The Memorial Wall

Pat Torpey, drummer of Mr Big has passed away at the age of 64. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

I live on a different continent, so sadly I won’t be there. From 2009-11, I was the bass technician on tour for Mr Big. Pat was my friend in that time and I’ll miss him. This is hard to write but I’d really like to do him tribute.

Pat was born in Cleveland, Ohio but moved to Phoenix, Arizona as a teenager. A love of his music and the lure of the bright lights brought him to LA in the early 1980s, where he picked up session, TV and touring work for a million artists including Ted Nugent, John Parr, Bob Geldorf, Belinda Carlisle, Robert Plant, Chris Impelliteri and even former WHAM! star Andrew Ridgley.

It was while playing with The Knack, of ‘My Sharona’ fame, that Billy Sheehan and Paul Gilbert first saw Pat in action and asked him to audition for the new band they were forming together with vocalist Eric Martin. This of course, became Mr Big.

Pat’s role in Mr Big was often overlooked. While Billy and Paul stole the limelight with their fretboard antics and Eric Martin stole the little girls’ hearts, Pat was doing the hard work in the background.

I truly believe that in many ways Pat saved Mr Big. You see, Pat had all his drum chops down, double kick techniques, stick spinning etc etc but he also had this amazing groove…

All drummers who can basically play in time have some kind of groove. Some have it different or better than others. Essentially, a good groove makes the listener tap their foot along at first listen. Pat had a truly awesome groove.

Quite often this separates a good band from an outstanding band. Mr Big would have been a good band without Pat’s groove, a very good band actually, but with him they were truly outstanding.

Try listening to this and unconsciously you’ll find yourself tapping your foot along. That’s Pat’s groove.

His contribution to the band didn’t end there though. Mr Big is a band that’s founded not only on excellent rhythmic musicianship but also on melody and harmony. Pat was a singing drummer. Thus all the members of Mr Big sing, giving them a three part harmony underlying Eric’s lead on hits such as ‘Green Tinted Sixties Mind’, ‘Just Take My Heart’ and of course their biggest worldwide single, ‘To Be With You’.

In fact, Pat’s vocals were in big demand on the LA session scene. Did you know that it’s Pat Torpey that you hear singing the chorus of ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ on the Mötley Crüe album of the same name?

Check out these backing vocals; this is Mr Big’s live cover of ‘It’s for You’ by Three Dog Night.

The first show I worked for Mr Big as a band (I’d worked for Billy Sheehan previously on other projects), was in Tallinn, Estonia in 2009. I had loved Mr Big as a teenager but seeing them gel onstage as a band from close up on the side of stage that first time was insane.

I don’t compliment the artists that I work for every night as a matter of habit. That gets dull – I see a lot of gigs per week when I’m on tour. I only ever comment if I witness something really outstanding. That night was one such event.

As they came offstage, I said to Pat something like: “Wow, great show!”

“Don’t blow smoke,” he said and walked past. If you’re unfamiliar with the phrase, it’s a rather crude Americanism for “don’t flatter me”.

I was a bit put aback. But the more I got to know of saw of him, the more I saw how in character that was. He was a very self effacing guy in many respects and didn’t like a fuss.

I remember at one Mr Big gig Pat’s floor tom fell over. His drum tech, Jason Kocis, couldn’t see it as he was on the other side of stage. I went over to pick it back up but Pat shooed me away.

After the gig he said: “Don’t worry about things like that. I can deal with it.”

“You can’t pick up a floor tom while playing a song. I am kind of doing a job here”

“Nah, don’t worry about it.”

I don’t know if I’ve ever met another drummer that laid back onstage. No fuss.

Mr Big would often have an instrument swapping jam at the end of a show; yes, Pat was a passable guitarist and bass player too. On these occasions, he’d borrow a random plectrum from my toolkit. Then at the end of the song, he’d bring me back the pick.

“No,” I’d say, “you’re supposed to throw it out into the crowd!”

One night in Brazil he did this and I prompted him back to the front of the stage and got him to throw the pick out. Of course the fans went crazy trying to grab for it but Pat would have preferred no fuss.

I will always remember long chats with Pat over dinner on politics, on which he was very well read, American history, another favourite of his was the Lincoln Presidency, and most of all, music. I quizzed him over his playing on the Chris Impelliteri album with Graham Bonnet singing and his time touring with Robert Plant, which being a big Zeppelin fan, he’d loved every minute of. Throughout our conversations he was always wise, witty and humble.

After a show in Osaka, as we started the 2011 tour, he told me he thought that he hadn’t played so well. At the time I assumed this was simply more modesty from him. I told him honestly that he sounded great to me, though I now knew better than to press the point.

But he said that he could feel something was wrong. He had a numbness in his hands and one leg that wasn’t quite responding the way it should.

He said, he’d been for some tests back home but that nothing was conclusively diagnosed at that point. I brushed it off at the time but looking back now I see that this was the start of it all.

As far as I was concerned he played great every night of that tour. We went across Asia, Europe and South America and he and the band ripped each and every night, I thought. We finished the world tour in Istanbul, Turkey and went our ways.

Then I saw the press release in 2014. Pat had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. I’d heard of it before but read up more online to check my facts and find it’s a long term degenerative neurone disease. Not good for a drummer. Not just something to brush off with no fuss.

I worried for him and sent a supportive email but heard nothing back.

Full credit to Mr Big as a band. They rallied around their fallen comrade. In his physical state, clearly he couldn’t play his former glories such as ‘Colorado Bulldog’ any more but he was still an essential part of the band. He was very much the vibemeister and often the voice of reason between healthy differences of opinion in band politics, as I saw them.

So the lovable Matt Starr, also of Ace Frehley’s band, was hired in as the drummer for the bulk of the gigs while Pat still played a few songs and added percussion and his trademark vocal harmonies to others.

I went to see them at Koko in London on that tour. On the way in, I bumped into Pat at the stage door. We hugged and he held me tight but I could feel the muscle wastage on his back. He was always so healthy and well toned before.

He sat me down and told me how it had all hit him. He apologised for not replying to my email but said that he had an initial period of depression after the diagnosis. Then with the support of friends and family, through determination and strength of character he had resolved to carry on, make the most of life and he began to make jokes with his son about his tremors rather than try hide them.

Oh boy, was it good to see Pat.

Three months ago, I caught up with Mr Big again at a couple of UK shows, London and Wolverhampton. Pat was now just playing one song in the set, ‘Just Take My Heart’. He told me he couldn’t tour with the band after this any more. It was just exhausting him.

I hugged him goodbye at Birmingham airport. I knew I’d probably never see him again but I didn’t think he would leave us this soon.

Pat leaves behind his wife Karen and son Patrick Jnr. Pat and I went shopping together for our kids in the Tokyo toyshops. We both missed our boys on tour. My thoughts are with them at this time.

Tributes poured in from his bandmates, fans and peers. Graham Bonnet, Richie Kotzen, Carmine Appice, Matt Sorum, Derek Sherinian, Mike Portnoy, Phil Soussan, Steve Lukather, Paul Stanley and Joe Lynn Turner all said what a great drummer and much loved friend Pat was.

Billy Sheehan led with: “Pat Torpey has been my closest friend in music for over thirty years. Pat was one of the finest human beings I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing, and the honor of working with, surely one of the finest rock drummers the world has ever known.”

Perhaps the most touching tribute I read online was an open letter to Pat written by a Korean fan, Sujin Lee.

“Dear Pat,

“It’s me, Sujin. How are you doing up there?

“It’s been only a few days but I do hope everything is much better than here. Cause, like many others, I’m still having awfully hard times to take it as real that you’re not here anymore.

“I know, to you, I’m just one of millions of fans around the world but to this forever-16 fan, you were not just one amazing, talented musician/drummer. You ARE much much more than that. Just like the other BIG guys.

“I still remember when I first met you in person in freezing Seoul, 22 years ago. You were shining so brightly with that big beautiful smile and unbelievably nice to this crazy little kid who took a four hour train ride and waited all day long at the airport only to say hello to her favourite band. I wish I could go back then just once again.

“Since then, we’ve had such a great time. What a ride it has been! There were some downs for sure but you were always right there, in control. You never let me down. You were always cool and made me feel everything is/will be ok.

“Do you remember that you wrote me an email when there was a huge earthquake in Japan while I was living there all by myself? I was scared to death, I really thought I was going to die at that moment. I was terrified and couldn’t calm down… and then I got this mail from you.

“You asked me if I was ok and said you worried about me. You’ll never know how it helped me go through those hard times. You might think it was just a mail. But I never expected something like that cause you’re a big rock star and I’m just a little fan.

“But that was only one of all the things you’ve done to me.

“Pat, thank you so much for everything. Thank you for your amazing music, passion and courage. Thank you for all those memories, love, kindness, smiles and hugs. Thank you for inspiring me to want to be a better person. You taught me never giving up and I’m trying to, not to let you down.

“And thank you for being you, my wonderful hero Pat Torpey.

“Big Love Always, Sujin”

We’re all missing you, Pat.

Published in Music Times

Known for his association with Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog and many others, he was also a founder of the Telluride Film Festival.

om Luddy, a quietly influential film archivist and movie producer who was also a founder of the idiosyncratic Telluride Film Festival, died on Feb. 13 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 79.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Julie Huntsinger, executive director of the Telluride festival, a half-century-old gathering of cinephiles held in a tiny former mining town in Colorado.

A transplant from the East Coast, Mr. Luddy landed in Berkeley in the 1960s, just in time to join the radical political activity that was afoot there, notably the Free Speech Movement that dominated the University of California campus in 1964.

He worked at the Berkeley Cinema Guild, a two-screen art house that had once been managed by the film critic Pauline Kael, after which he ran the Telegraph Repertory Cinema, another art-house theater, and joined the Pacific Film Archive, part of the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum, which he turned into a vital resource for film devotees and scholars.

By the early 1970s he was organizing as many as 800 programs there each year, from Preston Sturges retrospectives to programs of Russian silent films, new German cinema and movies from Senegal. He presented the United States premiere of Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” a Conradian tale starring Klaus Kinski as a Spanish conquistador who sets out to find a lost city in Peru, after it had been rejected by the New York Film Festival.

As director of special projects for Francis Ford Coppola’s company American Zoetrope, he produced movies like Paul Schrader’s “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” (1985), a complicated film about Yukio Mishima, the eccentric Japanese author who killed himself publicly in 1970 — a passion project that Mr. Schrader has described as “the definition of an unfinanceable project.” Mr. Luddy was its tireless booster and supporter, funding it early on with his American Express card.

In an email, Mr. Schrader described Mr. Luddy as “the big bang of film consciousness.”

He had a capacity for connecting artists to ideas, and to one another, that went beyond mere networking; it was a kind of vocation. The New York Times called him a human switchboard.

It was Mr. Luddy who suggested that Agnès Varda, the French New Wave filmmaker who was in Berkeley in the late 1960s, document the Black Panthers’ efforts to free the Panther leader Huey P. Newton from prison in 1968; her sobering portrait of the activists and their mission captured in two half-hour films is an urgent record of those fractious times.

When Laurie Anderson set out to make “Heart of a Dog,” her 2015 meditation on love and loss, and wanted to learn how to make an essayistic film, Mr. Luddy asked her to phone Philip Lopate, the film critic and essayist, for a tutorial.

It was a measure of Mr. Luddy’s influence, The Times noted in 1984, that he showed “The Italian,” a 1915 film that is considered a model for the immigrant-gangster epic, to Mr. Coppola before he made “The Godfather,” and “I Vitelloni,” Federico Fellini’s 1953 film about a group of young men on the brink of adulthood drifting about in a small Italian village, to George Lucas before he made “American Graffiti.”

And it was Mr. Luddy who introduced Alice Waters, his girlfriend at the time, to the work of Marcel Pagnol, the French filmmaker, in particular “Marius,” “Fanny” and “César,” the trilogy he produced in the 1930s about a group of friends finding their way in Marseille. That inspired the name of Ms. Waters’s restaurant Chez Panisse, the Berkeley institution that ignited the farm-to-table movement.

“We saw the films on three consecutive nights and I cried my eyes out, they were so romantic,” Ms. Waters recalled in a phone interview. “I knew I wanted to name the restaurant after one of the characters. We talked about Marius, Fanny’s lover, and Tom said, ‘Oh no, it has to be after that kindly man who married Fanny, and that was Panisse. And besides, he was the only one who made any money.’”

Chez Panisse would go on to global fame, but it remained Mr. Luddy’s dining room, where he could collect like-minded artists and watch the sparks fly. He and the restaurant also figured largely in a footnote to the moviemaking ethos of that decade, or at least of Mr. Luddy’s cohort, captured in an affecting short film by Les Blank called “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.”

As the story goes, Mr. Herzog challenged his fellow filmmaker Errol Morris to a bet, which was either a publicity stunt organized by Mr. Luddy or a genuine goad from Mr. Herzog: Mr. Herzog told Mr. Morris that if he succeeded in his seemingly quixotic mission to finish his first film, “Gates of Heaven,” a quirky, Gothic documentary about pet cemeteries, Mr. Herzog would eat his shoe. The movie was completed by 1978, and Mr. Luddy, Ms. Waters and Mr. Herzog set to work to honor the bet.

Ms. Waters decided, she said, that the best way to get the job done was to treat the shoe (a leather desert boot, actually) like a pig’s foot or a duck and braise it for hours in duck fat and herbs, which they did in her kitchen.

Later, at a screening of “Gates of Heaven” in 1979, Mr. Luddy played master of ceremonies as Mr. Herzog, with the aid of a pair of cooking shears, tackled his meal, which was laid out on a table on the theater’s stage. He bravely choked down a few bites, as did Mr. Luddy. Mr. Blank’s film is a touching, and very funny, ode to art-making, and also to the skillful machinations of Mr. Luddy.

In 1974, Mr. Luddy and a group of friends, Stella and Bill Pence and the film historian James Card, conceived a film festival to be held over three days in September in the picturesque former mining town of Telluride, Colo. (Bill Pence died in December.)

There would be no prizes, no angling for distribution, no marketing, no paparazzi and no red carpets — just an almost inconceivable amount of screenings, talks and shenanigans. They would show old films and new, local films and foreign, and art films as well as more popular fare, the offerings curated according to the organizers’ own appetites and interests. There would be guest curators from outside the film word, too, like Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Rachel Kushner and Stephen Sondheim.

You might find Louis Malle at the bar, Robert Downey Sr. declaiming in the town’s plaza that plots were dead, Mr. Herzog and Barbet Schroeder playing table football. Mr. Lopate recalled that during the festival’s first year he found himself on an elevator with Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi propagandist, and Gloria Swanson. The two women were trading health secrets involving sesame seeds.

“It mixes new directors and old ones — the venerable King Vidor is here this year — actors, distributors, scholars and the bristly and ardent society of film buffs,” The Times wrote in 1976. “Everyone is available to everyone else — names and no‐names, young and old — up to the point of exhaustion and past it.”

In 2016, A.O. Scott of The Times described the festival, then in its fifth decade, as “a gathering of the faithful, consecrated to the old-time cinephile religion,” adding: “The local school gym and a hockey rink on the edge of town are temporarily converted into what screening M.C.s unironically refer to as cathedrals of cinema. Everyone is a believer.”

Mr. Luddy might have been cinema’s most fervent believer, as well as its main officiant. The festival reflected his tastes, which were, as David Thomson, the San Francisco-based British film critic and historian, said, “both catholic and universal.” But, he added, “friendship was Tom’s art, really. He was unlimited in his wish and ability to help people in the broad area of film, and he did it without any ulterior motive, which is not common in the movie world.”

Thomas William Luddy was born on June 4, 1943, in New York City, and grew up in White Plains, N.Y., raised by staunch Democrats in what had been a monolithically Republican community. His father, William Luddy, who had worked in newspaper advertising and founded a national merchandise reporting service, was campaign manager for various candidates and, finally, chairman of Westchester County’s Democratic Party. His mother, Virginia (O’Neill) Luddy, was a homemaker and political volunteer.

At the University of California, Berkeley, Tom studied physics and then literature, graduating with a B.A. in English. He also ran a film society and played on the varsity golf team.

Mr. Luddy is survived by his wife, Monique Montgomery Luddy; his brothers, Brian, James and David; and his sister, Jeanne Van Duzer.

Although Mr. Luddy spent most of his time behind the scenes, he did appear in one movie: Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” in which he played to the creepy hilt one of the first humans to metamorphose into a pod person.

“Ah, the ubiquitous Tom Luddy,” The Times quoted a member of a film crew as saying in 1984. “It always seems like there were three or four of him!”

James A. Wilding, an airport executive who helped push for the transfer of Washington’s two major airports from federal control to an independent authority in the 1980s and was instrumental in their expansion to meet increased passenger demand as leader of that new body, died Feb. 24 at a rehabilitation center in Cary, N.C. He was 85.

The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease and hip surgery, said his daughter Patricia Wilding.

Trained in college as a civil engineer, Mr. Wilding was hired by the Federal Aviation Administration in 1959 and participated in the planning and development of Washington Dulles International Airport. He later became chief of the engineering staff at Dulles and National (later Reagan National) airports.

In 1979, he was named director of the FAA-owned and -operated authority overseeing Dulles and National, which were the only commercial airports in the country then owned and operated by the federal government. That meant the airports were susceptible to the cutback whims of legislators overseeing the federal budget, and investment in the two airports was much smaller than most others of comparable size.

Even the simplest of requests required going hat in hand to Capitol Hill. “Take something as simple as buying a new truck,” Mr. Wilding told The Washington Post at the time. “If the fire station at National needs a truck, we have to go to Congress to get the money.”

In 1984, with strong backing by Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Dole, a federal advisory commission she had appointed recommended the government renounce ownership and control of the two airports and hand it over to an independent public authority. According to the commission, the changeover would allow the airports, estimated to need nearly $200 million to finance new terminal and runway construction, to issue revenue bonds to fund improvements.

Some members of Congress reportedly were loath to give up control for fear of losing privileged access to National Airport, where they were guaranteed a parking spot after making the 15-minute drive from Capitol Hill.

Many airline industry officials marveled at Mr. Wilding’s self-effacing and even-temper in the most difficult of circumstances. The Post once called him a “quiet manager, a detail man who some employees say appears to feel more comfortable with computer printouts than with his colleagues.”

After the new Washington Metropolitan Airports Authority was formed in 1987, Mr. Wilding guided the organization through a multibillion-dollar capital development program that helped modernize the two airports, including a new terminal and an expanded runway at Reagan.

At Dulles, he led terminal and concourse expansions — helping, he said, transform the airport from “just a handful of overseas flights to London and Paris and little else to rank as a major gateway.” (The international arrivals hall, completed in 2011, was named in his honor.)

By the time he retired in 2003 as president and chief executive of the Washington Metropolitan Airports Authority, he had led the two airports through the implementation of post-Sept. 11, 2001, security measures as well as bankruptcy filings by major carriers, an economic disruption that can have an impact on vital fees to the airports.

“Jim was savvy,” Edward Faggen, the airports authority’s former general counsel, wrote in an email. “Parking for members of Congress was preserved. Congressional skepticism stemmed as much from fear of local control, people who wanted to limit or close National Airport due to noise complaints. Congress needed much assurance to make sure that would not happen.

“Jim was instrumental in reaching compromises with the Congress and the community," Faggen added.

James Anthony Wilding was born in Washington on Dec. 22, 1937 . His father was chief of the supply division at the Smithsonian Institution, and his mother was a homemaker. He graduated in 1955 from the Priory School (now St. Anselm’s Abbey School) in the District and in 1959 from Catholic University.

He was a member of the federal Senior Executive Service and was an officer in professional and regional development groups. A longtime resident of Silver Spring, Md., where he was a member of St. Andrew the Apostle Catholic Church, he relocated to Cary eight years ago.

In 1961, he married Marcella Gibbons. In addition to his wife, of Cary, N.C., and daughter, of Greensboro, N.C., survivors include three other children, Matthew Wilding of Arlington, Va., William Wilding of Evansville, Ind., and Marci Wilding of Cary; a brother; eight grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

In interviews, Mr. Wilding recounted the most dramatic moments of his career.

The worst day, he said, was the January 1982 Air Florida crash, which occurred moments after takeoff at National, when the plane — because of improper de-icing and other problems — could not gain enough height, clipped cars after it hit the 14th Street Bridge, and plunged into the Potomac River. Seventy-eight people died, including four motorists.

In large part motivated by that disaster, Mr. Wilding said, he successfully pushed to lengthen the overrun, an extension of the runway used to provide a safety margin in case an aircraft has to abort take off and needs more distance to stop.

Three years after the Air Florida disaster, an Eastern Shuttle jet ferrying 177 people rejected takeoff at National and came to rest, Mr. Wilding said, “at the very end of the extra 750 feet.”

As he recalled to The Post, he and one of the staff engineers, Frank Conlon, “just stood there looking at the plane, and I said, ‘Frank, I don’t know what would have happened to those people if the overrun hadn’t been there, but it wouldn’t have been good.’ That’s probably the most satisfied I’ve ever felt.”

Retired Professor Peter Kugel, a long-time member and former chair of the Computer Science Department who devoted much thought to the human dimension of computer technology, died on October 11, 2021. He was 91.

Befitting a scholar with a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard University who had worked in the software industry and at MIT before coming to Boston College in 1974, Dr. Kugel focused his research on the connections between human intelligence, logic, and computability. He summed up these interests in an abstract for a 2009 article: “I believe the human mind can evaluate functions so uncomputable that no machine, not even a hypercomputer, can compute them. But I believe that computers can evaluate such functions, too, because computers, like minds, have other ways to evaluate functions that go beyond computing. If we allow them to use these ways—or, as I shall put it, to uncompute—they may be able to do things that only minds can do well today.”

Earlier in his career, Dr. Kugel published an influential article on studying the process of induction—“by which we reason from the particular to the general”—using ideas from the theory of abstract machines and recursion theory. Another article offered suggestions on developing precise accounts of cognitive processes that could be modelled on computers.

He also was interested in how college teachers develop as teachers, and in 1989 published an op-ed piece in The New York Times that explained how bringing a cup of coffee to class helped him create a better rapport with his students.

“My pauses, as I sipped, not only gave my students time to think about what I had said, but gave me time to think about what I was going to say next,” he wrote. “I began to use my pauses to look around the room to see how my students were reacting to what I had just said. When I saw their attention wander, I tried to bring them back. When I saw them puzzled over some concept that I thought I had explained, I gave another example. My lectures became less organized and less brilliant, but my students seemed to understand me better. And my courses became more popular.”

Interviewed in 1989 by the Boston College Biweekly, Dr. Kugel—then the Computer Science chair—discussed how he and his colleagues made sure that the knowledge they passed along to their students was put to use.

“In computer science, you learn to do something by doing. We don’t simply lecture. We give students at least one assignment a week they must complete. And it’s not like doing an essay; a program has to work before your job is done.”

Dr. Kugel retired in 2005, but continued to write, teach, and learn. Among other activities, he took courses at the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement, where he taught a class titled “Vision and Art.”

A tribute posted on the Computer Science website recalled Dr. Kugel for “his wide-ranging interests and for his humor. He was an exceptional colleague and an especially generous mentor to both students and junior faculty colleagues.”

Dr. Kugel is survived by his wife, Judy, and sons Jeremy and Seth, who were all at his bedside when he died.

University Communications | January 2022

Justin O. Schmidt, an intrepid entomologist who measured the agony of insect stings by allowing himself to be stung hundreds of times in creating a renowned and vividly descriptive pain scale that ranked them, died on Feb. 18 in Tucson, Ariz. He was 75.

His wife, Dr. Li Schmidt, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Schmidt, who brought a joyful exuberance to his work and gained a measure of pop culture fame from it, spent his career investigating the biochemistry and lethality of bee, wasp and ant venom, and how they used their natural weaponry to deter predators. And he suffered, willingly, for his research: He was stung, sometimes on purpose, more than 1,000 times by his count.

“Humans are fascinated by stinging insects,” he wrote in The Conversation, a nonprofit news website, in 2016. “Why? Because we have a genetically innate fear of animals that attack us, be they leopards, bears, snakes, spiders or stinging insects.”

Dr. Schmidt got over that fear. He studied stinging insects professionally for more than 40 years and wrote hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, earning the sobriquet “king of sting.” His 2016 memoir, “The Sting of the Wild: The Story of the Man Who Got Stung for Science,” brought him renown for his colorful Pain Index for Stinging Insects, which he began in 1983.

He ranked, from 1 to 4, the pain caused by the stings of 80 types of bees, wasps and ants that he had encountered, and gave vivid descriptions of what they felt like.

Anthophorid bee, Level 1: “Almost pleasant, a lover just bit your earlobe a little too hard.”

The bullhorn acacia ant, Level 1.5: “A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.”

Red-headed paper wasp, Level 3: “Immediate, irrationally intense and unrelenting. This is the closest you will come to seeing the blue of a flame from within the fire.”

Bullet ant, Level 4: “Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.”

“When Schmidt recalls a certain agonizing sting, a memory that remains vivid decades after the pain has faded, he’s not just spinning a tale,” Avi Steinberg wrote in a profile of Dr. Schmidt in The New York Times Magazine in 2016. “He’s documenting a theory about how sting pain functions: as a deterrent, whereby it creates a memory of pain that stays with a predator for life.”

Dr. Schmidt insisted that he didn’t necessarily want to be stung.

“Want is kind of a dual word,” he told NPR in 2016. “I want the data but I don’t want the sting.”

Justin Orvel Schmidt was born on March 23, 1947, in Rhinelander, Wis., and grew up in Boalsburg, Pa. His father, Orvel, was a forestry professor at Penn State University, and his mother, Jane (Groh) Schmidt, was a home economics teacher.

He grew up among weeds, wildflowers and insects. One day, he recalled, he and several other boys threw rocks at a hornet’s nest in an old apple tree, hoping to topple it.

After their attempts failed, Justin moved closer to the tree and delivered a direct hit. Half the nest fell to the ground. As he ran away, he was stung multiple times on his back.

“It felt like someone had repeatedly struck the back of my neck with a hot branding iron,” he wrote in his memoir. “That was my first experience with what would decades later become a 2 on the insect-sting pain scale.”

He received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Penn State in 1969 and a master’s from the University of British Columbia three years later. But he turned to entomology for his Ph.D. at the University of Georgia because, he wrote, chemistry lacked “living, moving” nature — “insects to be exact.”

He studied harvester ants, collecting them on drives around the country with his first wife, Deborah Wragg, a zoology student.

“Wham, an ant stung me,” he wrote, as he started his travels around Georgia. “Serendipity had struck. This was no ordinary sting. This sting really hurt. The pain, delayed at first, became piercing and excruciating.”

A life’s work had begun. After postgraduate work at the University of Georgia and the University of New Brunswick, in Canada, he was hired in 1980 as a research entomologist at the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson, part of the United States Department of Agriculture, which works to improve the health of honey bee colonies.

He retired in 2005, but by then had also established his own nonprofit laboratory, where he conducted his research until recently. One project was recording the mating habits of vinegaroons, an arachnid that sprays a combination of acids that smells like vinegar, on property that he owned in a wildlife area in southeastern Arizona.

“He was one of the most insatiably curious people I’ve ever met,” Stephen Bachmann, a colleague at the Hayden center and a close friend, said in a telephone interview. “He questioned everything and didn’t suffer fools, especially administrators.”

Martha Hunter, a professor of entomology at the University of Arizona, where Dr. Schmidt was an adjunct scientist, called him “an amazing natural historian” with an extensive knowledge of the plants of the Sonoran desert, in addition to stinging insects.

“The story is that Justin once grabbed a tarantula hawk, just to see what the sting would be like,” she said. “It’s the last thing I would do.”

The tarantula hawk, a kind of wasp, ranked a 4 on the pain index:

“Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair dryer has just been dropped in your bubble bath.”

“I know some people think me crazy, but I am no masochist, and only occasionally am stung on purpose,” he told The Guardian in 2018. “When it does happen, I initially react as anyone else would — cursing, more than I should admit. Then I get out my notebook and stopwatch, sit down and make notes.”

In addition to his wife, Dr. Schmidt is survived by their sons, Kalyan and Veris; a daughter, Krista Jewell Schmidt, and a son, Scott, from his marriage to his second wife, Pat Figuli, which ended in divorce; his sister, Freya Phillips; his brother, Dan; and three grandchildren. His marriage to Ms. Wragg ended in her death.

In recent years, Dr. Schmidt’s easy-to-understand insect pain scale brought him to a wider world outside entomology. It was mentioned in the 2015 superhero film “Ant-Man” and was central to the Ted-Ed animated cartoon “It Hurts” (2021), for which he was credited as the educator and was a character. The scale was cited in a clue on “Jeopardy!” this year.

When he appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in 2016, Dr. Schmidt wore a red T-shirt with the image of a bug on it and brought along several types of stinging insects, including red and black harvester ants.

“The black ones only hurt for four hours,” Dr. Schmidt said. “So if you can imagine someone taking some needle nose pliers and digging underneath your skin and grabbing tendons and nerve and kind of ripping them for about for four hours.”

But the pain of the red one, he said, “goes on for eight hours. You get the bonus with no extra charge.”