Philip Connally Rogers

Philip was born in Milledgeville, Georgia where he spent his early childhood and summers for the next ten years. He lived in Tampa and Tallahassee, Florida during his elementary school years and middle and high school in Austin, Texas and Milledgeville, Georgia.

He graduated from Emory University with a degree in Chemistry. His last quarter at Emory had a lasting effect on him when one of his chemistry labs in 1972 required learning to write software to run on the school computer. He didn't understand it all but knew that he just loved what he was doing. His greater interest had always been electronics, so he went on to complete a degree in Electronics at Tampa Tech.

Philip was always so good at explaining concepts and had the required patience to help his fellow classmates when they did not understand assignments. In the middle of the semester at Tampa Tech, one of Philip’s teachers suddenly left due to health problems, and his classmates unanimously voted to have Philip teach the class until a permanent teacher could be hired—which took several weeks.

Tampa Tech happened to be the favorite school where RCA hired people to go overseas to work, so he ended up working on radar tracking for the Cape Canaveral missile test range. His actual work mostly took place on Ascension Island, an extremely remote volcanic crag located in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. Philip’s access to the island was by military transport jet, because there was no commercial transport to the island.

His job as a radar field engineer was maintaining the large radars used to track missiles out of the Cape for the USAF and commercial customers, space junk for the folks at NORAD for early warning purposes, and Trident II tests for the Navy. His practical understanding of fixing hardware and software problems were crucial to this important government project. He worked with this small, dedicated group from 1975 until his retirement in 1993. For many years on Ascension, he had also been writing software both for his work and on the side as a hobby and continued doing so in his retirement years.

Philip is survived by sister Charlotte Stock (Mark), niece Heather La Fleur (Steve), brothers Bob Rogers (PK and Kinzer), and Bill Rogers (Gina, William, and Michael). Philip was predeceased by his parents, John Robert Rogers of Milledgeville, Georgia and Barbara Connally Kaplan of La Grange, Georgia. The family extends a heartfelt thanks to those who helped Philip during his illness.