Abstract
An obituary for Ronald J. Konopka, a chrono-geneticist extraordinaire, who died on Feb 2015, is presented. Konopka started The Kapusta Kid (TKK), chronogenetically, with respect to an enterprise that by now has ballooned to industrial-level research. He did so by generating single-gene rhythm mutants, from scratch. He did so (in turn) by systematically searching for heritable variants displaying conspicuous subnormalities or anomalies of circadian rhythmicity. Konopka initiated this activity by exploiting the generic "biogenetic" potential of Drosophila. All of this began to well up (rhythm-wise) during the historic summer of 1968, when TKK was not that much more than a kid. Nonetheless, Konopka realized, as the final third of the 20th century began to unfold, that a handful of fruit fly folk were expanding their genetic horizons: no longer studying inheritance alone but instead beginning to take genetic approaches potentially to achieve some extra understanding of various biological processes.