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We have received notice that Richard Pearl passed away in December 2024.
Richard taught undergraduate business courses in Okinawa for the Asian Division from 2009 to 2015. He was also an incredibly talented musician.
We will post the obituary when it is available.
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Robert Walker
For the last several years, Richard had been quite ill from kidney failure. He was back and forth on quite a few medications and was one step away from weekly dialysis. He was still living and teaching in Vietnam (Hanoi) but returned to the US every few months. He has a very kind brother who is a doctor and lives in Ft Lauderdale. I live half the year about an hour away in Stuart. He came to my house and visited with myself and my wife, Annie Kao. I visited him in Lauderdale with his brother and his wife. His spirits were always good but he knew he was ill. I'm not certain of his age, somewhere in the low to mid 80s? He died in the hospital in Ft Lauderdale.
For several years, when we were both in Okinawa, we traveled frequently to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. He had a tremendous sense of humor and was a gifted musician. He was well-known as part of a band in Phnom Penh and everyone loved him. I loved him too. He was a fine - in many ways, brilliant - man. My wife and I will both miss him terribly.
Robert Walker, Stuart Florida and Kailua Hawaii (UMUC in Okinawa, Korea, Germany and Italy from approx 2000 to 2015.
Guy Moyer
Something remakable about Richard is that he not only was a skilled musician, but, as I recall, he taught himself to play the banjo. He then used that skill and his natural performing talent to "front" for some pretty big names, like Pat Paulsen of Smothers Brothers fame.
Douglas Dallier
I'll never forget the time I first met Richard. I was teaching in the late evening on Kadena Air Base in Okinawa (classes ended at 10:45 p.m.). To set the scene, we had just finished and I was packing up my materials after chatting with a few students. The education center was largely deserted. In an otherwise silent building, I suddenly heard the unmistakably distinct sound of a banjo, quite noticeable and somewhat close by. I walked around looking in rooms for the source and in one there stood Richard- one leg propped up on a chair playing the banjo with about four or five students hanging out, enjoying the jam session. It was an unforgettable moment that was only made possible by the irreplaceable person that was Richard. As one of my other colleagues mentioned, he was as much a deep thinker as he was a wonderfully affable colleague and profoundly skilled musician.He encouraged me to travel throughout Asia during my time with UMUC, and I followed his advice and travel recommendations, which were always superb (except for the time that he encouraged me to ride a tuk-tuk from the airport in Phnom Penh to the Mekong riverfront for the authenticity of the experience, which took me nearly an hour in miserably sweltering heat and traffic, but that's another story).
We kept in contact throughout the years and I was delighted when I learned that he had garnered a teaching gig in Vietnam. I have mentioned stories about him to some of my colleagues at my current institution (there aren't many academic 'banjo men' in the world, after all), and was deeply saddened to learn that he was sick and had passed away. The world lost a truly unique person on that day.
Jerry Collins
I learned in January that Richard had passed away the month before. I didn’t know he had been ill. I, along with a mutual friend in Okinawa, had been sending him messages on facebook for weeks and were concerned when we hadn’t gotten any responses. I did not know the details of his last few months until I read Bob Walker’s post on the OMA webpage. Thanks, Bob. for the information you provided.
Richard arrived in Okinawa around 2006 with his big smile, his hilarious stories and his plectrum banjo. I note that it was a plectrum banjo because I once referred to it as a tenor banjo and he admonished me for my ignorance by launching into a spirited disquisition on the differences between the two in terms of their tunings, the length of their fingerboards, the number of frets on each and their different tones.
In the case of his plectrum banjo, it was totally unique because it contained in its head a sound system that he created. It had an amplifier, receiver, batteries --- the whole works. He installed the whole thing after he bought the banjo. When I asked him where he had studied electronics, I was flabbergasted when he told me that he had never taken a course in electronics in his life. He learned it all by himself. When I asked why he didn’t get a patent on the sound system, he replied, “because I didn’t create anything. I just took all the parts and connected them to each other in a way that made them all fit in the head.” It was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen.
He owned that plectrum banjo, which weighed about a half a ton, for a couple of decades. He played that and his soprano ukelele during the years he toured and opened for performers such as Jerry Vale, Joel Grey and Carol Channing. When the nightclub scene dried up, he worked as a solo performer on international cruise ships for over ten years. After that, he did gigs at schools and festivals around the country, as well as gigs he performed for various mafioso patrons. He said he liked working for them because they always paid well and treated him very well too. His bookings were arranged by the William Morris Agency, the premium talent agency. Carol Channing had sponsored him with the agency after they toured together. He always spoke affectionately about her.
He came to my house a number of times to play music with friends of mine – my very talented guitar teacher once and a jazz pianist on a couple of other occasions. When he asked me what kind of music I liked, I played some traditional American roots songs for him that he was not familiar with, but which he pronounced were “easy.” He had the same reaction when I drove him to Naha to meet a friend of mine whose band played Celtic music. I had told my friend that Richard would like to sit in with the band, and I was sure that Richard could jam with them without rehearsing the songs beforehand. My friend was skeptical, but that’s what happened. Richard just sat on a stool and listened to the first few bars of each song that he had never heard before and then started playing along. When the band took a break, Richard did a few solo numbers. When they played together again after the break, Richard took it upon himself to scream out the chord changes to the band members as they played --- the chord changes to the songs that they played every week!!! The next time I saw my friend after that he said, “Yeah, he's quite a player, but don’t bring him around anymore. We don’t need a boss.” That was Richard. No one who knew Richard would be surprised by this.
The last time I saw Richard was in 2017, after we had both left UMUC. I was living in Bangkok, and he was teaching in Hanoi, but he would spend a lot of time in Phnom Penh playing guitar and banjo in the local bars. When I emailed him to tell him I was going to Phnom Penh to see him, he wrote back and told me he would send "my guy" to the airport to pick me up. When I got there, his guy, Aung, was there waiting for me. He took me into town in his tuk tuk, and over the next five days, he shuttled Richard and me around.
Richard had done a number of things for Aung and his tuk tuk. He installed new headlights, and he fixed the directional lights, and for good measure, he strung up a set of Christmas lights around the top of the vehicle. Aung was very proud of his tuk tuk after Richard's embellishments. Once when I spoke to Aung alone, he showed me a picture of his daughter who had some sort of medical condition, and teary-eyed he told me that Richard had helped him out with some of her medical bills. This man, a tuk tuk driver, had probably driven hundreds of people around, but I'm sure he never developed the sort of friendship with any of them that he had with Richard. They were very fond of each other.
One day, we drove over the river to an outside club that was owned by an Australian and his Khmer wife who were friends of Richard’s. There had been a storm and the owner's sound system had been damaged. We went there so Richard could fix it. It took him a few hours. He did it while Aung showed me around the island. When Richard finished, they gave us a big lunch. That night we went to another club, and when we walked in, the owner ran over to shake RIchard's hand and to ask me what I wanted to drink. On the house. It turns out that that club had had a few local bands give a concert earlier in the week as a memorial to a local guy who had passed away. One of the bands had messed up the sound system, so Richard fixed it for the owner. And believe it or not, there was a third place that he fixed the sound system for as well. That system had been damaged in the storm that messed up the Aussie's system. Going to these places with Richard was a heck of a lot of fun. I felt like the sidekick to a celebrity. And I loved it.
Richard really hadn't been in Phnom Pehn very long, but he made friends with the club owners. He treated them the way he treated Aung, the tuk tuk driver -- by being friendly and enthusiastic and helpful.
Richard was one of a kind. He travelled a great deal, but in many ways he never left Brooklyn. He just kind of assumed that everybody everywhere was into the same things he was into. Once when he complained to me that when he was in Vietnam he couldn’t find a place to eat a hot dog, I said that maybe that was because it was an Asian country. He replied, “It’s just a hotdog. They ain’t hard to cook.” I never met anyone so oblivious to his surroundings, but at the same time so happy to be where he was.
Richard was as unique as his plectrum banjo. I regret that I didn’t get to visit him in Vietnam when he lived there, as we had talked about. Sometimes he annoyed the hell out of me, but I look back at the time I spent with him with fondness. I’m always going to miss him.