Life is a journey. We travel through each day of life, hoping, planning, and look forward to what lies ahead. We enjoy the present and remember good times of the past. But, no matter how carefully we plan, no matter what our hopes and dreams for the future might be, as we travel the road of life we’re caught by surprises along the way. We find unexpected hardships, delays and problems.One of those unexpected hardships is the death of someone we know or a loved one. No matter how much we prepare and think about death, when it comes we’re never really prepared. No matter how much or how little advanced warning we have, death catches us off guard and stops us in our tracks. Because when someone close to us dies, we come face to face with our own mortality, with the fact that eventually each of us will die.

Today I would like to pause for a moment and catch our breath, because death has caught us by surprise again. We pause for a moment in the journey of life to celebrate, remember, and mourn the passing of Rointan Bunshah. Ron was different things to different people: to Zohreh his wife, a loving husband; to his colleagues gathered here today he was a visionary whose contributions to the thin film community is well documented, to me he was a mentor, a business partner and more importantly a great friend.There will be others who will detail Ron’s professional accomplishments and contributions (please see below), so I will give you a little personal insight into my relationship with Ron, how we became friends and our 26 years with ICMC-TF.

When I was employed at Airco Temescal, Len Bianchi then President of the Turbine Coatings Division asked me to visit Ron at the International Conference on Metallurgical Coatings. I asked Len what he wanted me to do for Ron, his answer was “do whatever he asks you.”I visited Ron and he asked me to help him establish exhibits at ICMC, up to this point ICMC did not have exhibitions. So, in 1974 I became the first Exhibits Chair at the 1974 ICMC held at the Jack Tarr Hotel in San Francisco, with 12 tabletop exhibits. Ron then asked if I could help with Local Arrangements as well as Exhibits and for quite a few years I helped Ron with ICMC. In recent years, with some resistance, we established a experimental session within ICMC-TF for Industrial Applications to serve the Exhibitors and to attract more applications related papers, this is now part of the regular programming of ICMC-TF. I know he is very proud of where ICMC-TF is today and is grateful for all those that joined him along the way to ensure the success and growth of ICMC-TF.I was lucky enough to have Ron join my team at Aultimut International and we traveled both in the US and Europe consulting on a variety of projects in recent years. Our collective strengths in establishing markets, technologies and services for international companies here in the US were greatly enhanced by Ron’s technical expertise, reputation and notoriety.

Whatever the nature of the relationship we each had with Ron, we pause today to recognize his contributions and having the privilege of knowing him and sharing life with him. Today we come together with our different memories of that life. We come to share those memories and experiences. We come to remember that each of these memories and experiences is a walk along our journey of life.

Certainly, Ron faced many trials in his life. The most recent, his efforts to combat a health problem that he hid from his professional life. He tried a variety of remedies including herbs and holistic cures, as traditional medicine did not offer any hope. His tenacity paid off for a while, as Ron was able to control and limit the discomfort and damage to his health, but alas, after fighting for the last few years, he succumbed to the sickness that most people did not even know he had.

Through these, trying times his wife Zohreh found unknown strengths and courage. Her courage was found in dealing with the transformation in the face of his illness. Ron’s illness took him on a journey of self-discovery and spiritual growth, many of his friends and family accompanied him on that journey and no one was untouched.

Ron was a wonderful friend. He was sympathetic, emotionally available, passionately intelligent and insatiably curious. He had a great sense of humor behind that strong stern face that most people did not get to experience unless they spent time with him. He treated me as an equal, not because of my success at business but because he valued me as a human being.

Ron’s great strength as a mentor was his absolute and transparent integrity. He never wavered from the bedrock of his principles and spoke only from his own conscience. He believed in the intelligence and good will of his students and helped each of us to understand the world of materials as it pertained to thin film coatings.

When I picture Ron now I see him first, not as a Professor, but sitting in an elegant restaurant ordering the best bottle of wine, savoring the special of the night and waiting intently for desert to finish off the meal. All the while discussing ideas of applying coatings for new applications and curiously asking inquiring questions on the next paradigm shift in coatings technology.

Ron was a brilliant thinker; he was, in the words of the Buddha, “a lamp unto himself”. For Ron, each search, each understanding, each dimension circled back into the others, layering, honing, softening a mind already so flexible and wide that he loved the journey more than arriving at his destination.# In closing, I would like to leave you with the following:

Don’t judge a man or woman on the deeds that they have done, or on riches that they have, or on the awards, they have won or their wisdom.# Think of all their actions and their deeds, of all the feelings that you have when you call them to mind. Think of their life from start to end and all that lies between, of all the things that you have shared, the things that you have seen.# For the true value of a life is not measured by wealth, or by longevity, by possessions, or by one’s health. It is measured by the impact they have made on a person’s life, be they your friends or family, your husband or your wife.# Remember them with gladness, for the times that you have shared, recall the happy moments. Think of all the things you did whenever they were around, or the times you both shared together. Ron would want you to remember the moments, the happy ones, the one’s that bind you to him and he to you.

I leave you with these words of joy, that you will one day see, that Ron still walk the paths of our memory which can be replayed within our head. For as long as we hold their memory, locked in our heart and head, he will never truly die and be forever a part of our thoughts.

Remember that we all must take this journey, this journey of life…Sundarajan Mutialu

 

Here is an article and tribute to Rointan F. Bunshah that give a brief overview of Ron’s technical expertise, his accomplishments and his associations with the American Vacuum Society (AVS). This article is printed as it appears in the AVS Newsletter. 

Following a distinguished career as an educator and researcher and major contributor to activities of the AVS, Professor Rointan F. Bunshah passed away on October 24th, 1999, on the eve of the AVS Symposium, after a gallant and quiet fight against leukemia.

As cited in his AVS Fellow award in 1994, Professor Bunshah is recognized for his “outstanding research contributions and leadership in identifying and conducting definitive investigations in emerging areas of particular importance to the coating and thin film industry.” His prolific research is exemplified by his 280 publications, editorships of numerous books, and 16 patents. In the 1960’s, he did important pioneering research on electron-beam deposition techniques, and continued his work by being the first to demonstrate the enhancement of tool life using TiN and TiC coatings and by conducting definitive studies, until very recently, on ITO, SiC, c-BN, superconducting, diamond, microlaminate and other films by various deposition processes.

Devoting a great deal of his time to AVS, “Ron,” in 1960, was the founder and first Chair of the Vacuum Metallurgy Division of the AVS, recently reidentified as the Advanced Surface Engineering Division and the Melt Processing Group. In 1974, he founded the annual conference that is now the International Conference on Metallurgical Coatings and Thin Films and is the world’s leading forum for the science and technology of films and coatings. For many years he was the chair and continued through the years to be the guiding light of the conference. Ron was President of AVS in 1971 and an AVS Honorary Member. He received the Gaede-Langmuir Award in 1986.

Following positions at Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he received his M.S. and D.Sc. degrees, and at New York University, Ron conducted research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and then accepted a position as Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UCLA in 1968. He continued his distinguished career in research and teaching there until the fall of 1998, earning during that time the Distinguished Teaching Award of the School of Engineering and attracting graduate students and post-doctoral scholars from all over the world.

Those who learned from him and were guided into the fields of coatings, thin films, and deposition processes, will now miss his leadership and insight, and his many friends and colleagues in AVS and elsewhere will sorely miss his friendship. We extend our sincere sympathy to his wife, Zoreh, and family.