Educator5 February 1925 – 6 June 1995
Josef “Joe” Sir
Executive Chef, Rainier Golf and Country Club; Culinary Apprenticeship Instructor, 1971–1991
For twenty years he taught the classroom half of Washington's culinary apprenticeship; six of his apprentices carried his coffin. He arrived in Seattle from Czechoslovakia in the middle 1960s, already about forty, and the record of the four decades before that is a single line on a funeral card. What survives instead is what forty people who trained under him sat down and wrote nine weeks after he died.