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Posted: Oct 04, 2024 9:38 AMUpdated: Oct 08, 2024 5:49 AM

Remembering Vasu

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Tom Davis
Sujatha Krishnan was our special guest on COMMUNITY CONNECTION to talk about her father, a man lovingly known to the Bartlesville community as Vasu.
 
Karappurath Vasudevan, affectionately known as “Vasu,” passed away Friday, Sept. 6 after a prolonged illness. He was 86. Sujatha announced on our program that a special public event to remember Vasu will be held on Tuesday, October 8, 2024, from 4:30pm to 6:30pm at the Service Technology Service Corporation offices at 105 South Penn in Bartlesville.
 
Sujatha said, "Much of Bartlesville does know that K. Vasudevan passed on September 6th, on a Friday. And for us from India and who are Hindus, Friday is a very good day, and it happened to be also a very special celebration on that day. So, worldwide people were praying, and Dad passed that evening."
 
She described her relationship with her father saying, "So, yeah, I hope I won't get emotional. I was very much a daddy's girl. I was his shadow for many, many, many years, and so I miss him." She added, "Like a lot of people, everyone's attached to their parents, but I spent all but 10 years of my life with my parents."
 
Sujatha continued,"If you're lucky, sometimes people find it hard to let go of being mom and dad, like dad, you know, people who knew Vasu, he was a very bright and loving guy, but he was also a go-getter, and a no-nonsense man, people who dealt with him in business knew that, and so sometimes there were little conversations about, dad, you need to kind of back off a little bit here, and he would smile and say, okay, but whether that really happened or not, I'll leave it up to the audience to decide." 
 
Vasu's family is going to have a very nice remembrance of him coming up on Tuesday, October 8th at the Service and Technology, or STC, building. Sujatha explaines,"Dad started three companies, for sure he had a vision to start, like, two or three more. Gave it names and everything, it was in the process, and then the good Lord took him when he was 86 years old, but it's going to be at the STC building, 105 South Penn, and for those of you who are not too savvy about, you know, using your phones or other stuff, if you go down to Frank Phillips, you know where the Frontier Pool is, well, one block west of Virginia, you'll make a right turn, and we own that whole block."
 
"We just welcome anybody to the Bartlesville community who would like to come and pay respects to Vasu. There's no set program as such, it's more of a come and go," said Sujatha.
 
Vasu's family was selected into the Bartlesville Legacy Hall of Fame in 2014.
 
Sujatha said her family live "an immigrant experience." She said, "Migrations started in the 1400s to find America with good old Christopher Columbus in 1492. The experience, although we've had technology and times have changed, there are some things that ring true through the centuries."
 
If you wish to honor Vasu, please send any contributions to: BLESS Fund, Inc.,105 South Penn, Bartlesville, OK 74003. Contributions can also be made online by going to the “donate here” tab at BLESS Fund Association or by using this QR code. For more information about the open house or making a donation to BLESS, contact Emily Droege at 918-33-8161 or emilyld@stceagle.net
 
 
Sujatha recalled the experience: 
 
"We migrated in 1970. And those who have seen The Legacy, bear with me. They've heard this before, but we migrated in 1970.
 
Dad was, in this sense, we were not a typical immigrant family in that, you know, Dad is, his lineage is actual royalty in South India. Like the people who met Vasco de Gama, the Indians who met Vasco de Gama, that sovereign or the quote-unquote king of that region was Dad's, I mean, Dad was a descendant of that family. Okay.
 
So we are, in our part of India, we're very well known. We're very prominent. And Dad was educated and he wanted to come to college in the 1960s.
 
And so with the help of his brother-in-law, who is Dr. Gopal, if you all know Dr. Gopal, the pediatrician in town, his father, who is already studying here, in those days immigration wasn't as difficult as it is today. Even if you were a student, you could sponsor relatives to come. And so he spoke up for Dad and he got to come to the University of Arkansas, go hogs go, in 1960.
 
And he graduated from the university in 1964 and made wonderful friends. And, you know, people who talk about America, those people who are representing us, those of us who are from the Midwest, you know, they have this idea that the East Coast and West Coast are the real Americas, especially the big cities, you know, Los Angeles and New York. Well, real America, in my humble opinion, is the Bible Belt Midwest.
 
I mean, people will literally take their shirt off and give it to you. And Vasu would say that all the time. And he was treated so well by so many people.
 
And looking back, you know, I don't think much about it. But after watching Remember the Titans, you know, desegregation had just happened. This is 1970, you know.
 
And I experienced a little pushback when I was growing up as a young girl in Pittsburgh, Kansas. But, you know, kids can be mean. I was little.
 
My whole education experience has been in the United States. When I migrated, I was only about a year and a half old. Now, Gopi was eight years older.
 
So he had studied in India and learned a lot of the really great Indian work ethics for studying. And he will humbly say that you all think I'm smart, but so many people from India and from that system, I mean, it kind of works against you, but it makes you so much smarter and stronger as a student because you better study your stuff and basically become an expert. Otherwise, you're not going to do well.
 
People come to America and go, this is a piece of cake, you know. So going back to my story, Gopi was very knowledgeable and was a third parent, but it was because he had gone through the school systems. And I was getting ready to take the ACT-SAT.
 
Gopi was a pre-med. It was hard to get hold of him. He was in Pittsburgh, and we still hadn't had cell phones, and it was expensive to call Pittsburgh long distance.
 
And so we were like, unless it's an emergency, you don't use the phone and call long distance, or it's very well planned ahead because we were trying to save every penny. In India in those days when Dad migrated in 1970, they wouldn't let people take any more than a very small amount of cash. I'm wanting to say like $500 from the country.
 
So Dad came to this country in 1970 with two small kids, his wife who was wearing sari and then the native dress of India, and himself, two suitcases, $500 in his pocket, no promise of a job. And my uncles who met us there at the airport, my uncle in Seattle, Ramachandran, says, you should have seen your dad's face, Sujatha. He was coming basically with nothing, like so many other immigrants, I mean from a great family, had a lot of money back there, but he couldn't take it, came to this country, and he was smiling from ear to ear.
 
And not nervous, not scared, smiling from ear to ear because he had been bitten by the America bug, like so many others. And the place that he worked in India at the time, he worked for some very major companies like Tata Motors, which is the company who actually ended up buying Jaguar. They're a very big company in India, steel company.
 
And they went ahead and he was working for Tata Industries, and so that's like one of the best jobs that ever happened, that you could have ever had. And then he worked for another company called McNally Bird, and they have a collaboration in Pittsburgh. And that's how dad got his first set of experience.
 
He was trained right out of college in Pittsburgh and then worked in India. But India, especially the part of India where he was working in Bengal, was turning more communist. And it was a very corrupt system, and he didn't want to deal with that.
 
I mean dad couldn't make thousands of dollars from bribes. Dollars from bribes. Not Indian rupees, dollars from bribes.
 
But that's not who he was. And we're going to remember him for who he was coming up on Tuesday, Octiber 8th and that is going to be at the STC offices, and that is at 105 South Penn from 4.30 until 6.30."
 
And for all purposes, he's a third parent. And a lot of that is just because of Gopi's nature, but also because Gopi went through the school system, and he was just brilliant. I mean, people who talk about me being smart in Bartlesville, always my friends are so kind to me and say, you are so smart.
 
I was nothing compared to Gopi. In Pittsburgh, where we migrated to, if he goes back, if there are people who have actually lived in the community for a long time, they will remember Gopi because he would do things like these kind of interviews. He was just so active in school and in the community.
 
He was student body president, and he was part of the school board, and just at a young age. But again, the immigrant experience adds to that. In any case, Gopi was a pre-med at Pittsburgh State University in Pittsburgh, Kansas, and we had moved to Bartlesville.
 
And in all honesty, a lot of people don't know, Dad didn't want to come to Bartlesville. Oh, really? No. Nobody knew that.
 
Yeah, I mean, because this community, it's like the Garth Brooks song, thank God for unanswered prayers. You know, the good Lord knows what's best. But it was a horrible time for Vasu because he was with a company for over 10 years in Pittsburgh, and there was kind of a conflict of thinking between the old regime and the new regime.
 
A lot of people have experienced that. And he decided he wanted to change jobs. And so he was actually unemployed for like, I think, eight months or something, six months, eight months, and he went into a real depression, and all he wanted at that point was to start his own company.
 
But he would put things together, and it just didn't work out. And so one day he was talking to one of his very close friends, Keith Thayer in Houston, who had worked with him before at Atkinson's. It was a client.
 
And he said, Vasu, I'm starting a new operation there in Bartlesville, an engineering company. Why don't you come work for me? And so that's how Dad came to Bartlesville. But he told my mom before he left, don't start packing anything because my intention is to be back in Pittsburgh because we had built, you know, again, back to this immigrant experience.
 
There has been such an outpouring from the public. That's why we're having this event for dad.
 
We really hope anyone who would like to come would come. We'd be very happy and touched to see you. Thank you."
 

 

 

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