Lou's contributions to the Santa Ynez Valley are legendary. He was medical director of the Lutheran Home in Solvang, and he was an old-fashioned country-style doctor to hundreds of local families who loved him dearly and forever. He was instrumental in starting Family School, the Country Medical Clinic, Friendship House, including the Alzheimer Residence, and the extraordinary Side Street Café. Then, already in his late fifties, he moved to the rain forest of Bolivia and established the Rio Beni Project, a medical clinic for the remote Indian villages along the Amazon. "The project is basically a boat and a motor," he once quipped, but its impact on many lives has been profound. Lou cared deeply about the indigenous people of Bolivia. He was acutely conscious of the frailty and interconnectedness of our world. He saw plainly that human lives are everywhere linked, and that our actions can have an impact. Start anywhere.

In order to support the Rio Beni Project, Lou returned to the Valley for two months each year to raise money. During one such visit, he agreed to be interviewed by a group of my students at Dunn Middle School. I knew even then we would never forget that gathering on the deck in the late winter light. He spoke of sunsets on the river and fluorescent blue butterflies, of living by candlelight and kerosene in a thatched hut, of the beautiful simplicity of his life. He also talked with honesty and intimacy about his past, his family, his concerns and his dreams. He was a thin, soft-spoken man, and in his long wool overcoat, he looked like a character from a nineteenth century novel, oddly out of place. And I think he was out of place. He was baffled by technology, newly astonished by the material wealth around him, and had rain and river in his heart.

Within a year, Lou learned of his illness, but he met his fate with eloquence and courage, graceful as a dancer. His greatest concern was still for others. Friends and strangers sought to ensure that his work would continue. Everywhere there were outpourings of praise and affection, and he surely knew how loved he was.

Lou Netzer lived a life of intensity and passion, but was modest, flawed and funny. He cared about people and experiences, not money or things. He was a writer and a poet whose message was love. He was a shining soul, and he knew to the very core of his being that each of us is a miracle, and that life must be a hymn of gratitude. I even think that Lou was crazy, crazy in the way of someone who lives out all his dreams and refuses to understand that this cannot be done. Let us see not emptiness in his absence, but an infinite space for hope and possibility.

- Cynthia Carbone Ward