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I just read a news story about a math teacher from Beachwood, OH who was killed in a car accident last night. His name was Art Gugick. I don’t know if he was a member of NEOLUG, but he taught in Beachwood, OH, and was a great lover of Lego. Might be worth it to reach out to NEOLUG and see if there is anything that they are doing for his family and students that we could support them in.
Beachwood math teacher and LEGO artist killed in car crash had lasting impact on his students
Here’s his Flikr feed: https://www.flickr.com/photos/10321180@N08/
Oh my goodness. This is not an April fools joke.
Arthur has done many amazong mosaics and builds. I know Greg is a fan.
I emailed Arthur many years ago to see if he’d be willing to share or distribute his mosaic software that he wrote to use 1×2 printed tiles. He declined.
He was interviewed on the brothers brick many years ago when they did Skype sessions.
@tim or @matt, want to reach out to Becky deak and see what they’re doing, if anything, and see if we can be involved? Maybe a charity event or something?
Holy crap, not Arthur? He almost became a master builder through a competition, but I think he turned it down at the last minute. He just retired from Math teaching a year ago. He spent the past year traveling the world. He just recently sold off most of his LEGO projects because he was downsizing to a smaller house. Geez.
I knew Arthur from BrickFairVA, and talked to him multiple times over the years. At the first one I went to, in 2010, he did a presentation where he discussed and told funny stories about his life as an AFOL, as well as a dad of young boys who built with Lego. In 2011, he was on the schedule again, so this time I had Susie come with me, cause I thought she would’ve liked the previous one. He started off by saying ‘This is the exact same presentation I have done in previous years, so if you don’t want to sit through it again, I won’t be offended if you get up and leave.’ Susie asked me if I wanted to leave and I said no. We were glad we stayed. I still remember a lot of the stuff he talked about and over the years have repeated some of those stories to other people; in fact, I just quoted him at Build Day at Walter’s (“Almost any part is useful as long as you have a lot of it.”) He also had a sense of humor about Cleveland, I don’t remember how it came up (probably cause I live in Pittsburgh), but I remember us laughing about the ‘At least we’re not Detroit’ video that was going around the internet at the time.
He didn’t come to BrickFair every year, and the last time I saw him was in 2015. He was very friendly and chatty. I was checking out his builds and we mostly talked about Lego, but then, despite the fact that I really didn’t know him all that well, he also told me a bunch of amusing stories about his recent adventures in speed dating. He made a wearable cape featuring the face of The Joker (there’s a pic of him with it in his Flickr stream), he was concerned though that pics didn’t truly capture the flexibility of the cape, so he asked me to use his phone to take a video of him walking around in it. I don’t know what ever came of that video though, cause I never saw it on the internet anywhere.
He’d also made a computer program that would calculate for you how to make a Lego dome (like you would put on top of a building) based on specs you entered; that one – at least back in 2010 – he was willing to send you for free if you emailed him about it. I don’t think I ever got it from him.
For those of you who are familiar with my big latticework cube made out of #2 angle brackets, that was based on / inspired by one of Arthur’s builds. In fact, at the time I built it, I thought it was a direct copy (which I didn’t care about, I just thought it would be fun to build), but for whatever reason (laziness), I built from memory without actually referring back to the original pic, which I hadn’t seen in some time. (On Flickr it’s “Mathematical mosaic 11 of 25”.)
I was not aware of his recent downsizing. He never posted a lot to Flickr, but he added two new pics in January. I had always thought I would see him again someday at BrickFair.
I think I heard the same talk at BrickFair by Arthur. The main point that I got was that people will ask you how long it took to build and how many pieces were required not because the answers matter to the person asking the question but because the person want to engage you and don’t know what else to ask. I think Arthur’s point was, the answer does not matter, just make something up and keep the conversation going.
Below are two pictures of photos from 2005, the first time I met him. He was doing more architectural builds than mosaics at the time.
>> I think I heard the same talk at BrickFair by Arthur. The main point that I got was that people will ask you how long it took to build and how many pieces were required not because the answers matter to the person asking the question but because the person want to engage you and don’t know what else to ask. I think Arthur’s point was, the answer does not matter, just make something up and keep the conversation going.
That’s the one, he said a lie was better than saying ‘I don’t know’. He said sometimes he just used pi – “This build contains exactly 31415 pieces.” He said even when he was impossibly specific in his answers nobody ever called him out on it.
The Taj Mahal was used in a movie made in Australia, and he talked at length both about the experience of taking the build to Australia (such as going through airport security with a second suitcase that contained literally nothing but Lego) as well as the fact that Lego’s Taj Mahal was coming out around the same time and there some concerns, I forget how they were resolved though. I don’t remember the name of the movie, and I never saw it. I do remember that it wasn’t for children (he couldn’t talk the moviemakers out of removing the nudity from the movie), and that a main story arc was the relationship between a man and his daughter, and they build the Taj as something to do together.
SO sad. I am almost positive I talked to him a time or two at the Beachwood Lego store. If it is the same guy I am thinking of, he was very kind and friendly.
Here’s an email Rachel sent me back in April (posted here with permission), after I asked her how she knew him:
I met him at Brickworld when I went the first time [2015]. I saw he had a note saying he was a math teacher in Cleveland and I was working with GLSC [Great Lakes Science Center], so we had a conversation about how he had designed a space-themed kit for GLSC, for a pittance, and then when that got popular he charged a lot more to do something like it for the Columbus Science Center. Then later he came over when I was in town for a GLSC meeting and we had a design session related to the LEGO exhibit they were planning. We had Joe [Meno] on the speakerphone, big group of museum staff. My favorite moment was later in the fabrication shop, standing around a large pile of beat up LEGO parts, when he plucked a 1×1 round from Megablocks, looked me in the eye, and said, we don’t need THIS in here, do we? Total Princess and the Pea moment.
A week ago I was at BrickWorld Chicago. Like many conventions, they have trophies for various build categories as voted on by the exhibitors. The final award is for Master Builder, they come up with five nominees, and the winner is chosen based not on what they brought that year, but their lifetime body of work. It’s considered the highest honor that BrickWorld has to offer.
There’s a tradition that the previous year’s Master Builder will create a build/trophy, something small that they can make 100 or so of, and something that reflects their own building. They then go around late Saturday night (after midnight, when World of Lights ends), and put their tiny trophies on all the builds that they especially like that year. Then everybody finds them when they show up for public hours on Sunday. I got one from Imagine Rigney in 2016, and one from Mark Larson this year. I did not get one in the intervening two years.
What I didn’t know (or had known and forgotten) is that the person who started this tradition was Arthur. He apparently told nobody ahead of time that he was going to do it, it was done in the spirit of a fun prank. I don’t know what his build was, I’ll have to ask around.
At closing ceremonies this year, they (Bonahoom and Larson) announced that in Arthur’s honor, from now on, those little builds will be referred to as gugicks. Ie: Ben is a two-time gugick recipient. I am not sure if they’re using an uppercase or lowercase g for that, I’ll have to find out. (I also discovered that I’d been pronouncing his name wrong, they used a j sound for the second g, which I had not been doing.)
So that’s it. Amanda Feuk is this year’s Master Builder. So come to BrickWorld next year, bring something good, maybe you’ll get a gugick from her.
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