Roland A. Duquette,
2/13/1926 – 7/22/2009

Roland A. Duquette was born in Los Angeles, California in 1926, the second son of William E. Du­quette and Ruth Gratz Duquette. He grew up in Hermosa Beach and Pasadena. At 16 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy; after six months of training in electronics in San Fran­cisco he shipped out to the Pacific and served as Electrician’s Mate on the destroyer U.S.S. Dashiell. He ended the war a warrant officer.

After the war, Roland – “Duke” to his friends and “R.A.” to his brothers – returned to Pasadena and attended Pasadena City Col­lege; he also built a number of houses with his older brother, William L. Duquette. He then at­tended the University of California at Berkeley, where he got his bach­elor of science degree in Electrical Engineering.

In the years that followed, Ro­land traveled widely, working for the U.S. Navy as an employee of Hopkins Engineering. One project took him to Honolulu in the sum­mer of 1952, where he met a nurse named Wilma Anne Ward of Mor­gan Hill, Calif. The morning he was due to return to California, a week later, Wilma proposed. They were married the following October. Roland and Wilma lived briefly in Pasadena, and then settled in La Crescenta, where they remained until 1997. They then moved to La Cañada-Flintridge where they lived until Wilma’s death in 2000. They were married for 47 years.

In 1965, Roland left Hopkins Engineering with two of his co-workers, Charles Wieland and Langdon Parrill; the three of them founded Electrocube, Inc., a suc­cessful electronics firm. The com­pany is now operated by Donald Duquette and Clay Parrill, sons of the founders.