Gerald Boerner

September 25, 1943 – January 30, 2019

“You’ve been a positive on this planet and we will meet again.”

Gerald Boerner (Jerry to his friends and family; Prof. Boerner to his many students) passed away peacefully in his sleep Wednesday morning in his Riverside home, surrounded by the love of his wife, his daughters, and his friend John Coverdale. He was 75 years old.

He was born with a tenacity of spirit and brilliance of mind that touched all around him, and a sharp tongue that could surprise you with its wit. He was blessed with a life that allowed him to travel the world, learn every day, and share his knowledge with others.

Jerry was the oldest of four children born to Len and Betty (Inderbieten) Boerner in Las Vegas. Both parents were of German ancestry and German was spoken in the home. The family moved back to Downey, CA, to be close to Betty’s family three years later. His maternal grandmother was like a second mother to him, and he spent hours at her house, listening to The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy and The Cisco Kid on her old-fashioned radio and playing out the story lines in the yard afterwards.

He also loved visiting his other grandmother on New Year’s Day, where they sat in her Pasadena house on Carmelo Avenue, and watched the Rose Parade go by, while eating a big breakfast. That night, he would come home to a big German dinner.

He earned the Eagle Scout rank in Boy Scouts at the age of just 13, becoming one of the younger boys to receive that honor. Despite some family hardships, Jerry excelled in sports and academics at Earl Warren High School, where he was a member of both the baseball and football teams, all while working at a dairy to help support the family.

He earned a full scholarship to the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (Biola University), where he graduated magna cum laude in psychology and met his beloved wife Grace McChesney. The pair married after graduation and took a high spirited road trip across the country, where his long hair and mutton chops grew surprised looks from diner patrons in Utah. He then received his masters degree in experimental psychology at Claremont Graduate School, specializing in physiological psychology. He then went on to work on his PhD at the same institution, writing a dissertation on the relative changes in the activity of small groups of nerve cells in the brain.

It was here in the 1960s that he started working with programming and computers, which became his passion and vocation for most of the rest of his life. The pair moved to Riverside in 1974, where he and Grace raised their two daughters, Tasha and Heather. As his children grew up, Jerry often retreated to the family garage, not to tinker with the family car, but to build mainframe computers. He worked in management at Riverside Unified School District, where he sometimes brought his young daughters to watch the massive mainframe computers process standardized tests, and where the pair, along with colleagues gathered on the school district’s roof in downtown Riverside to watch the Fourth of July fireworks. 

He was quite proud of his technological foresight, often being the first among his colleagues and friends to acquire computers, including the Lisa, the Apple II and Apple IIe, the original Macintosh computer and it’s successor, the Macintosh SE. This passion eventually led to the formation of Decision Tree, a software and computer training company. Many days, local teachers brought their computers to the family home, part of which had been transformed into a training space, to teach teachers, office workers and business owners how to use the new technology of the mouse, graphic interfaces and windows. He was a voracious reader on everything from LAN technology to coding in BASIC, DOS, COBALT, 4TRAN. 

In that same office, Grace and Jerry ran a FRED bulletin board, an early precursor to the modern internet. And Jerry was quite proud to be among the first users of a hardwired car phone in the late 80s.

Around that same time, Jerry found his academic home at Azusa Pacific University, where he taught graduate-level courses in computer programming, new trends in computing and operating systems. It’s there that he met his mentor, Wendell Scarborough, and his friend for the rest of his life John Coverdale. 

During that time, he produced a number of articles for the educational press and made many professional conference presentations, especially in the areas of individualized learning and online learning. He also became a regular workshop presenter at educational technology conference around the world, especially in the areas of wireless networking and service learning. He was passionate about closing the digital divide between those who had access to digital technology and those who didn’t.

In the spring of 1996, he was selected to teach a course in organizational change and development in APU’s overseas educational program, Operation Impact. He loved doing this work and visiting Vietnam, Taiwan and Japan, where his 6’3” frame led to locals asking for photos with him. These visits, along with trips to Edinburgh and Paris with his wife and to Cambridge, England, with his whole family, were highlights of his life. Later, when he walked his oldest daughter Tasha down the aisle at a 1,200-year-old church in Germany, he said it was like coming home.

After retirement from APU, he continued to teach computers at Riverside Communtiy College’s Norco Campus, where he got into desktop publishing and computer networking. 

After a long career, he retired for good in 2002, when his creative side began to take prominence. He returned to RCC’s campus to take French language classes and photography. He was proud of his RCC photography certificate, and often woke before daybreak to take photography trips out to Van Buren Avenue and Hidden Valley Nature Center, as well as to spots around San Clemente, Riverside and Los Angeles’ Union Station to capture the trains in motion. 

When he wasn’t learning and taking photos, he was writing in his blog, Professor Boerner’s Explorations. There, he did series of posts on famous photographers, notable events in history, emerging technologies, movies and books and family travels.

Once health problems confined him to home, he still didn’t stop learning, tearing through novels by Dan Brown, Lee Child, JRR Tolkein, Robert Ludlum, JK Rowling, Tom Clancy and Steve Barry among others. He also continued to teach himself, listening to online lectures on Medieval philosophy, American literature, Winston Churchill, and authors of the Western cannon. 

In his waning days he treasured time with his wife, Grace, and time in the family’s Riverside garden, where he assiduously watered plants and smoked a pipe. He was endlessly proud of his science journalist daughter Heather and state legislator Tasha Boerner Horvath.

He is predeceased by his infant sister Elizabeth and brother Charles. He is survived by his brother Jack Boerner (Elizabeth) of Indiana. He is also survived by his loving wife Grace, his daughter Tasha, son-in-law Istvan Boerner Horvath and grandchildren Máté and Maya Kate, as well as by daughter Heather Boerner and her partner Paula Johnston. 

In lieu of flowers, please send donations to Planned Parenthood Action Fund of the Pacific Southwest or Digital NEST.