Obituary of GERALD E. MANLEY

Gerald E. Manley passed away peacefully on September 6, 2019 at the age of 94. He was born May 21, 1925 in Denver, Colorado to Gerald A. Manley and Nellie Brierley Manley. He had one older brother, Frank, who he always admired and loved. Gerry married Helen Stanton when he was 22, and they had two daughters, Kathleen and Karen. As a young man, Gerald served his country in the Navy as an electrician in WWW II and then again in the Korean War. While he was in the Service, he and Helen divorced, and he remarried a gal who ran the USO in San Francisco, Lucile Elder. They moved for a short time to Sonora, California, where he operated the local radio station. Then his good friend from the Navy, Kenny Rigdon, helped him get a job with AT&T in Los Angeles, where Gerald and Lucile settled and raised their two children, Michael and Patricia, and his first daughter Kathleen. Gerry worked in the telecommunications industry until he retired many decades later. He started as an electrician, but his magnetic personality and ingenuity helped him rise through the ranks to become an upper level sales manager later in his career. Gerald and Lucile eventually divorced, and Gerald remarried two more times: first to Sylvia Ferkovich and they moved to San Francisco and lived for many years; and then finally to Julie Blenio and they lived together for most of remainder of his life in Alamo on the east side of the San Francisco bay area. Gerald was intelligent, whitty, creative, handsome, and had a huge heart. He loved jazz, dancing, water skiing, snow skiing, politics, family, and good times with good friends. He had a resilient and fun-loving nature that held fast his entire life, as a result he made friends easily, resulting in many treasured life- long friendships from all chapters of his life. He traveled all over the world in the Navy and in his civilian life, which gave him perspective on the value of all peoples. He was proud of his Irish roots, and indeed had a strong streak of the luck of the Irish. This Irish saying sums it up, and would make him smile… “Here's to a long life and a merry one. A quick death and an easy one. A pretty girl and an honest one. A cold pint and another one!”