Thank you for joining us today. We are here to lay Doyle Kisler to rest. Some may be here to say goodbye, others are here to remember. To many he was a friend, a colleague, an eccentric, to others a brother, a husband, father, a guide, a storyteller, and a person who made you feel at home, wherever you were. To his children, there will be a home that won’t be the same without him, and a million stories that they will have to tell each other since his voice is now only in the wind and the crashing of waves. We shall continue to tell his stories.
The only thing Doyle loved almost as much as his family, was a challenging hobby. Radios, stereos, cameras, cars, aircraft, he liked seeing how things worked, and then seeing if he could make them better. So much of his work career revolved around finding interesting problems and creating interesting solutions.
In his youth, he worked selling cameras at a department store, which began a lifelong fascination with photography. In these years he discovered the nefarious humor of misusing flashbulbs, starting with a practical joke on a friend, where he replaced every lightbulb in his friend’s home with flashbulbs. He sat outside with another friend, and they watched the windows as one light after another was turned on. After the third light, they could hear the cursing from across the street. While telling this story, Doyle admitted that his poor friend didn’t find them all that first night.
When Doyle bought a then cutting-edge Super 8mm camera, he and his friends decided the natural thing to do was create a feature film. Of course, the flashbulbs made their way into this production as well, this time as special effects for gunfire. Their madcap production unintentionally packed over a dozen people into a single car for one scene, saw them galivanting across the USS Texas museum ship docked in the port of Houston, while in costume, and other zany shoots that earned them first the curiosity then the embarrassment of the Houston police. When the film was finished, the local newspaper advertised the release of their hour-long espionage action feature called Secret Agent GL-70. Their hero named after an ingredient in a then-popular toothpaste. Their production company was called Wonder Films because they said that “if it worked, it will be a wonder”. To this very day, at least one Wonder Films t-shirt continues to exist.
Doyle bragged about how high his GPA was despite carrying an F in English. His “innovations” in spelling were lifelong yet did not prevent earnest expressions in writing, from letters to his father in his youth, to a recent poem he wrote when he learned of a dear friend passing away. The poor English grades however did contribute to him being drafted, then joining the Navy during the Vietnam War. This led to him meeting and marrying Carol, his wife of fifty years, who happened to be an English major.
He had many stories from his time in the navy, of all the antics on the aircraft carriers. Of lounging in the safety nets off the front of the ship, of the waves breaking across the bow of the massive ships; how they kept a rescue seaplane to recover the rescue helicopter; while loading cargo, how he learned which serial numbers on the boxes were for ice cream and beer to determine what to redirect to the squadron barracks; he told stories about the admiral who was on an unattended self-tour of the carrier, for which he received both a compliment on hiding secret radio settings from a superior and instructions on how to improve security. He told stories of visiting far off places and eating delicious food that he could not identify, and lamented that he never made it to Australia.
While in the States, he never missed an opportunity to get on an airplane, traveling across the nation, sometimes not knowing where the next flight would take him, and occasionally getting the chance to operate some of the equipment he worked on in the air. Oftentimes this would take him to new places he had never been, though one poor choice he admitted was a mail delivery route, that was a constant cycle of takeoff and landing, with very little in between.
He learned how to fly, earning a pilot’s license through the squadron flying club. He would use a plane from the club to fly his new bride Carol around southern California, taking her to dinner with a Cessna instead of a car. Though on one trip, Carol told him that if he didn’t lose the turbulence, then he might be wearing her lunch before they even got to dinner. So that night they ended up taking a car.
Losing out on college, he was determined to learn as much as he could while he was in the navy, taking every electronics course they offered, earning certifications for a plethora of equipment. Soon, the crews learned who to take their problem machines to, coining the phrase that many future co-workers would use: “Doyle makes it work.” Later, after the navy, one employer tasked Doyle with increasing the speed of a particular machine which was brought up to his second-floor workshop. After exceeding expectations on the improved speed of the machine, Doyle was commended, and informed that he would now be working on a ground floor workshop, since he had the machine operating so fast that it shook the entire second floor.
Throughout most of his career in the Silicon Valley, he worked as a servo engineer, creating reliable and innovative machines for testing microchips. As the century changed, he began working more on medical technology, and after officially calling himself retired, he continued to pick up contract work designing servo systems for driverless vehicles. Retiring allowed him to become more active in the local amateur radio groups, sharing his knowledge with other enthusiasts, tinkering with antenna design, and gaining more certifications, including an Amateur Radio Operator certificate from the FCC. He forged many new friendships, and still he focused on things to improve, emergency response in particular. In the summer fires of 2020, he was nearly recruited to help man CalFire radio transmitters, until he found that he would not be able to keep up with the three-day-long deployments in the mountains, sleeping in a tent or on a fire engine. But he remained dedicated to helping train younger generations for the future.
Plumbing however, was not one of the things he found interesting. On one occasion, only he, Isabeau and Colin were home while he worked to change out a faucet before the rest of the family returned. Finding out he was missing parts and that the hardware store closed in a few minutes, he declared “Oh, dirty words!” and then took the twins on a drive to the hardware store that Isabeau described as the fastest she had ever seen her father take those turns . While this time the faucet was ready when the rest of the family arrived home, for many decades in every house he lived, his archnemesis was a leaking faucet.
He enjoyed his music, especially since it gave him a reason to tinker with stereos and speakers. He would talk of custom-built speakers, including one proud creation with a coil that moved horizontally further than the speaker cone was tall. As his child, you might come home to 45s being played loud enough to hear from the street, or you might be woken up on a Sunday morning to a cacophony of baroque-era music, or worse, polka. He introduced his children to Warren Zevon and insisted that the songs were still very relevant today. When you were lucky, he was blaring The Moody Blues on the stereo. One of the last albums he heard in its entirety was In Search Of The Lost Chord, and while it played, he was interested only in listening to the music and the memories it conjured. When his eldest daughter, Kassandra called during the album, he asked to call her back after it finished. He told Gretchen that the song Ride My See-Saw should play at his wake, loud enough to shake the walls. Then he reminded her to open the windows, so they don’t break.
He loved his children and his grandchildren dearly. He loved watching them play, watching them learn, and discovering the world around them. He sought to be an active part of his grandchildren’s lives, visiting them when time permitted and calling when it didn’t. He would take them to airshows, aviation museums, theme parks, and camping. His last wish was to spend a long day at the beach with his family, his children and his grandchildren, talking, joking, and watching them play. He wanted to eat shrimp off the barbie, sip at a Mai Tai, and maybe possibly admit that he might be ready to retire.
He will live on through his children, as they carry his teachings and stories throughout their years, shared with their own children and loved ones. He will be remembered by the friends and associates he found, for the knowledge he shared freely, the eccentricities he inhabited, and the help he offered. His laughter, his delights, and his love will not be forgotten.