Alice and Roger’s Rehearsal Dinner

Alice Ai and Roger Ma were students from Taiwan who decided to get married in Johnson City. Alice was at ETSU and Roger was in North Carolina. We offered to have the rehearsal dinner at our home. Janice cooked a very big meal for this dinner. Not only was the church pastor invited, his wife, the church organist and the organist’s wife were also in attendance. Sherman Tang’s whole family was there for the occasion, including his parents and two sons. Alice’s parents had worked with Sherman’s parents in a bank in Taiwan. Alice’s host family, Dave and Sharon Benner, were there with the entire wedding party, for a total of 16 adults plus a separate table for children. Roger’s father and brother were there too.  This was the biggest dinner Janice had ever cooked. With many dishes to prepare, she had worked very hard for this wedding rehearsal dinner. Janice appreciated that Alice had often baby-sat for our two kids who loved her and she went out of her way to have a great celebration for this special day.

A Second Grader

Margaret was a second grader in 1977. She was already a very good reader and had started to correct my English whenever she noticed my pronunciation varied from what she was taught at her school. She was very active, and always talked to us when she got home, telling us everything that had happened at school in great detail. She remembered everything in clear sequence and never forgot anything or missed any implications. Janice always listened patiently and let her finish every story! I was amazed about this activity between mother and daughter and it impressed me at the time and now. The pictures represent some of Margaret’s activities in second grade. I still do not know what they were doing!

Henry Bauer

Henry was a colleague of mine at the University of Kentucky in the Chemistry Department. He was doing electrochemistry research there with several research grants from the National Science Foundation. I was involved with a small theoretical aspect of the research before I left Kentucky. Henry came to ETSU in the spring of 1977 to give a seminar in the Department and was interviewed by a local TV reporter, as shown in the pictures below.Later, Henry became the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Tech. He was very interested in and knowledgeable about several controversial issues, including the Loch Ness Monster, homosexuality, affirmative action, and the AIDs virus. You can easily Google his name to get more information on these topics.

Steven at Child Study Center

During the academic year 1976-1977, Steven was again at the Child Study Center in the College of Education at ETSU. He started there in the Fall of 1975. During his first year he went to the Thayers’ home at Washington College Academy with his good friend David Thayer after school.  Since Janice was teaching there, she would bring him home at the end of the day. During the second year there was a new arrangement for him, as David chose to go to the county school for kindergarten. I took him to the Study Center before I taught my classes. And, since both Janice and I could not pick him up at the end of the day, we were lucky that our friend Jane LaPella, whose son Alex was also at the Study Center, offered to pick them both up at the same time. Then Janice would pick Steven up at the LaPella’s home after the end of her work day. Steven enjoyed the Child Study Center very much. He made a lot of good friends there and developed good relationships with both his teachers and others at the Center. We appreciated the Center very much. The following pictures were taken there in the spring of 1977!

We bought a piece of land

The Mathews put an ad in the Johnson City newspaper, hoping to sell their land in Fall Branch, TN. They were retiring and planned to move to Florida. Janice and I took our kids to see this place in so-called Ugly Hollow, and we found it a beautiful place. There was a house there which had burned down. The trees were everywhere and there was a stream from a spring passing through the land. We loved the place and the owner had a plan by which we could pay them directly with a reasonable interest. It did not take us a long time for us to decide to buy it from the owners. So, later, we signed the contract at their lawyer Jack Hodge’s office and started to buy this land. The pictures below were taken when we went to see it the first time!

More Play in our Back Yard

It was really fun to have children older than six, as they started to take care of themselves and to learn how they could make use of what they had learned. Both Margaret and Steven were very good and happy kids. They were comfortable with their lives and were certainly able to enjoy themselves. We had a dog named Coco, who loved to play with both of them and Coco was always involved in the action. We just do not have a lot of her pictures. I have only this one picture of her in action. We had a tire swing in the back yard which the children enjoyed playing on. When Jeff was here they really played together well, and the weather was very cooperative. We certainly did not miss any time to take some more pictures.

Lindsay’s last visit

Our neighbors in Lexington, Kentucky, Joyce and Lindsay Able, helped us to move to Johnson City in 1971. Later on, in 1977, Lindsay and their son Jeff came to visit us when they came to Bristol to watch the car races. That spring they stayed with us as there were never any hotels available in the area when the races were taking place at the speedway in Bristol. We were very happy to see them. They came at the most beautiful time of the year. Our redbud and dogwood trees in the front yard were blooming to welcome them. Certainly both Margaret and Steven were very happy to see them. We have some great pictures to remember that time. They never came to visit us again - life changes and friends change too!

Wake up, it’s my Birthday!

On Margaret’s eighth birthday this year, Janice baked a special birthday cake, just as she had always done for every birthday for both of our two children. But, when it came time for the cake, Steven was sound asleep on the sofa, and he had slept for quite a while. “Let’s wake him up.” “Let him sleep a bit more.” We debated for a while, but still we did wake him up and he was not very happy. Margaret did get the book she wanted, after blowing out the candles, and set to reading it right away!

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Tenure, Promotion, & Search Committees

The politics in a University are not much different from any other place in the world. They have their own life although their nature might be very different in different places. They develop in their own way and you have to experience them to appreciate it. At a university, the Tenure and Promotion Committees and Search Committees are generally pivotal in determining the lives of so many scholars. Certainly they are very important to the future of any prominent university. In theory, if you are an outstanding teacher and researcher you should have no problem to get tenure and be promoted. The politics come when you have to establish some criterion to decide what is “outstanding”. It is easy to count the number of publications and papers presented and to determine the number of good student ratings. But you know that is never the full story. Regardless of how long a university has been in existence, the committees will change every year, in every college and, sometimes, in every department. I left the University of Kentucky before I experienced these things. At ETSU, I was very fortunate to be liked by the old Chairman of the Department, D.G. Nicholson. At that time, he decided everything. That was the system. In 1976, I was both tenured and promoted to the associate professorship without much fanfare. In 1977, Nicholson was retiring and Dick Kopp was appointed to be the acting chairman. Apparently the system was changing right before our eyes, we just did not realize the tide until much later. Since Nicholson had been interested in appointing another faculty member to be the chair, but the University president had vetoed his choice, we were told to search for someone from outside the university. I was on the search committee. This committee was supposed to find the best person for the department in a six month period, but things changed. I will talk about this change later. Spring at etsu was a beautiful time of the year, in regardless of all the politics behind these red brick buildings.    

ACS meeting in New Orleans

The spring meeting of the 1977 American Chemical Society took place in New Orleans from March 20th - 25th. Both Boris and I attended the meeting. This was an important meeting for me, personally, as I was starting to get involved with ACS politics and starting to give papers and participate in oral research results. New Orleans was a beautiful place in the early spring time and it was my first time in there. The ETSU graduate school in Chemistry had many Tennessee Eastman full-time workers who enrolled in ETSU to advance themselves, both at the undergraduate and the graduate levels. My first graduate student at ETSU was such a student. Her name is Jane Adams. who did the decomposition reaction of Oxalic acid in solutions, which was first presented orally at this meeting and was eventually published in the Journal of Chemical Kinetics two years later. She and I did quite a number of experiments during the evening hours and weekends.