In Remembrance of My Dad

John Muccio

1933 - 2025

Dad and Grandpa

I followed in my dad’s footsteps—to the exact day. He was born on December 11, 1933. I was born on December 11, 1964—a birthday present to him as he turned 31. He was a systems analyst living in Southern California, working in Air Defense. I didn’t know how closely I would follow in his footsteps. I also became a systems analyst. It kind of crept up on me as I pursued engineering before choosing Operations Research as my specialty. He spent a great deal of his life working in Air Defense. I’ve spent most of my professional career working in the Air Force, and a lot of it has been dedicated to Air Defense. It’s strange how this circle repeats. My dad drove Volkswagens. I drive Volkswagens. But there is so much more. Friedrich Nietzsche called it the Eternal Return. It is a philosophical concept which states that time repeats itself in an infinite loop, and that exactly the same events will continue to occur in exactly the same way, over and over again, for eternity. It’s meant as a litmus test for how your life has gone. Knowing you will repeat your life, over and over again, for infinity, will you be happy? Or will you be sad?

My dad grew up in Queens, New York, born in Jackson Heights. Long Island, the west side, as opposed to the East End, Martha’s Vineyard, or the South Side where Jaws was filmed, or the North Shore, where Gatsby hosted his parties and searched for the green light.

From what I can tell, there is nothing wrong with growing up in an apartment in the ’40s. You play baseball, you play street hockey and stickball, and some ice hockey. You go to school, then you get drafted into the Army and drive a truck in Europe. He almost died driving that truck, stopping the infinite law of returns. He was driving off a mountain road in Germany, and the transaxle hit a rock just before the cliff. A rock saved my life, too. 

Despite spending his entire professional life in service of our country—whether it was for the U.S. Air Force, the Army, or the Intelligence Community—it is his two years of service in the Army that rates him as a veteran, and rates him this beautiful location in Arlington, to be laid to rest beside my mom. As we look up the hill at the Air Force Memorial, I remember that my dad came with me to the dedication of that memorial when it was complete. And over by the Pentagon, we can see the side where 9/11 devastated that building.

From the early pictures of him with his friends growing independent, it’s clear that drinking beer was a thing for my dad. At some point, he switched to wine. But even though my sister preferred that he stick to red wine, he always enjoyed that first sip of a German lager. My dad drank one glass of red wine every night for his entire life. He outlived his brothers, topping out at 91. Resveratrol is the active ingredient in life extension. You can take it in pill form. I do. One resveratrol is like 250 glasses of red wine a day, without the side effects. 

He also went to college, for free, at Queens College, where he studied economics. 

Before the Army, he worked at H&M Green Stamps. No idea what he did there. I just know that he did. 

Then he was hired to go to SDC, in California, to learn computer programming. That was in the late ’50s, at the advent of the computer age. He would learn to program the SAGE system, and thus began his entry into Air Defense. And he knew it well. He told me many stories about saving the day. In one story, keep in mind that the SAGE computer was programmed with punch cards. They had VIPs visiting his site in Sioux City, Iowa. None of the network radars were reporting air tracks from their remote sites. My dad suggested to his boss that a flag had been incorrectly set, and that the training simulation was still the feed that was live; thus, no real tracks were making it through. His boss told him that was impossible, and finally my dad won the pissing contest. He needed to send a command into the computer with a punch card. His boss told him, and I quote, “This better work or I will kill you.” It was a different time in the ’60s. Note that my dad was still alive.

Another story is even better. Some of these remote Air Defense radars went out on oil platforms in the Atlantic, and they were called “Texas Towers.” On one particular day, an aircraft went missing over the Atlantic, and none of the radars in the Atlantic could find it. My dad suggested the aircraft might have traveled beyond the radar field of view, and that they should simply remove the artificial restriction on how far the radar would report tracks to see if they could find the aircraft. And his boss said, “What? How can you do that? That’s not a thing. That’s impossible.” But it is a thing if you know how the code works. Most of you have no idea how close all of this is to the reality of my current daily life. My dad survived that encounter with his boss as well.

A kid from Queens, who studies economics, gets a chance to learn computer programming from a company that RAND started, the company that invented computer science. They invented JOVIAL. I think there are aircraft, probably the B-52, still programmed in JOVIAL flying today. I worked B-52s when I was in the Air Force in 1991. I’m not going to go into it with this crowd, but this is truly a significant thing. Before JOVIAL, computer scientists programmed in Octal. Not hex, where there are only 16 things you can program with. You have a pin with three settings, and you’ve got to fly a plane or you have to go to the moon. These were amazing times. When you hear that this generation was the greatest generation, it’s hard to argue that my dad wasn’t part of it. Whether he got there on his own, or whether the programs that were in place in this country to assist and lift him were the conditions necessary for his success—free schooling, including college; being drafted into the Army and becoming a veteran; home ownership; and so on—here we are with those programs still paying back. And now, as a veteran, we are enshrining his memory forever at Arlington, alongside Anna, our mom, your Mema, and your aunt and friend to everyone.

My dad was an economist through and through. He read Consumer Reports, shopped at Montgomery Ward, and saved toward his retirement. He even invested in a long-term care insurance policy to reduce the burden of end-of-life care on his children. It was the right thing to do, and many years ago it might have actually been an insurance policy. These days, it’s just a scam, as we learned over the past 10 years trying to take care of both of them. 

And he loved animals. I don’t know if he had a lifelong love of animals, but certainly in the second half of his life he spent a great deal of time trying to understand them and communicate with them. He talked with Riley, his last cat, almost every day. One time he told me the cat was talking with him. He said she would rise up on her back legs and tell him things. I just shook my head up and down, agreeing with him. Then one evening I watched Riley come in, sit in front of him, and rise up on her back legs and begin to speak to him. I have the video if you don’t believe me. 

He was a conservative until later years, when it looked like the conservatives had started to run amok—about the same time I was thinking similar things—just after September 11, when Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld decided to invade Iraq. He was done.

An Italian food lover, he and our family and extended family spent a lot of time eating spaghetti and meatballs at our numerous family gatherings. 

He loved his family. He married my mom, Anna Virginia Muccio, after meeting her at a New Year’s Eve party in New York City. She worked for the airlines—Lufthansa—and had been busy traveling the world. To my dad, she must have been very different from women he had met: so independent to have traveled to Europe and Africa at that time. He had been to Germany in the Army. He traveled to Germany many more times in his career working for various programs. One program in particular, ASAS—the All Source Analysis System—required reporting from a new sensor on a U-2R. A noble U.S. Air Force aircraft that knows how to straddle the U.S. Air Force and the Intelligence Community. “The system isn’t reporting,” was my dad’s diagnosis on the site in central Germany. “That’s impossible,” his boss replied. My dad said, “The system works. Someone didn’t turn the system on in the U-2R.” Guess who was right? I’ve never been to a test when someone failed to put the knob setting in the “ON” position. Eternal returns. 

My dad didn’t show his emotions. He would never say, “I love you.” We didn’t lack for those words, as my mom said them hundreds of times a day, every day, for my entire life. Later, my dad’s rigid back softened when he would be told those three little words. His response had softened to the phrase that Ellen DeGeneres speaks to her fans: “Right back at you.” And this phrase he never failed to say back

His service to the country didn’t stop as an enlisted man in the Army. He spent his entire career in the service: 

 Air Force 

Army 

and U.S. Intel 

As a defense contractor, he would write: 

Here I sit in boredom sublime 

Attempting just to bide my time 

Because work is not a big factor 

When you are a government contractor 

 But perhaps I should not be so gruff 

Assessing the value of this stuff 

Which has for many numbered years 

Provided me with food, shelter, and beers 

He retired right after Y2K. In fact, on New Year’s Eve of Y2K, he was on duty until after midnight, just in case the systems he was developing for the Army decided to go rogue when the millennium switched over. Right after that, he called it quits and retired to his home in Sterling, Virginia, to read books. 

He loved books. His library was extensive. I wanted to read as many books as he did. I thought one day I could catch up. And then he retired, and his reading accelerated substantially. I knew I never had a chance. He read from 65 to 85 every single day. It’s hard to catch up with 20 years of nonstop reading. He slowed down in his final years, mostly due to eyesight, and preferred to watch a lot of TV. His favorite shows were old war movies, Columbo, and Seinfeld. 

I can’t wait for my retirement to read, uninterrupted for weeks on end, and occasionally binge-watch Seinfeld and Columbo. He never had a fondness for cars. He was practical. A car was to get you from point A to point B. His first car was a Hillman Minx, then a VW Bug, then a Dodge Coronet, a Ford Granada, a VW Rabbit, and a long line of Ford Tauruses. I drive better cars than my dad drove, but I don’t take care of them. They are a practical asset to me, a way to get from point A to point B.

No matter how many times I told him he didn’t have to turn his computer off at night, he turned it off and shut off the power. He wasn’t a hacker, but he knew. He knew. Having programmed a SAGE computer, he knew they were just dumb machines. Very clever engineering, but a very stupid collection of silicon and circuits. They are easily influenced by external forces. A simple flag set differently can change everything.

One of the last days I spent with my dad, we sat out on my deck. It was a perfect day. He sat on the outdoor sofa with my big dog Gunner up next to him. It couldn’t have been a more perfect day. It was no more than 70 degrees. A slight breeze was blowing. We were beneath shade trees, and the birds were singing, and the squirrels were running back and forth on the fence line. To get to that point, he had spent 91 years of his life, and I had spent exactly 31 years fewer. He didn’t complain. We didn’t talk. We just sat together. We sat for hours. We sat almost six hours on that deck without a care in the world. The sun had set before we finally went inside. That day, that moment, those hours, those minutes were absolutely perfect. There was no doubt in my mind that my dad was reflecting on his life. He knew it had come to an end. His cycle was complete. To reduce our lives to those few minutes of perfect time, reflecting on his life and mine, repeating forever, has made me very happy. I think they made my dad very happy as well. His return to his resting place is eternal.