Rochester, NY: Eugene Stephen Evanitsky died peacefully in his home on the afternoon of February 17, 2020 surrounded by his loving family.
He is survived by his remarkable wife of more than half a century, Tatiana Evanitsky, and by their children, Stephan and Olya and Roxanne and Alysia, and by those children’s spouses, and by his 5 grandchildren.
The youngest child of Ukrainian immigrants, he was born August 10, 1947 in Sewickley, Pennsylvania to Stephen Anthony Evanitsky and Katherine Krill Evanitsky.
He grew up in Ambridge, a steel town on the heights above the Ohio River northwest of Pittsburgh, babied and beloved by his three older sisters, Gloria and Patricia and Stephanie.
His fondest memories of childhood may be of reading on the sun porch outside, wrapped in blankets, imagining himself the captain of a great steamship, the pilot of a rocket plane to Mars, a rider on the railroad roaring toward the cowboy west. For several years in the early 1950s, he was Hopalong Cassidy; and he once rolled his friend David Fasciano down the steepest hill in Ambridge inside a tire – and was eventually forgiven for having done so.
He loved then and his whole life long chess and puzzling and word problems and the beauty and symmetry and stillness of geometry and logic and the idea at the heart of it all that an answer will come to you if you can be quiet enough to hear it.
He graduated Ambridge High School a smart, sweet, shy kid with an aptitude for numbers and a gifted imagination. He took a B.A. in mathematics from Case Western Reserve University. He earned an M.A. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Rochester, and an M.A. / E.E. in Biomedical Engineering from the U of R not long after.
More importantly in those early years he found and wooed his soulmate, Tatiana. They met one young and humid summer by the pool at Soyuzivka, a Ukrainian resort in the Catskills. They walked to a waterfall in the high, green woods and held hands and kissed and fell in love.
They married in 1968 and began their family. Eugene taught math at Monroe High School and they bought their first house, on Belgard Street in Rochester. He took a job at Xerox in the mid- 1970s.
His other, now lesser passion was still for problem solving – whether the problem was how to digitize the greatest libraries on earth, or how to improve his children’s science fair projects.
Across five decades as a lead engineer and innovation architect at Xerox, he puzzled out answers on behalf of a world moving from paper to photons, forming and leading teams that over his tenure were awarded nearly three dozen patents. He was an extraordinary worker who never brought his work home.
Instead, to his wife and his children he was a teller of magical stories and a helper with impossible homework; a hanger of paintings and singer of songs; an artist and a poet and a playmate and a chef; photographer and archivist and the executive producer of a hundred family movies and living room musicals. He won the respect of everyone by never demanding it of anyone. He was kind and gently funny, and the secret ingredient to his breakfast oatmeal was ice cream.
If there were a patent on happiness, he’d have held that too.
Still, his grandchildren invented with him a new joy and a new contentment, perfect in every specification, radiant, and filled with the peace and promise of unimaginable tomorrows.
He traveled the world but found no place prettier than the country roads of Western New York. From Pittsford he walked and drove and swam and climbed its hills and fields and lakes and orchards. He sought and found serenity here, and this landscape in its breadth and modesty and simplicity became to him an expression of his own soul and spirit.
To Eugene the greatest puzzle of all was the mysterious turning of the universe and the lyrical workings of god. A lifetime in earnest search of meaning and grace led him at last to the inarguable wisdom of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“He who loves is a participant in the being of God.”
Love then – love without beginning and never ending, love everywhere inside him and outside him – was the only answer Eugene ever needed.
Beloved father, son, husband and brother, grandfather and uncle and colleague and friend, he leaves none of us behind, but rather goes bravely on before us all.