1 September 2009

I grew up in the college town of Swarthmore, just outside of Philadelphia. My dad taught German in the local high school. From him I learned the value of hard work and gained an appeciation for the sport of baseball. He was himself a very talented ballplayer but was not able to pursue a career in the sport because of a medical problem contracted in his mid teens (and not treated properly until after WWII).

From my mom, who had a genius for encouraging the best in her two sons, I learned to appreciate classical music. I took up the violin and then switched to viola (in order to play string quartets in high school). My brother Noel took up the 'cello and later graduated from both Swarthmore College and Curtis Institute. Neither of us went into music professionally, but we have both continued playing and, to this day, derive enormous pleasure from this aspect of our lives.

On graduating from high school, I attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. My freshman year started with a battery of placement tests. To my surprise, I was told I did not have to take freshman English. (English had always been my least favorite subject!) OK, I would take a course in music theory instead. This opened up a relationship with Wesleyan's small but active music department that, over time, would prove very special.

I had entered Wesleyan expecting to major in chemistry but was advised to start my studies with a course offered by the physics department, a class in classical mechanics. The instructor, Tom Green, was absolutely the best I had ever encountered or would ever encounter. His elegant presentation focused on the fundamental relationship between the physics and its mathematical description; it was beautiful to behold, and I was hooked. I took an organic chemistry course my sophmore year but became a physics major, with a minor in music.

I hope I will not discourage anyone from reading further if I reveal that my freshman year at Wesleyan was a banner year. The end of the first semester, I won the Ayres prize for the highest grade point average among freshman. The end of the second semester, I won the Bruner prize for the highest relative improvement in grade point average! I'm afraid it's been downhill ever since.

In my sophmore year, I became a founding member of the Wesleyan String Quartet. My good friend, Dave Spencer (also from Swarthmore), was the group's first violinist. We started giving concerts on campus and off. In the spring of 1955, we performed a string quartet I had written the previous summer.

I continued playing in the Wesleyan String Quartet throughout my junior and senior years. (The music department had created a special tutorial class for us, supervised by Jerry Jaffe. We gave three concerts each year, performing each concert several times.)

Meanwhile, I continued with music composition in another tutorial class with Dick Winslow. In two semesters, I wrote some background music for the Shakespere play, "Much Ado about Nothing" (scored for harpsichord), and a suite for string orchestra. The background music accompanied a theater department production of the play; the suite for string orchestra was never performed.

I spent the better part of my senior year at Wesleyan on a thesis project employing the physics department's linear (deuteron) accelerator to probe the quantum states of an isotope of iron. (Classmate Naren Bali looked at a different isotope.) The truth be known, I lacked the technical skills to be entirely comfortable with such an experimental project. In view of my later calling as a field oceanographer, however, this early hands-on experience with multivibrators and machine tools proved quite valuable.

Upon graduation, I was accepted into the PhD physics program at Princeton University. I was privileged to be part of this program, but found that I was not ideally suited to it. First, the program was a bit too unstructured for me; I didn't know what to do with all the freedom. Second, I was beginning to realize that I was not that keen on modern physics. What appealed to me most was the classical physics of objects I could see and touch. Of the classes I took at Princeton, I would have to say that I found John Wheeler's class on nonlinear mechanics to be the most stimulating.

The spring of my second year at Princeton, I took and passed the qualifying exam to go on to a PhD in physics. But I barely passed, and I was having trouble finding a thesis topic.

That summer, I did some sailing in the Bahamas with my brother Noel and his friend Bob Lafore. It was a life-altering experience with multiple repercussions. Although I had always been intrigued with sailboats and the adventure they represented, this was really the first time I had ever cruised extensively anywhere, and I found that I really liked it. And I really liked the Bahamas.

I returned to Princeton convinced that a career in modern physics was not really what I wanted. I was better suited to some branch of applied physics, and what better choice than physical oceanography, a branch that would bring me close to the ocean and give me further opportunity to go sailing? A rudimentary calculus perhaps, but one that I have never regretted.

I wrote away to several graduate programs in physical oceanography and was accepted in the program at the University of California at San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The following summer, I took part in a Scripps cruise to the Line Islands and Hawaii, and, in the fall, entered the graduate school in La Jolla.

Scripps provided a sharp contrast to the more formal Princeton. People seemed to really enjoy what they were doing. At lunch time, many took to the beach by the pier and went body surfing in the often frigid water. My first year, I occasionally saw Chip Cox, my eventual thesis advisor, in bare feet inside Ritter Hall. (I think the dress code people finally got to him, however. By the time I graduated, he was dressing in a coat and tie.)

At Scripps I met and eventually married Johanna (Jody) Hanson, then a graduate student in chemistry. Jody and I are still together after all these years. Her secret: enthusiastically supporting all my crazy adventures, keeping her (mostly well justified) complaints to a minimum, and not getting seasick. My secret: taking her to places that are to die for and, despite all the problems enroute, maintaining the illusion that I am in full control of the situation.

I also met Jean Filloux, a graduate student working with Chip Cox. Jean had emigrated from France to the east coast of the US in the early 1950s and, in an arrangement with a French businessman, had personally constructed one of the first ever fiberglass sailboats (designed by Georges Hofmann). But Jean had only recently obtained clear title to the boat, and he needed some help bringing her around from Fort Lauderdale to San Diego. I volunteered. It was my first truly offshore sailing experience, and it also started me thinking about building my own boat.

By the end of my first year at Scripps, I had started looking at possible thesis topics. One topic currently of interest to the physical oceanographic community was the question of how the wave spectrum evolves in response to the wind. Several people on the Scripps staff, Klaus Hasselmann and John Miles, had recently contributed significantly to the theoretical understanding of this issue. Not too much was known, however, on the experimental side.

In talking with Chip Cox and Walter Munk, I began to see how I might conduct a simple field experiment that would bear on the issue. The key was Hasselmann's transport equation governing the evolution of the spectrum. This equation suggested that, if one towed a wave recorder away from a windward shore at constant velocity, simultaneously recording both the signal from the wave recorder and the apparent wind speed, one might be able to say something about the evolution of a single wave component (that component with a group velocity equal to the towing velocity).

Ultimately, I pieced together a four-component directional wave recorder and, behind Eleuthera Island in the spring of 1963, aboard a vessel chartered from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, conducted my first Bahama Banks field experiment. The analysis of the data from this field experiment was the basis for my thesis at Scripps.

I came away from this project convinced that the Bahama Banks provided an ideal environment for further wave studies. Accordingly, after graduating from Scripps in 1965, I decided to join the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School, teaching and starting up a number of new Bahama Bank field projects. Subsequently in 1968, I moved my base of operations from the University of Miami to the newly formed Oceanographic Center of Nova University in nearby Fort Lauderdale.

It is not appropriate in this summary biography to describe in any detail my research activities at the University of Miami or the subsequent continuation of these activities at Nova University. Suffice to say that, over a period of about fifteen years, I conducted a series of field projects in the Bight of Abaco region of the Little Bahama Bank, including 1) a project to look further at the wind generation of waves by measuring microscale fluctuations of atmospheric pressure just above the water surface, 2) a project to monitor and model the tides in the Bight of Abaco (with special attention to the generation of overtide components), and 3) a project to explore the relationship between the wave spectrum and the statistics of the resulting whitecap field. A detailed account of these activities will eventually be included in the Career section of this website.

While still in Miami, I also embarked upon the adventure of a lifetime, the design, construction, and sailing of a 36' ketch-rigged sailboat that we named Catspaw. Since meeting Jean Fillloux at Scripps and sailing through the Canal with him, I had long thought about this possibility. If he could do it, why not me? Never mind that he had repeatedly advised against it.

As described in the Catspaw section of this website (Early History link), we had purchased a one-acre home in South Miami that allowed me to undertake such a project with minimal impact on my neighbors. I proceeded to convert the home's two-car carport into a shop, lay down the lines for the boat, and begin building Catspaw, upside down, in our driveway on the north side of the lot.

Suffice to say, the Catspaw project survived both a zoning complaint by the owner of two adjacent vacant lots to the north and the subsequent move north to Fort Lauderdale when I changed jobs. I persevered, eventually Catspaw became operational, and we began sailing her as a family.

Our first son, Garth, arrived in 1967 and was aboard in 1973 when we sailed Catspaw to the Lesser Antilles, getting as far south as Grenada. Our second son, Gavin, born in 1976, was aboard in 1980-1983, when we sailed her around the world via the Bahamas, Panama, the Galapagos, French Polynesia, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, the Louisiades, Australia, Bali, Chagos, Sri Lanka, Oman, the Red Sea, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, Madeira, the Canary Islands, and the Bahamas.

After returning to Nova's Oceanographic Center in 1984, I started up one final NSF sponsored field project in the Bight of Abaco, conducted in part from Catspaw. This major project, focusing again on the wind generation of waves and carefully integrating a number of new elements on both the theoretical and experimental sides of the ledger, was to have been the culmination of my research career. Sadly, despite the successful prosecution of its first two phases, NSF declined to support the project's third analysis phase. Four times I tried and failed to gain support.

Eventually I stopped trying and moved on ... I retired and returned to what I liked most, sailing and music. After correcting a problem with Catspaw's inside ballast in the late 1990s, we once again started revisiting our favorite cruising grounds in the Bahamas. Mostly we sailed back to the Exumas (as recently as summer 2008) and back to the Abacos (as recently as summer 2007).

Alas, this phase of our continuing adventure with Catspaw, too, has now come to an end. If you visit Catspaw's home page, you will learn that she is now up for sale. Hopefully, we can find someone to take up where we have left off.

In 1978, prior to setting off around the world aboard Catspaw, I had had a brief opportunity to resume playing my viola. My brother Noel was living in Belle Glade, studying the Everglades Kite. Together we joined I Classici, a small chamber group headed by the violinist Tom Tsagarris, and for a year took part in a series of concerts in one of the local churches in Palm Beach.

With my research career now apparently over, I started looking for an opportunity to again resume playing. Coincidentally, a memorial service for Tsagarris introduced me to a new crop of local musicians. I am currently playing with a number of groups, including the Lyric Chamber Orchestra of Highland Beach, conducted by Toronto's Victor Feldbrill. In March of 2007, the LCO gave a second performance of my string quartet.

Jody and I are also singing with the Nova Singers, a local community choir, directed by Peggy Barber and Chuck Stanley.

In 2004, Jody found an Aliner camper on the internet. We have since taken the camper to Alaska (in summer 2005), to Maine (in summer 2006), and, more recently, to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone (this past summer), and we look forward to more road trips in the US and Canada. Chez Moa will never replace Catspaw, but there is much to see ashore, and Snowflake (our CRV) and Chez Moa can get us there in reasonable comfort and at reasonable cost.