Lasting Memories

Jacob Daniel Haskell
1943-Dec. 5, 2022
Palo Alto, California

Jacob, loving husband to Toni Haskell for 51 years, died of Parkinson’s disease at his home in Palo Alto at the age of 79 on December 5, 2022. Jacob was born in Bombay, India in 1943 to Louise Haskell (from Manchester, England) and Moses Edward Haskell (from Pune, India). Jacob was educated at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay, the University of Sussex in England, the University of Wisconsin at Madison (where he met Toni), and the University of Salford in England, where he received his PhD in electrical engineering.

In 1971, Jacob left England to complete a postdoc at Caltech, and he married Toni. In 1973, he and Toni moved to Palo Alto, where Jacob began his career as a process engineer for semiconductor companies in Silicon Valley, including H-P, Intel, and AMD. During his tenure as a process engineer, he was granted 41 patents. Jacob later worked as a technical consultant, providing troubleshooting support to companies around the world.

Jazz music was Jacob’s be-all and end-all. As he said of Miles Davis, the pleasure of listening to him “helped me get my head together.” Not only Miles, but also luminaries such as Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown, Bill Evans, and Marian McPartland all brought joy and meaning to his life. Jake also liked to make music. A jazz drummer in his youth, he later taught himself to play the bass and enjoyed performing with jazz groups in the evenings.

Allied to his love of music was his interest in the transmission and production of sound. As a boy in India in the 1950s, he built his first radio and, starting in his teens, wrote articles on hi-fi technology for Practical Wireless--his first article giving instructions on building a hi-fi system from scratch, a topic he understood well, as he had built from scratch a hi-fi for his family. Throughout his life, he pursued the goal of the perfect sound system, deciding that the most pleasing sound comes from the old inventions: vinyl records and a tube amplifier.

Social gatherings were enlivened by Jacob’s stories and jokes. He loved to talk about his boyhood in India—of his much-treasured Meccano set, of his family’s agreement to delay Shabbat dinner for an hour so that he could listen to the only jazz radio program of the week, of the horse-racing-enthusiast uncle who believed that a wave goodbye from Jake before a race would bring him luck. …

Fixing things was Jake’s forte—broken radios, crashed computers, a finger invaded by a sliver, a seemingly insoluble problem faced by a high-tech company. He could even fix a heart, encouraging one to face difficulties head on and thereby resolve them, thus earning the name Toni lovingly and laughingly gave him, “My Dr. Freud.”

Jacob leaves behind his wife, Toni, his brother, Ernest (Shanti) Haskell, and his nephew, Daniel Haskell. Jacob’s parents and his sister, Mozelle, predeceased him.