April 8, 2012 · 6:00 AM
↓ Jump to Comments

IN REMEMBRANCE: 4-8-2012

ELIZABETH CATLETT,  SCUPLTOR WITH EYE ON SOCIAL ISSUES

By KAREN ROSENBERG

Published: April 3, 2012

Elizabeth Catlett, whose abstracted sculptures of the human form reflected her deep concern with the African-American experience and the struggle for civil rights, died on Monday at her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she had lived since the late 1940s. She was 96.

Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Elizabeth Catlett in 2011.

Elizabeth Catlett/Licensed by VAGA, New York, via The Detroit Institute of Arts

Ms. Catlett’s “Homage to Black Women Poets.”

Elizabeth Catlett/Licensed by VAGA, New York

A linoleum cut by Ms. Catlett. Her influences included pre-Columbian sculpture, Henry Moore’s nudes and Diego Rivera’s murals.

June Kelly, one of her American dealers, said Ms. Catlett died in her sleep.

In her smoothly modeled clay, wood and stone sculptures, and vigorous woodcuts and linocuts, Ms. Catlett drew on her experience as an African-American woman who had come of age at a time of widespread segregation and who had felt its sting. But her art had other influences, including pre-Columbian sculpture, Henry Moore’s sensuous reclining nudes and Diego Rivera’s political murals.

Her best-known works depict black women as strong, maternal figures. In one early sculpture, “Mother and Child” (1939), a young woman with close-cropped hair and features resembling a Gabon mask cradles a child against her shoulder. It won first prize in sculpture at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago. In a recent piece, “Bather” (2009), a similar-looking subject flexes her triceps in a gesture of vitality and confidence.

Her art did not exclude men; “Invisible Man,” her 15-foot-high bronze memorial to the author Ralph Ellison, can be seen in Riverside Park in Manhattan, at 150th Street.

Her art was often presented in the United States, in major surveys in the 1960s and ’70s in particular, among them “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976. Her posters of Harriet Tubman, Angela Davis, Malcolm X and other figures were widely distributed.

Alice Elizabeth Catlett was born on April 15, 1915, in Washington, the youngest of three children. Her mother, the former Mary Carson, was a truant officer; her father, John, who died before she was born, had taught at Tuskegee University and in the local public school system.

Ms. Catlett became an educator, too. After graduating cum laude from Howard University in 1935, she taught high school in Durham, N.C.

Howard hadn’t been her first choice. She had won a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, in Pittsburgh, but the college refused to allow her to matriculate when it learned she was black. So she entered historically black Howard, with one semester’s worth of tuition saved by her mother. She earned scholarships to cover the rest.

An interest in the painter Grant Wood led her to pursue an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa, where Wood was teaching. There she focused on stone carvings rooted in her own experience — sensitive portraits of African-American women and children.

After graduating she moved to New Orleans to teach at Dillard University, another historically black institution. There she organized a trip to the Delgado Museum of Art so that her students could see a Picasso exhibition. But this was no ordinary school trip; the museum was officially off-limits to blacks, so Ms. Catlett arranged to visit on a day when it was closed to the public.

While on a summer break from Dillard, she met the artist Charles White in Chicago. They married in 1941 and divorced five years later.

She left New Orleans to study with the Russian-born sculptor Ossip Zadkine in New York. Mr. Zadkine, who spent his formative years in Montparnasse alongside Modigliani and Brancusi, nudged her work in a more abstract direction. During this time, the early 1940s, Ms. Catlett also worked in adult education at the George Washington Carver School in Harlem, a program that nurtured the photographer Roy DeCarava, among others.

In 1946 Ms. Catlett traveled to Mexico on a fellowship. There she married the artist Francisco Mora and accepted an invitation to work at Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), a workshop in Mexico City for murals and graphic arts. The TGP inspired her to reach out to the broadest possible audience, which often meant balancing abstraction with figuration.

“I learned how you use your art for the service of people, struggling people, to whom only realism is meaningful,” she later said of this period.

Like other artists and activists, Ms. Catlett felt the political tensions of the McCarthy years. The TGP was thought to have ties to the Communist Party; Ms. Catlett never joined the party, but Mr. White, her first husband, had been a member, and she was closely watched by the United States Embassy.

In 1949 she was arrested, along with other expatriates, during a railroad workers’ strike in Mexico City. Eventually she gave up her American citizenship and was declared an undesirable alien by the State Department. In 1971 she had to obtain a special visa to attend the opening of her one-woman show at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Ms. Catlett continued to teach even after becoming a successful artist. In 1958 she became the first female professor of sculpture and head of the sculpture department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s School of Fine Arts in Mexico City. She retired to Cuernavaca, about 35 miles southwest of Mexico City, in 1975.

Ms. Catlett’s art is in museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the High Museum in Atlanta; the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City; and the National Museum of Prague. In 2003, the International Sculpture Center gave her a lifetime achievement award.

Mr. Mora, her husband, died in 2002. She is survived by three sons, Francisco, Juan and David Mora Catlett, 10 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

In 1998, the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College in Westchester County exhibited a 50-year retrospective of Ms. Catlett’s sculpture. The critic Michael Brenson wrote in the show’s catalog, “Ms. Catlett’s sculptures communicate a deeply human image of African-Americans while appealing to values and virtues that encourage a sense of common humanity.” He also singled out the “fluid, sensual surfaces” of her sculptures, which he said “seem to welcome not just the embrace of light but also the caress of the viewer’s hand.”

In his review of that show for The New York Times, Ken Johnson wrote that Ms. Catlett “gives wood and stone a melting, almost erotic luminosity.” But he also found her iconography “generic and clichéd.”

Last year, the Bronx Museum mounted “Stargazers: Elizabeth Catlett in Conversation With 21 Contemporary Artists,” an exhibition that placed her sculptures, prints and drawings in the company of works by Ellen Gallagher, Kalup Linzy, Wangechi Mutu and others at the forefront of the contemporary art scene.

In her own words, Ms. Catlett was more concerned with the social dimension of her art than its novelty or originality. As she told a former student, the artist and art historian Samella S. Lewis, “I have always wanted my art to service my people — to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential.”

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

SOURCE

**********************************************************************

JOHN CHASE, ONE OF UT’S FIRST BLACK STUDENTS, TEXAS FIRST BLACK ARCHITECT

By Lisa Gray
Updated 08:48 p.m., Saturday, March 31, 2012

Gallery

  • John S. Chase, seen in 1998, was the first licensed black architect in...

John S. Chase, seen in 1998, was the first licensed black architect in Texas and a political power broker.

Photo: Houston Chronicle photo library  / HC

John S. Chase — a prolific modern architect, the first African-American to enroll at the University of Texas, and a force to be reckoned with in local politics — died Thursday night after a long illness. He was 87.

“He was the first licensed black architect in Texas,” said his son-in-law, former Channel 2 anchorman Jerome Gray. “The first black president of the UT alumni group, the Texas Exes. The first black to serve on the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts, which during his watch picked Maya Lin to do the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He was the first of so many things. He blazed so many trails.”

But on June 7, 1950, when Chase enrolled at the University of Texas, he didn’t intend to make history; he simply intended to study architecture. Two days before, when the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that UT must desegregate its graduate and professional schools, the 25-year-old draftsman, a native of Maryland and graduate of predominantly black Hampton University, saw his chance to study at one of the best architecture schools in the country.

“I remember, specifically, a photographer who talked non-stop to me about making history and getting the right moment on film,” Chase told a University of Texas magazine many years later. “He told me that I wasn’t officially accepted into the university until it became a contract, in other words, until the university took my money. He was right there next to me at that moment to snap the photo.”

And with that, the University of Texas became the first major university in the South to enroll an African-American. Chase and the other young man who enrolled that day were UT’s only black students. He received hate mail and, for his own protection, was shadowed by federal marshals.

Started own company

The UT faculty were supportive, but when he graduated, no white firm would hire him. So after moving to Houston, he started his own firm.

He and his wife, Drucie, visited black churches all over city, meeting people and telling ministers about his master’s thesis on churches and progressive architecture. Soon, he had all the work he could handle.

“The 1950s were the most interesting period for his architecture,” says architecture historian Stephen Fox. “He was very much influenced by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.”

For roughly a decade, Fox notes, Chase was the only African-American architect licensed in Texas. So though his work was concentrated in Houston, he also built houses, churches and union halls all along the Gulf Coast and in Austin.

In 1963, he built the Riverside National Bank (now the Unity Bank), “a distinctive modern building,” in Fox’s words – and, not coincidentally, the first black-owned bank in Texas.

He led efforts to expand Texas Southern University, and naturally enough, the campus came to include a significant number of his buildings. Among his best works there are his Martin Luther King Humanities Center (1969), the Ernest S. Sterling Student Center (1976), and the Thurgood Marshall School of Law Building (1976).

By the ’70s, he’d also become a force to be reckoned with in Houston’s political world; his sun-filled modern house was a hub for African-American power brokers.

“In the ’70s,” says former Mayor Fred Hofheinz, “there was never a significant political event happening where John was not in the forefront. And he was the head of a group of African-Americans whose support was how I got elected.”

His architecture practice began moving into the realm of large public projects. His firm was part of the teams that designed the George R. Brown Convention Center and renovated the Astrodome; and it was awarded the commission to design the U.S. Embassy in Tunisia.

“I think you can achieve more by being inside than by being outside,” Chase said 1998, after he became president of the 66,000-member Ex-Students’ Association. “It’s just that simple.”

Children’s successes

Chase passed on his drive for education to his children. All three – John Jr., Tony and Saundria – became lawyers.

Tony is CEO of ChaseSource LP and Chase Radio Partners, and in January, he became chairman of the Greater Houston Partnership, the powerful group that represents the city’s business interests. His father was too sick to attend the annual meeting that introduced Tony to the partnership’s membership, but Tony mentioned his dad in his speech. One of its major themes – the importance of education to Houston’s future – would have resonated deeply with the first black student to enter the University of Texas.

“We simply cannot deny that success is directly related to obtaining a superior education,” Tony Chase told the crowd.

On March 12, he spoke publicly about his father again. This time, it was at an intimate fundraising reception at his house, hosted for his longtime friend and Harvard classmate, Barack Obama.

Once again, Tony Chase said that he wished his father could have been there to see it: The United States’ first black president. Having dinner. At the home of John Chase’s son.

“Proud?” Tony Chase said Friday. “He’d have been so proud. That’s what my dad’s life was all about. It was the completion of the circle.”

Services will be at 11 a.m. Wednesday at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, 500 Clay.

lisa.gray@chron.com

SOURCE

********************************************************************

FERDINAND A. PORSCHE, DESIGNER OF CELEBRATED 911

Porsche, via European Pressphoto Agency

Ferdinand A. Porsche at work in 1968.

By

Published: April 5, 2012

Ferdinand A. Porsche, who designed the original Porsche 911, the snazzy, powerful sports car that became the lasting signature of the German automobile company founded by his grandfather and later run by his father, died on Thursday in Salzburg, Austria. He was 76.

Porsche, via European Pressphoto Agency

Mr. Porsche in 1968 with a model of the 911 S Targa.

Porsche A.G., whose headquarters are in Zuffenhausen, near Stuttgart, Germany, announced the death in a statement. No cause was given.

Mr. Porsche, who was known as F. A. and also by the childhood nickname Butzi, was the scion of a family whose roots are entwined with the history of German automaking.

Before founding the company that still bears his name, Mr. Porsche’s grandfather, Ferdinand, worked as an engineer and designer for, among other companies, Daimler-Benz, the makers of Mercedes. And during the early years of the Porsche company in the 1930s, Ferdinand and his son, known as Ferry, created the prototype of the Volkswagen at the direction of Adolf Hitler.

F. A. Porsche joined the family business in 1958, working in the technical design department essentially as an apprentice, immersing himself in the details of engine construction, aerodynamics and body styling. By that time the company, under his father’s direction, had started along the path that would make it famous by turning out exquisitely engineered, elegantly designed roadsters suitable for the highway or the racetrack.

It was Ferry Porsche who had turned his own father’s business from strictly an engineering and design company into a manufacturer as well, and he designed its first product, a lightweight rear-engine roadster, the Porsche 356, which was introduced in 1948 and put into wide production in 1950.

Toward the end of the 1950s, however, Ferry Porsche decided to create a replacement model for the company’s signature automobile, and several proposals from designers both within and outside the company were rejected as either too closely tied to the 356 or not tied closely enough to the distinct Porsche aesthetic.

But in December 1959, F. A. Porsche completed a full design model for the replacement prototype, and in 1963 the new model, originally designated the 901, was introduced at an auto show. (The designation was changed to 911 after the company learned that in France, Peugeot had a claim on three-numeral designations of passenger cars with a zero between two digits.)

Slightly longer and narrower than the 356, more powerful, with a six-cylinder, rather than a four-cylinder, engine, the original 911 also had more legroom, more rear seat room and bigger doors for easier entrances and exits.

Mr. Porsche also modified the body of the 356, rendering the signature sloping back end and extended hood into a sleeker silhouette. It was a remarkably simple design that helped create Mr. Porsche’s reputation as a designer who prized function above all.

“Design must be functional and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics, without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained,” he said.

The Porsche 911 proved both an immediate and enduring hit, and the company has never replaced it, instead allowing the car to evolve over almost half a century. In spite of myriad design tweaks and updates in parts and technology, it remains an unmistakable descendant of F. A. Porsche’s original vision. Now in its seventh iteration, and starting at more than $80,000 for the least expensive version, the car remains a symbol of luxury, stellar engineering and sex appeal.

“The new version was mobbed and groped when it was unveiled in September at the Frankfurt auto show,” The Associated Press reported. “Showgoers left the doors and roof smeared with fingerprints as they scrambled for a chance to sit behind the wheel.”

Ferdinand Alexander Porsche was born in Stuttgart on Dec. 11, 1935, and as a boy spent time with his father and his grandfather in the design office in Zuffenhausen. He went to school in Stuttgart and in Switzerland and studied at the Ulm School of Design.

As an engineer working for the Daimler-Benz racing team, Mr. Porsche’s grandfather, Ferdinand, had met Hitler, a racing fan then early in his ascent to power, in the mid-1920s. Mr. Porsche started his own company in the 1930s, and responded quickly when Hitler, as chancellor, directed him to create a car that ordinary Germans could afford.

Ferdinand Porsche and his son, Ferry, created the first prototype for the so-called “people’s car” — the Volkswagen. Hitler approved the design and a factory was built, but the war intervened and production of the Volkswagen was postponed; in the meantime, Porsche built tanks and airplane engines for the Nazi military, employing forced laborers on their assembly lines.

After the war, the influence of the Porsche family on German automaking became dizzyingly complicated. Volkswagen became an independent company, whose first chairman, appointed by the democratic government of Konrad Adenauer, was Anton Piëch, the husband of Louise Porsche, Ferdinand’s daughter.

Their son, Ferdinand Piëch, who began his career at Porsche, became a rival of F. A. Porsche, and in 1972 their enmity forced their parents to banish them from management and restructure Porsche into a public corporation. Mr. Piëch went on to lead Audi and is currently the chairman of Volkswagen, which owns part of Porsche.

After leaving the car company in 1972, F. A. Porsche started Porsche Design, which extended the brand to luggage, sunglasses, pens, cuff links and other items in the high-tech modernist mode. Eventually, Mr. Porsche returned to the parent company, serving as chairman from 1990 to 1993.

Ferdinand Porsche, the company founder, died in 1951. Ferry Porsche died in 1998.

SOURCE

*******************************************************************

GIL NOBLE, HOST OF PIONEERING TV SHOW FOCUSING ON BLACK ISSUES

By

Published: April 5, 2012

Gil Noble, a television journalist who hosted “Like It Is,” an award-winning Sunday morning public affairs program in New York, one of the longest-running in the country dedicated to showcasing black leadership and the African-American experience, died on Thursday in a hospital in Wayne, N.J. He was 80.

WABC-TV, via Associated Press

Gil Noble

The cause was complications of a stroke he had last summer, said Dave Davis, president and general manager of WABC-TV, which had broadcast “Like It Is” since 1968.

Though broadcast only in the New York metropolitan area, “Like It Is” attracted guests of national and international influence. Some were controversial. His interviews with figures like Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam drew complaints of one-sidedness. But for Mr. Noble, that was the point:

“My response to those who complained that I didn’t present the other side of the story was that this show was the other side of the story,” he said in 1982.

His interviews comprised a veritable archive of contemporary black history in America: hundreds of hourlong conversations with political and cultural figures like Lena Horne, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bill Cosby, Sammy Davis Jr., Muhammad Ali, Andrew Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Stokely Carmichael.

Mr. Noble viewed “Like It Is” as a platform for ideas and perspectives — especially those of blacks — that were missing from the mainstream news media. He once called his show “the antidote to the 6 and 11 o’clock news.”

His one-on-one exchanges with African and Caribbean heads of state, including Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Michael Manley of Jamaica and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, were part of another mission: to report on events affecting people of African descent throughout the world.

“You learned a lot watching Gil,” former Mayor David N. Dinkins of New York said in an interview for this obituary. “You didn’t have to agree with everything he said, but for many of us, he was required watching.”

The deep support Mr. Noble enjoyed among his viewers helped him survive two controversies stemming from interviews with figures considered anti-Semitic, biased against Israel or both. In 1982, the Anti-Defamation League accused Mr. Noble of showing an anti-Israel bias when he broadcast a panel discussion about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon without presenting the Israeli perspective.

Just the rumor of disciplinary action prompted protests outside WABC headquarters, led by the Rev. Calvin O. Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. No disciplinary action was taken, but Mr. Noble was required to present a program with pro-Israeli guests.

Similar tensions arose in the summer of 1991, when Mr. Noble made plans to broadcast a speech in which a friend, Leonard Jeffries, a City College professor of black studies, was said to have made bigoted remarks. News reports had led to Mr. Jeffries’s removal as chairman of the black studies department.

Mr. Noble argued that only by hearing the speech in full could college officials (and everyone else) decide whether the remarks were cause for discipline or had been taken out of context. (In one remark, Mr. Jeffries said Hollywood movies demeaning to blacks were made by “people called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani.” In another, he said, “Everyone knows rich Jews financed the slave trade.”)

WABC-TV executives shelved the segment, saying it could aggravate racial unrest in the city. As it happened, long-simmering tensions between blacks and Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn exploded into violence the next week.

Protesters again appeared outside the station’s offices. This time, they included a state senator, later to be governor of New York, David A. Paterson.

“It was a spontaneous protest as I recall,” Mr. Paterson said in an interview. “People just showed up. Because ‘Like It Is’ — it was something special in the African-American community, to be protected.” A segment on the Jeffries affair was eventually shown later.

“Some white Americans are repelled by ‘Like It Is,’ but that’s the nature of the program,” Mr. Noble told The Village Voice later that year. “We are witnessing a quarrel between the races in America, and certain opinions in the black community must be heard even if they are revolting.”

After Mr. Noble’s stroke, WABC-TV began broadcasting “Here and Now,” a public affairs show it described as “continuing the legacy of Gil Noble.”

Gilbert Edward Noble was born in Harlem on Feb. 22, 1932, the son of Rachel Noble, a teacher, and Gilbert R. Noble, who owned an auto repair shop. Both parents were born in Jamaica. He attended City College and was drafted into the Army during the Korean War.

Mr. Noble was hired as a reporter for the radio station WLIB in 1962. In 1967, after nationwide race riots that prompted television stations around the country to recruit some of their first black reporters, he was hired by WABC. He worked as reporter, weekend anchor and sometime correspondent for “Like It Is,” a show begun in 1968, before taking over as its host in 1975. He received seven Emmy Awards.

Mr. Noble’s survivors include his wife, Norma Jean; their four daughters, Lynn, Lisa, Leslie and Jennifer; a son, Chris; and eight grandchildren.

Milton Allimadi, publisher of the Harlem-based newspaper Black Star News and an occasional guest on Mr. Noble’s show, described the special regard in which Mr. Noble was held in the community he served.

After Mr. Allimadi appeared as a guest on the show, strangers stopped him on the street to shake his hand, he wrote in an online appreciation last August. “When I enter an M.T.A. bus, drivers refuse to accept my fare,” he wrote, “saying they are happy to drive someone who has been on ‘Like It Is.’ ”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 6, 2012

An earlier version referred incorrectly to Milton Allimadi who was an occasional guest on Mr. Noble’s television program. He is the publisher of The Black Star News, not the former publisher.

SOURCE

RELATED ARTICLE:  “GIL NOBLE, PIONEERING JOURNALIST“

***********************************************************************

DALE CORSON, CORNELL ADMINISTRATOR WHO HELPED QUELL PROTEST

By

Published: April 5, 2012

Dale R. Corson, a nuclear physicist and Cornell University administrator who was instrumental in defusing a potentially explosive standoff with armed student militants in 1969, then brought relative peace to the campus as the university’s president during the 1970s, died on Sunday in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 97.

Chris Hildreth/Cornell University Photography

Dale Corson around 1992.

Associated Press

Black students at Cornell took up arms during a 1969 protest.

His son David confirmed the death.

Dr. Corson, who had been provost since 1963, was named acting president in 1969 after the resignation of James A. Perkins, who had been roundly criticized as having been too lenient with the protesters.

Though Dr. Corson and Dr. Perkins had been in full agreement during the crisis, the university’s trustees chose Dr. Corson because of his proven ability to connect with students and faculty across the political spectrum, colleagues said.

“He had contacts among the militants, as well as the respect of faculty and administrators,” said Elaine Engst, the Cornell archivist. “He brought the temperature down.”

As provost, Dr. Corson had invited incoming freshmen to drop by anytime to talk, and many did, including several of the 100 or so students who later occupied Willard Straight Hall on April 19, 1969, demanding that a black studies program be established.

The occupation, one of many campus protests across the country, began after a cross was burned one night outside a black women’s dormitory. The protesters refused to leave Straight Hall until the university agreed to set up the department. White fraternity members tried to take back the building and were repulsed, prompting the occupiers to arm themselves with weapons from a Sears, Roebuck store.

Meanwhile, hundreds of police officers from Rochester and Syracuse, summoned by the local police, were in downtown Ithaca, and some university officials were urging Dr. Perkins to call the authorities in.

Dr. Corson counseled against it, and many people involved said his credibility with both the militants and the hard-line faculty and administrators was crucial to Dr. Perkins’s decision to resolve the crisis by giving the militants what they wanted.

A national uproar ensued. President Richard M. Nixon called the militants “ideological criminals.” A photograph of armed students leaving the building was on the front page of The New York Times and the cover of Newsweek, under the headline “Universities Under the Gun.”

Demonstrations and occupations about racial tensions and the war in Vietnam continued after Dr. Corson was officially named president in 1970. But Dr. Corson, who was willing to wade into crowds of angry protesters, was credited with keeping the protests from escalating out of control. He stepped down in 1977 and was chancellor until he retired in 1979 at 65.

Homer Meade, who was an occupier of Straight Hall and is now an executive for an educational services firm, said Dr. Corson had had an acute understanding of “how close we were to a Kent State,” referring to the killing of four students by Ohio national guardsmen the next year.

“He knew a lot of us in that building, and he understood that people were ready to die that day,” Mr. Meade said. He was one of a half dozen activists who remained in touch with Dr. Corson.

Dale Raymond Corson was born in Pittsburg, Kan., on April 5, 1914, to Harry and Alta Hill Corson. He graduated from the College of Emporia in Kansas and received his master’s degree at Ohio State and his Ph.D. in physics at the University of California, Berkeley. During World War II, he worked with British scientists in developing radar. He began teaching at Cornell in 1948.

Besides his son David, he is survived by his wife, Nellie; two other sons, Bruce and Richard; a daughter, Janet Corson-Rikert; and six grandchildren.

As dean of Cornell’s College of Engineering, Dr. Corson helped start the university’s Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the largest radio telescope in the world at the time, and a particle accelerator on campus.

Dr. Corson probably had a deeper understanding of volatility than most. In the early 1950s, he belonged to a team of physicists credited with discovering the radioactive element astatine. Astatine is among the least stable elements on the periodic table.

SOURCE

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s