Burton Asa Golden

Burton Asa Golden passed away peacefully on September 5, 2023, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, following a brief illness. 

He is survived by his children: Elspeth Golden and husband Bill Roper, and Thad Golden and wife Tracey Golden, all beloved though none of them followed his advice; by three grandchildren: Samantha Golden, Nicholas Golden, and Dashiell Roper, whom he hoped would have long, happy, and interesting lives, whatever they might end up doing; and by his ex-wife, Jo Yeik, whose ear he continued to bend about a variety of subjects for forty years after they split up.

Burton was born at Jewish Memorial Hospital at the corner of Broadway and 196th Street in New York and grew up in the Bronx. As a teenager in the 1950s, he enjoyed hopping the subway down to Manhattan to play pool and listen to live bebop jazz, which he would continue for the next 65 years to uphold as better than rock and roll.

After graduating from Bronx High School of Science at age 15, he escaped as quickly as possible to Penn State, and, when that proved not far enough away, to Tucson, Arizona, where he settled in at the University of Arizona for six years of unabashed dilettantism before agreeing to leave with a BA in Political Science and a beautiful wife.

Children and a career in radio soon followed. From the late ’60s into the ‘90s, Burton worked behind the scenes at WMCA, KFRC, KYUU, and Countdown USA, among others. He had a keen ear and enjoyed audio engineering, recording spoofs, and harmless shenanigans with friends and colleagues.

At various times in his life, he reveled in road trips and campouts, playing alto sax and crooning bits of The Great American Songbook, photography and darkroom, flexing his green thumb with terrariums, tree seedlings, and orchids, studying math and physics, tinkering with electronics and computer programming, translating his forebears’ writing from Hebrew and Yiddish into English, and meandering near any large body of water. He delighted in MacGyvering cheap solutions to technical and automotive problems. In later years he continued to take pleasure in relaxing near the water, talking with people about things that interested him, eating desserts, and diving down rabbit holes on the great free library of the internet, whence he sent out copious informative tidbits to his near and dear.

Burton was intelligent, irreverent, irascible, intractable, idiosyncratic, and fiercely resistant to any attempts to define him. He will be missed. There will be no immediate memorial services, but he would doubtless like it if you raised a cookie or a glass to him and told a funny or appreciative story. If you feel a need to send something, donations may be made in his name to One Tree Planted, to plant more trees and provide homes for the bears he appreciated.

https://onetreeplanted.org/products/in-memory