Obituary Edgar Carter Rust III (Ted)
6/12/39 - 12/8/23

Edgar Carter Rust III (Ted) passed away at home in Los Angeles on December 8, 2023. Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, Ted moved several times with his parents, living for a while in Palm Beach, Florida. His favorite childhood home was in Rio de Janeiro before the family moved to Williamstown, New York.

His first job after getting a Master’s in city planning at M.I. T was in Anchorage, Alaska, where he moved with his late wife Loraine Morey Rust and their young daughter and survived the 1964 earthquake. He raised his family in the Bay Area, living in Larkspur a short time, in Berkeley for many decades and in San Francisco for several years.

Ted’s daughter Marion Leeson Rust remembers: “Dad loved challenges of all kinds — intellectual, musical and the outdoors — and he included my brother, Daniel, and me in his ventures almost from the start. He was an amazing listener, especially in times of trouble: he took my heart-struck teenage sorrows as seriously as my adult trials and triumphs. Dad lived by the premise that life is a series of adventures, and he taught it by example. He had a child’s spontaneous laugh, which toppled him out of his seat during a screening of Young Frankenstein. Those Dad loved will always carry his voice within.”

Despite many health setbacks, including Parkinson’s Disease, Ted was active until a stroke in November 2023. He was a superb sailor, sailing the San Francisco Bay for many years; most summers since his early childhood he sailed with his family on Lake Erie. In 1976 he won first place in the Cal 20 National Championship.

Ted ’s undergraduate degree at Williams College was in art history; for his Ph.D from U.C. Berkeley his dissertation was No Growth: Impacts on Metropolitan Areas. He became a city planner and ports and harbors consultant. Throughout his life he listened to and performed music. As a child he sang musicals with his parents; at St. Paul’s School he sang in the choir and developed a knowledge and love for liturgical music. In high school he began playing the oboe — because the chair was vacant. He studied oboe with Louis Speyer of the Boston Symphony and with Eleanor and Raymond Dusté. 

From March 1988 to November 2008 he published Music For the Love of It, a newsletter intended for amateur chamber musicians. In those years he taught woodwinds and chamber music at The Crowden School and played oboe in the Kensington Orchestra, the quintet Quorum Ventorum and the Berkeley Bach Cantata Group. He was a member of the Chamber Musicians of Northern California.

In 2010, after becoming a widower, with his life partner Viva Knight Ted began Dolci, an oboe-piano duo. Dolci performed in Santa Barbara, the Bay Area at various music clubs, on the Old First Concert series and on the mid-Atlantic Ocean aboard the Windstar sailing ship. After the move to San Francisco, Dolci played a weekly noon concert at Aquatic Park’s Senior Center. Since the oboe-piano classical repertoire is limited, Ted began to explore contemporary compositions for oboe and piano. Gloria Cheng and several contemporary composers coached Dolci on this new music. Dolci commissioned a piece by Philip Friehofner which it performed at an annual conference of the International Double Reed Society, of which Ted was a member.

 Dolci’s final concert, in 2019, Oboe and Piano Music of our Place and Time, in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Auditorium, at the Santa Monica Public Library featured music by John Steinmetz, Terry Riley, Jenni Brandon, Bruce Babcock and Bill Douglas. While the pandemic kept everyone at home Dolci recorded and posted weekly short podcasts. A friend of Ted’s since grade school at St. Paul’s School, George Faison, wrote in his tribute to Ted: “Dolci ’s podcasts extended personal musical joy and commitment to provide pleasure, comfort, prayer even, for the afflicted.”

In the last two and a half years of his life Ted became a member of the Parkinson’s community through the Pacific Neuroscience Institute. His online group of newly diagnosed “Parkies” continued in person when the online sessions ended and became a network of close friends who shared the many challenges of PD. All who watched Ted delighted in his joy smashing the ball at the weekly classes of Ping Pong for Good (for players with neurological challenges).

Ted is survived by his children, Marion Leeson Rust and Daniel Williams Rust, his grandchildren, Thomas Daniel Caldera Rust, Max Aaron Bograd and Sadie Loraine Bograd, his brother Langbourne Rust, his sister Charlotte Castro, his life partner Viva Knight, and his many cousins, nieces, nephews, friends and fellow musicians.