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If a thing interested my father, he became
obsessed. And so it was with Mr. Rubik's remarkable cube. During a
visit with my sister's family, back when The Cube was all the rage, my young niece
happened to show him her cube. He was hooked. Although
he was nearing sixty and legally blind, he was soon solving the cube as swiftly
as the most enthusiastic teenager. But even that wasn't enough.
My father saw many possibilities in the
simple design, based on powers of three. He began experimenting with four
cubes. . |
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As
the Cube craze subsided, boxes of cubes began to appear in thrift shops.
We scooped up just as many as we could find. He expanded the patterns using
64 cubes. My mother tells me that he wanted to create a pattern using 512
cubes, but regretfully, that wasn't to be.
Fred Holly passed away June 17, 1995 after
losing his battle with lung cancer. Yet right to the end, he received great
enjoyment from the cube. While visiting, a week or so before his death --
although he was extremely weak and could barely see -- he insisted on showing
us the design (right). You may notice that he couldn't quite align the cubes
as he intended. But I think the effort alone shows great determination,
and his desire to spend every remaining moment embracing those things that gave
him pleasure. .
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Fred and
Ava Lee Holly  |
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Also visit Hana
Bizek's Cube Designs
Jacob
Davenport: Rubik's Cube Art and
Mark Longridge's Rubik's Cube Site |
Sarah Holly Mankowski is Fred Holly's middle daughter. Other
Web activities include: SarahMankowski.com
WordThunder
, a resource site for online writers. E-mail
Sarah
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