A Late Father's Day

I didn't write about my father on Father's Day because it was, well, a little crazy around here. First we were recovering from the dance recital, then we had the storm that dropped a huge limb from our tree nearly onto our neighbor's car. Then there was my Dad.

This is a picture of the first four directors of Argonne National Laboratory. My father was the third director, he's the third from the left. I love this picture because he looks so young, so engaged, so in his element.

Albert V. Crewe received his PhD in physics from the University of Liverpool in 1950. He was 23 years old. He was born into a rather poor family - his father was a mechanic and his mother was "in service," a maid or housekeeper for well off families. His parents divorced before he was a teenager and he went to university on scholarship. In my mind, his life has always answered the question of whether or not Einstein would have been a great scientist had he been born in a rice paddy.

Dad came to Chicago in 1955 for a project at the University of Chicago, stayed a bit longer than anticipated, was head of Argonne and Dean at U of C along the way. He invented the Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope, which was able to "see" an individual atom. He proved atoms move and opened the doors for a whole lot more research in all sorts of fields. That stretches the limit of my technical knowledge of his accomplishments. I dreaded asking him for help with math or science homework growing up.

My dad was a strong man, and a big man. Not an athletic man, unless you count the two weeks or so a year he would spend at their place on Sanibel where he would play tennis and walk for hours on the beach every day. But he was capable of amazing feats. He built my sister a coral for a horse she brought home one weekend, digging post holes by hand. Then he built a barn for the horse. He liked to putter around the house, building things, fixing things, cutting down trees, etc. He took us sculpture more seriously about 20 years ago, carving beautiful shapes from alabaster and marble. One year the kids all pitched in to get him an engine hoist for his birthday so he could make really big pieces.

He liked parties. My parents held a big Boxing Day party every year until recently and Dad would always wear his red velvet smoking jacket, fill drinks too full, joke and laugh, tell stories until the wee hours. He also liked being with his children, especially as we got older. We regularly had dinner with the Oxford English Dictionary on the table, arguing over words, spelling and usage. Dad is a larger than life kind of guy.

Except now he's riddled with Parkinson's, having trouble with basic movements, can't eat solid foods, can't sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time and is whithering away before our eyes. On Father's Day he was severely dehydrated and needed many bags of IV fluid to recover. His mental functioning is not at all affected, but he has difficulty talking, difficulty holding a book, or pencil. The disease has even robbed his face of expression.

I try to keep in my mind the images of him as a healthy man - letting us hang on to his back as he swam long, slow laps in the pool or chopping wood for his fireplace. All those advances made in medical research and technology from his microscope and electron beam magnification aren't enough to find a cause, course of treatment or a cure for Parkinson's.