It is fitting that the American Chemical Society (ACS) comes to the fore as my #stampoftheday “project” (obsession?) is coming to a close. For chemistry, in general, and the ACS, specifically, were incredibly important parts of my father’s life.
It’s odd then, that his sometimes meticulous stamp albums doesn’t include today’s #stampoftheday. A 3-cent stamp issued in 1951, it commemorates the 75th anniversary of ACS, which was founded on April 5, 1876. But it’s also appropriate that there was a loose copy of the stamp floating among his collection’s odds and ends. (I knew I had but it took me a few minutes to find since, like my father, I’m only intermittently organized).
Family lore is that my father always knew that he wanted to be a chemist (or perhaps a chemical engineer, I’m not sure which). In fact, at about this time in 1944, not long after he and my mother, who had been dating for about three months, had become serious, the US Army put that determination to a test. My father had been stationed in New York where the Army was sending him to college. But as preparations began for the immanent invasion of France, the Army closed down the college program and began sending soldiers back to camps for more training.
Recognizing that my father was smart and had a knack for science, the Army offered to send him to medical school, which would have kept him off the frontlines for a long time but also required that he serve for several years after finishing med school. Believing this would keep him alive, my mother and her family urged him to accept. He refused because he didn’t want to be a doctor; he wanted to be a chemist (or was it a chemical engineer?).
He was in Europe from fall 1944 to the end of the war in 1945. He came back, got his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Cooper Union and did his PhD coursework in chemistry from Columbia. After a short stint teaching at Cooper, in 1953, he took a better paying job in industry (finally wrote his dissertation) and then had three, increasingly senior jobs over the next 15 years, the last of which – at the Lummus Company – led to our move to Summit, New Jersey in 1963. I don’t know all the details but I do know that 7 years later, having written a few columns for an ACS magazine, he left chemical engineering to become the founding editor of a new ACS magazine called ChemTech.
I was 13, so I didn’t understand what a shift this must have been. Supposedly, when the family gathered to discuss it, I asked whether being a magazine editor could get him press passes to Mets games. It didn’t, though it helped get us two press passes to see US and Chinese ping-pong players compete in a friendly match at the Nassau Coliseum not long after President Nixon went to China. (Apparently, a senior ACS official was also a leader of the US Table Tennis Association).
But now, I am quite impressed by what he did. He was 45 years old with three children, the oldest of whom was heading off to college that fall. My father would later say he had so little sense of what an editor did that he had to look up the word “editor” in a dictionary. And although ACS is based in Washington, we didn’t move. Instead, he rented an office in downtown Summit, first, I think, subletting from his attorney on Springfield Avenue and then for many years on Maple Street, over a record shop, across from a clothing store, and around the corner from a terrific cheese shop whose owner, Dominic, made awesome smoked mozzarella cheese. This allowed to work at home in the mornings and then walk to work. He also perfected the art of working remotely from a desk stuck in a corner of the small “cottage” my parents bought on a lake in surprisingly beautiful northwest New Jersey.
In many respects, my always-loud father found his voice at that magazine, which printed a wildly eclectic set of articles. He mounted the cover and editor’s note (which he always called “The Industrial Chymist”) from the first issue, published in January 1971. (It also includes a picture of him from his mustached, pipe-smoking era.). This hung it in his office and then his house. When my mother moved in 2013, it was one his few artifacts that she hung up in her much smaller new apartment.
I brought it home after my mother died. I didn’t hang it up but relegated it to the ubiquitous box in the basement. Today, I pulled it out and looked at it for the first time in several years. While I think the first Industrial Chymist is a bit overwritten, I recognize the voice and vision in that piece. “A major problem of those charged with applying chemistry to the achievement of economic and social goals is that we never know exactly what aspect of the discipline we will have to apply,” were his opening words. “In fact, solutions to chemical problems often reside outside of the realm of traditional chemistry.” He went on to note that ACS was already publishing 21 magazines as well as Chemical Abstracts and while all were highly regarded, they were narrowly focused at a time when “today’s vexing problems…require interaction among the disciplines….Filling this need is one objective of CHEM TECH [the magazine’s original name]”
His voice, like his look, was more personal and distinct in the last note, which was published in March 1992. Now white-haired and bearded, he wrote about retiring and the “BIG dragon” that would be his next big project. “I want to concentrate on The Public,” he wrote, “to help them regain, first, their self-confidence and then confidence in what we [i.e. chemists] do.”
Here’s the final paragraph: “Helping The Public deal with fear doesn’t take a great chemist. It takes someone with a lot of ordinary attributes and an ability to convince others that he or she, and other chemists always have The Public Interest as their beacon. I’m convinced that what we need to do is drop any semblance of hubris and just show ourselves as the folks next door who do care about everyone’s health as well as their comfort, and that we’ll gladly help anyone who cares, to evaluate what we do.”
I can – and often did – quibble with him on such things and the way that he spoke about them. But I respected – and now honor – the curiosity, decency, and optimism that drove him, to become a chemist, to not become a doctor, and, most of all, to have the courage to find his voice as an editor, writer, and lecturer.
As if it weren’t already obvious: “Dad, this stamp is for you.”