Professor Suchy served on and off tennis court

As a kid growing up in Milwaukee, Raymond Suchy would just run and run all the way to the neighborhood tennis courts to play. He couldn't wait to get there - and besides, the run was training.

"He just loved the sport," said his daughter, Jessica Suchy-Pilalis. "He trained hard. He watched, he read, he learned."

At one time he ranked second in the state, and he competed against tennis greats Bobby Riggs and Ellsworth Vines.

But in those days, going pro in a sport just didn't pay very much, his daughter said. Besides, Suchy had a brilliant mind for physics, so he chose physics.

It meant a career spanning more than 40 years, with work ranging from research and writing to teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a stint during World War II teaching crews to fly the new P-61 Black Hawk using relatively new technology: radar.

Suchy died Thursday at his Pasadena, Calif., home at age 99.

Washington High years

After getting his degree in physics from the old Milwaukee State Teachers College (later UWM), Suchy taught at his alma mater, Washington High School, from 1938 to 1942.

During that time he became a prolific writer, with a series of self-study books on such topics as actuarial mathematics, physics, chemistry and criminology.

With the start of World War II he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, serving as a second lieutenant in the signal corps. He taught radar courses, training those early Black Widow crews. The Black Widow was the first American aircraft designed specifically for night fighting.

Suchy's knowledge very nearly had him involved in another project.

"They tried to divert my father to the Manhattan Project, but that was overruled because radar was more immediately important to the war effort," his daughter said.

Before and after the war, Suchy did graduate work at UW-Madison in physics, receiving his doctorate in 1936.

By 1945, he was teaching at UWM, developing a reputation for a dry sense of humor. Often, he'd embed a joke in a lecture, his daughter said. One classic involved a tale about an experiment with a group of people traveling up a mountain and somehow, on the way, alcohol that they had been carrying with them had slowly dissipated.

It was at UWM that Suchy met his wife of 64 years, Gregoria Karides Suchy, a composer who was on the music faculty.

At that time, their departments were in the same building - Mitchell Hall - and colleagues tried in vain to get them together. They tried to get them together by having them chaperon the same dance, Jessica Suchy-Pilalis said. "That didn't work."

However, Suchy had noticed Gregoria Karides on his own.

He decided to make a move.

"One day he walked into her classroom with two oscilloscopes, and he puts them on the piano and fiddles with the wave form," his daughter said. "He was in a white lab coat. That was his way of getting her attention.

"Mom just had to stop playing the piano and look at this guy."

At their Shorewood home, with two professors for parents, life was about education.

"We were focused on education. I knew from the time I was a kid I would get my doctorate. It was a given," said his daughter, who does indeed hold a doctorate. She's a professor of music theory, harp and Byzantine music at the Crane School of Music at the State University of New York at Potsdam.

"His mind was brilliant," his daughter said. "If you asked him a question, and he didn't know the answer, a half-hour later the answer would come. He would be pondering the whole time. That was classic of him."

Suchy was in tennis gear as soon as he could get out of his teaching clothes, though.

He played tennis with both of his daughters.

He once wrote a note so she could get out of school and play tennis with him.

"I felt like he was my best friend," she said. "Who else could you go play hooky with?"

Suchy retired from UWM in 1983, but never stopped playing tennis, or wanting to. He had coached the UWM men's tennis team during the 1950s and for years he strung tennis rackets as a hobby. "He had to judge the tension exactly," his daughter said.

He was last on the court around Christmastime last year . He needed help standing. "My sister stood behind him for balance. He was frustrated," his daughter said.

"I do not hit like this," he said. But he was there.

"He would still go out on the court and try," his daughter said.

Raymond Suchy

Visitation will be held from 4 to 8 p.m. Sunday at Krause Funeral Home, 9000 W. Capitol Drive. Funeral services will be held at 10:30 a.m. Monday at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, 9400 W. Congress St.

Besides his wife and daughter, Suchy is survived by another daughter, Mara Suchy Saigh, and two grandchildren he happily coached in tennis.