>On Friday, September 16, 2005, Drew Speedie and his son, Brent, fell a few hundred feet to their deaths from a bridge in Yellowstone Park. The Speedie family was on vacation there. Details of this tragedy are extremely limited at this time.
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>Drew was a friend and a valued member of the Visionpace team. He was the architect and primary developer of the Visual Maxframe Professional VFP framework and a frequent speaker at Fox conferences in North America and Europe and was often accompanied by Brent and his wife, Irene.
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>Questions or concerns should be directed to Russ Swall (
rswall@visionpace.com) or by phone, 816-350-7900 or 888-904-7900.
The tragedy is very mysterious indeed. But let other speculate on it - it won't change the facts. Therefore I will share some of our memories with you:
No doubt Drew Speedie was a very important and highly respected personality within the FoxPro Community. We all will miss Drew as a speaker, as an initiator, as a source of many ideas and as an advisor. But most we miss Drew and his son Brent as dear and always reliable friends. Therefore this
will be a very personal memory.
Scene from Prague 2003: Jan Vit and Jan Král and myself were sitting in a one of the computer rooms at the Technical University of Prague, each of us working with his notebook typing his portion of the report about the Prague DevCon 2003. Suddenly a slim young boy came in - Brent Speedie. He switched on the
computer next to me, logged into the internet and started playing some complicated strategy game. After a while he was bored with this. Since the two Jans and myself were busy writing, but not talking any word he got interested in what we were doing. He looked onto my screen and pointed at a word I had spelled the
wrong way. I thought that this was very useful, but it was also sort of disturbing, because I was in a hurry to get my text done. So I asked him whether he would like to help us. Brent's Answer: "Sure what can I do?". So I pointed him to UT and asked him to check the report uploaded so far.
This was the start of an exceptional friendship between an old man (me), who easily could have been his grandfather, and a young, committed and very efficient young boy - Brent Speedie.
Brent then became our "Assistant Spell-Checker" for this report from the Prague 2003 DevCon. (At the end of this 2003 report there are two pictures, which pretty well illustrates this story.)
Some month later: Again I had agreed to the report about the Frankfurt DevCon 2003, this time in a team with Armin Neudert. This I formally asked Brent whether he would join us again. He agreed to it. Now Armin and myself promoted him to be our "Proof-Reader". So he no longer was a simple spell-checker, which was very important for him.
Unfortunately we had no pictures of Brent during this conference. That's why there are only lines about Brent helping us with the report of the Frankfurt DevCon 2003.
One year later, again Frankfurt: The - sadly - last contribution of Brent Speedie as a Proof Reader for a DevCon Report was for the Frankfurt DevCon 2004. Again Brent was a reliable partner and his commitment helped to make a good report. But this time his picture was included in the same fashion as the pictures of the reporters, which was very important for him.
Well, so much about Brent. My wife and I had the great opportunity once to invite the Speedie family - Irene, Drew and Brent - for dinner to our house. It was an exceptional evening with dear friends in a very friendly, relaxed and at the same time very stimulating atmosphere. We exchanged many thought about FoxPro, but also about many other topics as well: two families from very different parts of the world, eager to learn as much as possible from each other. We certainly will never forget this evening.
Hans and Gaby Lochmann
