I remember David Jeremy Blow, Richard's second son, as a pleasant but lonely man. He was close to my mother Rayanna. She ran an arts and antiques business at the time, and helped Richard Blow sell his famous mosaics. For several years, son David rented a house our family owned just across the street from our own, in Bethel, CT. Many mornings he would walk over and have a cup of tea with my mom, sitting at the big chestnut kitchen table, talking about his famous father, and his lonely childhood. My mom was famous for her listening skills; she became a surrogate mother. Richard and his biological mother, Manhattan socialite Marya Mannes, led busy lives and largely farmed out David's childhood to relatives and nannies.

He seemed a bit of a "lost soul," rootless and searching. He was a decade older than me, always dressed in a sport coat, unathletic, and spoke softly. He never raised his voice, or laughed out loud. He constantly wore a faint enigmatic smile. He reminded me a bit of the gardener Chance in the 1979 Peter Sellers film "Being There." I was never sure what he did for a living. I think he dabbled in computers, and was supported financially by his artist father. But it's debatable how emotionally close father and son were. According to Mannes, neither she nor Richard were really interested in parenthood. David grew up in the U.S., his parents were divorced, his father lived in Italy. According to one story I heard, David as a boy once visited his famous father at his villa in Florence .Richard decided David needed to toughen up, so he made him sleep outside in the open. Kind of sad. David eventually moved to the West Coast, and the visits stopped, but he occasionally sent my mom a letter updating his nomadic wanderings. In 1974 he came back to Connecticut briefly to help organize with my mother and Muriel King the mosaic collection his father was donating to Oregon State University; then he finally disappearing altogether. We didn't know he died until last year, when we started researching the guidebook. He died in Kentucky. We couldn't find a proper obituary. Rest in peace, David

Michael Schmicker