Professor Dudley Towne |
Prof. Dudley Towne
Dudley H. Towne, the Emily C. Jordan Professor
of Physics, Emeritus, died November 25 at his home in Amherst at the age of
78. Towne taught at Amherst for 45
years, or, as his colleague Professor Emeritus Robert Romer observed, for
one-quarter of the college’s existence. “He was a great teacher of physics and
the liberal arts,” says Professor of Physics Kannan Jagannathan. “Rigorous,
elegant and demanding, he was loved or at least admired by generations of students.
To his colleagues who could appreciate more fully all of the power and beauty
of his mind, he was an inspiration and a generous guide.”
Towne’s main research focus was wave phenomena, and his textbook on that
subject, Wave Phenomena, is widely used. Although most colleagues recall his
teaching approach as elegant and restrained,
he knew how to use drama to get a point across: When he was teaching students
the Maxwell formulas—the essential, but very difficult, foundation of
electro-magnetism—he would perform a striptease he called “Climbing
Mt. Kilimanjaro.” As he explained each successive layer of logic
underlying the formulas, he would remove another layer of clothing. As the
lecture progressed, the students’ anticipation—and attention—increased
until he reached the final layer, his undershirt, on which were printed the
Maxwell formulas.
His choice of a title for the Maxwell lecture was not coincidental. Towne traveled
widely, including one especially memorable trip up Mt. Kilimanjaro, which was
all the more challenging for him because he was an insulin-dependent diabetic.
He had a tremendous gift for languages, and whenever he traveled he would make
a point of learning the local language
first. At the time of his death, he spoke 11 languages, including his first
conquest, Chinese.
He learned Chinese during World War II, while he was the chief radio operator
at theater headquarters in Chungking, China. The highlight of his military
career came when he received a communication from General Douglas MacArthur
himself with orders to broadcast it on all frequencies. The communication was
for the Japanese emperor, ordering Japan to cease hostilities and giving precise
instructions for
surrender.
Towne’s World War II uniform played a role in one of the most significant
aspects of his life, his sexuality. After wrestling with his sexual identity
for the first 54 years of his life, Towne finally came to grips with it in
1978, and told College President John William Ward that he was gay. It was
a bold move for any college professor in those days, and Towne was afraid the
admission might end his career. But, as he told the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Ward
was not only receptive, but supportive. “His reaction,” Towne
said, “was that there were gay students who came to him, and now he would
have someone for them to go and talk to.” Once Towne embraced his sexual
identity, it became a central element of his life. He became active in support
groups, gay hiking clubs and other organizations. In 1993, he took his
involvement further when he went to Washington to join a march protesting the
government’s position on gays in the military. President Clinton had
ordered the ban on gays to be lifted, but Colin Powell, then Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs
of Staff, refused to follow the order, prompting the protest. Towne took his
World War II uniform out of mothballs, made a sign saying “Colin Powell
is Afraid of Me!” and ended up in the front row of
the march. A picture of him taken at the march appeared in a number of newspapers
and even on a postcard, something of which Towne was particularly proud.
Towne had an unusual countertenor voice and a great love of music. He sang
with several local ensembles, including the Hampshire Choral Society, Smith/Amherst
Chamber Singers, Da Camera Singers and the Gay Men’s Chorus. He first
developed his interest in singing as a high-school
student performing Gilbert and Sullivan operas in Stamford, Conn., and pursued
it through his undergraduate studies at Yale and his graduate work at Harvard,
where he received his Ph.D. in 1951.
“He was famous in my family,” said Romer, who worked with Towne through
most of his time at Amherst, “for calling at 3 o’clock in the morning
and saying, ‘Go out and take a look at the rings around the moon,’ or ‘Did
you know there’s a really spectacular display of the aurora borealis
out there?’ ”
Towne was also a philanthropist. He donated an $18,000 grand piano to the Northampton
Community Center, and when the local community was unable
to raise $200,000 to restore the Amherst
Cinema, Towne donated all of the money himself. According to Professor Emeritus
of Physics Joel Gordon, when Towne was a visiting professor at Universidad
del Valle in Cali, Colombia, in the ’60s, he set up a program to bring
Colombian students to Amherst, Williams and the University of Massachusetts.
His final donation was his extensive papers, which he gave to the Amherst Archives
and Special Collections just before his death.
He is survived by his sister, Will Towne Curtis, and brothers Robert and Stephen,
as well as seven nieces and nephews. A memorial service for Dudley Towne will
be held at the college on April 27, and his ashes will be interred next to
those of his mother and father in Amherst.
Next: Thomas
H. Wyman '51 >>
Photo: Gabriel Cooney
|
