In memory of a friend,& to the memory of our friendship. I certainly was not ready for you to leave us, Mike Flower.  You had carefully machined a worthy existence into our lives. Yet gone is our only mechanical engineer who took with him integrity and ingenuity, along with his wisdom. Gone is the mechanic along with his justifiable affection for automobiles, especially those of the 50's, and his amazing solutions to repair our own. Gone is the
avid garage sale bargain collector & the resolute bargain protector. Gone is the historian & his regard for his ancestry, Gone is his honesty and his genuine down to earth congeniality.  Yet also gone are his meticulous systems of order and organization, his regard for precision and pursuit of perfection, something we shared while admitting to each other that the curse more often led to some of our biggest though always partial downfalls.  Gone is his gift for practicality along with his ability to describe or explain the most complex and intricate by making splendid use of ordinary common, and well known everyday objects in life.  Gone are our opportunities not just to share ideas but also those moments of verbally frolicking in our West Texas commonalities given to days that have now gone by with all the wind.  
Gone are the stories and life's experiences we would discuss over one more hamburger at his favorite mom and pop eating establishments in and around town. And like anybody else, gone is the extraordinarily uniqueness that he was; a one of a kind individual that his life's experiences had made of him. Gone is the mentor, the father and the grandfather. But especially gone for us is simply a darn good friend who was far and beyond just another neighbor!  We are missing you already, Mike!

Mike and me worked together in Applied Optical Systems and stayed friends even after that. Wanted to see him again, but unfortunately it's not possible. My condolences to his family...

Mike and I worked together at CIM Systems and remained personal friends after that.
We collaborated on some proposals for projects that were intensive in their mechanical component, like a large conveyerized bakery, oil well drill manufacturing, paint manufacturing, and others.
I always admired and was fond of Mike, who was an engineer of engineers type always happy to preemptively bailout other engineers before they would get in trouble in some aspect of a design.
Mike shared his insights on some innovative projects that I worked on both at CIM and later privately. The latter included a digital market-making entrepreneurial initiative. I remember Mike lavishly praising me as the most tenacious person he had ever met, and I was grateful that he both observed and voiced it. 
Mike was always very generous with his knowledge of how to repair cars -- both motors and bodies -- and generous with the tools necessary to fix the problems (on which I relied several times). 
I liked hanging out with Mike at his personal machine shop to observe him at his creative work. The shop was in his own home's garage and he had several machines (lathes, etc.) that he used to create custom high precision parts for current projects. He showed me some of the earliest versions of the fiber optic connectors that he had taken a special interest in designing, since at the time the linking fiber optic cables remained a problem for which solutions still fell short of acceptable, and generally any good connectors were inconsistently so.
Solving that problem made him very happy!
Mike was very fond of a brother who conducted a locomotive, whom I believe I met during his visit to Mike. And on two or three occasions I also met at least one of his daughters, who managed a store.
A few times I was honored to receive Mike over at my house in Plano for dinner.
Having repatriated back to Brazil between 2001 and 2014, and missing him over the years, some two years ago I made a few attempts to catch up with Mike, but I did not get a response. So I planned to just show up for a surprise visit whenever I returned to Richardson.
Now I am saddened that this dear friend has departed and will not be there next time I come through, 
May God bless all of you.

OBITUARY

Rodney Michael Flower

Born JANUARY 10, 1945

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