40°
PEEKSKILL, N.Y. – Siegfried Mader, 85, died Wednesday, June 24.
He emigrated from Germany for a 32-year career as a research physicist at IBM, and lived for five decades in Croton-on-Hudson
Mader was from the small farming community of Wilhelmsdorf in the far south of Germany, where he was raised by his widowed mother through World War II. His father died less than two years after he was born July 26, 1929. He studied physics and earned a doctorate at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, and later went to England to study at Cambridge, where he met his wife, Gillian Leonard, during a summer vacation party in 1959. They dated, and later met again by chance while both were hiking in Scotland. They married in 1961, and moved later that year to New York where he had a job at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. They settled down in Croton in 1965 with their two children.
Many years later, they would both obtain U.S. citizenship. During the early decades of the Information Age, Mader worked with some of the processes involved in the manufacture of silicon chips that would form the basis of home computers.
The family chose to hold a small private ceremony after cremation, and planned a memorial service for later in the year.
He is survived by his wife, Gillian; his daughter, Lisa Morsberger; his son and daughter-in-law, Ian Mader and Eunice Mateo; and four grandchildren.
Click here to follow Daily Voice Peekskill and receive free news updates.
