1980s photo of the author, right; his father, center; and his sister, left.

Science magazine launched the ‘Past As Prologue’ feature to share stories of how writers’ forebears influenced their offspring’s scientific careers. I submitted the following, just as the magazine discontinued the feature! So what you see here did not appear in Science. Maybe Science2.0 will invite more submissions of this kind.

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My father, the first of our family to attend college, wanted to be a lawyer. But World War II demanded engineers. So, following an engineering degree at Purdue and midshipman school at Notre Dame, Dad was shipped to Kwajalein (in the South Pacific’s Marshall Islands) in 1946 as a Navy Lieutenant JG. There, he designed and built a conveyor to bring the atomic device from its ship to the site where it was to be tested. In his spare time, he McGyvered a refrigerator from scrap parts, to keep beer cold for the U.S. Marines who were guarding Japanese war prisoners on the island.

Demobilized, he worked for Philco Corporation, where he headed a research lab – in those days, that was possible for a person with but a bachelor’s degree – and invented the first self-defrosting refrigerator, which Philco patented. This was a boon for folks who tired of attacking their freezers with ice picks! It was a later patent by another company, however, that was adopted for mass production in the USA.

Dad traveled the world, assisting the US Trade Representative in establishing international electrical standards. As engineering VP of an industry association, he led the charge to eliminate chloroflourocarbons as coolants in appliances – thus shrinking the Earth’s ozone hole. His daughter graduated law school, and his son (me) is an engineering professor. My own older daughter is an engineer, but she elected to go into law and now litigates intellectual property disputes.

Dad had encouraged me to attend an NSF program for high school students, and later to do after-school and summer work for a professor who was a pioneer of operations research (and who later became my PhD advisor). This was extraordinary for a respect-authority guy like Dad, because my high school administrators wanted me to go into politics! It showed the strength of Dad’s vision, and taking his advice was a critical turning point for me, leading to much career satisfaction.

When our father was 90, an immigrant plumber, fixing a pipe in Dad’s apartment, noticed the framed patent certificate on the wall. “That’s the technology we use in Ghana!” he exclaimed, and he insisted on taking a selfie with Dad.

At about that time, Dad devised but did not bother to patent a mouthpiece for a trumpeter friend who had a bad case of Parkinson’s.

Dad’s Navy buddies who were not rotated off of Kwajalein prior to the detonation had long since died of cancer. Dad lasted to the age of 96, passing away in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.