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Carl William Gerst, Jr.

  • 3 days ago
  • 5 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

7/13/26


Carl William Gerst, Jr., of Skaneateles, New York, died on July 13, 2026, at the age of 88, six days short of his 89th birthday. He had lived three and a half years without Anna Marie, his wife of 63 years and the woman whose name he built into his life's work. He was, to everyone who knew him, a man who always showed up. He was there for his children, his community, his faith, and his family, and he did what mattered without needing anyone to notice.

Carl was born in Youngstown, Ohio, on July 19, 1937, the oldest of three children. His father was a bricklayer and a policeman, and his mother ran the household. He was the first in his family to go to college, paying his own way through Youngstown State University, where a professor sparked a lifelong love of math and physics. From there, he would never stop wanting to learn. An engineer by training and a mathematician at heart, he was, in the words of many who worked with him, one of the smartest people they knew.

Carl began his career at General Electric, where he was chosen for its elite Edison Engineering Program, then moved to the Syracuse Research Corporation. In 1967, with three young children at home and graduate engineering coursework underway at SU, he and his friend Hugh Hair set out on their own to found Anaren Microwave. The company was born of the Cold War, created to detect the kind of Soviet missile threat that had just stunned the world's navies, and they named it for their wives, Anna Marie and Renee. Carl served as Anaren's chief technology officer and was the technical heart of the company, beloved by the engineers he worked alongside. He held numerous U.S. patents in radar and microwave signal detection, most aimed at a single hard problem: determining the direction an incoming threat was coming from. Decades later, his work is still cited in a scholarly history titled Fifty Years of Instantaneous Frequency Measurement. Anaren was a product company from the start: it built hardware that reliably worked in the most unforgiving environments there are. Its components serve at the core of communications satellites in orbit, military radar and defense systems, the wireless base stations that carry the world's calls, and the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and smart-home devices people use every day.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, as Anaren expanded and Carl traveled the world for work, the family grew to seven children. Through it all, he never stopped learning. He continued taking graduate engineering courses at SU, and in the 1980s went back once more for an Executive MBA, completing the two-year program on nights and weekends. He managed it all while serving as chief technology officer of a growing public company and raising seven kids, most of them active in high school sports (and some well-known to local police).

What he built endures. More than 1.85 billion Anaren components have shipped around the world, and the company Carl started with a handful of engineers lives on as a cornerstone of TTM Technologies, employing some 1,000 people in Central New York. Three weeks before he died, TTM opened a $130 million expansion of the Syracuse campus he founded in 1967. His mentorship carries on through the Gerst-Hair Endowed Fund in Microwave Engineering at SU. Ask him a question about any of it and he would happily talk for hours. The more you asked, the more animated he got. He was a delight to talk with when he knew you were genuinely interested (otherwise, mostly crickets).

But for all he built, what mattered most to Carl was being there. He was at almost every game his children ever played.  For a period of time in the 1980s, his three sons had schedules that meant watching six youth hockey games every weekend during the winter. He served nearly 30 years on the Skaneateles school board, unpaid and long after his own children had graduated, because he believed the work mattered. A boardroom there is named in his honor. He gave to many causes, almost always without his name attached.

A devout Catholic, Carl went to Mass up to the last months of his life, and if no one was free to take him, he simply drove himself, without telling anyone, a practice that survived his children's objections and, briefly, his driver's license. When Anna Marie's health was failing, Carl tracked every detail of it. Their close friend Father Lou Vasile laughs about visiting in those years: he would ask Anna Marie how she was doing, and Carl would answer for her, delivering a detailed anatomical analysis of everything going on.

Carl met Anna Marie on a night out, each of them there with someone else, and 63 years of marriage followed. When she became ill, he stopped working to care for her. In his last years, his world was Anna Marie and their youngest daughter, Christine, the angel of the family, who lived at home. He looked after them himself until his own health no longer allowed it, and his devotion to Christine never wavered, to the last days of his life. Every night, after she had been put to bed, Carl would go into her room and sing to her before he went to sleep.

Carl was predeceased by Anna Marie and by his sister, Mary Jane. He is survived by his brother, Tom, of Akron, Ohio; his seven children, Mary (Ken) Hardy, Maureen (Scott) Stalica, Carl (Ingrid) Gerst III, Greg Gerst, Gary (Lynda) Gerst, Amy Ruetsch, and Christine Gerst; and his twenty grandchildren.

A Funeral Mass will be celebrated at 11:00 a.m. on Monday, July 20, 2026, at St. Mary's of the Lake Church in Skaneateles, with Father Lou Vasile officiating. There will be no public calling hours. A reception will follow at The Sinclair, 4357 Jordan Rd, Skaneateles. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to The Michael J. Fox Foundation.

To learn more about Carl's life and work:



 

 
 
 
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