Ray Winn has made his gracious exit at the tender age of 91, passing away in the presence of family in December 2025.
Ray tore through life with meteoric zeal. The term Renaissance man gets tossed about fairly recklessly, but let’s try it on.
Pilot / sailor / semiconductor lithography innovator / nuclear submarine planner and nuclear test site overseer / real estate magus / night club owner / fusion researcher / record producer / restaurateur / Viking Mars Lander imagist / multi-instrumentalist and composer / doting father and grandfather.
Ray was a fuel-injected barrier-buster with a velveteen heart, his life a nearly ballistic line from A to B. Were there early signs that Ray’s “journey” would see him joyously strapped to a rocket sled of his own making? Yep.
1934. Ray was born in Price, Utah, to a coal-mining father and unshakeable mother. When his father abandoned the family, the mining operation locked Ray’s mom and his six sibs out of their modest company housing, and one of Ray’s infant brothers died of exposure in the night.
Ray’s hardworking single mom soon moved Ray and his five brothers to a preincarnate Las Vegas of some 8,200 souls. Legendary mobster Bugsy Siegel had yet to build the iconic, cornerstone Flamingo Las Vegas, but neon-soaked plans were afoot.
Despite his mother’s working two jobs, for a time Ray and his brothers lived in a Salvation Army tent.
In his Vegas youth, Ray took on a tony paper route none of the other kids wanted. The spacious lots meant fewer delivered papers per block and deep setbacks that wore out the throwing arm.
Ray saw only upside, parking his bike and briskly walking to the front door with a pointedly courteous hand delivery. The founder and CEO of Las Vegas air carrier Bonanza Airlines was wowed, tipping the enterprising tike company stock with which a grown Ray would buy his first house.
Another enamored customer, early Hollywood superstar and desert retiree Clara Bow, would allow young Ray the run of her expansive music collection, a protean listening experience that would re-emerge in his later musical life when he would teach himself six instruments and compose at the piano.
At the arguable other end of the cultural spectrum, once the Bugsy Siegel coterie began construction of Vegas’ cornerstone Flamingo Las Vegas, Ray would bike down to the Red Rooster and pick up chicken takeout for the friendly mob throng,
By graduation day at Las Vegas High School, Ray had amply demonstrated his scholarly mettle and anomalously high intelligence, his teachers often challenged to keep up.
More significantly, he’d met and fallen hard for a young lady in the band room, a fellow musician named Lorraine whose IQ, wit, and grit matched his own.
Ray and Lorraine would later marry and raise three creative argonauts in Paul, Kevin and Lisa. Ray’s adored future grandkids Zoey, Zachary, and Nathan lay in wait; three glittering jewels in a future of unimaginable largesse.
Following graduation, a cohort of helpful adults – including the local state representative –thought it best that Ray skip college entirely and work with the Ph.Ds at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
A path to Los Alamos was arranged through defense contractor EG&G, through whose offices and historically relevant expertise Ray, initially hired as a technician, would rise like a morning star.
EG&G’s principal business was testing nuclear payloads, and in time Ray would oversee some 14,000 workers and many a field experiment, on one occasion offering Sen. JFK himself a chopper tour of a test site.
Ray would spend 23 years at the company and close his tenure there as chief of staff to EG&G’s president.
From there Ray would leap from strength to strength, driven by a restless, inquiring mind on fire: Advanced Semiconductor Products, Inc. (president and CEO, 1981-2002); Nano Life Sciences, Inc. (chairman and CEO 2006-10); K & A Design Group 1987-2025 (real estate investor/developer); Alexandros 2011-25 (president).
Under the Advanced Semiconductor Products (ASP) imprimatur, Ray would invent and patent an optimizing link in the semiconductor lithography process (Patent number: 4378953) whose effect would be to shrink the geometries of computational hardware, ushering in the laptop, the cell phone, the you-name-it.
This would be one of some 33 patents Ray would secure – many of them classified and owned by his respective employers – over the course of an avid and fulfilling career in tech.
Scientist, inventor, composer, self-discoverer; the man’s avid pilgrimage of intellectual and emotional revelation reached its zenith in the early ’70s, when what should Ray Winn discover but a largely unmapped terra incognita named … Ray Winn.
So it was that when a common friend introduced Ray and Peter Kavoian in 1988, stars aligned at the doorstep, and 37 years of inseparable love commenced like the turning of a page, the two hosting family, friends, and grateful nonprofit fundraisers at their Rametto Road bungalow in the heart of Birnam Wood.
The decades of shared adventure saw Peter to Ray’s bedside when Winn’s Comet completed its earthbound circuit and left the solar system.
Ray Winn was preceded in death by his mother Angie ONeil; son Paul Winn; and former wife Lorraine Cass. He is survived by his son Kevin Winn; daughter Lisa (Winn) Luna; grandchildren Zachary Winn, Nathan Winn and Zoey Luna. And his loving spouse Peter Kavoian.