I have only just happened to find this report.  Bruce was a close friend at Reading and I join my university friend Graham Lenton in sending belated condolences to his family.  He visited our family home on several occasions after Reading and we enjoyed a wonderful and memorable few days with him in Salt Lake City in 2004.

Dear Bruce’s family
I have only just stumbled upon the obituary for Bruce some one year after his demise. Bruce and I were at Reading University in UK  when he read Geology for a BSc degree. At Christmas he came to stay with me on a couple of occasions and we both managed to obtain work delivering Christmas post in my home town of Olney in Buckinghamshire. He was a good friend and we did touch base a few years ago but more recently we lost touch. It was sad news to read of his death and I send my belated condolences to his wife and children. 
Dr Graham Lenton 
grahamlenton@btopenworld.com

To say that Bruce led a remarkable life would truly be an understatement.  I would mainly visit with Bruce when we went to excursions to hear pipe organ recitals, poetry recitations, art exhibits, or to do his family history. We walked the neighborhood together while he was trying to get back on his feet after medical problems. He attended some of our LDS activities and had been involved with other Christian faiths, but he identified mostly as Jewish.  How thrilled he was to find the ship logs, census records, and other items that documented his grandfather’s journey from Russia (or Eastern Europe) through Argentina to settle in Pennsylvania!
Back to remarkable, Bruce told me how he lived for a summer, then extended year with First Peoples on the Bannock Reservation is southern Idaho. Then, while away at college in England, he made a solo pilgrimage on foot across Europe and Turkey to Israel, arriving back by ship four months later in time for the next semester. He told of exploring caves in Slovenia (or Slovakia) for weeks.  His geology work took him to the jungles of Panama, working with some nefarious characters, and he was glad to have escaped alive! It seemed that when I shared my own excursions – to Ghana, or Peru, for example – Bruce had spent longer there and could recall wonderful adventures of his own.  He knew Utah backward and forward, having camped, driven, hiked, and encountered it all as State Geologist. The several final years I spent with him, I marveled at his correspondence courtship that turned to marriage of his wife in Shanghai, where he would live six months of each year, appreciating that exotic culture. They even took a trip across Southeast Asia – to Singapore that was fraught with challenges.   
Whatever the topic, Bruce was knowledgeable, a remarkable conversationalist, inquisitive and sharing.  He is missed!  I wished he had written a memoir or personal history.

Another memory I have of Bruce is he loved bread, especially rye bread.  He loved all types of rye bread including light, dark, marbled, Jewish style, Russian style, etc.  In recent years he often had me drive him to many grocery stores, bakeries and farmers' markets in search of the perfect rye bread.  He would call me on the phone and tell me about new rye breads he had discovered.  He also loved any bread with a thick crust, such as artisan bread cooked in wood burning pizza ovens and Dutch ovens.  He also loved Mexican bread.  But despite visiting many Mexican bakeries in the U.S., he never could find Mexican bread in the U.S. that compared to the bread he loved in Mexico.  Every time Bruce talked about bread he loved he would sound like the late actor Walter Matthau.  He would wink and have a twinkle in his eyes and a big smile would come across his face.  He will be missed.

I was a good friend to Bruce.  In recent years I drove him many times every month to buffet restaurants, free musical entertainment events and other places.  He was a big eater.  He liked all food,  especially Chinese and exotic food.  He was a wealth of knowledge.  He knew geography more than anyone else I  have ever known.  He traveled all over the world to far off exotic places and shared many stories of his travels and adventures.   He will be missed.

OBITUARY

Bruce Kaliser

May 21, 1942 – December 8, 2020

Wasatch Lawn Memorial Park and Mortuary

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