John Pritchard Kneubuhl
Died December 16, 2002
John Kneubuhl went home to California after graduation and became a reporter for the Hollywood Citizen News, but it wasn’t long before he was drafted into the Army. He became a radio technician and served in a unit in Panama which traveled throughout South America.
After his two years in the Army were up in 1971, John went back to California, attended UCLA for a semester, got married and settled down in Santa Barbara where he and his wife, Deena, had two children as well as a stepdaughter by Deena’s first marriage. John continued to work in electronics, but his passion was the classical guitar, which he both taught and performed.
In the 1980s, the family moved to Grass Valley in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada where John met a singer who would become his second wife, Adrienne. They occasionally performed together and in 1985 were married. John went to work for the Grass Valley Group which developed and produced technology for the video and broadcast industry. In the 90s, he moved to another Grass Valley firm, NVision, a developer of consumer electronics.
With the Information Revolution running at full throttle in 2002, John took a job with LSI Logics in Silicon Valley, which required the family to move to Los Altos.
There was not time for both a career in electronics and the classical guitar, and Adrienne says, “it always bothered him” that he was not able to devote more time to his music. Still, John and Adrienne performed in two musicals together – he played the lead in Music Man and El Gallo in The Fantasticks.
John was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2002 and passed away on December 16th of that year.