This site was created as a place to celebrate and reflect on the life of Egons Arnolds Plavnieks.

Egons was beloved by family, friends and colleagues. He was a proud Latvian-American. He was a talented musician who once played solo piano at Carnegie Hall. He was a businessman whose work with Proctor & Gamble brought him and his family from the United States to Europe, Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and back again. He was a business owner, founding a BrightStar Care franchise in Bethesda, Maryland. He organised charitable work and donations. He regularly played organ and piano for the Latvian church in Rockville, Maryland.

He also loved tacos. 

Site Notes

Family and heritage were extremely important to Egons, and throughout the course of his life he developed a wonderfully rich collection of friends, colleagues, acquaintances and experiences in difference places across the world. I know that this is something he did not take for granted and that he appreciated the opportunities he was given which allowed him to meet so many interesting people.

It simply wouldn’t be feasible to represent the full richness his experiences and relationships in the context of this site. Inevitably, the content here will exhibit an unavoidable bias towards the perspectives — and ignorances — of those people collecting and presenting it. The initial content of these pages has been collected and compiled by his eldest son Kristofer.

The Brief Biography presents a general over wise of Egons’ life and career.

The Image Gallery includes generous collections of photos and artefacts from throughout Egons’ life. Some are roughly chronological and others lean towards the thematic. Obviously, some periods of time may be better represented in the available photographic record than others, so please feel free to supplement by uploading your own.

There are separate sections which are essentially essays written by Egons’ two eldest sons:

His son Kris considers a question that he first read, as a child, on the blue felt letters of a custom-made t-shirt that his father once wore in the early 1980s: ‘What’s an Egons?‘

His son Richards offers Impressions of My Father, which was originally published in the Latvian-American newspaper Laiks, but appears here along with additional, higher-resolution images.

In Selected Music Recordings Kris shares the story behind a cassette tape Egons recorded for him in 1978. This section currently includes a number of old home recordings of Egons playing piano. It will eventually also include selections from Egons playing live with two of his bands — Boxcar and Musique. And… if anyone out there has any other recordings of Egons playing they would like to share here — be it kokle, piano, keyboard, synthesiser or even accordion — please let us know.

The Stories section is meant to allow others who knew Egons to supplement and improve the content of this site by sharing their own memories of him through stories and/or images. Please help us capture the richness of his life through your own contributions. Write as much or as little as you’d like. Note: the Stories area will likely be closed to additional entries a few months after his memorial service on September, 2021.