I met Larry about 10 years ago, when his only daughter kidnapped me to Florida and held me at gunpoint until I said, "I do."
I came back to Ohio ready to be his best son-in-law.
Behind his desk he sat when I walked in and introduced myself as his new son-in-law. And...he said nothing to me...he just stared at me. Larry was expression-less with that stare over his glasses, and kept the room cold and me clueless.
I was intrigued by that meaningful, unexpressive stare for years. It had seemed...familiar to me.
Years of conversations, handshakes, and hugs we got to know each other, and develop a father-son relationship that had love and respect, and he called me Son.
I had served in the Marine Corps and Dad, in the Army. He trained in Russian and to be an interrogator...and that is when I recalled his cold Winston Churchill expression when we first met.
Your son, Kevin

I met him when taking an MBA Operations Management (OM) course that he taught in approximately 1976. At the time, I sought a PhD in Computer Science. Given my background, I found the OM course work very interesting. I really liked him. One office visit led to another, eventually leading to taking an “independent study” course from Larry the next quarter. Larry encouraged me to switch to the PhD program in the business, which I did. Funny, I don’t recall ever applying for the program, he must have taken care of all the details. He worked out funding so that I could quit my job and work full time in the program.
A funny story, we worked on a project to allocate the offices in the business school to the faculty. It so happened that after completing the project and moving all the faculty to their new offices, we discovered that we had left out one small office from the study. The office was in the basement of Hagerty Hall. Larry worked it out so that I was assigned to that office! He really took care of me throughout the program.
Another story occurred after I defended my dissertation. In the period of about two weeks my daughter was born, I defended my dissertation and moved to Houston to start teaching a class. Following the defense a few "edits" had to be made to the dissertation. We were against a deadline to get the dissertation “turned in” so that I could graduate that summer. Larry took in on himself to see that those changes were made to the dissertation and personally walked it to the Graduate School and through their process to make sure that I met the deadlines. I would say that is a bit beyond the duty of a dissertation advisor, but it says much about his dedication to his graduate students.
Larry was my most trusted mentor, always willing to spend time working with me to make those key career decisions. I will miss him greatly. I share your loss and will think about how much he meant to me often.

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Larry Paul Ritzman

August 11, 1938 – November 11, 2024

Schoedinger Worthington

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