Richard Watkin Rees

Passed on December 2, 2020, age 91.

Richard Rees left his home country for the Americas as a young man, but retained and reflected his fondness for it throughout his long life. He was born the youngest of three boys and raised in Ystradgynlais, a small town in the coal mining valleys of South Wales, UK. The Welsh are known for their love of music, story-telling, and exploring their sweeping, verdant countryside.

Richard was a “natural” at music. He could play almost anything on the piano, organ and reed instruments, at first sight and with astonishing ease. Beginning with stints as organist at his hometown Sardis Chapel, he continued to play in churches everywhere he lived, and would accompany singers at the Welsh Society of Delaware’s annual “Cymanfa Ganu” Welsh hymn and choral festivals. No language problem for Richard, as he was a Welsh speaker from his upbringing. He also wrote novels based on that world he knew so well, happily in English. And with a passion little understood outside the British Isles, he developed encyclopedic knowledge and a deep appreciation for the railway locomotives and public transport buses that traversed that land.

Richard was a man of ambition and of science as well. After earning his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Wales (Swansea), he left behind the gloom of post-war Britain for Canada. He made his mark quickly with a Quebec-based chemicals company and soon had several patents to his name. It was there, in the town of Shawinigan Falls, that he met his wife Shirley (née Guseck) and started their family.

The DuPont Company was Mecca for many a chemist, and he soon relocated to Wilmington to begin a 35-year career with DuPont in plastics research and development. He worked for many years at the Experimental Station, rising to the position of Senior Research Fellow, and gladly accepted postings along the way at DuPont’s Orange, TX plant and at the company’s European headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

He was fortunate, he said, to be poking around in an area that his intellect and intuition told him was a good one, and in the 1960’s was credited as the primary inventor of a new family of plastics known as ionomeric resins, and got to star in a DuPont “Better Living… Through Chemistry” television commercial of that time. Surlyn®, the DuPont name for these plastics, became a big seller for many applications, but are best known to the public as the no-cut covers on golf balls, which made him many friends among amateur golfers, and landed him on an elite list of “Those Who Shaped the Game” in Golf Digest. Of greater professional weight, he received the Lavoisier Medal, the top technical achievement honor given by the DuPont Company, and was feted as a Hero of Chemistry by the American Chemical Society.

Richard did not let all this go to his head. He was known by many as a warm, hospitable, and even shy man – unless you got him going on one of his many tales from the Old Country. His family learned almost as much as if they had been there too!

He had the strength to endure family tragedies that seemed to strike more often than they should. He and Shirley suffered the loss of their eldest daughter, Glenys, a radiologist with the US Army, at age 34. Their younger daughter, Andrea, and their only daughter-in-law, Diana, both died in their early 50’s. In their later years, Richard and Shirley thoroughly enjoyed themselves travelling, and often hiking, around Europe and America. When in residence at their Wilmington home, Richard could frequently be seen, dressed in impeccable Welsh sheep farmer gear, complete with plaid cap, roaming the fields and woods of the Brandywine Valley with the family dog, which, more often than not, was a Corgi.

Richard is survived by his son Eric, two granddaughters Julia and Amanda, and by more distant relatives in the UK, Canada and Germany.

Donations to The Alzheimer’s Association, or other charities dedicated to this cause, are also warmly appreciated.