David Eugene Rector

David E. Rector, 69, passed away on October, 15, 2019, in San Diego, CA. He was born and raised in Northeast Washington, DC, as Mildred Rector’s only child. He graduated from McKinley Technology High School with a concentration in visual arts, and attended the University of the District of Columbia, earning a Bachelors in Political Science.

After cutting his teeth as a staff photographer and teacher of visual craft to community teens and adults with Topper Carew’s The New Thing Art and Architecture Center, David enjoyed an exhibit of his photographic work at the renowned Corcoran Gallery. Decades later, David’s photographic work would also be remembered in the Smithsonian exhibit, “The Right to the City.” He became an On-Air Personality and weekend DJ at WOL-AM, then-flagship station of the Hughes’ Radio One network. His aesthetic interests skewed to life as lived in the District during the Civil Rights Era and the protest culture that preceded today’s social justice movement. His temperament evidenced a calm, measured, quiet, unequivocal passion and loyalty to all that he valued.

David re-created and edited Outcome!, a literary arts magazine that earned notice in the District. He then became the Public Affairs Photographer for Pride, Inc., an inner city, self-help group, where he shot news, events, and feature personality journalistic pieces for the community organization.

Eventually, David took on freelance production work at National Public Radio DC headquarters in 1981. He made his mark during his ensuing 28-year career on NPR’s staff as a Producer of stories and segments for All Things Considered, Weekend Edition Sunday, Performance Today, and NPR’s modular service for specialized audiences. He coordinated production of the weekly New York Times Puzzle series with Will Shortz, and took on director and editor mantles whenever—as one storied NPR host famously stated—a piece of radio news was “too difficult for anyone else to do anything with it.” David developed a reputation for aurally seamless productions replete with the engaging, distinctively human sound that NPR pioneered and defined for radio.

After his mother’s passing, David began to look West for his next chapter. He asked Roz Alexander-Kasparik to marry him and arrived as San Diego’s newest resident on opening day of Comic-Con 2008. (In addition to the camera he always carried, David grew up with a comic book in hand from which he learned to read.) Ever the Voting Rights advocate, David also registered to vote in his new home and mailed his registration in before entering the convention center doors to the Con.

David Rector survived an aortic dissection less than a year later, and spent the next ten years fighting to regain his ability to move purposefully and speak. Due to his quadriplegia and non-verbal challenges, the court took away David's cherished right to vote. Armed with a new disability rights law, lawyer Tom Coleman of the Spectrum Institute, Roz, and a bevy of supporters by his side, David appealed to the court that had disenfranchised him. Ultimately, David Rector regained his very human right to vote.

With Roz, David also focused on co-creating RECALL AND GIVEN, a memory-as-superpower, comic, with the help of award-winning friend and mentor, Batton Lash and an array of comic luminaries who gather annually in San Diego. As David had taught and mentored radio arts to students at McKinley Tech while a producer at NPR through DC’s Prime Movers program, so he likewise painstakingly made his editorial preferences and decisions known to the illustrators and script writers intent on developing RECALL AND GIVEN into the real-world, anti-ableist, superhero saga he envisioned.

David Rector spent a lifetime immersed in visual, broadcast, musical, theatrical, film and television arts. He played The Beatles’ song, “The End,” for Roz and all those gathered around on his last day: “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

David survives in the ongoing lives of fiancée Rosalind “Roz” Alexander-Kasparik of San Diego, CA; cousin Edward Davis of Bowie, MD, and a family of relatives, friends and fans scattered across the country and the world. David Rector’s life will be remembered and celebrated at Fort Lincoln Cemetery Community Chapel at 1:00 p.m., Saturday, November 23, 2019.