Richard Carl Boetcker, 72, passed from this life on February 14, 2015 in Collinsville, Oklahoma. Richard was born in Erie, PA to Carl and Mildred Boetcker. .He fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming a successful inventor when he received a patent in 2000 for his invention The Volcano Stove (http://www.volcanogrills.com). He is survived by his loving children, Wendy Potter and husband, Danny and Jennifer Borutski and husband, Kevin; grandchildren, Desiree and Derek Potter, Travis and Kristen Dever, Daniel Meadows, Jacob and Suzannah Borutski, and Shayne and Noah Barnett; and sister, Anita Kirkaldy. He was preceded in death by his parents. Private Family Services.

To whom it may concern : I was born in Erie, Pa. in 1942 and joined the USAF in 1960. I stayed in the service until 1967.

Most of my time was spent at Lowery AFB where I conducted classes on the Hughes Weapons Control System associated with the F106 Aircraft. I did spend about 18 months with a field unit at McCord AFB in Washington. I went to work with RCA in New Jersey as a computer hardware instructor in 1967. When they decided to leave the large scale processing business I went to work for GTE in Moorestown, New Jersey. That lasted about 18 months. They went out of the Communications business and I joined Telex Computer products in Tulsa Oklahoma. I worked as a hardware instructor for them for about 8 years and then moved to Boulder Colorado where I managed the training department for NBI. They were innovators in Word processing at the time. I left NBI when a friend called me up one day and explained that a company named Denelcor, in Aurora Colorado, was manufacturing the largest and fastest computer system on earth and they needed someone to put the training course together. I jumped at the chance. They were underfunded and mismanaged and went out of business in about three years.

I was out of work for about two years and rather than have my brain go to sleep or sit around waiting for the phone to ring, I started work on a couple of my pet ideas. The one that you may be familiar with (The Volcano Stove) started out to be just simply a way of cooking in a Wok without the problems associated with the high heat, grease, smoke, smell and danger with that type of cooking when done inside. The stove was designed for outside use only. It evolved first into a small barbecue, then to a frying pan heat source and large pot stove to a fire pit for a Dutch oven. I made many modifications to accommodate new utensils without compromising prior designs.

I got a job with Evans & Sutherland in Salt Lake in 1987 and for a time dropped all work on the stove. I was again teaching and doing course development on some very large Computer systems used in Image Generation for flight simulators.

When I felt comfortable with the job I started back to work on the stove and received the patent 4,909,235 in March of 1990. I met an interested individual shortly thereafter and ultimately signed an agreement with Volcano Incorporated in 1992. Without going into any detail, that was the dumbest thing I have ever done. I trusted him and he is not to be trusted. End of story! I figured that the only way I would be able to profit from my idea was to get another patent and get it away from him. I started improving the stove and spent many hours talking to patent attorneys regarding my own prior art and how we could justify a stove that was so similar in concept.

We played heavily on the collapsibility of the stove and luckily there were no camping stoves at the time that collapsed in this particular way. Evans & Sutherland laid me off in 1999 and I put all my efforts into getting the patent and licensing this new and better stove. I was granted the patent in 2000 and had my first meetings with Camp Chef in Logan, Utah shortly thereafter. They were an established company and I believed I could trust them to do right by the new stove. They did not design it as I had asked so they were plugging along with the written material and mechanical design but after numerous self imposed, stupid manufacturing mistakes, the stove finally worked.

I also designed a small stove that fits inside the large stove, when stowed, and they both fit into the same carrying bag. The small stove had a grill diameter of approximately nine inches and could be used to cook veggies or heat coffee while the main meal cooked on the larger stove. Camp Chef was dragging their feet on the small stove and I was poking around trying to find interested parties to manufacture the small stove. Camp Chef looked at the small stove as an accessory and did not make any decision as to whether they would manufacture and promote this small stove although it is part of the patent.

While I was working for Evans & Sutherland I took a trip to Japan, two trips to France and a trip to Dubai. It surprised me to find nothing like this stove exists in any of the countries I visited. In Dubai I was surprised to find that the locals vacation in the desert or on the beach. This would be perfect for them because of the no trace camping attributes. It is mostly unknown by anyone outside the computer industry that people associated with computers for as long as I had been, have developed a heightened sense of logical thinking. There is right and wrong and logical. There are always specific reasons associated with the right and wrong way of doing something but there is no discussion when it comes to making a logical decision because there are so many non specific reasons for the decision. Many times, when possible, one can turn everything upside down just to see if it would work better. This is what I call looking at something from a new perspective. The concept is not new but it has worked for me over many years.

As a simple example: The stove I developed is upside down from all the rest of the outdoor cookers on the market since it is smaller on the top than on the bottom and because of that it works better. That simple fact is included in the patent in one of the primary claims. I am not going to go into detail regarding my reasoning for this here but it seemed logical to me at the time, I tried it, and it solved a lot of problems. I must say at this point that I never was interested in higher mathematics. Mathematics okay, especially that used in mechanical design, but I never took any courses in higher learning. All of my knowledge has been gained over many years. After all I am 68 now and one has to have learned something in that time or at least developed the ability to think logically.

In a very famous Quotation from Einstein: “Imagination is more Important than Knowledge. Knowledge is Limited. Imagination Encircles the World” I have always believed this and that is why I detail this example of my Imagination. Einstein has always been one of my favorite people because he was a great thinker and dared to think outside the envelope. This product of my Imagination is way outside the box of envelopes and yet I hope it is taken seriously by some.