Deceased March 6, 2023
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IN MEMORY
Bob lived outside the prevailing fraternity life at Amherst, focusing on experimental science with honors work under Tom Yost in the biology department. The discipline of the New Curriculum exposed Bob to the humanities, which may have initially been only a diversion but, 45 years later, materialized in his master of humanities degree at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, with his thesis on Kierkegaard and Kafka.
Before Amherst, Bob was valedictorian of his Solvay High School class in a suburb of Syracuse, N.Y.; post-Amherst, he earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, served in the U.S. Public Health Service, then was a postdoctoral fellow in London at the British equivalent of NIH. There he married an English girl, Ruth, his wife of 60 years, who raised three children during her own career as a skilled laboratory technician and co-contributor to many publications.
For five years, Bob was on the Harvard faculty, where, in his words, he “tortured a couple of Amherst graduates in my biochemistry section.” With two children approaching school age just as the busing issue hit Boston’s public schools, Bob and Ruth moved to new opportunities in Yellow Springs, Ohio, an Eden with green spaces, safe biking and diverse friendships in an academic setting. Bob’s best work, funded by a private foundation, not government, started there at Kettering research laboratory, which embraced a vast range of exploratory projects developed through cooperative effort.
Bob underwent cochlear surgery about 40 years ago that resulted in severe facial paralysis but also his resolve to expand his interests beyond the laboratory to opera, chamber and orchestral music, theater and the coveted ability to solve New York Times crossword puzzles neatly in ink—never pencil.
Bob died March 6, 2023, at home under hospice care, leaving Ruth, three children and six grandchildren.
Ruth M. Darrow and Nick Evans ’52