From Wyatt’s brother, Chris…
Wyatt was a know-it-all. That’s what big brothers seem like, anyway.
They take the lead in everything. They’re walking while you’re still crawling. Talking
while you’re still grunting. And making cool things with clay while you’re still finger
painting. Wyatt was my mentor - three years older and a whole lot smarter. His nick-name
when we were growing up in Tucson was ‘Hey-Daddy-How-Come-James', because he was
constantly asking our father how this thing or that thing worked. Once he found out,
he’d tell me. He taught me how to make rockets out of match heads and coat hanger tubes.
He showed me how to draw space ships on the shiny Bronco toilet paper English people
used in the late 50s to wipe their asses (it was far better used as tracing paper).
In the seventies, before the advent of Dungeons and Dragons, Wyatt took the lead in
devising a multiple board game called Gerousle which took the two of us six months to
create. The first, and last, game of Gerousle took us six days to play.
With the advent of the Internet, Wyatt had the perfect platform on which to display his
prodigious talents for writing, invention, literary criticism and wry humor. Working
alone and until all hours of the night, he was his own editor and boss. I think his wife,
Susan, soon gave up trying to make Wyatt keep normal hours.
Always an anglophile, Wyatt was left marooned in the U.S. when the rest of us were granted
residency status in the U.K. in 1968. Because he was over 21 at the time and not a minor,
he wasn’t considered by The Home Office to be part of the family any more. Thereafter, he
still spent 90% of his annual vacation time in Britain, and most of the content of his
British Castles website was compiled during these trips. Wyatt was also a voracious reader,
having been taught by our mother several years before starting school. I would not even
hazard a guess as to the total number of books he read in his life.
Wyatt always struck me as being disillusioned. People of his intellect rarely aren’t.
They know, and feel, too much. He may have seemed reticent to many, but inside, he was as
sensitive and sentimental as they come. I remember the pained e-mails he wrote when, first,
George Harrison died and then, Johnny Carson went.
‘While I never watched his late night show religiously,’ he wrote on January 23, 2005,
‘Johnny Carson was one of those fixtures in one's life and his death is a saddening thing.’
Two months later, Wyatt was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer.
It’s difficult to gather all my memories of Wyatt all at once into a readable form and
I reserve the right to add to this page from time to time. I encourage others who knew him to do the same (just click on the link at the bottom of this page).
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![[Wyatt James]](Grobius_files/Wyatt1.jpg)
![[Wyatt on the S.S. Rotterdam]](Grobius_files/Wyatt2.jpg)
![[Photo of Wyatt by Roger Gaess taken Sept 2005]](Grobius_files/W_wyattbyroger.jpg)
![[*****]](Grobius_files/W_vicky2_T.jpg)