Robert "Bob" Howard Byers Sr.

Bob was born in Lafayette, Indiana, to Harold and Mildred Byers, followed by his sister Brenda. He was raised on a farm three miles south of West Point tending to chickens, pigs, milk cows, corn, soybeans, and hay. It was a childhood spent outdoors: catching crawdads in the creek, riding mules at his grandparents' place, and working from an early age. He rode his bike three miles to school and chopped weeds out of the bean fields to earn his own money.

He attended Southwestern High School, where he ran track, played football, and was elected senior class president. When his small West Point class consolidated into a much larger school, he simply made friends with everyone — a knack he never lost. He pumped gas after school, worked his relatives' farms every summer, and bought a 1947 Ford for a hundred dollars that he drove around the hay field before he had a license. He and his friends had got into a great many dumb things, most of which he was still happy to tell you about sixty years later.

After graduating high school in 1959, Bob joined the Navy that August for seventy-eight dollars a month. He trained as an electronics technician at Great Lakes and served aboard the USS Cone (DD-866), making Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, North Atlantic, and Caribbean deployments — Naples, Istanbul, Athens, Barcelona, Gibraltar, Crete, Kingston, Guantánamo. He was honorably discharged in June 1963 and enrolled at Purdue.

That September, at a party, he met Jan. They connected immediately and both knew it was something rare. They eloped in Carmel, Indiana, in December and didn't tell a soul until January because they hadn't found a place to live yet. It was the beginning of fifty-five years together.

In August 1964 he joined IBM, and he and Jan began a life of moving: Delphi, Rochester, Kokomo, Lafayette, Nashville, Fairfax, Green Bay, Louisville, Mohegan Lake, and finally back to Colorado. Their sons Rob, Tim, and Casey were born along the way.

Over fifty years at IBM, Bob helped install the first supermarket ATM, and retail store systems in the United States, worked on satellite imaging at Purdue's LARS lab, led the Green Bay branch to Branch of the Year, built software and IT operations across Denmark, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Mexico, and stood up global command centers in Brazil, Argentina, and India. He received an Outstanding Innovation Award in 1997 and IBM's Chairman's Award for leading Y2K across Latin America and the U.S. subsidiaries. He celebrated fifty years with the company in 2014 and retired March 31, 2015.

But it was never really the work he talked about. Ask Bob about his work in the US or Brazil or Argentina and he'd tell you about the people who became friends. Those friendships outlasted the projects, the reorganizations, and retirement itself. Long after he'd stopped working, and long after ALS had made speaking difficult, he was still trading messages with people he'd worked with decades earlier and half a world away. They checked on him, and he on them, right up until his final days. He counted them among the great gifts of his life.

He loved speed his whole life. He wrecked a new Corvette in 1962 and never entirely learned his lesson. He worked corners and safety for SCCA, Indy Car, and formula one races, drove go-karts with his grandchildren well into his seventies, took an IndyCar ride at the Speedway at 185 miles an hour (at 83 years old), and made pilgrimages to the Pikes Peak Hill Climb and Speed Week at Bonneville. Bob also loved to travel. He and Jan set out to see all fifty states and finished in 2016 with Alaska.

Jan died on June 30, 2019, after a long illness. Bob missed her every day that followed. He stayed on at Bonaventure, running the resident council and keeping a garden in the summers.

Bob was diagnosed with ALS in 2016 and lived with it for a decade with characteristic stubbornness and good humor.

He is survived by his sons Rob, Tim, and Casey and their wives Krista, Megan, and Lori; grandchildren, Keegan, Evan, Zoe, Owen, Camden, Eli, Audrey, and Carter; sister, Brenda and her daughters Gretchen and Erika; sister-in-law, Claudia and her son, Chris. He was preceded in death by his wife, Jan, and his parents, Harold and Mildred.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to any local ALS cause.