From humble beginnings as a poor, barefoot, cotton-picking Georgia farm boy, Robert Shipp rose to become an engineering specialist who helped build nuclear power plants around the world—and a beloved family man.
Indeed, when the Fukushima plant in Japan he worked on was hit by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, his whole being focused on one thing only—his granddaughter, Jessica Brewka.
She worked in Japan as the liaison with Gilroy’s sister city; for several days, no one knew if she was dead or alive.
“He wanted her to come home, he said she should come home,” recalled his wife, Eileen Shipp, of Gilroy.
The young Morgan Hill woman, a former Garlic Festival Queen, stayed safe and unharmed in the small northern Japan town of Takko-Machi, where she worked for the rest of her yearlong assignment.
Shipp had faith the power plant would not fail. Indeed, it only went out of service when seawalls were breached by the tsunami wave, according to Eileen Shipp, a retired Santa Clara Valley Water District project coordinator.
After retiring from a career as a metallurgical engineer, Shipp kept his hand in consulting, helping to restore an antique airplane, building a water system for a mushroom farm and doing metal failure analysis.
An inventor, avid gardener and inveterate tinkerer, Shipp was building a souped-up golf cart to ride with his grandson in the Boulder Creek July 4 parade. He collapsed and died of a heart attack May 25 while planting tomatoes with grandson Anthony Heinz, 20, of North Fork, California. Shipp was 79.
Family members, including the second family that came when he and Eileen married, each for the second time, said he was the most decent of men, supportive, positive and genuinely caring; a brilliant engineer and happy adventurer who loved life and had a great sense of humor.
He would greet the day by walking out his front door every morning singing, “Good morning America, how are you” from the song, “City of New Orleans.”
Shipp spent years showing his children the world and reveling in watching grandchildren grow up, his family said.
“He was a natural grandpa,” said daughter Linda Brewka of Morgan Hill.
Her daughters, Jessica and Julia, she said, were his first grandchildren and were “Papa’s girls.”
When they dressed up for children’s theater “Bob would sit in the family room and be entertained for hours,” she said.
That she was a stepdaughter never entered anyone’s mind, he was just “Papa” to everyone, she said.
Son John Shipp of Boulder Creek, from his first marriage, said, “He did an amazing job of opening the world for me.” He described numerous family side trips to foreign lands while his father worked for General Electric building nuclear plants overseas.
Robert Shipp also is survived by children Melanie Richards, John Heinz and grandchildren Grace, Skyler and Anthony.
The family returned from Europe to settle in the Almaden area of San Jose. Shipp took an engineering job with Newtech in South San Jose, was divorced from his first wife, then met and married Eileen in 1983 in a backyard ceremony.
She was attracted to Shipp, she said, because he was “A good guy and a nice man, plus he was funny.” They moved to Gilroy in 1996 after he retired.
After moving to their new, rural home, Shipp tended a garden with grapes and fruit trees, devised gadgets, kept the swimming pool clean and helped his neighbors,
“He was always building or designing,” Eileen Shipp said. “He never really threw anything away. If I had a mixer that went out, he would take it [to his workshop] and end up using it for something.”
He worked so much on cars and repairing things with welds, he became the go-to fix-it man for the neighborhood, she said.
“He was that way from the day we met, an innovator and willing to be an entrepreneur, that always fascinated him,” said Bud Van Cott of Lincoln, California.
They’d been friends since their days as engineering students after Van Cott left the Army and Shipp left the Navy, which he had joined at 17 at the end of the Korean War.
While in the service, Shipp was an airplane mechanic, for a time at Moffett Field in Mountain View. Later the friends worked together at Newtech.
John Shipp says his dad’s time in the military was the turning point in his life.
He used the GI bill to get his engineering degree, which transformed the Georgia farm boy into a world-class metals engineer, according to his family.
“It was a blessing that he joined the Navy,” his son said.
“Just think of it,” said his son, John, who inherited his dad’s creative and inventive abilities and works with poppy jasper rock and others for a jewelry booth each year at the Gilroy Garlic Festival. “For a poor, cotton-picking Georgia farm boy he did an amazing job. His cousins are still in the same little town [Hiram, Georgia]. He opened up the world for me; we went to India, South Africa and Australia, Nepal, Thailand and Malaysia.
“He really had a sense of adventure; he was the right dad for me, I’ll tell you,” he said.
Even after his death, Eileen Shipp marveled at his creative capacities and the breath of his interests and curiosity.
“He was always making things. Like with all our tomatoes, he was making something that would take off the peels and he was coming up with a machine to squeezed out the seeds,” she recalled.
Shipp was cremated. A life celebration will be held in July.
In the meantime, Eileen Shipp said, he’s in the garden in a birdbath specially designed to keep ashes.
“What could be more appropriate?” she asked. “I don’t think he’d want to be in the house overlooking his garden. And he loved birds, so he is out there.
“I opened it up and put a little tiny bottle of Crown Royal in there,” she said, “and some vodka for when I join him.”
