Bill Cirrito died on June 1, 2008 in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona. 

Bill was 52 years old.                                                         

    Bill had a lot to do with what we make at Zomeworks.  In 1988 he pointed out the great need to cool battery cabinets.  He was selling irrigation equipment in Tucson that needed batteries and the batteries were dying in the hot battery boxes.  Bill suggested I work on a way to passively cool these hot batteries.  Some months later, after a number of false starts, I realized that plain water in freeze tolerant plenums and tanks was a perfect answer.

    With this push from Billy we began building and now 20 years and thousands of Cool Cells later we are still at it. Innovations of Dave Harrison and Dave Nevin promise to add continued patent protection and greatly increased sales.

    The Cool Cell was not the first influence Cirrito had on Zomeworks. In 1987 I was experimenting with using cable as axle and bearing for passive trackers.  Bill had a solar store in Tucson where he sold our passive trackers. After seeing a prototype cable system, Cirrito grasped possibilities. With characteristic excitement and vision he set to work.

Zomeworks Cable Tracker, Tucson, AZ 1987

    With no more than a glimpse of a prototype, Billy sold a large cable tracker to hold 36 13” x 48” ARCO photovoltaic panels to an airline pilot outside of Tucson, Arizona.  We had never built a big one, but Billy brushed aside any doubts. Kent Johnson, who had just started working at Zomeworks , and I made the components and Kent talked
us through every step from unloading the truck to the last act of tightening the turnbuckle before I headed off for Tucson.

    Years later Bill Cirrito made what was called solar art. I believe an innovator such as Cirrito is more than an artist.  Being around him gave one a lift.  He lived in what must have been a half imagined / half real world, and he encouraged us to get on with the task of making what he imagined real. This more-than-artist used commerce as a medium and shaped things by changing the mood of those around him. How he did this is a mystery.

    Billy was in the trench with me behind the house in October 1987 when the stock market crashed.  We dug on, operating a rented jackhammer, drinking tanks of lemonade in the day and alcohol at night.  Billy cajoled a woman backhoe operator into a spell of assistance with her hydraulic bucket.  We got the anchors twisted in that rocky hillside and the cables with panels attached, stretched tight.

    Billy was also a musician. Driving up to the worksite I parked with a Charlie Parker tape running and Billy approaching, tapping out a rhythm on the hood …”oh, Bird – Scrapple from the Apple”.  Billy knew the music of Charlie “Bird” Parker, the alto sax Be Bop genius who died in 1954, just before Billy Cirrito was born. Perhaps a child has already been born since Billy’s death who will be inspired by Billy’s work as Billy was by Bird, and who will contribute in yet a different field.

    I just returned from Tucson where I stopped to see the cable trackers Billy and I put  in 21 years ago.  They need a little bit of maintenance, but after 21 years are still working nearly flawlessly.

    We plan to start building these rugged, low cost, low weight cable trackers again.

Steve Baer

Zomeworks Corporation

November 2008

Links to more about Billy Cirrito: http://azstarnet.com/sn/metro/245561.php