Mark David Virtue

Until Mark David Virtue married Laura Ellen White and started raising a family of his own, he considered himself a citizen of the world. He was homeless. His was a vagabond life, accompanying his father, a foreign correspondent, and mother to and from a series of Latin American countries. He felt allegiance to no country.

One of Mark’s complaints about life in Latin America was that often his play with friends on the street would be interrupted by the arrival of their grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Like other expatriate children, he had no relatives like that around, and he felt he was missing out.

Mark, an only child, was born on May 1, 1968, in São Paulo, Brazil, where I was manager for United Press International news agency. He always called us Mamae and Papae, the only words he remembered in Portuguese.

Then living in Caracas, Venezuela, when he was four we returned to his birthplace on vacation. He was registered as a citizen at the Canadian consulate, but had only been allowed to leave Brazil on a Brazilian passport, at age 18 months. I once asked him what he remembered from São Paulo at age four. It was the Ibirapuera snake farm where snakes are milked for their venom. One of the things we remember is he needed proof he owed no income tax before being allowed to leave Brazil again. I contacted the fixer, despachante, who handled such things for me when I was manager there. Had Mark been five, he would have been fingerprinted as part of the process. Now that he would have remembered!

Mark unknowingly ended a 12-year estrangement between my father and his only son. When Mark was born, I sent my father pictures, cards, letters, all to no avail. Finally, cousin Barbara from the Virtue side of the family stopped off to see her uncle, then living in Kelowna, B.C. She told him he was a silly old man who was going to die without seeing his only grandson. That prompted a letter from my father. When our next home leave came in 1972, we spent a week in Kelowna with him. He still had a fantastic rapport with children. When we left, he dropped us off at a car rental so we could get a vehicle for our drive through the Rockies to Edmonton, Alta., to see my mother. As we were leaving the car rental, I saw he was still there, trying to change a flat tire. When I reached him, I saw why he was having trouble: he couldn’t see what he was doing for the tears in his eyes. We never saw him again. He died the following year. When the funeral director asked if I wanted to see his remains, I said no, the last image I wanted of him was playing with his young grandson.

For nearly eight years, Sunday morning was a day of rest for his mother, so father and son were left on their own. At first, Mark was in his baby carriage. Then we graduated to a car and visited zoos, parks and museums. Once in Caracas we sat in our car for 10 minutes while a giant sloth laboriously crossed the road in front of us.

After six years in Caracas, the Virtue family moved to Mexico City, in 1975, when Mark was seven. The first thing we did was find a school for Mark, Greengates, a British School, where he entered grade two. Then we rented a house. Since the school was located in Jardines de San Mateo, a middle-class Mexican district on the outskirts of Mexico City, that’s where we settled. As far as we could determine, we were the only foreign family there. How would we fit in? Mark took care of that.

The day the movers arrived with our furniture, we were busy in the house when Mark found his roller skates. He put them on and headed down the street. He stopped when he came upon a tall man and two boys who looked his age who were washing a lovely Karmann Ghia sports car. They were surprised when this blonde-haired boy stopped and said in impeccable Spanish, “I have experience washing a car.” As far as I can remember, he never helped wash our family car in Caracas; he might have handed me a rag to polish it. The tall man was Luis Cabrera, a doctor who taught medicine at the national university. He became my best friend in Mexico. The night his wife gave birth to their last child, he wasn’t at her bedside but playing bumper pool with me in our playroom. She became my wife’s best friend; Anna was soon involved in weekly events. The boys became Mark’s best friends. Once another boy stole one of their bikes and the three of them tracked down the thief and retrieved the bike, unbeknownst to the parents.

Mexico was where Mark developed his love of photography. The first to influence him was a teacher whose workshop on photography he attended. The person who taught him how best to take pictures was Reva Brooks, who, with her Canadian War Artist husband, Leonard, lived in the art colony of San Miguel de Allende. Mark was directly involved in our meeting the Brookses.

Every year I’d make a business trip that ended in San Antonio, Texas, where I’d pick up parts for equipment in the UPI bureau. We would stay overnight, coming and going, at a Holiday Inn in Matehuala, no relation to the American chain. On the way up, Anna had solved a wooden puzzle not unlike a Rubik’s cube. On the way back, after gobbling his meal, Mark wandered around the restaurant and saw two men struggling to solve the puzzle. “My mother solved that in one minute,” he told the men. On the way out, the men stopped at our table to see what Mark’s mother looked like.

It turns out that the two men owned a home in San Miguel de Allende. We told them we’d love to have a weekend home so that Mark could take his young lungs out of the smog of Mexico City. They had a friend with a property for sale. They gave us her telephone number and we arranged to meet her the following Saturday. She wasn’t there, so we found a real estate agent who showed us four homes. One of them belonged to the Brookses, whom we arranged to meet the next day. While Reva and Anna worked out the details of the sale of their house at Quebrada 109 – they had built a new home – Leonard and I sat on the terrace and drank the first of what would be gallons of rum.

Reva had been selected by the San Francisco Museum of Art as one of the top 50 female photographers of all time. She had once been hired to give photography lessons to the son of a Mexican president. Now she was giving free lessons to a 10-year-old. I would write the biography of the Brookses.

Mark had a third instructor at the UPI bureau, Lou Garcia, director of photography for Latin America. He spent a lot of time with Lou in the bureau darkroom.

When Mark applied for admission to the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was asked the genesis of his interest in aviation. He said it was at his father’s eleventh floor office, where he would launch paper planes and watch their flight paths. We used to have a Christmas Eve dinner for friends in Caracas. One Christmas, Bill Heath, the Associated Press bureau chief, gave Mark a model of a B-52 bomber to construct. That was certainly his first model airplane, if not the inspiration for a career in aviation.

During summer vacation, Anna would take Mark to Canada, where they’d stay at her parents’ summer cottage in the Laurentian Mountains. Then she thought that we should own a piece of Canada with which Mark could identify. The opportunity came in 1974 when a widowed aunt put on sale her cottage at Lac Labelle, 90 miles north of Montreal. We ended up with a cottage on 350 feet of lake front where Mark would spend a decade of summers, swimming, fishing, windsurfing, making model airplanes. He’d be joined by our goddaughter, Ariane Finsten, her parents, Lawrence and Lucile, and sisters Rachel and Geneviève. Cousins on his mother’ side would join him.

I left United Press International in 1981 after 25 years to become executive editor of the Spanish-language daily newspaper El Mundo in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The decision to move was taken by all three family members. Anna and Mark, then 13, joined me in San Juan, where he visited Saint John’s, a private school noted for the number of graduates accepted at leading American universities. Back in Mexico City, we held three votes over three days. We discussed the pros and cons of moving. The first vote was to move to San Juan, the second vote was stay in Mexico, the third vote was again to move, which we did.

Saint John’s was difficult for Mark as he was a continental, an off-islander, not a Puerto Rican. Although the language of instruction was English, non-Puerto Ricans, less than 10 percent of the student body, were looked down upon. The teachers soon realized Mark was more advanced than other students, especially in math. He’d be asked to help the math teachers, something that did not endear him to other students. He found salvation in his camera.

Mark became the school photographer, taking pictures of school events and pictures for the newsletter. He took many pictures of the students for their own use and enjoyment. He’d submit to the overseeing teacher at the close of the school year a detailed list of material used, the cost and the picture results. He was a bargain!

Mark was home on school break from university on December 31, 1986, when there was a deliberately set fire at the Dupont Plaza Hotel, a block from where we lived. I told him to grab his camera. He didn’t like the up close gore – 98 people died – and retreated from the immediate scene. From a block away, he took a photo of guests being evacuated by helicopter from the roof. His shot was reminiscent of the picture of the last Americans leaving Saigon. The picture editor of El Mundo, which I edited, used Mark’s photo.

Before finishing high school, Mark had a list of engineering schools he was interested in but he only visited two: the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. As soon as Mark saw MIT, he had found his home. He applied and received early admission at the university, possibly helped by the recruiter who said he could write an amusing essay, which he did on how the fish bone always ends up in the mouth of the diner who will gag on it.

When Mark graduated from Saint John’s in 1986, he was one of only 141 high school students in the United States named Presidential Scholar, the nation’s highest honor for high school students. Because of the recognition, Mark received some 50 letters from American universities seeking his registration, but he was already accepted at MIT. One, in Michigan, offered him a full scholarship if he studied mechanical engineering there.

He installed his train set at an MIT layout. He joined the rugby team. He joined the weekly newspaper, The Tech. Within two months the newspaper published a full-page photo essay of his on “The Foot of the Charles”! His credit appeared in The Tech for the first time as Mark D. Virtue.

When the publisher of El Mundo newspaper asked where Mark was going to study, she said the foundation which owned the newspaper would give him a half scholarship, the Virtues paying the other half. Then I did something that affected his stay at MIT. A new president of El Mundo wanted the heads of the advertising and circulation departments to have input in the newspaper’s editorial content. I fought him for a year before deciding I had to resign on a point of ethical principle without having a job lined up. Mark lost his half scholarship and eventually needed student loans.

During the summer of 1987, Mark and I both ended up in Washington. We agreed to meet at a White House gate. After about half an hour of waiting, each was cursing the other. I don’t know if it was the MIT student or the well-traveled journalist who was to blame. We both left the gate where we were waiting and met. We laughed and did our rounds of the museums. He liked air and space, I liked the M.A.S.H. exhibit.

I eventually joined the Miami News where I was told I’d become the editorial page editor. Before that could happen, the newspaper closed Dec. 31, 1988, and I was unemployed again.

The year had been even more difficult for Mark. He had an unrequited love interest at MIT that grew ugly, notes being posted on doors where everyone could read them. His grades suffered to such an extent he was told to take a year off. While her husband and son were unemployed, Anna was hired as a reporter/researcher in the Miami bureau of the Los Angeles Times.

Since Anna used the family car, Mark once took me to a job interview on the back seat of his motorcycle. Mark was eventually hired as a pasteup man in the composing room of the Miami Herald. He was the only pasteup person who caught errors in two languages, English and Spanish. Some of the editors on the Spanish-language edition knew Mark from when they worked for me in Caracas or San Juan.

Mark living at home again allowed me to do things I wouldn’t have done otherwise, like accompanying him to a Grateful Dead concert at the Arena, a demolition derby at the Orange Bowl and a formula one race on the streets of Miami. He loved formula one racing. When Canadian race driver Gilles Villeneuve was killed in 1982, Mark mourned his death as if he had been a family member.

In mid-1989, I joined Florida International University’s journalism school on a program, funded by the State Department, to train mid-career Latin American journalists. When I retired 26 years later, I was director of the school’s International Media Center.

Mark took time off from the Herald to join Daniel, the brother of Tech colleague Ezra Peisach, on a trip to Italy and France in 1989; their parents had some frequent flyer miles going to waste. Mark always chatted with people, and he did so with a young man waiting for a bus outside of Florence. It turns out he had also been born in São Paulo! They communicated in a mixture of Italian and Spanish. When the boys went to Paris, they dined with Mark’s godfather, Canadian ambassador to France Claude Charland. Claude was the consul in São Paulo when he and his wife, Marguerite, agreed to be his godparents. Mark and Daniel were able to navigate Paris without any problem as Mark spoke very good French. He learned it in school and from his mother and perfected it during the months he spent at the summer cottage in Quebec.

Mark drove down to Miami to spend Christmas of 1991 with us in an old Ford Econoline van that broke down in North Carolina. We drove up in the rental car he had and retrieved the van, presumably repaired. It broke down again in Miami but he managed to get it back to Cambridge, where it finally expired. This is important because a classmate of Mark’s, Andrew Bennett, a matchmaker of some renown, had a high school friend from Albuquerque, N.M., who was moving. He had committed Mark and his van to help her. Mark showed up without a van and met Laura Ellen White, a flute and voice student at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge. They had their first date the day after Valentine’s Day.

Mark and Laura were married June 11, 1994 in Provincetown, Mass. Laura’s voice teacher, Donna Roll, had a home there and suggested the nuptials take place in Provincetown. A justice of the peace married them on a seaside dock across the street. The reception was held at Donna’s.

The end of the Cold War wasn’t kind to Mark’s career. He had dreamed of helping design new fighter planes at Grumman or Northrop. But the manufacture of new fighter planes was suspended. Mark had been working on a computer system at MIT, so he went on full staff there. They rented a house in Topsfield that belonged to MIT. He shortly afterward joined Ebsco, a company involved in education and the Internet and located closer to home. From there he moved to a company that was developing a type of yellow pages online. He’d just been there several weeks when it was acquired by Amazon.com. He was interviewed by Amazon and offered a job in Seattle. Their Washington State lives were about to begin.

After two years renting a house in Seattle, Mark, Laura and their infant daughter Madeline, born in 2000, moved to a two-and-a half acre property outside of Port Orchard. Samantha was born in 2006. There were four buildings, one of them, becoming Mark’s wood working shop and his photo studio, Virtuous Photography. Eventually the property became a mini-farm, with nine goats and ducks and chickens, the number of fowl depending on the appetites of the bald eagles, raccoons and coyotes who visited the property.

I’m sure that Mark, having traveled so much as a child, was perfectly happy to spend the rest of his life in Port Orchard.

In 2006 he swore allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, obtaining his third citizenship and passport. Laura had felt uneasy about Mark’s lack of citizenship, while he said he was tired of waiting in the non-American line at U.S. immigration as other members of the family breezed through on return trips from Canada.

Mark built cabinets in the house and put in hardwood floors in three rooms by himself. He once told me that if he wasn’t a computer software engineer, he’d want to be a cabinet maker. My paternal grandfather, whom I never met, was a cabinet maker in Carleton Place, Ont.

Mark moved often among the many buildings Amazon occupied in Seattle. For a while, he’d roller skate from the ferry to work. At another location, he’d bike from the ferry.

Mark was soon active in Port Orchard. He coached in-line skaters in nearby Bremerton, including Madeline. He took the participants to meets in Lincoln and Omaha, Neb., and Las Vegas. When the girls took dance classes, his camera followed. He became a fixture at the Dance Gallery, taking photos and videos of practices, competitions and shows.

Mark participated in the Washington State Science and Engineering Fair and an annual short film competition, where Madeline helped as his assistant. He did the sound and lighting for the haunted house at the Kitsap County Haunted Fairgrounds, the main Halloween season attraction where Gallery dancers performed.

The organization that was most important for Mark and Laura was the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), which they originally joined in Boston. It’s dedicated to researching and re-creating the arts and skills of pre-17th-century Europe. It numbers over 30,000 members worldwide, ranging from blue collar workers to PhDs. Members select appropriate names for themselves, Marcus Tullius Calvus, in the case of Mark, a bow to his baldness.

Mark died at 3:35 a.m. on December 30, 2015 at the St. Joseph Hospital in Tacoma of a concussion after falling and hitting his head at home. A Celebration of his Life was held Sunday, January 3 at the Dance Gallery, a home-away-from home for him. It was organized by his friends from the SCA.

Despite having just 48 hours notice, there were 200 people at the event. Over 90 minutes, about 30 people spoke about what Mark meant to them. One person said Mark never talked about himself, that he was interested in what you had to say. At least three photographers told how Mark helped them become more professional. Several dancers talked about how their self-esteem and dancing was improved by the photos Mark took of them. A recent arrival from Oregon said he had no friends until Mark took him under his wing.

A friend from Amazon.com who was at the event told us that once the company’s top computer engineers met to see who among them was familiar with all of Amazon’s computer systems. Only one engineer was and he wasn’t present at the meeting: Mark Virtue. As valuable as he was to Amazon, he was forced out after 15 years because he was allergic to dog hair. He and five others with similar allergies were housed in a building separate from those where employees brought their dogs. For staff meetings, his boss and other members had to go to Mark’s office. Amazon has a policy, now rejected by most companies, of firing 20 percent of its employees every year. Mark felt he was about to become a 20 percenter, so two years ago he hired a headhunter who placed him at 10000 ft., an Internet company specializing in helping executives arrive at decisions. There he was able to work three days a week from home. His 10000 ft. boss, who was at the Celebration, said the company would have to hire at least two engineers to cover the breadth of Mark’s expertise. There are no longer any employees allergic to dog hair at Amazon.

There have been more than 200 Facebook postings, one from a teacher at Greengates in Mexico, Bernice Jervis, who said she started following Mark’s career when Facebook was in its infancy. “He had that funny laugh when he was 11 years old,” she posted. “He was a lovely young man even then.” Here are some of the postings, including from some who had been at the Celebration:

Erynn Bosch: “I didn’t understand the impact you had on me until now. I will be forever thankful of that.”

Connor Edwards: “I remember when I first started skating, the pictures were very helpful. I will never forget the times we laughed and the times we talked.”

Megan Nerwik Renick: “Here Mark was, MIT, nerd, parent, cyclist, skater, photojournalist.”

D. Kaufman: “It’s clear from the outpouring of support and sympathy that he touched many, many lives, and left a full lifetime of positive experiences in his wake.”

Korin Pittman: “The impact he had on my life and the world is unreal.”

Arathi Ramani: “Mark was so much fun to work with and talk to. I’m sorry I only knew him for such a short time.”

Tracey Ramsey: “I always felt like we could walk up to you and strike up a conversation. I will never forget the sound of your laugh.”

Bonnie Erskine: “Mark and I met on the Bremerton-Seattle ferry in 2001. I noticed this guy who had a car steering wheel strapped to his backpack walking laps on the passenger deck. (Note: he would remove the steering wheel from his Nissan 300 Z car when he parked it at the ferry.) I offered him a seat and he accepted. I was bald and he asked about my cancer, then, with that smile, told me his experience with (his mother’s) breast cancer and that I would defeat it.”

Karin Stahlecker: “Mark was truly the person that bridged gaps between multiple lifestyles.”

Kimberley Smith: “He volunteered without having to be asked, shared his talents selflessly and did everything with true spirit and joy.”

Tom Hull: “I taught Mark at Saint John’s. I remember him as gentle and kind and a joy to teach.”

Greengates classmate Mark Otto: “I remember our days as kids in Mexico City. We spent countless hours taking many photos together and learning how to grow up.”

Saint John’s classmate Francisco de Torres: “Mark was a big part of our small class. Intelligent, happy and always willing to give it all. You’re a Champ in everything you did. Big standing ovation for a life well lived!!!”

MIT classmate Jake Yara: “Mark, you probably don’t know this, but you were my big brother in college and you helped me get through the insanity that was MIT. I owe you a lot, my friend. There are precious few people out there who are as wise, generous and kind.”

Tech colleague at MIT Ezra Peisach: “It is very upsetting to hear of the loss of Mark Virtue. I was always impressed by his roll with the punches attitude and his ability to get things done under pressure.”

Mackenzie Boom: “I can’t thank you enough for all you have done in this world.”

Jodye Beard-Brown: “Just thinking about what an honor and blessing to have known you, Mark Virtue.”

C.J. Hayes: “Whether he had an airsoft gun or a camera in his hands, Mark was always smiling.” (Mark had joined a group using airsoft guns, replicas of military and other firearms that fire harmless pellets).

If Mark, during his life, had heard or read any of these accolades, how would he have reacted? I think he would've shrugged, modestly, and said he'd been acting the same with everybody all his life.

For surely he must have had the friendship gene.

John Virtue