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Jack Wesley Kearns (1939 - 2022)
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 Jack Wesley Kearns passed away peacefully after a brief illness at Reston Hospital with his family by his side on April 7, 2022.
Jack was born April 15, 1939 in Washington, DC and grew up in Vienna, Va. on his grandmother’s farm off Lawyer’s Road. He was the son of the late Wesley Jacob and Effie Virginia Kearns. In addition to his parents he was preceded in death by his sister, Judith Mae Groves.
He graduated from Fairfax High School in 1957 and then enlisted in the U.S. Navy and was stationed in Norfolk, VA. He served honorably for four years as a coxswain of a mike boat transporting troops from their ship to the shore. Jack met the love of his life, Betty Cockerill, at a dance at the Chantilly firehouse in November of 1961. It was love at first sight and they fell madly in love, and were married on Nov. 24, 1962 at Forrestville United Methodist Church, later renamed Great Falls United Methodist Church. Jack and Betty would have celebrated their 60th anniversary in November of this year.
They soon had two children, Janet Michele in 1963 and Jerry Wesley in 1965. Jack began J.W. Kearns Refuse Service in 1963. He would stay in business for 40 plus years and retired in 2008. Jack was an avid hunter and fisherman. He enjoyed time spent with his son in the outdoors. Jack loved gardening and was so proud of the crops that he raised every year, especially the tomatoes that Betty would so lovingly can every winter. One year she canned 80 quarts but he would have preferred she canned 100. :-) Gardening was his life and he looked forward to starting his garden every year and anticipated the delicious meals that Betty would prepare from the fruits of his garden. He worked hard in his garden to make sure that he would have plenty to eat and share with others.
Jack and Betty acquired a love for tennis and were regulars at the Great Falls Swim and Tennis Club until they built their own tennis court in 1988. Both Jack and Betty were very competitive and when he didn’t play well his temper caused him to break many a racquet in the heat of the matches. Both Jack and Betty decided that in order to not go broke buying tennis racquets that they would just rally and not keep score.
Jack and Betty didn't travel much but in 2001 they drove across the country and back with their daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren. It was the trip of a lifetime for them and he talked about how much he enjoyed it and would've liked to have done it again.
Jack adored his family and was proud of each and every one of them and would tell them so. They meant the world to him. He especially loved spending time with his two grandchildren who when they were younger spent a lot of time together at their home on five acres in Great Falls and really enjoyed their visits after they were grown. He also loved and looked forward to seeing his seven great grandchildren who now live in Colorado, and couldn't visit very often. He adored his great granddog Vina as well and would ask about her often.
Jack also enjoyed watching Andy Griffith reruns every weekday at 4 p.m. sharp. If you were around him at that time you had better move aside and not block his view of the screen. And also put on your earplugs because he liked his Andy Griffith often and he liked his Andy Griffith loud.
Jack was a little rough around the edges on the outside but had a heart of gold on the inside. He was a Christian and loved his church. He served as the church’s head usher for a couple of years and also looked forward to fellowship time to talk and catch up with his church friends. He missed going to church very much during Covid and was looking forward to going back. When his illness kept him from being able to go back to church he didn't want Betty to go without him.
Jack is survived by his wife, Betty, his two children, Janet (Ralph) Scherer, Jerry Kearns, his two grandchildren Jonathan (Christy) Scherer and Jennifer Scherer and his seven great grandchildren Philipp, Eva, Matthias, Jerusha, Jael, Nathanael and Charles Scherer.
Funeral services will be held at Great Falls United Methodist Church at 1 pm. Wednesday, April 13 with visitation at 12 p.m.
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Remembering Rush’s Neil Peart, The Relentless Idealist
Even amid tragedy, the beloved drummer's beliefs and music never crumbled into cynicism
on January 12, 2020, 1:14pm
Neil Peart, photo courtesy of Wikipedia
The first thing to say about Neil Peart is that he always meant it. The drummer and lyricist of Rush, who died this week, spent his life battling to keep hold of a certain earnestness, in spite of the world.
This is never an easy task, but the obstacles were especially significant in Peart’s case. His band got famous. He read widely. His life was marked by tragedy — in the space of a single year in the late ’90s, his daughter died in a car crash, his wife of cancer.
(Read: 10 Moments That Captured Neil Peart’s Awesomeness)
Any of these things are liable to strip away romantic inclinations. Getting famous almost inevitably entails some amount of compromise and some unpleasant discoveries about other people, or about yourself. When Rush opened for bands like Aerosmith in the ’70s, the sound crews would sabotage their sound checks, jealous and not wanting to have them outshine the main act.
Equally, with culture often comes a tendency to analyze, to doubt. Tragedy, when it befalls especially idealistic people, tends either to make them cynical or break them completely. So it’s impressive how slow Peart always was to turn towards cynicism, and how even when he was disillusioned, he managed to be disillusioned in an idealistic way.
In one of his last interviews, Peart spoke of his “moral attitude to music,” something that wasn’t dislodged by a trip to London as a young man, where he tried and failed to make it as a drummer. “I was kind of stunned by the cynicism and the factory-like atmosphere of the music world over there,” Peart said. “And it shook me. I’m thinking, ‘Am I wrong? Am I stupid and naïve?’”
Typical for Peart was to decide that, no, he wasn’t. Or if he was, he preferred to keep being that way. This personal decision, when the choice presented itself, against cynicism and in favor of a higher naivete was one Peart was to repeat many times over the course of his life. It was also a fundamentally American gesture — American, that is, in the larger, continental sense, Peart being Canadian (though he gained American citizenship in his last years). Leave ennui to the Old World. North Americans aren’t supposed to stop believing in things.
This wasn’t something that changed much through the decades. Rush’s production during the ’80s marked a turn, away from sci-fi prog epics and towards shorter, synthesizer-driven songs with — it’s often said — more personal lyrics. On “Subdivisions”, Peart laments the isolation of his youth in suburban Ontario.
But Peart’s lyrics had been about himself the whole time. In the title track on 2112, composed during the height of Rush’s ’70s prog baroque, the protagonist lives in a society where all entertainment is prescribed by the ruling “priests of Syrinx.” Discovering a guitar by chance, he anticipates how the priests will “praise my name on this night.”
Of course, the priests don’t praise his name. “It’s nothing new,” they tell him. He can’t believe it: won’t they think of the joy his instrument will bring the people? No, they say, there’s no need to introduce novelties that might threaten social stability. Crushed, furious, he plots against the regime, but only in his daydreams.
Unlike Orwell’s 1984, on which the album is based, 2112’s protagonist wants to believe in the regime, wants even to help the rulers achieve the ideal of the perfect society. It’s only when they reject his offer that he becomes disillusioned. Cynicism does not come easy, and when it comes, it takes the form of idealistic fantasy.
The shadow of a young Peart is not hard to discern here. It’s the shadow of the eccentric and fanciful child, who grew up in the post-war tameness of a Canadian suburb and speaks in his own voice on “Subdivisions”. The science-fiction totalitarianism of the priests of Syrinx is hardly more repressive than suburban monotony, the social tyranny of high school. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
“Nowhere is the mystic or the dreamer more alone,” Peart writes on “Subdivisions”. But dreamers and mystics are supposed to be alone. They don’t become dreamers and mystics if they’re popular, well-adjusted members of the community. The suburban society from which Peart felt so disconnected was also the one that created him.
One question that often plagues people who choose not to let go of their dreams is, what to do when you come to suspect there are problems with what you believe in? A constant point of interest regarding Peart’s lyrics is their libertarian inclinations, detectable especially in the ’70s. As a young man, Peart was a devotee of Ayn Rand, a fact attested by songs like “Anthem” (named after the Rand book), “2112”, and “The Trees”.
This last song adds a sinister racial dimension to the common libertarian opposition to restrictions on individual excellence. In the parable, one species of trees is always growing taller than another species. When the shorter trees form a “union” to demand “equal rights,” the taller trees insist their pre-eminence is not oppression; why can’t the shorter trees just enjoy the shade? But the trees can’t reach an agreement, so they’re all chopped down.
By his final years, Peart repudiated the politicians who purported to advocate libertarian principles — Rand Paul et al. — and answered in the negative when asked if he still considered himself a Randian. Still, it was obvious his dream was still alive, only accommodated to long experience. He called himself a “bleeding-heart libertarian,” meaning he still believed, in an abstract way, in the vision of a world of unrestricted individual greatness, but he recognized that politics on earth required communal generosity — to think otherwise would be inhumane. “That’ll do,” he said.
This is a somewhat Christian idea for a non-Christian to hold. Peart was not a religious man. On “Freewill”, he offers a defense of the courage he saw was necessary to choose not to believe. Not even tragedy caused his atheism to waver. But he took the idea of belief seriously enough to demand the religious act in a manner consonant with their beliefs.
In truth, Peart’s atheism and his early libertarianism are not connected to a straightforward rejection of utopian state planning or of religion, like such beliefs are for many people, but rather to a kind of earlier and deeper, if less specific, faith in what utopia and religion suggest. Like his character in 2112, Peart rejected attempts to create an ideal society and to catechize him not because he thought they were inherently doomed to fail but because they didn’t live up to the ideas of beauty and truth he held in his own mind.
There’s an obvious indicator in Peart’s own life that he wasn’t allergic to order, discipline, and enforced routine. He had been heralded as one of the greatest rock drummers, recognized especially for his mathematical precision and complete control behind the kit. A recent tribute noted that while on Hemispheres he contrasts the Dionysian (instinctive) and Apollonian (reasoning) aspects of human nature — a borrowing from Nietzsche — behind the kit he was an utter perfectionist, one hundred percent Apollonian. He was never tempted to engage in fits of passion like Keith Moon.
In a way, that simply seems to be another indicator of Peart’s idealism. He was so dedicated to the idea of a perfect drum performance that he refused to leave it up to chance, insisted on refining it to a science. But it also points to how he balanced fantasy with mettle, idle dreams with sweat, focus, and even monotony. None of that destroyed the dream if the dream was the right one.
The ideal society, true religion, beauty, truth — all these were possibilities for Peart. It was just that they began not in what he saw around him, in newspapers, in history books, but rather in his dreams of forbidden joyrides in his uncle’s red Barchetta. Naïve, maybe, but he knew what he was saying, and he meant it.
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 Helmuth Scherer died Thursday, May 19, 2005 at his home in Winooski, Vermont, after a courageous and painful struggle against an alarming number of critical ailments.
Helmuth was a man of rare and outstanding talents, truly one of a kind. Born in Czervenka, Yugoslavia on May 8, 1936, Helmuth and his family, father Rev. Philipp Scherer, mother Olga Frieda Magdalena (Czakowski) Scherer and sisters Dorothea and Gerda, spent their early years fleeing from Tito's Partisans, and the bombs that fell on Europe during that war. The family was on the last train out of Dresden, Germany, before the infamous firebombing of that city.
Their guardian angels worked overtime throughout their lives - in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, Germany and the jungles of Brazil, his father to carry out Christian missionary work there. Helmuth grew up in the Brazilian jungle area of Candea and the bustling city of Porto Allegre.
From Brazil, the family moved to Canada in 1955 where Helmuth received a scholarship from the Brazilian Baptist Convention, to attend college and subsequent medical school in the United States, to become a Medical Missionary.
Helmuth graduated Summa Cum Laude from Georgetown College (Kentucky) and attended Medical School for 4 years at the University of Kentucky at Lexington. Instead of pursuing his calling, however, an improbable series of events led him to establish a publishing and printing business in Lexington. Subsequently, Helmuth owned and operated several publishing corporations in the Virginia and Washington, DC area.
Helmuth moved to Colchester, Vermont, on the shores of Malletts Bay, in 1990, primarily to find a quiet place to contemplate his lifetime experiences which, by this time, would have filled several books which he planned to write. Illness prevented him from completing his dream, although he was able to pursue his hobby, gardening, and to teach himself computer programming and become a "web-master", establishing websites for many Vermont businesses. Helmuth was a man of amazing intellect, personality and generosity, and made countless friends.
He leaves his sisters, Dorothea Gerber of Toronto, Canada; Gerda Carroll of Colchester VT; four children: Ralph Scherer of Gainesville, VA; Wolfgang Scherer of Vienna, VA; Hans Scherer of Charles Town WV; and Heidemarie Scherer Randall of Marshall, VA. There are 8 grandchildren: Jonathan Scherer, Jennifer Scherer, Erika Scherer, Jessica Randall, Jacob Randall, Emilie Scherer, Katrina Scherer, and Abigail Scherer and his special friend Jenny. Helmuth is also survived by his ex-wife and mother of his children, Irmgard Scherer, with whom he sustained a continued friendship throughout his life.
His family wants to thank Dr. Allan Ramsay, his primary physician who provided him special care over the last 15 years; Dr. Barbara Grant and Dr. George Philips during his treatment, and at least 17 more outstanding Vermont professionals who helped ease his life.
Special thanks to Helen Turcott and Anya Martinez of the CVAA for helping manage his life during the past 4 years. Also to the Visiting Nurse's Association (VNA), especially care-givers Mary McDermott, Jackie Bettis, Fred Decarlo, Tina Smith, Jim Tatro, Kim Fox, Rebecca Brooks, and countless others who took selfless, wonderful care of him.
Cremation has taken place and his children are taking him home to Virginia. Services will be at a later date in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. As memorial gifts, please consider donations to the Champlain Valley Agency on Aging (CVAA), 1 Mill St., Burlington, VT 05401 and the Visiting Nurse Association, 1110 Prim Rd., Colchester, VT 05446.
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"This Davy Jones thing is a great dry run for when Paul McCartney dies."
—Anthony Jeselnik
Davy Jones dead, Monkees singer was 66
2:16 PM By Verne Gay
Photo credit: Handout
Davy Jones -- forever young and forever beloved by fans the last 50 years -- has died, according to Reuters. Age: 66. The cause of death was apparently a heart attack.
Jones and his band the Monkees were in a brief moment and time very nearly as popular as the Beatles -- whom they so gently satirized and idolized in that long ago NBC hit. ("The Monkees," by the way, bowed Sept. 13, 1966 -- five days after "Star Trek" launched.)
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ISSUE 48•05 | 02.02.12 | Obituaries
An unopened one-gallon jar of Hellmann's mayonnaise quietly expired last week. MORE»
ISSUE 48•05 | 01.31.12 | Obituaries
Rosa Maria Torres, 81, died peacefully in bed surrounded by fat grandkids.MORE»
ISSUE 47•46 | 11.15.11 | Obituaries
Steven Geary passed away Tuesday evening surrounded by friends, family, and one secret enemy. MORE»
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Alan Webber (1925-2011) died April 14. He started to work as part-time copy editor for Empire Press in the spring of 1992 and was reading copy at home the day of his death. He died from a ruptured aorta while practicing his trombone for one of two weekly gigs he did with his jazz band at Leesburg King's Court Tavern. He liked limericks. Here is one a bit too tasteful for his tastes:
There once was a perpetually young man from Short Hill
Who long played the trombone for a thrill
While his horn was well worn
It still played sweet as corn
Though copyediting was what paid the bill...barely
His service is Saturday April 30 at 11 a.m.
St. Peter's Episcopal Church
37018 Glendale St.
Purcellville, VA 20132
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Report: 10 Million Killed Annually By Stepping Out Of Comfort Zones
AUGUST 24, 2010 | ISSUE 46•34
WASHINGTON—A new report published this week by the Department of Health and Human Services revealed that more than 10 million Americans are violently killed each year while attempting to break away from their regular everyday routines and try something new. "We found that getting out of your comfort zone and facing your fears resulted in premature death nearly 78 percent of the time," HHS researcher Madeline Hersh said. "People always ask themselves, 'What's the worst that can happen?' Well, according to our research, anything from being bitten by a poisonous snake to dying in a hot-air balloon crash can happen." The report found that the safest individuals were those who surrendered to the soul-crushing monotony of habit and then convinced themselves that they had things pretty good.
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