Curiosity 23: November 13

Since I missed posting yesterday, I will make a brief entry today to note that it's been 45 years now since my father died, on November 13, 1978. He was seventy; the cause, cancer of the liver, brought on, remotely, by a chemistry-lab accident he was involved in in 1944, doing war research. For ten years after that, he was in and out of the hospital, on the verge of death several times, but by the time I came along, he was all better. For another twenty-four years, anyway.

The day I got the news of his death, I was in my room in Madison, Wisconsin. It was late afternoon and had just started snowing, light flakes drifting down into gathering dusk. After hanging up—I don't remember the phone call itself, but it must have been my mom?—I put on a recording of Mozart's 21st piano concerto, which was my father's favorite. The light notes of the piano and the fluttering snow helped soothe my tears.

When I look now for a photo of him, I just find this silly one from a photomat. But it's fitting.

Googling, I find many entries for the Theodore A. Geissman Excellence in Research Award, given annually by the UCLA Chemistry Department, where he taught for, I don't even know how long. He came to LA in 1939, retired a few years before his death. Thirty-odd good years. He loved teaching, loved research, loved his postdoctoral students (I remember many lively parties at our house). 

Oh: a second search gets me this portrait of him, from when he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in, I'm guessing, 1964. He would have been 56. I believe he used the award to spend six months in Tokyo, where we lived the first half of 1965. (He was also, apparently, awarded a Guggenheim in 1950. Could this be him at 42? It's certainly possible. He looks young.)

In another year plus a few months, I will have outlived him. But I certainly won't have come close to accomplishing what he did. Which included groundbreaking phytochemical research and a textbook:

I'll be happy if I can get just a poem or essay published one of these days. But if I do, I know he would be proud. Keep on trying!

Here is a memorial tribute, written by men—Francis Blacet, Vern Robinson, and Tom Jacobs—I know he held very dear, and who clearly held him dear. I hope we're all so lucky.