- Email: [email protected]
A great grandfather
Astroparticle Physics 53 (2014) 3–5
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Astroparticle Physics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/astropart
A great grandfather William Breisky Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA
Much will be said in this volume about Victor Hess (see Fig. 1) the scientist and cosmic explorer. I would like to tell you something of the grandfather I knew and loved, and of two women who loved him. He was, to be sure, my step-grandfather – the man my grandmother married after her first husband died during the First World War. But we never thought of him that way. He was simply Grandpa Hess. I liked to think of him as my great grandfather. Marie Berta Hess – Mrs. Victor Francis Hess, but known to my brother Arthur and me as Grandma Hess – was what you might call praktisch. ‘‘Ach, you are a waster!’’ she would declare if I, or Arthur, failed to consume everything she placed on our dinner plates. She advised us that in Vienna, in 1918, we would consider ourselves fortunate if we were served horsemeat. We could observe for ourselves that Grandpa Hess – or ‘‘VEEKtor’’, as she called him – never wasted one morsel of her superb cooking. And because VEEKtor was a cigar smoker, our praktisch grandmother concluded that the sterling-silver cigarette case presented to him in 1909, when he became a balloon pilot, was being wasted. So, shortly after arriving in America in 1938, she decided that the case should be given to her son Hans, my father, who smoked cigarettes, and could make good use of it. But before presenting it to Hans, she determined that the case would have to be modified. She instructed a nearby jeweler not to tamper with the sketch of the hot-air balloon that had been engraved onto the case . . . or with the October 1909 date – the day of his graduation as a balloonist. Rather, the jeweler was instructed to remove a signature that somehow, to her mind, made the case unsuitable for use by her American son. That is why the silver cigarette case passed on to me – and now displayed at the Victor Franz Hess Museum in Pöllau, Austria – does not carry the signature of the man who took ballooning lessons with Victor Hess, and who presented the case to him as a graduation memento: Baron Louis Nathaniel von Rothschild, of the banking Rothschilds. My father was dismayed when he saw that the Rothschild name had been removed. But I digress. What I would like you to know, first of all, is that the Hesses became my grandparents because Victor Hess, the cigar-smoking, high-flying balloonist, had been wise enough – back in 1921, when Austria was desperately poor and there was no money for cosmicray research – to take a job with the United States Radium Corporation in East Orange, New Jersey.
E-mail address: [email protected] 0927-6505/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.astropartphys.2013.08.005
It was in the dining room of the Hesses’ East Orange boarding house that Victor and Berta Hess and her 21-year-old son Hans met a German-American family named Baer – and that the Hesses invited Laura Baer to teach English to Hans. Before long, Victor and Berta returned to Austria. Hans stayed in America and became Jack, and Laura became Jack’s wife, and Arthur and I came into the world. I met Grandpa and Grandma Hess in 1932, in Innsbruck, when I was not yet four years old, and Arthur was a baby. Our father had suffered what he later called a nervous breakdown after losing his Pittsburgh engineering job to the Great Depression, and we had found refuge in the Hesses’ Innsbruck apartment. It was a tumultuous time for both families, with two noisy children interrupting Professor Hess’s calculations, and young Nazis, the Heimwehr and the Bolsheviks clashing in the streets – ‘‘right outside our window’’, my mother reported in a letter home. One day that year we were taken to the new cosmic radiation research station Grandpa Hess had established on Mt. Hafelekar. Our good friend Peter Schuster documented that visit not long ago when he sent me a copy of an entry in the June 14, 1932, Hafelekar guest book, in my mother’s handwriting. She had written: ‘‘The top of the morning, and the top of the world!’’ and signed it, ‘‘Laura Breisky and Billy, Pittsburgh, Pa, USA’’. I was ‘‘Billy’’ to my mother, and ‘‘BEE-ly’’ to Grandma Hess, and just plain ‘‘Bill’’ to Grandpa Hess, and the rest of the world. In 1933, after my father had recovered his health, we returned to Pittsburgh. In 1934, our mother succumbed to breast cancer. In 1938, two years after Grandpa finally received his Nobel award, Austria succumbed to the Anschluss, and the Hesses fled to America. They were with us that Christmas in Baltimore, and Grandpa began his tenure at Fordham. I remember those years vividly. I remember my many train trips from Baltimore to New York to have my teeth straightened by an Austrian orthodontist. Grandpa invariably was waiting for me at Penn Station, smiling broadly. I remember his stories – of, for example, a motorcycle adventure in Austria, with my father in the sidecar, and the driver, Professor Hess, careening into a brick wall. I remember Saturday drives into Manhattan, to shop for Bauernbrot, Dobosh torte and cold cuts. And countless adventures on the open road in his pre-war Plymouth – to Yankee Stadium for baseball . . .. to New Jersey to reconnect with my mother’s family, the Baers . . . to movie matinees while Grandma was entertaining her German-speaking ‘‘bridge ladies’’ . . . and to the New York World’s Fair – where Albert Einstein had spoken, on the fair’s open-
4
W. Breisky / Astroparticle Physics 53 (2014) 3–5
ing day, of what he termed Victor Hess’s ‘‘pioneering work on cosmic rays’’, and of his ‘‘seeking refuge in this hospitable country’’. I remember taking radiation measurements with my grandfather, on trips to a Harlem River pier, and to the city’s deepest subway station. I remember my grandfather’s letters, received regularly when I went off to college, and always signed ‘‘Your loving Grandpa’’. I remember learning of the loneliness that gnawed at him at times – of how he missed his old colleagues in his Austrian homeland. And I remember almost every inch of Apartment 4A at 20 William Street, Mount Vernon, New York, because that is where the Hesses lived out their lives in America. I remember the living room cabinet where Grandpa’s medals were laid out, one shelf below his collection of mysteries by A. Conan Doyle and other masters of suspense. I remember the front closet where Grandpa hung his furcollared ‘‘winter coat’’. But most of all, I remember the dining alcove, where Grandma’s incomparable apricot dumplings and paprika chicken, and goulash, and wiener schnitzel, were served. And the bedroom – where Grandma kept a bottle of Jamaica rum on the top shelf of the closet, to enhance a celebratory cup of tea on New Year’s Eve – and the dresser drawer where she hid some $3000 she had fraudulently collected from her husband to pay a non-existent cleaning lady, in order to finance their postwar visit to Innsbruck. Grandma passed away in that bedroom – having never in her life spent a day in a hospital – but before she died, she gave one final instruction to Victor: ‘‘Marry Elizabeth’’, she said. Elizabeth Hoencke was a German refugee, born in Husum an der Nordsee, who had nursed Grandma lovingly during her final illness – and Grandma, knowing that Elizabeth had operated a bakery in Berlin, made an effort to pass her best strudel recipes along to her. Several months later, Victor did as he had been told by Grandma. He married Elizabeth. She called her bridegroom ‘‘mein Schatz’’, and she accompanied him when he was inducted into the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Science – and to a White House reception for Nobel laureates, hosted by John and Jackie Kennedy. When Barbara and I were wed, we became married friends of Victor and Elizabeth – and she would drive her schatzi to Philadelphia to meet our grey-bearded German schnauzer, Doktor Pfeffer – who reminded Grandpa of his beloved dachshunds, Heinzi and Waldi. A week before Christmas, 1964, Elizabeth called our home in Connecticut to tell me, through her tears, that Parkinson’s had finally prevailed, and that her Victor was gone. She asked that I help her notify some people at Fordham. When I phoned the home of Alphons Weber, a brilliant young physicist who had assisted Dr. Hess in his radiation-monitoring work, Mrs. Weber came on the line. ‘‘I just got some very sad news’’, she told her young twins after she had hung up the phone. ‘‘Doctor Hess, a man from Fordham whom your daddy liked and admired very much, has just died’’. The twins thought for a moment. Then one of them said, ‘‘That’s not sad news, Mommy. Christmas is coming soon, so Doctor Hess will be in heaven just in time for the birthday party’’. Grandpa would have liked that story, because he was, indeed, a man of faith, as well as a man of science. It was in 1943, as I was recuperating from double pneumonia – after receiving the last rites of the Anglican church – that Grandpa told me of the vow he had made after larynx surgery had left him with a voice that never rose above a whisper.
Fig. 1. Victor F. Hess.
He had vowed that if he were spared, he would honor his God by attending Mass every Sunday for the remainder of his life. And he kept that vow. It is the task of a scientist, he wrote while I was in college, to help unravel the mysteries of nature. A scientist comes, he wrote, ‘‘to marvel at these mysteries. Hence it is not hard for a scientist to admire the greatness of the Creator of nature. From this it is only a step to adore God’’. Real faith, for a scientist, as for anyone else, he said, can be a bitter struggle. ‘‘What is certain’’, he wrote, ‘‘is that, when faith comes, there follows a great serenity of soul and a deep peace in the human heart’’. But if Victor Hess has left us to puzzle such things, he also remains alive . . . in our memories. In the last couple of years, I have talked to some who remember him clearly – including one former Fordham student, Keran O’Brien, who has worked on the exposure of aircraft and astronaut crews to cosmic radiation, and the impact of cosmic-ray ionization on climate, and who recalls one Hess story in particular: ‘‘It was shortly after the Anschluss’’, O’Brien related to me. ‘‘Dr. Hess told his class that a policeman came down the path to his door and said, ‘Professor Hess, tomorrow I will come down this path with a warrant for your arrest. I thought you should know’. ‘‘Hess and his wife’’, said O’Brien, ‘‘were gone the next day’’. Another of his Fordham students, Joseph Braddock, went on to form a contracting firm that played a major role in developing America’s anti-ballistic missile system. Hess and Braddock had frequent lunches together, when they often would discuss opera. ‘‘The unofficial Hess’’, Braddock said, ‘‘was very warm’’. Such memories linger on. Last year, I took my 14-year-old grandson, Ethan McPherson, to New York to visit Fordham – which had just celebrated ‘‘Victor Hess Day’’ – and to meet Fordham’s president, Joseph M. McShane. Father McShane led us to the university’s Wall of Fame, where the Hess name is memorialized for all time. And in parting he said to Ethan, ‘‘I’ll see you in four years’’. Shortly after we returned home to Cape Cod, Ethan looked up Victor Hess on the Internet, and informed me, ‘‘He died on December 17. That’s my birthday’’. Somehow, that did not surprise me. Grandpa Hess has left us – Ethan, me, and the rest of us. He has left us with memories, and with some great scientific insights. He left us Elizabeth, who made his final years as joyful as possible, and who lived long enough to become our three children’s much-loved ‘‘Nana Liz’’.
W. Breisky / Astroparticle Physics 53 (2014) 3–5
He left us his books, his papers and his medals. He left with us his profound appreciation of the out-of-doors – the open road, and the boundless skies. He left us to marvel at nature and its laws, as he did – and now to contemplate the God Particle, as he surely would be doing, were he with us here. . .
5
Thank you, Michael Walter, for organizing this fine event. And thanks to all of you for celebrating an August day in 1912.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Astroparticle Physics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/astropart
A great grandfather William Breisky Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA
Much will be said in this volume about Victor Hess (see Fig. 1) the scientist and cosmic explorer. I would like to tell you something of the grandfather I knew and loved, and of two women who loved him. He was, to be sure, my step-grandfather – the man my grandmother married after her first husband died during the First World War. But we never thought of him that way. He was simply Grandpa Hess. I liked to think of him as my great grandfather. Marie Berta Hess – Mrs. Victor Francis Hess, but known to my brother Arthur and me as Grandma Hess – was what you might call praktisch. ‘‘Ach, you are a waster!’’ she would declare if I, or Arthur, failed to consume everything she placed on our dinner plates. She advised us that in Vienna, in 1918, we would consider ourselves fortunate if we were served horsemeat. We could observe for ourselves that Grandpa Hess – or ‘‘VEEKtor’’, as she called him – never wasted one morsel of her superb cooking. And because VEEKtor was a cigar smoker, our praktisch grandmother concluded that the sterling-silver cigarette case presented to him in 1909, when he became a balloon pilot, was being wasted. So, shortly after arriving in America in 1938, she decided that the case should be given to her son Hans, my father, who smoked cigarettes, and could make good use of it. But before presenting it to Hans, she determined that the case would have to be modified. She instructed a nearby jeweler not to tamper with the sketch of the hot-air balloon that had been engraved onto the case . . . or with the October 1909 date – the day of his graduation as a balloonist. Rather, the jeweler was instructed to remove a signature that somehow, to her mind, made the case unsuitable for use by her American son. That is why the silver cigarette case passed on to me – and now displayed at the Victor Franz Hess Museum in Pöllau, Austria – does not carry the signature of the man who took ballooning lessons with Victor Hess, and who presented the case to him as a graduation memento: Baron Louis Nathaniel von Rothschild, of the banking Rothschilds. My father was dismayed when he saw that the Rothschild name had been removed. But I digress. What I would like you to know, first of all, is that the Hesses became my grandparents because Victor Hess, the cigar-smoking, high-flying balloonist, had been wise enough – back in 1921, when Austria was desperately poor and there was no money for cosmicray research – to take a job with the United States Radium Corporation in East Orange, New Jersey.
E-mail address: [email protected] 0927-6505/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.astropartphys.2013.08.005
It was in the dining room of the Hesses’ East Orange boarding house that Victor and Berta Hess and her 21-year-old son Hans met a German-American family named Baer – and that the Hesses invited Laura Baer to teach English to Hans. Before long, Victor and Berta returned to Austria. Hans stayed in America and became Jack, and Laura became Jack’s wife, and Arthur and I came into the world. I met Grandpa and Grandma Hess in 1932, in Innsbruck, when I was not yet four years old, and Arthur was a baby. Our father had suffered what he later called a nervous breakdown after losing his Pittsburgh engineering job to the Great Depression, and we had found refuge in the Hesses’ Innsbruck apartment. It was a tumultuous time for both families, with two noisy children interrupting Professor Hess’s calculations, and young Nazis, the Heimwehr and the Bolsheviks clashing in the streets – ‘‘right outside our window’’, my mother reported in a letter home. One day that year we were taken to the new cosmic radiation research station Grandpa Hess had established on Mt. Hafelekar. Our good friend Peter Schuster documented that visit not long ago when he sent me a copy of an entry in the June 14, 1932, Hafelekar guest book, in my mother’s handwriting. She had written: ‘‘The top of the morning, and the top of the world!’’ and signed it, ‘‘Laura Breisky and Billy, Pittsburgh, Pa, USA’’. I was ‘‘Billy’’ to my mother, and ‘‘BEE-ly’’ to Grandma Hess, and just plain ‘‘Bill’’ to Grandpa Hess, and the rest of the world. In 1933, after my father had recovered his health, we returned to Pittsburgh. In 1934, our mother succumbed to breast cancer. In 1938, two years after Grandpa finally received his Nobel award, Austria succumbed to the Anschluss, and the Hesses fled to America. They were with us that Christmas in Baltimore, and Grandpa began his tenure at Fordham. I remember those years vividly. I remember my many train trips from Baltimore to New York to have my teeth straightened by an Austrian orthodontist. Grandpa invariably was waiting for me at Penn Station, smiling broadly. I remember his stories – of, for example, a motorcycle adventure in Austria, with my father in the sidecar, and the driver, Professor Hess, careening into a brick wall. I remember Saturday drives into Manhattan, to shop for Bauernbrot, Dobosh torte and cold cuts. And countless adventures on the open road in his pre-war Plymouth – to Yankee Stadium for baseball . . .. to New Jersey to reconnect with my mother’s family, the Baers . . . to movie matinees while Grandma was entertaining her German-speaking ‘‘bridge ladies’’ . . . and to the New York World’s Fair – where Albert Einstein had spoken, on the fair’s open-
4
W. Breisky / Astroparticle Physics 53 (2014) 3–5
ing day, of what he termed Victor Hess’s ‘‘pioneering work on cosmic rays’’, and of his ‘‘seeking refuge in this hospitable country’’. I remember taking radiation measurements with my grandfather, on trips to a Harlem River pier, and to the city’s deepest subway station. I remember my grandfather’s letters, received regularly when I went off to college, and always signed ‘‘Your loving Grandpa’’. I remember learning of the loneliness that gnawed at him at times – of how he missed his old colleagues in his Austrian homeland. And I remember almost every inch of Apartment 4A at 20 William Street, Mount Vernon, New York, because that is where the Hesses lived out their lives in America. I remember the living room cabinet where Grandpa’s medals were laid out, one shelf below his collection of mysteries by A. Conan Doyle and other masters of suspense. I remember the front closet where Grandpa hung his furcollared ‘‘winter coat’’. But most of all, I remember the dining alcove, where Grandma’s incomparable apricot dumplings and paprika chicken, and goulash, and wiener schnitzel, were served. And the bedroom – where Grandma kept a bottle of Jamaica rum on the top shelf of the closet, to enhance a celebratory cup of tea on New Year’s Eve – and the dresser drawer where she hid some $3000 she had fraudulently collected from her husband to pay a non-existent cleaning lady, in order to finance their postwar visit to Innsbruck. Grandma passed away in that bedroom – having never in her life spent a day in a hospital – but before she died, she gave one final instruction to Victor: ‘‘Marry Elizabeth’’, she said. Elizabeth Hoencke was a German refugee, born in Husum an der Nordsee, who had nursed Grandma lovingly during her final illness – and Grandma, knowing that Elizabeth had operated a bakery in Berlin, made an effort to pass her best strudel recipes along to her. Several months later, Victor did as he had been told by Grandma. He married Elizabeth. She called her bridegroom ‘‘mein Schatz’’, and she accompanied him when he was inducted into the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Science – and to a White House reception for Nobel laureates, hosted by John and Jackie Kennedy. When Barbara and I were wed, we became married friends of Victor and Elizabeth – and she would drive her schatzi to Philadelphia to meet our grey-bearded German schnauzer, Doktor Pfeffer – who reminded Grandpa of his beloved dachshunds, Heinzi and Waldi. A week before Christmas, 1964, Elizabeth called our home in Connecticut to tell me, through her tears, that Parkinson’s had finally prevailed, and that her Victor was gone. She asked that I help her notify some people at Fordham. When I phoned the home of Alphons Weber, a brilliant young physicist who had assisted Dr. Hess in his radiation-monitoring work, Mrs. Weber came on the line. ‘‘I just got some very sad news’’, she told her young twins after she had hung up the phone. ‘‘Doctor Hess, a man from Fordham whom your daddy liked and admired very much, has just died’’. The twins thought for a moment. Then one of them said, ‘‘That’s not sad news, Mommy. Christmas is coming soon, so Doctor Hess will be in heaven just in time for the birthday party’’. Grandpa would have liked that story, because he was, indeed, a man of faith, as well as a man of science. It was in 1943, as I was recuperating from double pneumonia – after receiving the last rites of the Anglican church – that Grandpa told me of the vow he had made after larynx surgery had left him with a voice that never rose above a whisper.
Fig. 1. Victor F. Hess.
He had vowed that if he were spared, he would honor his God by attending Mass every Sunday for the remainder of his life. And he kept that vow. It is the task of a scientist, he wrote while I was in college, to help unravel the mysteries of nature. A scientist comes, he wrote, ‘‘to marvel at these mysteries. Hence it is not hard for a scientist to admire the greatness of the Creator of nature. From this it is only a step to adore God’’. Real faith, for a scientist, as for anyone else, he said, can be a bitter struggle. ‘‘What is certain’’, he wrote, ‘‘is that, when faith comes, there follows a great serenity of soul and a deep peace in the human heart’’. But if Victor Hess has left us to puzzle such things, he also remains alive . . . in our memories. In the last couple of years, I have talked to some who remember him clearly – including one former Fordham student, Keran O’Brien, who has worked on the exposure of aircraft and astronaut crews to cosmic radiation, and the impact of cosmic-ray ionization on climate, and who recalls one Hess story in particular: ‘‘It was shortly after the Anschluss’’, O’Brien related to me. ‘‘Dr. Hess told his class that a policeman came down the path to his door and said, ‘Professor Hess, tomorrow I will come down this path with a warrant for your arrest. I thought you should know’. ‘‘Hess and his wife’’, said O’Brien, ‘‘were gone the next day’’. Another of his Fordham students, Joseph Braddock, went on to form a contracting firm that played a major role in developing America’s anti-ballistic missile system. Hess and Braddock had frequent lunches together, when they often would discuss opera. ‘‘The unofficial Hess’’, Braddock said, ‘‘was very warm’’. Such memories linger on. Last year, I took my 14-year-old grandson, Ethan McPherson, to New York to visit Fordham – which had just celebrated ‘‘Victor Hess Day’’ – and to meet Fordham’s president, Joseph M. McShane. Father McShane led us to the university’s Wall of Fame, where the Hess name is memorialized for all time. And in parting he said to Ethan, ‘‘I’ll see you in four years’’. Shortly after we returned home to Cape Cod, Ethan looked up Victor Hess on the Internet, and informed me, ‘‘He died on December 17. That’s my birthday’’. Somehow, that did not surprise me. Grandpa Hess has left us – Ethan, me, and the rest of us. He has left us with memories, and with some great scientific insights. He left us Elizabeth, who made his final years as joyful as possible, and who lived long enough to become our three children’s much-loved ‘‘Nana Liz’’.
W. Breisky / Astroparticle Physics 53 (2014) 3–5
He left us his books, his papers and his medals. He left with us his profound appreciation of the out-of-doors – the open road, and the boundless skies. He left us to marvel at nature and its laws, as he did – and now to contemplate the God Particle, as he surely would be doing, were he with us here. . .
5
Thank you, Michael Walter, for organizing this fine event. And thanks to all of you for celebrating an August day in 1912.