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Wednesday, August 17, 2005

"He believed in education.
He made sure his three kids all went to college.
He was one of 10 children.
He sent a lot of his brothers and sisters to college too."




From today’s Bakersfield Californian:



Poor Bob Schrieffer. A brilliant research scientist, the pride of Tallahassee, Fla., snatched from the laboratory before his time. One of America's foremost theoretical physicists, a man of boundless mathematical curiosity and imagination, gone.

All because of a galling, tragic collision on a Central California freeway 11 months ago.

If Schrieffer, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1972, sounds like the victim here, the confusion is understandable. Some newspaper accounts, riding a narrative arc built around the incident's baffling incongruity, have in effect portrayed the 74-year-old verifiable genius as the party for whom we should be grieving.

Somewhere down in the last few paragraphs, if at all, we catch the barest glimpse of the other party, the only person in this story who, as a direct result of the events of that September day, won't be returning to any labs, scientific or otherwise.




When Schrieffer, the pride of Florida State University's National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, crashed his new Mercedes-Benz sports car into a Toyota van last Sept. 24 near Santa Maria, it killed 57-year-old Renato "Rey" Catolos of Ridgecrest and injured seven others.

Schrieffer, who taught at UC Santa Barbara for 12 years and directed its Institute for Theoretical Physics in the 1980s, was zipping down the coastal highway at an estimated speed of 110 mph when he barreled into the van, prosecutors say. He fabricated a story blaming another, nonexistent vehicle. Then he owned up to it himself.

Amparo Mangapit, a 77-year-old passenger in the same van, died a month later,but Schrieffer was not charged in that death. A third passenger was partially paralyzed and remains in a skilled-nursing facility.




Schrieffer pleaded no contest to vehicular manslaughter on July 25 and probation officials recommended an eight-month sentence in the Santa Barbara County Jail. But at his Aug. 8 sentencing hearing, Superior Court Judge James Herman said Schrieffer might deserve "a taste of state prison."

Now he's the smartest inmate at Wasco State Prison -- or will be, if Herman decides to keep him there after his three-month pre-sentencing evaluation period concludes. Sentencing has been rescheduled for Nov. 7.

Colleagues on both coasts are shocked and puzzled. This is an aberration, they say with unanimous incredulity. They never saw this coming, despite Schrieffer's having piled up nine speeding tickets since 1993, including 18 bad-driver points in the 18 months prior to the accident, prompting the state of Florida to yank his license.




Back in Ridgecrest, Estelita Catolos is too gentle a soul to rage at the injustice of the wreck -- or the injustice of its postmortems. She just misses her husband.

"He was a hardworking man and a good provider," she says, "When we first came to the United States (from the Philippines) in 1971 he worked three jobs. He was a very hard worker who cared about his family very much."

For a time, Catolos did commercial janitorial work early in the morning, cleaned apartments in the late evening and, in between, went to his regular job with the U.S. Navy. He retired in the early 1990s after 20 years of military service and got a job as a warehouse manager, most recently for General Dynamics.

He liked Ridgecrest. Thought it was a good place to raise kids.

He drove his wife into Los Angeles on regular buying trips for her Ridgecrest store, Lita's Fashions -- which over the course of her 16 years in business evolved into an Asian market with no "fashions" to speak of. At night he often cleaned the store for her.

It was the classic tale of a father who busted his backside so his children wouldn't have to.

"He believed in education," said his oldest daughter, Agnes Ysselstein, a registered nurse who lives in the Bay Area. "He made sure his three kids all went to college. ... He was one of 10 children, and he sent a lot of his brothers and sisters to college too."

Catolos and his wife -- two days shy of their 33rd anniversary -- were traveling with friends that day almost a year ago. They had visited friends in the town of Guadalupe and were on their way to the Chumash Casino in Santa Ynez, northwest of Santa Barbara, when Schrieffer intervened.




Inexplicable behavior, agonizing results.

Each man was passionate about his perceived purpose in life. Each gave all he could muster, exercised all of his gifts. In both cases the results were admirable.

Nobel Prizes and international acclaim have a way of skewing things, though. Genius attracts headlines. Accompanied by a fall from grace as precipitous as Schrieffer's, the story can only move in one direction on the page -- up.

But for one humble, grieving Ridgecrest family, the wrong man got top billing -- no matter how many honorary doctorates line the walls of John Robert Schrieffer's empty office.




By Robert Price