April 1, 1946-January 12, 2024
Otto Edward Rieke, a scholar and scoundrel, a provocateur and agitator, a Godly man and a man whose presence often prompted others to question the existence of God, died Friday night after battling a brief illness. As he said in his will, written years earlier: “I told you I was sick.”
Idiosyncratic, prone to malaprops and mispronunciations, never afraid to greet the day wearing unsightly Zubaz pants, always working on a new letter to the editor because the world needed to know exactly what was on his mind, Otto was a character no author would have the temerity to draw.
Born on April Fool’s Day in 1946 — a cruel joke on the world, Otto liked to say — he grew up in Jefferson City. Otto occupied his home’s third floor, and every morning those beneath him would awaken to his coughing, hacking and unleashing a panoply of other guttural intonations. It was a habit he never kicked. Otto made noises never before, and never again to be, heard by human ears.
Rusty, as family and friends called him, was the oldest male among nine siblings. He ordered his youngest sisters to preface any conversation with three words: “Hail, handsome brother!” They nonetheless tagged along as he built soap-box derby cars, outfitted with a steering mechanism and hand brake, the first sign of what would be a lifetime of tinkering.
After graduating from Helias Catholic High School in Jefferson City, he earned a degree in mathematics at Rockhurst University, married his high school sweetheart, Mary Beth Markway, and was drafted in the Army. At Fort Leonard Wood, Otto said, he spent most of his time playing basketball. Upon his honorable discharge, he bounced from teaching math and physics at Indiana University to Chicago to Kansas City, starting a family that would grow to five children.
His days quarterbacking Helias’ football team led to a lifelong love of sports. He would walk across the street from his home in Kansas City’s Brookside neighborhood and play baseball with his sons Gabriel and Michael almost daily. He would attend his daughter Catherine’s basketball games and inevitably irk the referee with his chirping. He would travel to Iron Mountain, a tiny Missouri town accessible by back roads, to golf, drink and bicker with his beloved younger brother, Henry, the id to his super-ego.
Otto quit drinking in 1988 before the tragic losses of Gabriel and Michael. Though the boys and Mary Beth were gone, his sobriety held for his final 35 years, a point of immense and understandable pride. He poured his energy into the rest of his family and his job at Hallmark, where he spent 30 years, taking the city bus to work every day. After helping create the company’s IT infrastructure, he often found himself without much to do, and downtime brought out, depending on one’s perspective, the best or worst in Otto. He once clipped his toenails, taped each to a 3x5 notecard, labeled them to reflect the phalanges from whence they came, dropped the lot into an envelope and interoffice mailed it to his daughter Sara.
She and others learned to roll their eyes at Otto’s behavior. He was a proud boomer, an eccentric with charm. He liked what he liked. At Christmas one year, the refrigerator crisper was filled with slice ham. When asked about it, Otto said: “It’s my ham drawer.” Each time he imbibed in the delicious pork, or any other consumable for that matter, his right cheek would weep, the product of a parotid-gland surgery gone wrong.
Once he retired from Hallmark in 2008, Otto dug in on his masterwork, “From Grief to Glory,” his “Otto-biography,” a nearly 500-page tome. The book, which drew from more than 40 years of diaries and told a hero’s story, prompted two reviews on Amazon. One was written by him.
It doesn’t cover the full breadth of his 77 years. The conversations and communications with his eldest son, Adam, his best friend. His trials and travails on the senior dating scene, where he trawled apps under the name “MellowedHunk.” His self-stated, post-retirement occupation as a “crusader for justice.” He called himself that unironically, which always amused those who knew him as the person whose idea of justice was to throw a playing-dead possum into the backyard of a neighbor.
In Otto’s living room sat two statues of Don Quixote. He, too, evermore tilted at windmills — a McDouble in each hand, Pavarotti straining through the speakers, the complications of the world swirling in a mind that fired until 6:30 p.m., when he’d head to bed, reanimated between midnight and 3 a.m., fueled by a pot of coffee, and kicked in again when his alarm buzzed and reminded him that the world needed handsome brothers and ham drawers and nail mail and mellowed hunks.
Otto is survived his children Adam Rieke (Amy), Sara Passan (Jeff) and Catherine Rieke (Jason); grandchildren Gabriel and Elizabeth Rieke, Jack and Luke Passan, and Alice and Jude Pettus; two brothers and five sisters; dozens of nieces and nephews; and legions of those who learned to admire what a man who truly didn’t give a damn looked like.
Funeral services for Otto will be held at St. Peter’s Parish, 815 E. Meyer Blvd., Kansas City, at 11:30 a.m. Friday, January 19 to be followed by a reception. In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to the Gabriel and Michael Rieke Memorial Scholarship at Rockhurst High School, Memorial/Tribute Gifts (rockhursths.edu). Burial will be held at Mt. Olivet Cemetery at a later date.
