John Denton Armitage, Jr.

John Denton Armitage, Junior was a beloved father, brother, grandfather, son, and friend. Throughout his long and full life he was a curious and adventurous seeker of new knowledge and experiences. He was the rare person who was doing exactly what he wanted for much of his life.

John was born on January 17, 1935 in San Antonio, Texas. He was the first child born to John Denton Armitage Senior and Sue Denman Browne Armitage. His father grew up in Andover, Massachusetts and was attending West Point when he met Sue, who was visiting from her hometown of San Antonio, Texas. They married in April 1934. John Senior’s first posting was in Essex Junction, Vermont, at the Fort Ethan Allen military base right outside of Burlington. After Sue’s family wrangled a transfer to Texas, at least according to Sue, by talking to General Douglas MacArthur, John Sr. drove down to San Antonio where he had been transferred to Fort Sam Houston. Sue took the train to San Antonio separately in December 1934 and John Junior was born a few days before her nineteenth birthday. John’s younger brother Lee Davis Armitage was born March 26, 1938. The family lived in Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland from 1937 to 1941, and John Sr. was briefly at MIT during this time. He went into the ordnance (weapons) branch of the military. They went to Jefferson Proving Ground in Madison, Indiana from 1941 to 1943, where there were large ammunition factories for the war effort. When John Sr. was posted to India during World War II, from 1943 to 1945, for two straight years without coming home, the rest of the family stayed in Indiana, then San Antonio where Sue’s family was, then in Ohio where some of Sue’s sisters were.

After the war, they were transferred to the Indiana Arsenal in Charlestown, Indiana from 1945 to 1948 and then Muroc Air Force Base (now Edwards AFB) in the Mojave Desert in California from 1949-1950. This is where they would go on camping trips in the mountains nearby and John Jr. first developed his love of the Western mountains. His black lab, Black Star, used to love to chase lizards in the desert though he could never catch any. They were back at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland from 1950 to 1952, then the War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania twice, with John Sr. teaching the second time; the Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey in 1954, and Aberdeen Proving Ground three times overall. In Carlisle, PA they lived in the house of the famous Native American athlete Jim Thorpe, who had attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School there.

John lived with his grandparents in Andover, Mass. for a year when he was attending Phillips Academy in the 1950s. He graduated in 1953; his high school interests included the Rifle Club and Rifle Team, German Club, Mechanics Club, and Outing Club. John’s grandparents’ family went every summer to their cabin on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. This is where John first experimented with sailing by putting a triangular sail (made from a parachute Aunt Ruth brought back for India after WWII) on the canoe. This was a much-loved family vacation spot.

John first attended Purdue University in Indiana in 1953 but disliked it and transferred to MIT in Cambridge, MA, where he graduated in 1957 with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics. He joined the MIT sailing club and spent a lot of time sailing on the Charles River and on the Atlantic off the East Coast. He met his future wife Sue (Susan Merritt Hodge Armitage) on a date arranged by friends in 1957 when she was attending Wellesley College. He was working at his post-MIT job at Jarrell-Ash Co.in the Boston area, working on engineering of spectroscopic instrumentation and fine mechanisms, and then worked at Block Engineering on infrared spectroscopy instrumentation. They married in December 1958 at Sue’s parents’ house in Norwalk, Connecticut while Sue was in her senior year at Wellesley. John’s friend Gurdon Wattles, who he met at Phillips Academy, was the best man and Sue’s friend Dory Park was the maid of honor. They lived in the Boston area, first in Wellesley and then in Arlington when Sue worked at the World Affairs Council in Boston.

John wanted to get back out west, where he loved the mountains and the scenery, and he and Sue drove cross country in 1961 to live in California. They first rented an apartment in Cupertino, then rented a nice cottage in a small almond orchard outside San Jose which has since been torn down for a huge shopping mall. Prof. Sumner Davis (John’s MIT thesis advisor in 1956, who came to Berkeley in 1959) had recommended John for a job at the International Business Machines (IBM) lab in San Jose, working in optical data processing technology, which began his long career there. Sue received her master’s degree in history from San Jose State University and worked as a secretary for the famous anthropologist Dr. Gregory Bateson, who had been married to the even more famous anthropologist Margaret Mead. Bateson had a tank of little octopi in his office that Sue took care of. This is when John became interested in mountain climbing with Will Piper who became one of John’s lifelong friends. He used to do a lot of climbing around California, and with Sue, through the Sierra Club, camping and hiking around Yosemite, the Sierra Nevada, the Grand Canyon, etc. Stories from this time include: having their sleeping bags invaded by swarms of ladybugs, one of which bit John; encountering several rattlesnakes on a hike in the Hetch Hetchy Valley; and getting caught in a snowstorm backpacking high in the Washington Cascades and being sheltered by some hunters in a big lean-to and fed royally on fresh trout, bear, and deer. They also spent a summer in Florida on the beach at Fort Walton Beach where John had started working for the Air Force Cambridge Research Lab on experiments with rockets, part of infrared atmospheric chemical signature field studies that were essential to the development of an anti-missile defense system. John always loved driving and fast cars and enjoyed speeding on highways in his Chevrolet Corvette.

They lived in London from 1965 to 1968, at 16 Cornwall Gardens. John received his PhD in 1968 in Applied Optical Engineering from Imperial College London. He studied with professor H.H. Hopkins, an acclaimed pioneer in optical design. His thesis was on “Partial Coherence of Thermal Light Sources.” Sue received her PhD in history, with her dissertation on British labor history, from the London School of Economics. They saw hundreds of cultural events in London – ballet, theater, etc. -- which was still very affordable then. John became interested in brass rubbings of monumental brasses in churches and made several rubbings that he later hung in the Boulder Heights house with its towering ceilings. John climbed in Cornwall and met Mac McDermott, a climbing guide and carpenter, on a train to a mountain rescue conference in Wales. Mac had been a British commando in WWII in Burma and was somewhat older than John. John and Mac went climbing in the Alps but John couldn’t do the rigorous climbs so they took a driving vacation instead.

John and Sue traveled extensively in Europe, especially the trip when they bought a Volvo in Sweden and drove and camped across the Western Soviet Union through Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa to Romania at a time when this was very unusual. The road was very primitive and they got a lot of attention from the locals, including local police who were fascinated by the Volvo. They also drove through Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands. They visited historic sites and tourist attractions and often camped, with John taking photos along the way. Sue’s Wellesley friend May Lou White was an art restorer at the Uffizi in Florence, and they visited her there after the famous Florence flood of 1967 when students and artists from all over the world came to Florence to save and restore flood-damaged treasures. While the museum was closed they got to see back rooms and working art restoration areas including the famous Cimabue crucifix sitting on sawhorses.

They moved to Boulder, Colorado where John had a job at IBM a few months before their first child was born in May 1968: Eleanor Victoria (E.V.) Armitage. They lived in a house in Boulder Heights among the ponderosa forest, several miles above Boulder, that John improved using his excellent carpentry skills. Amy Virginia Armitage was born in March 1970. John became involved in sailplane soaring and spent several years soaring along the front range of the Rockies near Boulder; several of his soaring photos were published in the book Soaring on the Wind. John later became interested in flying small four-seater airplanes, obtained a commercial pilot’s license, became a certified flight instructor for single engine planes and instrument training, and taught flying lessons. He used to take E.V. and Amy up for plane rides. John had also become interested in darkroom photography and made many excellent prints including photos of his family, nature, and gliding.

John worked at IBM for 28 years, primarily in a Senior Engineer role. IBM was a leading technology company, pioneering and innovating computer technology during the time John worked there, first in mainframe computers in the 1960s and then personal computers and other office machines in the 1980s. John was involved in early computer programming languages, and technology in areas including optical data processing, how to represent letters on computer screens, photocopiers, and other optical technical areas. His focus areas included: magneto-optical storage technology, communications channel design for advanced magnetic recording technology, photocopier technology (including lens/mirror specifications, design, testing, and general optical engineering on copiers), image quality analysis, distortion pattern analysis, and microcircuit metrology. He created and taught 40 or 48-hour courses to hundreds of IBM engineers in Applied Optical Engineering and the computer language APL. He held four patents, assigned to IBM, and five IBM publications, some related to light transmission in photocopiers, and co-authored several technical papers on optical techniques. “Analysis of Overlay Distortion Patterns,” with his longtime friend and colleague Joe Kirk, was published by SPIE- The International Society for Optical Engineering, and became an industry-wide reference standard. He used to bring home things like mainframe computer punch cards, rainbow wiring, and prisms for his daughters to play with. He would set up a telescope to see the moon, the rings of Saturn, distant galaxies, and other astronomical sights.

John and Sue divorced in 1975. Sue had started teaching history at the University of Colorado, and she and the girls moved to Boulder while John remained in the Boulder Heights house. John met his second wife, Joey (Joellen Geyer Reed Armitage), at an EST self-help training in Denver. Joey had two sons from her first marriage, Mark and Sean, who were a few years older than E.V. and Amy. They married in October 1975 in snowy Gregory Canyon outside Boulder, at a small wedding attended only by their children and the officiant. John and Joey became very involved with EST including volunteering and instructing sessions. John participated in many self-actualization workshops in the 1970s and 80s and had been the only man accompanying Sue to an early women’s consciousness-raising group. John and Joey moved into a house on Collier Street in Longmont, Colorado, which at the time was a small town. E.V. and Amy lived with Sue and her second husband Bob Greene in Boulder but would spend many weekends and vacations with John and Joey and the boys. They used to go on camping trips in the Rockies in the “big yellow truck,” a Chevrolet Suburban long before they became popular. Road trips often included listening to John Denver and Abba. John was a loving and attentive father and often said his favorite times were when his kids were young.

John’s parents spent some summers in Boulder in the mid-1970s, and moved to Cedaredge, Colorado, on the western slope of the Rockies, in 1976; John’s brother Lee was also living in the area. John and the girls would visit them regularly there including one memorable visit when E.V. and Amy had chicken pox and John flew them home across the mountains to Boulder in turbulent conditions.

John and Joey’s first child, Daniel Geyer Armitage, was born in November 1978 and died suddenly three weeks later from an undiagnosed heart defect. John and Joey had Benjamin Geyer Armitage in May 1980. In 1981-1982, E.V. lived with John and family for a year, and in 1981 John accepted a job offer to transfer to the IBM plant in the Hudson Valley, East Fishkill, New York, where his old friend Joe Kirk worked, and the family moved to Walden, New York, where Amy lived with the family for a year in the 1980s.

Back on the East Coast, John was able to resume his lifelong interest in sailing which soon became a major interest. He first purchased a small sailboat, the Joellen, which he sailed on the Hudson River and Lake Champlain, as well as on the Atlantic off the northeast coast. He and Joey separated in 1986 when she moved to New York City; they divorced in 1990. John decided to live on a sailboat full time and in 1989 purchased Kyrah, a 36 foot heavy duty sailboat made for ocean travel. He sold the Walden house and ended his career at IBM, living in a tent on a friend’s property for a time. He was able to retire from IBM at age 54 in 1989 with a generous pension and healthcare plan. He sailed down the East Coast and to the Bahamas, and in 1990 sailed solo across the Atlantic from Bermuda to Ireland. This began one of the best times of John’s life: his years spent sailing in Europe. Until 2001, John lived on Kyrah and explored the British Isles and Norway. He especially loved the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway and made several trips to Svalbard. He spent at least one winter on the boat in Narvik, Norway, made close friends among the Norwegians he met, and other liveaboard Americans, and helped a local group that was constructing a replica of an old Viking style sailboat, taking pride in the sail he sewed for it. He was a co-author of the Norwegian Cruising Guide, a comprehensive guidebook to sailing the Norwegian coast that included many of his photos and descriptions of sites. Son Ben was first mate to John’s captain, and split his time between living and homeschooling on the boat and his mother Joey in New York. In 1994 Ben enrolled and began boarding at Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale, Colorado for high school.

John’s mother developed brain cancer in 1983 and died in the summer of 1984. John would regularly visit his father in Cedaredge, Colorado and when he decided it was time to move on from sailboat life he lived with his father and took frequent trips in a camper. In 2001 he special ordered a Ford 350 one-ton long bed truck and had an Alaskan Camper custom built just to his specifications and installed on the truck. This began the next phase of his travel adventures in his “land yacht” as he liked to call it. In the last years of his father’s life, he took John Sr. along on camper trips all over the West. He helped care for his father when he died at home in Cedaredge in 2003 at age 90. In 1998 John discovered he had an acoustic neuroma brain tumor which was successfully removed through radiation treatment.

For over 20 years, John lived in the camper and explored wild and beautiful places primarily in the West. He made expeditions to the East Coast and Florida, Texas, Ohio, and other places to visit family (including daughter Amy and family in the Boston area; Lewis Ma, John’s only grandchild, was born in 2008) and explore birding and natural areas. His brother Lee’s property in Cedaredge, Colorado was his home base. His lifelong interest in photography led to photographing nature scenes, flowers, and birds, which turned into a keen interest in birds and birding photography. John loved attempting to get great bird photos with his large lenses and editing his photos in Photoshop. He would compile his travel photos, including bird photos, into “slideshows” which he would email to a list of friends and family. He kept a “life list” of the almost 600 bird species he had seen and would gladly chase rare bird sightings. His large camera lenses got a lot of attention and he was always happy to discuss photography with fellow photographers and share camera knowledge.

John loved British Columbia and Alaska and made several camper trips to remote areas of Alaska, including trips with first Amy, then E.V., Ben, and his friend Michal Krell along the Dalton Highway from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean. His favorite camping spots were those in scenic locations (mountains, rivers, forests, beautiful views) far from organized campgrounds and other people. He loved small dirt roads which were only drivable by a high clearance vehicle. He would spend summers in the Portland, Oregon area where he and E.V. would go birding and they had many great birding trips to places including the Florida Everglades, Magee Marsh in Ohio, High Island in Texas, and southeast Arizona. Ben and Amy also joined him on camper adventures to the Bosque del Apache, El Camino del Diablo, the Everglades, the Grand Canyon, Utah, and other scenic spots. He enjoyed sharing information about his camper and camper-ing lifestyle with people he met, and supported/inspired several friends and acquaintances to buy campers and travel in them.

In the last years of his life, John no longer traveled in the camper but lived in it on his brother Lee’s property on the edge of Cedaredge. Lee and partner Marsha Bryan’s rural land was an ideal place for John to live in the camper and look out on fields, trees, and the nearby Grand Mesa. Son Ben lived nearby in Paonia for most of this time. John spent most of his time reading; he had a wide range of reading interests, from romance to military history. Amy, E.V., and Ben with his wife Robin, had several great visits with John where they would rent a house not far from Cedaredge and spend time together visiting scenic nature sites, looking at photos and documents, and reminiscing. A high point was Ben’s wedding to Robin Pryor in October, 2023 which also served as a family reunion.

John lived independently and happily on his own terms until February 2025, when he developed shortness of breath and was hospitalized for congestive heart failure. He decided at 90, having lived a long and full life, and not wanting to live in a state of decline and dependence, that it was time to go. With the support and love of his children and brother, he died peacefully in hospice at Colorow Care Center in Olathe, Colorado on March 6, 2025.

John was a lifelong learner who loved to master new pursuits and share his expertise with others; he was an excellent and patient teacher. He taught small plane instrument flying, soaring, photography, sextant navigation, sailing, and mountain rescue, and created and taught technical courses at IBM. He often said that he was grateful for the opportunities provided by friends and mentors at key moments in his life and career and credited them with helping him advance. He was fond of animals and never passed up a chance to pet a dog or cat, including Lee and Marsha’s curious outdoor cats who took a liking to him. He was an engineer and mechanically inclined and loved to tinker with/improve everything from computers to car engines. It seemed that he could do or fix anything, and solve any problem. From his outdoor pursuits he knew a lot about the natural world and weather and how to interpret clouds. His many and varied interests included: spending time in nature (especially mountains), cars, flying, sailing, hiking, mountain climbing, guns/target shooting, photography, reading, classical music, and birds.

John is survived by his children, E.V., Amy (husband Tom Ma), and Ben (wife Robin Pryor); grandson Lewis Ma; brother Lee Armitage and Lee’s partner Marsha Bryan. Through his life, he made good friends who he kept in touch with and visited and were important figures in his life. These included:

Friends from his younger years: Gurdon Wattles (who he met in high school; they were each other’s best men at their weddings), Will and Linda Piper, Sal Pomponi, Joey Tuttle, Sumner Davis, Lou Feierabend, and Joe and Annie Kirk. From his sailing years, he met fellow sailors Ed and Mary Arnold, Mike and Susan Huffman, and John and Ann Kellum. In Norway, he befriended Ola Bergslien and Gunn Haberget, Jan Tore Berg, Lars Erik Karlsen, and others. In the camper years, he became friends with Don MacMillan (“Donnie Mac”) in Cedaredge who worked on the truck and camper for many years. John was very pleased that Donnie Mac accepted the truck and camper as a gift and is enjoying its next phase of being used for camping and fishing on the Grand Mesa near Cedaredge. One of John’s best friends in his later years was Michal Krell, whom he encouraged to become a full-time “camper;” they spent many good times together on camper-ing adventures and tinkering in Cedaredge.

Photos of John’s life are compiled in two photo books on Shutterfly which anyone can access through these links:

https://www.shutterfly.com/share-product/?shareid=40d05d9e-bcc6-4a69-abf8-088361dbda9b&cid=SHARPRDWEBMPRLNK and

https://www.shutterfly.com/share-product/?shareid=c00a6c70-2262-40a8-9db7-5f01828c421f&cid=SHARPRDWEBMPRLNK.

John is greatly missed but his memory lives on in those who knew and loved him.