Sweet Yet Sour

The Professor Retires

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 | The Daily Special | 4 Comments

After 41 years of teaching, my father retired this year.  My dad has taught organic chemistry at a small liberal arts college since 1969 and will spend this summer cleaning out his office and his lab and starting a new life as a retired citizen.

Amazingly, my father has had one job interview his entire life.  My grandfather was an auto mechanic so when my dad was young he and his brothers worked in the shop – no interview there!  In 1969, having completed his Ph.D., my father interviewed for a job at Colorado College for a chemistry teaching position.  He got the job and has never looked back, until now.

When my father first announced last year that he was retiring, my sister and I wanted to do something to celebrate his retirement.  With help from the alumni office we received the names and email addresses of every student of his since 1985 and every chemistry major from 1969 – 1985.  My sister diligently emailed ALL of them, asking for submissions for a surprise collection of memories of my father’s long teaching career.  For those students that did not have email addresses we had postcards made and sent 650 of them out.

From those submissions that my sister received she created a beautiful book and had it printed and ready for my dad’s retirement party. The book was filled with stories of my dad’s teaching style, which was firm, but always helpful when he recognized that people were working hard.  He has always had a little humor and sarcasm that has shone through his teaching. Over the years my father has taught an immense amount of students and many of them have gone on to do amazing things.  Many of them are medical doctors, medical researchers, and a few are even chemistry professors.  It was wonderful to have so many people praise my dad for his hard work and dedication.

I was supposed to add my own memories to the book, but the book had to be sent to the printer right after Henry was born.  During the last stages of my pregnancy, and after Henry arrived I simply did not have time to write anything for dad’s book.  So I’m going to make up for that now.

I have always been proud to tell people that my dad is/was an organic chemistry professor.  For me, it was always pretty cool.  When I was in grade school my dad would come to school once a year and set off a little volcano.  As I remember it was a small black volcano that would spew out some “lava” after my dad set it off.  I’m pretty sure it was a little explosion of baking soda and vinegar, and probably did not require a doctorate in chemistry, but it was fun nonetheless.  I remember one year my class was asked to write thank-you notes to my dad for coming to school and setting off the volcano.  I wrote, “Hi Dad.  Thanks.  What’s for dinner?”

In junior high and high school having a dad that was a chemistry professor meant that every year, right before science fair like clockwork, some popular boy would come up to me and ask for my home phone number.  I learned after this happened the first time that this was not so they could call me, but so that they could call my dad and ask for his help with their science fair project.

I myself always got help from my dad with science fair.  Science fair was a little father-daughter bonding time for us, beginning in the 4th grade when we experimented with the elasticity of rubber bands at different temperatures.  My most successful science fair involved feeding fruit flies various foods/supplements to determine if any of them would extend their normal life cycle.  Broccoli was the clear winner, but thanks to my dad I fed a batch of fruit flies a food preservative, Butylhydroxytoluene (BHT) – only a chemist could have thought that was funny!

When I was a child my dad’s office was a wonderland of fun things to play with when we visited.  There was a deep drawer in my dad’s desk that was filled with small plastic tubes of different colors and little connectors.  They were supposed to be for making 3D models of chemical structures, but we would spend hours making little people and the like with them.  I remember once fooling around with these things and having my father take what I had made out to the conference room where his students were studying.  My father showed them what I had made and then quizzed them on what chemical structure it was.   When they all looked perplexed and frightened by the potential affect on their grades, he laughed and said, “It’s nothing.  Just something my daughter made.”

While my father was hard at work teaching future doctors and researchers, my mother was working hard raising two kids.  As busy as she was, every Thursday for years my mom would make two 13″ X 9″ cakes, one for our family and one for the chemistry students.  Friday afternoons we would take the cake into the chemistry department and my sister and I would fight about who got to carry the spatula (we were never allowed to carry the cake).  My mom would set the cake in the conference room and we would watch with amazement as the students appeared out of the woodwork and would descend on the cake like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

When I transferred colleges in the middle of my junior year back to Colorado College (CC), partially because I was homesick and couldn’t take another Wisconsin winter, and in part because I wanted to study primates, I learned of my father’s reputation on campus.  Being his daughter I knew my father was a hard task master, but it was interesting to hear of the same unbending attitude towards his students.  Once, I met a former student of my father’s who, when I informed him who my father was, silently smiled and then ended the conversation – I’m guessing he didn’t get a good grade!

And then one day I met a former student of my father’s who had a far different story of my father’s teaching style.  He told of how he had done miserably in one of my father’s classes, but my father had seen some potential in his failure.  My father asked him to spend a block (CC is on the block plan) retaking the class.  The student did so, spending my father’s once a year block off with another student who was also retaking a class.  The student passed the class the second time and went on to be a chemistry major.

I think what our family will miss most about my father not teaching anymore will be the community of the campus.  My sister and I grew up on campus, were friends with all of the other professor’s kids, took swim lessons at the pool, spent hours in the library and really considered it our second home. My father, when he wasn’t teaching also coached the women’s cross country team and had positions on many faculty boards.  We were dedicated fans of the hockey team and probably always will be to some extent.

I will miss being able to go into my father’s office, find the coffee cup and the hot apple cider packets he kept there for me and sit down with my dad for a chat while his students come in and out of his office asking for help.  I’m sure my father will miss this too, but I’m hoping he can make up for that by spending lots of time with his grandkids and even someday help them with their chemistry homework like he did for me when I was in high school.  Perhaps then they will realize that not only is he a great grandad, but he was also once a great professor.