Raymond William Green

Raymond William Green, 82, died in the evening of May 8, 2023, from complications resulting from a week in the hospital with an intestinal bleed. The son of Frederick Louis and Margaret Foote Green, he was born on October 5, 1940, in Detroit, Michigan. He grew up in Plymouth and graduated from Canton High School before attending the University of Michigan, where he received his undergraduate degree in chemistry in 1963 and his law degree in 1966, and where he met his wife, Phyllis Ann Hart, whom he married on August 21, 1965. Ray and Phyllis had two sons, Charlie, born in 1971 (now a patent attorney in Oak Park, Illinois, married to Kristin and the father of Beckett and Matthew), and Christopher, born in 1972 (now a law professor in Oxford, Mississippi, married to Bonnie and the father of Hadley, Hudson, Sebastian, and Naomi).

Ray worked as a patent attorney, first for Proctor & Gamble for two years in Cincinnati, then for the Carborundum Company in Niagara Falls, New York, and from 1982 until his retirement in Chicago with the firm known (until its merger last year) as Brinks Gilson & Lione. He specialized in a procedure at the Patent and Trademark Office known as "interferences," in which the Office determines, sometimes with great difficulty, which of two or more purported inventors was the first to invent something. For many years, Ray spent much of his time in the "diaper wars" representing Kimberly Clark against his old employer, P&G. He identified the secret of his success as his ability to continue digging for 15 or 20 hours into problems so complicated and seemingly dull that most of his colleagues would give up on them after an hour or two. He could find almost any technical dispute interesting, to the point that he once had some difficulty writing an opposition to a petition for certiorari, whose success depended on convincing the Supreme Court that the dispute was mundane and not worth their time. He was famous at the law firm for having the office with by far the tallest and most numerous stacks of paper. Phyllis once decorated their house with a needlepoint announcing that "creative clutter is better than idle neatness" and featuring a small calendar in the corner highlighting the fifth and tenth days of October (Ray and Christopher's birthdays).

As a child, Ray's favorite book was George Gamow's One Two Three ... Infinity, a book whose audacious claim to "survey briefly the entire field of basic scientific knowledge, leaving no corner untouched" no doubt sparked his lifelong obsession with popular explanations of science. Over the years, he and Phyllis accumulated a library considerably larger than ten thousand volumes. Several thousand of those volumes covered popular science. Ray could do quite a bit of damage in visits to numerous bookstores. In fact, many of his vacations around the world would include a day visiting a local bookstore. While Ray did not read all of his books in their entirety, the bookmarks left in a great many of them indicate that he had dug through at least the first few chapters. In the hospital the week before he died, Ray brightened up considerably when his sons offered to bring a book on Pluto's declassification as a planet into his hospital room. Psalm 111:2 captures his attitude: "Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them."

The breakfast table was always a place for Ray to explain something technical to his boys. Bill Watterson, himself the son of a patent attorney, once drew a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon that featured Calvin's dad telling Calvin on the phone, "This is the story of the hydraulic pump (Fig. 1), the wheel shaft flange (Fig. 2), and the evil patent infringement." Those were the sorts of stories that Ray loved to tell and his sons loved to hear. Many times, Phyllis would assign Ray the task of reading bedtime stories to the boys and come back to find all three of them asleep with Joe Kaufman's What Makes It Go? What Makes It Work? What Makes It Fly? What Makes It Float? open on Ray's lap.

While none of his sons or grandchildren has followed his footsteps quite precisely, Ray was very proud of the interest they have displayed in their own ways in science, engineering, law, and design. While Christopher jumped from physics to a politics degree halfway through his undergraduate education, unswayed by Ray's advice that staying in a technical field would leave the door open to sitting for the patent bar, Charlie eventually found his way to law school and life in the world of patents after an extensive initial career in hardware and software engineering.

Ray's eulogy of Phyllis in January 2022 was beautifully concise; he simply thanked Phyllis's parents for raising such a wonderful woman to spend his life with. The sixteen months between their passings made it very clear how deeply he loved and depended on her. In addition to his sons and grandchildren, Ray is survived by his sister Mildred Herman of Milford, Michigan, his sister-in-law Janet Sparks of Austin, Texas, and his brother-in-law Jim Hart of Perrysburg, Ohio. Besides Phyllis and his parents, Ray was predeceased by his brothers Larry and David, his sisters-in-law Charlene and Beverly, his sister Carolyn Hartnett, his brothers-in-law Robert Hartnett, Tom Herman, and Robert Sparks, and his mother- and father-in-law, Ilene and Charles Hart.

Visitation will be Friday, May 19, 2023, at Glueckert Funeral Home, 1520 N. Arlington Heights Road, Arlington Heights, IL 60004 from 3 pm until 6 pm and Saturday, May 20, 2023 at First Presbyterian Church of Arlington Heights, 302 N. Dunton Ave., Arlington Heights, IL 60004 from 10 am until the time of the funeral service at 11 am. Interment will be at Memory Gardens. The service will be live-streamed at https://firstpresah.org/experience/livestream/.