Philip Snyder, 87, electrical engineer

When he was 13, Philip Snyder got a homegrown lesson in electrical engineering.

"One of his brothers taught him how to take apart broken doorbells and clean the connections so they would work again," said a niece, Gail Snyder.

One of Mr. Snyder's proudest accomplishments "was that he was able to rewire an entire house when he was a teenager," said Jack Porter, a Wynnewood clinical psychologist, who grew up near Mr. Snyder's home near Third and Wolf Streets in South Philadelphia.

On Tuesday, March 29, Mr. Snyder, 87, of Mount Laurel, an electrical engineer who retired in 1996 as a project manager for the Lockheed Martin satellite program in Moorestown, died of cancer at home.

Born in South Philadelphia, he graduated in 1947 from South Philadelphia High School, where he became captain of the crew behind the scenes of the annual student stage production.

A memorable moment occurred, Gail Snyder said, when as the student in charge of stage lighting, Mr. Snyder hit the wrong switch, and the players, for a moment, were left in the dark.

Mr. Snyder earned a bachelor's in electrical engineering in 1952 at Drexel University, where he was editor of a campus technical journal.

A member of the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity, he played saxophone in the band of the campus Reserve Officers Training Program, though he was not an ROTC member himself.

From 1952 to 1968, Mr. Snyder helped design digital communications equipment under military contracts at RCA in Camden.

From 1968, he wrote in his resumé, he worked with four companies, before returning to RCA in 1980 as, among other things, an administrator of document management for its satellite programs.

RCA merged its efforts with GE in Moorestown in the mid-1980s, and after Lockheed Martin took them over, Mr. Snyder become a project manager, his niece said.

He shared two patents with colleagues.

From 2000 to 2010, he was a volunteer mentor for the Mount Laurel branch of SCORE Association, formerly known as the Service Corps of Retired Executives.

The SCORE website states that it "provides free business mentoring services to entrepreneurs."

"He was a very reserved person," his friend Porter said, "but with a lot of depth."

And some humor, Mr. Snyder suggested in a 2002 commentary for The Inquirer about his hobby of working with a wood lathe.

"The feeling that comes with taking nice curly shavings off a piece of wood," he wrote, "is probably not unlike the feeling a duffer gets when he finally hits a nice straight drive with a golf club."

Encouraging amateur woodworking despite its pitfalls, he wrote, "a thing worth doing is worth doing badly."

Mr. Snyder is survived by his wife, Arlene; sons David and Danny; daughter Cyndi Lee; and three grandchildren.

A funeral was set for 1 p.m. Sunday, April 3, at Platt Memorial Chapel, 2001 Berlin Rd., Cherry Hill with interment in King David Memorial Park in Bensalem.

Condolences may be offered to the family at www.plattmemorial.com.

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