Ross Jordan was an engineer in every sense of the word: whether it was working on the Apollo space program at Honeywell, coming up with practical but whimsical household inventions with names like the Squirrel Adieux, or engineering weekends of discourse on far-ranging social issues at his familial Cloquet, Minn., farmhouse.
He died Dec. 20 of complications from a fall. He was 92.
He and his wife, Phyllis, rented rooms in their house to African exchange students attending what is now the Dunwoody College of Technology, the first family to integrate their Lowry Hill neighborhood. He walked the "Soul Patrol" in north Minneapolis to help defuse racial tensions in the 1960s. In 1962, he ran unsuccessfully for the Minnesota Senate.
He renovated the family home on Fremont Avenue S. in Minneapolis to include a basement play area that became a magnet for kids in the neighborhood. Included among the attractions was something he labeled the "whoops-a-daisy." It was a human-sized equivalent of the blowup clown that would keep springing back up, no matter how hard it was punched, pulled or kicked.
Before the days of RVs, he converted an old milk truck into a family vehicle for camping trips, complete with bunk beds and kitchen.
"He was raised during the Depression with a pretty button-down family," said a daughter, Catherine. "He got it in his head that the rest of his life was going to be much more interesting and more diverse and more playful."
He was a 1940 graduate of Minneapolis West High School and the University of Minnesota, where he received degrees in aeronautical and mechanical engineering. He served in the Pacific during World War II on the escort carrier Natoma Bay, a highly decorated ship that participated in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, a pivotal naval encounter with the Japanese fleet.
Jordan told his family his work on the Apollo space program was classified, and he rarely talked about it. But Honeywell employees in Minneapolis and Clearwater, Fla., contributed to the program's stabilization and control systems for Apollo 11, the 1969 mission that landed astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon.
