I was honored to be asked by the Simonton family to participate in the technical editing and timeline corrections for John's obituary and press releases, and to participate in his memorial celebration in Oklahoma City on December 10. I have a photo page and description of John's memorial ceremony here. The brochure from the memorial service is here (pdf, 2.2M). I also have a high-res version available. Additional memorial photos are on Teri Simonton's site here.
The January issue of Electronic Musician and the February issue of Keyboard will have special tributes to John, in which I participated. A couple newspapers have phoned me for extended coverage of John's accomplishments after publishing the obit. Here is one of the newspaper articles from the Oklahoma Gazette as a 350K jpeg. (Thanks to Greg Leslie for the scan)
John was also featured in the opening night ceremonies at NAMM 2006 in Anaheim, where NAMM paid tribute to industry members lost during the previous year. NAMM memorial photos are here.
Find the official Paia announcement here. Be sure to follow the links to the blogs at the bottom of that page to see just how much John touched his customer base throughout the years. Great reading.
Larry Fast has posted several nice recollections of John on his site here.
I will be posting many fun recollections from working with John over the years on my Paia pages. Use your browser's Refresh command frequently on those pages in order to get the latest additions. There are a lot of great stories to be told! Keep checking back!
updated 6/20/06