Memories of John Robin Noone

In memory of

John Robin Noone

Cupertino, CA, USA

July 20, 1953 - August 16, 2018

Jul 20, 1953 - Aug 16, 2018

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Maureen Chenoweth

We miss John's smiling face, his kindness and all the ways he made this world a better place - he is truly missed! Love always, Maureen and Wayne

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Maureen Chenoweth

Can't believe it's been 5 years! We miss you so much John!

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Maureen Chenoweth

We miss John's smiling face, his kindness and all the ways he made this world a better place! He is truly... Read more We miss John's smiling face, his kindness and all the ways he made this world a better place! He is truly missed. We miss John's smiling face, his kindness and all the... Read more

Linda Davidge

I couldn’t have asked for a sweeter, funnier, more loving brother-in-law. I only wish I’d had more time knowing you, John. You were a bright spot in my life and the family is not the same without you. Forever in my heart, Linda

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Marc, Susan Roth

Whenever we think of John, and of course Leslye, we have smiles on our faces- smiles starting when Chris and our son Justin went to kindergarten together, coaching and cheering at soccer games, challenging our boys during the Cub Scout cake baking contests, racing in Pinewood Derbies, laughing through father/son rafting trips, years of Sunday afternoons watching the 49ers dominate the NFL, repairing redwood fences and always welcoming each other’s family to drop by unannounced. As our son Justin said when he heard of John’s passing, “He was such a nice dude!” Through all our history together, we will remember John most of all as the “other half” of Leslye, living life to its fullest, loving his wonderful family, being a tried and true friend, so playful and funny, touching so many lives in his shortened life with all of us. #Forever in our hearts.

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Vivek Sahh

John’s Eulogy written & delivered by Leslye 8/24/2018

Hi everyone, thank you all for coming here today to help me and the other members of the Noone Monsoon celebrate the life John led while he was with us and for all you’ve said and done for us these past days and today especially. It’s because I believe so strongly that you love and care about our family, that I know I’ll have you for support when I need it and when the kids need it later.
So here’s the plan. When we looked around this little chapel, we felt like, though it is beautiful, it’s very sterile and unfamiliar and that we are surrounded by people who don’t know us. Because of that we decided that the immediate family members could get up here in the formal chapel and say all the sad stuff—maybe tell a story or two, but it is still the sad stuff. Then after we’ve wiped those tears; we want to take this big beautiful gang home and have a real celebration, look at pictures and tell the stories at the home we all built together, where John touched every square inch hundreds of times over the last 31 years there. That’s where we’ll have the real John with us rather than here. I hope that makes sense to you all and that you’ll be able to relax and go with it. Another reason I want to do this is because I don’t want the funeral director coming in here and hushing us while we are laughing because there are other people grieving here.
We were going to ask my brother to MC this memorial service but he wasn’t able to stick around for the whole day and is heading back to his home in New York right now. So I decided to go ahead and take this on myself and see how it goes. I’ll just start to tell the story his of life now, and afterwards I hope you will tell us your own John-story so we can laugh and probably cry with you at the house. This will be fun because our life together these past 45 years has been fun and filled with joy mostly because you were all a part of it. I do have to clarify one thing, when I wrote the obituary I said we’d been married 45 years. I lied. We’ve been together 45 but ‘only’ married 40 years! So here we go:
John was born in Detroit in July 1953. His parents were George Noone and Mollie De Freitas. Mollie told me once that she liked saying she and George were married in June and that John was born in July and that she’d purposely leave out the part that they’d married 13 months before his birth and not 1 month earlier just to see the person’s eyebrows raise…so maybe that’s where John’s sense of humor was born. Anyway, George accepted a teaching job in an Oakland school district and they trucked across the states with Baby John in a dresser drawer arriving at Birdsall Street in time for school to start that September. His brother Freddy was born in February 1956 but only lived two months. In June 1957, his brother Chick was born and their close childhood friendship began. John’s mom and grandmother were classical singers and Mollie had John start playing classical violin at an early age where he, as an early teen, worked his way up to second violin in Oakland’s Junior Symphony. He was a pretty compliant kid so he did what he was told all the while playing violin but just wishing he could be a member of a swim team. He loved it in the water and when I first saw him swim in their pool in RC, I was delighted to see what a beautiful swimmer he was, especially when he did the breaststroke. He so wished he could have participated in swim as a teenager.
Anyway, they moved from Birdsall Street up to Caledon in the Oakland hills while he was in junior high. Their house, I have often been told, was just down the road from the famous Stone family, as in Sly and the Family Stone, and they often saw Sly drive his fancy Cadillac with its spade-shaped window past the house. Their home was on a hillside overlooking a busy road and he told me that he, his friends and sometimes little brother Chick would lie in the yard in wait and throw dirt clods at on-coming vehicles! His other favorite story about that home was in telling how Chick tried to burn down the place when he incinerated some dry eucalyptus leaves and seeds but didn’t quite put out the embers thus catching the line of trees afire and also damaging the neighbors’ yard. This seemed to be the age-old story of 2 little hoodlums growing up in Oakland but not so much, really. John moved on to Skyline High and, as an adult, he loved to tell us that he and Tom Hanks went to school together. Don’t believe it; that’s just one of his stories, fake news. As a junior, he and his family moved to RC and he had to leave all of his childhood friends behind for another high school in a strange town whose only redeeming feature, he felt, was living in a home with a pool.
He graduated from Sequoia High and entered San Jose State as a Math major in the Fall of 1971. He lived in Allen Hall as a freshman but moved to the 7th floor of West Hall in Sept. 1972, his sophomore year. It was there he met me, a little blond 17-year old girl, a freshman from Southern California. I, like of the girls on 7th floor, thought that he was a handsome guy but so was his next-door neighbor Tom Craig. The thing was that we didn’t know which guy was which because they were the same height and both had wire-rimmed glasses and a little mustache. My roommate Mary figured out which one he was first and, because of a huge crush, she started stalking John. She was not an attractive person and John became known as the “wall-walker of the 7th floor” where he would walk next to the walls so he could guard against her by looking over only one shoulder rather than two.
The summer of ’73 was a good one. He asked me out for a first date—to join him in RC for the 4th of July parade followed by dinner at the house where I met his folks for the first time and then we watched fireworks from the hills. I’ve been by his side since that date, even though our third date was going to the SCC Fair. That was when I found out he could only go on certain carnival rides because while on the Octopus, he threw up all over me in my pretty red sweater, he broke into a dizzy, cold sweat and it was about a half an hour before he could stand, walk out, and hand me the keys so I could drive home. It must have been love.
He was accepted to the Master’s program at San Jose State in Computer Science and lived in an apartment with a motley crew of college chums while he worked for Craig Construction as a carpenter (he later became godfather to Tom’s son). He did that until August 1977 when he interviewed for and accepted a job at TRW. Two weeks after he accepted the job, he secretly called my dad then came over to my place, dropped down on one knee and proposed. We set the wedding date for Spring Break ’78 so we could take the week off for a honeymoon. We were married in March and he completed his Master’s in May 1978.
Working at TRW was great. He met some super people there and we believed life was great. We moved to Blazingwood Ave. in Cupertino. Chris was born in September 1981 and I went on a 6-month maternity leave from the SCC Property Management Department. I didn’t go back there because he was doing well enough and we could live on one salary. In January ’82, John was asked to come work at a start-up called Ultrasystems where he became an Ultraman. That was where a new family was formed; the people, several of whom were from TRW, were hard-working but loving and silly and talented and friends. We had parties at each other’s homes, Christmas parties for the kids and then there was the penis-apron that somehow circulated from one lucky friend to another. Voni was born in May ‘83 and Chels in July ’85. We had one Ultrason and two Ultragirls. It was a rosy time in our lives. And we moved to Wes Hill Lane, our forever home.
As time went by, the kids grew and careers changed. Chris became a Cub Scout at Regnart Elementary. Here we met a new group of kids and parents for the first time. Nobody wanted to be the leader, so we all became leaders, rotating responsibilities week by week, month by month until the Cubbies crossed the bridge and became Boy Scouts. There were cake-bake-sales, Pinewood Derbies and badges to be earned. And long-lasting friendships to be made. John was one of the Assistant Scout Masters and he helped those little guys grow up into big dudes and even an Eagle Scout or two. The highlight of the Scouting experience other than watching Chris become an Eagle Scout was going with Scoutmaster Charlie Schramm, Chris and 7 other Scouts to Philmont Boy Scout Camp in New Mexico. They hiked 72 miles over their twelve-day trek and a beautiful bond was formed between John and those boys.
But that wasn’t all he did. He was a soccer dude and had played for fun since he’d been in college. So when it became time in the fall, each of the kids was entered into AYSO where John became a member of the Board that introduced and helped establish a new Spring Soccer league making soccer a year-round sport in Region 35. He coached them all, rotating through Chris, Voni and Chelsea until Chels quit to just do dance and Voni moved to a CYSA traveling team. Chris and some of the guys also moved on to CYSA with John as their coach and that lasted through high school.
Life wasn’t just coaching and Scouting, however. There was fun to be had and becoming a part of a group who went house boating on Lake Shasta every year became thee high mark on the fun-scale. We also traveled—road trips being a love of both of ours. We’d do a day trip to a North Bay museum, an evening drive among the eastside foothills, or a three-week adventure following the Lewis and Clark Trail. For our 30th anniversary we did our one-and-only cruise. In 2016, we went to the British Isles and this June/July we celebrated our 40th anniversary in Croatia and Italy. But the best was traveling with family. New England. Gettysburg. Niagara Falls. St. Maarten. The British Virgin Isles. Acapulco. Cabo San Lucas. Fish Lake, Michigan. Chicago/Barrington. Aruba. During each of those trips we were with our kids, our cousins, aunts, uncles, siblings. Creating those memories with all of those different people was Priceless.
After the kids moved on to college—they were all in high school and then college at the same time—that empty nest syndrome hit and we actually had an exchange student with us for a semester. John’s over-40 soccer team, the Eagles, evolved into the over-45 team, the Old Eagles, and then into the over-50 team, the Bald Eagles. He left the team when knees and other body parts began taking a toll on most, if not all teammates.
With that end came a new beginning. Running. John had always been a runner, running as a pastime in college and all through his adult life. He loved saying that he and Bruce Jenner worked out together at San Jose State and San Jose City College while Bruce was training for his 1976 Olympic Decathalon Gold Medal. Don’t believe it; that’s just another of his stories. They did happen to work out on the same track but not together; fake news, once more. I ran with him maybe twice but he didn’t ever talk about that. Anyway, his running was a passion. He ran in the hills above Cupertino mostly at Rancho San Antonio and up to the PG&E trail but he did run in many places over the years. Once before were married, he ran the Avenue of the Giants Marathon. I didn’t know it then but he wanted to do that again! And in 2008-2009, he started training for it and he ran the Silicon Valley Marathon. Then he ran the Napa Valley Marathon; and lo and behold, he qualified for the Boston Marathon. Talk about pumped. The Noone Clan lived in Massachusetts! What a great experience it would be to go be with family for such an historic event. We were off to Boston in April 2010. Cousins and friends came to watch the race. And it was a highlight of his life, running 3:35:02, though not his best time, was amazing and the whole thing was a blast. He did some more runs, never a 5th marathon, but his running never ceased. He was up at Rancho 3 to 5 times a week and he even ran the week before he passed away.
Not one to remain un-busy, there was now time to do some GOOD stuff after he retired. The Cupertino De Anza Lions became his focal point. We joined together and were ‘just members’ participating in individual activities as they came up. He wanted to do more, though, and started helping with the website, taking a leadership role in the Thanksgiving Food Drive and the Ride 4 Diabetes and by becoming a member of the Board as Membership Chair. His wish was to trim off some of the excess to help streamline the Club and to help the Lions become a valuable member of the Cupertino community. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do.
We’ve always been a pretty tight family unit: JLCVC. But as we all grew up, our family grew. The bond that was created between the East Coast Noones and the West Coast Noones was our greatest treasure. To become best friends with cousins who are the same age as we and who have kids the exact same age as ours, who hold the values that we do and who act the way we do, who fell in love with our kids the same way that we fell in love with theirs—there is no word or set of words to describe the deep gratitude we have in finding them. Our kids, their kids? No. We are more than cousins, more than what the family tree calls us. “We’re the same” as Tristan texted me. And to have spent almost two weeks with you guys in July, the experiences we had together were a perfect way for this man that we all loved to have spent his last month.
I hope I let you in on the kind of guy my best friend was and what a fantastic life-partner I was lucky enough to have. Together since we were 18- and 19-years old, we built a good, purposeful life; a life that we wanted our kids to be proud of. Our love story has just taken a turn and I’ll have to figure out a new path that is now different from what we planned together. But because of the man he was and what I learned from him as we grew up together, I’ll do it. It just really sucks that he won’t be here to continue to be the father he wanted to be with Chelsea and Vivek, Voni and Mark and Chris and the someone he may find in his future. They just got jipped. So it’s up to them to take what John put in their hearts and extrapolate it out to what he might have told them in the future and they’ll be able to do that; it’s just going to be harder than what might have been…
Chelsea, Vivek, Veronica, Mark, Chris and I thank you for being a part of John’s life and of our lives. I believe that we lived well and chose wisely. So Chelsea will speak next.

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