concepts · updated 2026-07-19
Holly Baer
confidence: medium volatility: cold verified: 2026-07-19fresh
Steve Baer's wife and collaborator. Died February 23, 2026, after battling Alzheimer's disease, per a message from her son Jose Baer to Solar Fool members (private communication, not independently web-verified). This corrects two earlier, wrong passes in this KB's own history: an unsupported 'died 2025' claim, then an over-corrected 'still alive' verdict.
Steve Baer’s wife and collaborator. Died February 23, 2026 (a Monday night), after battling Alzheimer’s disease. Source: a message from her son Jose Baer to Solar Fool members, sent Thursday, February 26, 2026 — “The Sunman is dead, long live the sunmen. We lost my mother on Monday night. She died peacefully after battling Alzheimer’s with the same fierce spirit she attacked every other task in life. Thank you Bruce for preserving so many of these wonderful essays.” This is a private communication relayed to this KB, not independently fetched or verified by web search — but its date arithmetic is internally consistent (Feb 26, 2026 is in fact a Thursday) and its content fits precisely with facts already documented in this archive before the message was provided (“Sunmen” is Steve Baer’s own 2004 manifesto term, see Sunmen; “Bruce” matches Bruce W. Davis‘s established role here).
This KB’s own history on this question, in full, for transparency: an earlier pass claimed she “died 2025” based on an over-read of an unrelated Wikipedia sentence about Zomeworks’ ownership passing to Benjamin Rodefer. A 2026-07-19 audit and research pass found no obituary anywhere and, reasonably given the evidence available at the time, corrected this to “very likely still alive” — citing a Wikipedia passage (edited 2026-07-06 by an account named “JoseBaer”) that described her in present tense as still serving as Zomeworks’ Director of Administration. That correction is now itself superseded by the Solar Fools message above, which gives an actual death date (February 23, 2026) roughly a year and a half after Steve’s own death and about 4.5 months before the July 6 Wikipedia edit. The most likely reconciliation: the July 6 edit was narrowly focused on fixing “confusion over ownership and governance history” (per its own edit summary, about the Rodefer point) and simply didn’t revisit the adjacent, by-then-outdated sentence about Holly — a common way stale text survives nearby edits. This reconciliation is plausible, not independently confirmed.
In December 1964, in the attic of her grandmother’s house in Zurich, Switzerland, Holly made a rhombus-icoso-dodecahedron on the floor — the first physical zonohedra model, predating the Drop City work by nearly four years. This is the archive’s earliest documented date.
Named in the Zome Primer (1970) preface for editorial assistance. Steve Baer enrolled at ETH Zurich in part because he married Holly while serving in Germany (US Army); she is the reason the Zurich chapter happened.