Arnold Spielberg, the father of Steven Spielberg, died on Tuesday. He was 103.
Variety reports that Spielberg was surrounded by family in Los Angeles at the time of his passing, including his son Steven, the acclaimed filmmaker.
The Spielberg family confirmed that the patriarch of the family died of natural causes.
According to a statement, Steven told him, “You are our hearth. You are our home.” He also said of his father, who was an engineer at General Electric, “When I see a PlayStation, when I look at a cell phone — from the smallest calculator to an iPad — I look at my dad and I say, ‘My dad and a team of geniuses started that.’”
Arnold also had three daughters, Anne, Nancy, and Sue. In a joint statement, the Spielberg children said their father taught them to “love to research, expand their mind, keep their feet on the ground, but reach for the stars [and] look up.”
“Thank you for my life. I love you, Dad, Daddy, Daddelah. And then so then, and then so then, what happens next…” they told their father at his bedside.
The 103-year-old was born in 1917 and earned a degree in electrical engineering after serving as a chief communications man and radio operator for the 490th Bomb Squadron in World War II. The Hollywood Reporter reports that he helped design the GE-225 mainframe computer, which led to personal computers.
He also went on to work for General Electric and IBM.
In 2012, he was awarded the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s inaugural Inspiration Award for his work in creating a platform to preserve recorded testimonies of Holocaust survivors. His son founded the Shoah Foundation.
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