grandchildren graduate high school and head off to university, and he knew it.

He is survived by his son, David Bragg and his partner, John Hartford; his daughter, Karen Elizabeth Craig and her husband, Doug, and their grandchildren Dylan, Mitchell, and Adara Craig; and by Carol Reynolds, Terry Burridge; and all the others who loved him and will carry him forward.

He was a man who loved animals, in particular the golden retriever and the Rhino, always tried to do the right thing, and never once stopped wanting to learn one more thing about the world.