Gerald Calame - Obituary

erald Paul Calame, 83, a forty-eight year resident of Annapolis, died on October 6, 2014 at Anne Arundel Medical Center due to congestive heart failure. Born on November 27, 1930 in Le Locle, Switzerland, Gerald emigrated to the United States at age 5 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen at age 18. He earned a B.A. in physics from the College of Wooster in 1953 and a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1960. Gerald performed nuclear reactor core designs for U.S. Navy submarines and destroyers while working at the General Electric Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in Schenectady, NY from 1958-1961, and he was a physics professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY from 1961-1965. He moved to Annapolis in 1966 and was a physics professor at the U.S. Naval Academy for 34 years, including serving as the chairman of the physics department for 4 years. He retired from the Naval Academy in 2000, and was later named Professor Emeritus of physics in 2005. His interests included hiking, running, watching football, and reading books on science fiction, military history, and comparative religion. In his later years, he enjoyed taking college-level courses on history, archeology, astronomy, and religion through DVDs and the internet. Gerald is survived by his wife of 56 years, Jocelyn F. Calame; a son, Jeffrey P. Calame of Annapolis; a daughter-in-law, Lynn Stonebraker of Annapolis; a sister, Mary Ballard of Lady Lake, FL and a nephew, Ken Ballard of Vallejo, CA. A celebration of his life will be held in the spring of 2015.