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Judith Reiffel (1931–2002): Life and Letters
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Ultramicroscopy 102 (2005) 173–180 www.elsevier.com/locate/ultramic
Judith Reiffel (1931–2002): Life and Letters
J. REIFFEL
Anyone who published, or attempted to publish, an article in Ultramicroscopy in the ‘‘Zeitler years’’ (1975–1993) will know the name of Judith Reiffel. But few of us have any picture of the person behind the name. Elmar Zeitler has dedicated his Editorial in Volume 100 to her [1] and she has given us a glimpse of herself in her contribution to the Zeitler festschrift [2], but who was she really? These lines are intended to record a few more details of her life and are illustrated by anecdotes sent to me by her family and friends as well as extracts from some of her correspondence with me over the years. doi:10.1016/j.ultramic.2004.10.001
First, the facts: Judith Reiffel was born Judith Eve Blumenthal on 5 November 1931 in Omaha (Nebraska), the third child and only daughter of a family of four. Her parents were Edgar Blumenthal, a precision machinist and Laverne, ne´e Wilson. When Judith was still very young, the family moved to Chicago and settled not far from the University of Chicago, where Judith first attended Wadsworth Grammar School and then progressed to the Hyde Park High School. Her brother David, only a year older than she, recalls that her favourite haunts were Lake Shore Park,
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called ‘The Point’ at 57th street, the Museum of Science and Industry and the Art Institute; the two of them formed a gang whose pleasure was to harass the pretentious and ‘‘punch holes in personal balloons’’. She continued to do this all her life. In 1950, she was working as a secretary in the Public Relations Department of the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she met Leonard Reiffel; they married in 1951. (This Institute will be known indirectly to many electron microscopists since the IIT Research Institute, IITRI, published the proceedings of the Scanning Electron Microscopy meetings for many years.) She then became a travel writer for the Chicago American (a daily newspaper, now defunct) but had never visited the places she described: her accounts drew upon published travel stories and guidebooks. She wrote imaginatively and fluently; all her life she felt that her word skills were her ‘‘only saleable asset’’. In the mid-1950s, two sons were born, Evan Carl (a graduate of Arizona State University who has his own business in Chicago) and David Lee (a graduate of Harvard School of Music, now a composer and book-designer). In 1960, Judith and Leonard separated and were divorced a year later. Judith then obtained a post as secretary in the Public Relations Department of the University of Chicago, which entrusted her with organizing many of the events in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the university. At a commemorative concert, she played the tambourine while perched high on a balcony on the tower of the university’s Rockefeller Chapel. A little later, she heard (via the grapevine, the vacancy had not been posted) that Albert Crewe, Director of Argonne National Laboratory (1961–1967) and professor in the university, was looking for a new secretary. ‘‘She popped her head into my office’’, Crewe recalls, and said ‘You need a secretary and I am a good one’. Without hesitation, I hired her! How she knew about the vacancy I never found out but it was typical of her to know everything about everyone. She was a good secretary but she was much more. She rapidly took over the lab, especially the graduate students. On one occasion (at least one), she objected to their hairstyles and proceeded to give everyone a haircut
in the lab. She also paid for gossip. Twenty-five cents for a good piece of gossip and only a nickel for a piece of low quality. ‘‘As I recall, Elmar Zeitler came to Chicago shortly afterwards and Judith took care of him as well. She was always happy to expand her empire, so it was natural for her to take over his new Journal as well as all the other activities of our two labs’’. Another reason why Crewe accepted her was surely her appearance. She has a flair for choosing the clothes that would suit her and was always ‘stylish’. She was petite with dark wavy hair. The 1960s clearly brought out the best in Judith (or worst, depending on your point of view). She and a group of friends created the imaginary figure of Rose Bimler, a liberal-minded woman who had supposedly disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. ‘Rose Bimler’ became the subject of a documentary on public television, complete with footage of children chanting ‘‘Free Rose Bimler’’; the hoax was famous enough to make the Chicago Tribune’s list of memorable events of that memorable decade! I have googled ‘Rose Bimler’ to see whether any account of the hoax has found its way onto the web. She is indeed there, but with no mention of the hoax: in connection with children’s clothes, on eBay, and on the Greg Kihn Band Homepage Guestbook where a certain David asks ‘Who is Rose Bimler?’ but the question is unfortunately undated. Nor was Albert Crewe spared: ‘‘I was lucky to escape one of her best efforts. I was in the habit of preparing my talks by putting my slides in order and then relying on them to prompt my memory when delivering the talk. On one occasion she slipped a slide of her own into my collection. It was one of Adolf Hitler sitting in a chair with his right hand supporting the breast of a naked woman standing beside him. Fortunately I checked my slides once more just prior to giving my talk and found the intruder’’. How disappointed she must have been! Her spoof EMSA paper is another delightful example [3]. Again, I quote Albert Crewe: ‘‘The first I knew about it was the day before I left for the meeting. I said that I would see her the next week and she replied, ‘But I will see you tomorrow’. With some astonishment I asked why
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she was going and she said that she had to give a paper. Eventually, the full story came out. She had noticed that the main topic of the lab was various types of contrast so she wanted to express her own thoughts. I recall that [the paper] included a photo of the moon over Lake Michigan1 and gave reference to a Papal encyclical,2 but otherwise it was nonsensical. Nevertheless, it had been accepted for publication. With some difficulty I persuaded her not to go to the meeting. In response she sent a message to the chairman to the effect that one of the ‘authors’, one Dr. Gandolfi, had passed away and so they were not able to attend the meeting. I understood that the chairman of the session solemnly gave the sad news to the audience’’. He also used the vacant 15 min to provoke a discussion of the quality to be expected of material for the EMSA proceedings. The ‘missing’ paper clearly revealed shortcomings in the EMSA refereeing machinery, which was subsequently distinctly more rigorous. Her paper is as amusing today as when it was written. Two microscopes are required, a CEM and a STEM, and ‘‘the CEM is usually placed on the left, the STEM occupying a superior position on the right (as the investigator faces the microscopes). That this particular positioning is crucial to the success of specimen observation will become obvious when one considers that (1) most investigators are righthanded, (2) the signal intensity of the STEM is 104 times greater than that for CEM, which means that, (3) the juice must be able to be turned off and on the STEM almost instantaneously. With the CEM set for operating in the ‘bright field’ mode and the STEM set for the ‘dark field’ mode, the specimen is inserted in the specimen chamber for the conventional microscope, which is attached to a conveyor belt connecting it with the specimen chamber for the STEM. In the initial design stages, the conveyor–specimen chambers presented almost insurmountable problems, because of the requirement that the specimens be transported from the left-side ma1 The caption reads: ‘‘Dappled field effect on Tobacco Mosaic Virus. Moon over Lake Michigan (on right) is an artifact due to specimen preparation. 750,000 X mag’’. 2 In fact, the reference is to Caesar, J., in Act I, Sc. 2.
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chine to the right (or conversely) with great speed, combined with minimum loss of vacuum to insure minimum specimen contamination. We have experienced fair success employing a standard Garrard turntable which supports the lightweight chamber on a woven horsehair conveyor belt which is attached, spring-like, to the spindle with the rotational speed set at 99 rpm. Horsehair was chosen because of its little-realized elasticity and durability, which lends itself very well to the stretching and snapping required for the speed at which the system must travel’’. Lily Gandolfi was resurrected a few years later in the pages of Physics Today [4], where she protested about congress participants who failed to attend, somewhat ironically in view of her own behaviour at EMSA. Many years later (1994), she remembered those days: I was just reading that the latest employee affliction for which employers can be sued (and we’re always looking for these, aren’t we?) is something described as REPEATED MOVEMENT malady. It seems that people who sit on computers get sore hands fromytyping? They showed pictures of them little hooks, hands poised and fingers actually having to touch the keys, REPEATEDLY. When we get old we like to schrei about the old days, you know, and my old days consisted of typing VERY FAST on a manual machine, for whole days, in fact I got paid for doing that. Also, to get money for European trips I used to type theses. No mistakes allowed, no corrections, no nothin’. Merely, perfection, and fast, and 30 b a page, double spaced. Of course, those were the days when a scientist would send his important peers real preprints, which had been produced using carbon paper, meaning if a guy had ten peers at least two of them were going to get almost unreadable copies, and that was with the poor typist doing the opus two times. Some awfully good science was done then, I hear, and there was genuine working together toward a goal instead of trying to beat out the other guy. On the other hand, we did not have hard rock ‘music’ to listen to on CDs.
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In what leisure remained to her, her son David tells me that She dabbled in painting (I and my brother have several of her canvases), writing, and miniatures at various times in her life, and always seemed to have a bohemian crowd around her – I feel very lucky to have grown up in such an artistic and stimulating atmosphere. She taught herself to bake seriously after a disastrous incident with a cherry pie, and ended up very good at it indeed – doing a great job at kougelhopf and lebkuchen. Her interest in such things would flutter like a butterfly from flower to flower. She knew how to enjoy life. She also knew how to compose limericksy here is one for ultramicroscopists: An electron microscopy whiz Is involved in some dubious biz. When interests conflict He is quick to predict Great profit to mankind (all his). In July 1975, after preliminary discussion with H. Wimmers, one of the founders of the North Holland Publishing Co. (which amalgamated with Elsevier in 1971), the first issue of Ultramicroscopy appeared, with Elmar Zeitler as editor and Judith Reiffel as editorial secretary, and most of us would agree, ruefully in some cases, that these were her finest hours. Once the editor had examined incoming manuscripts, she took over all correspondence with the authors, the referees and her crony at Elsevier, Mrs Franc- oise VerploeghChasse´e, whom she forgave for her nameyFlemish names were one of her nightmares: REF. MS***, co-authored by (immediately one’s skin begins to prickle, anticipating a veritable shit-load of unpronounceable and unspellable names, obvious hangers-on to the real go-getter in the laboratory—the one who is generous to a fault in allowing every meat-head who handled a test-tube or swept off a laboratory bank to claim co-authorship)ydoes it matter what their names are? And as luck would have it, these choo-choo trains
of authorship always seem to come from Belgiumy After a lengthy diatribe, she resumes: Anyway, what I’ve got today is a Short Note, three-and-a-half pages long, with (are you ready) Vanhellemont, Bender, Claeys, Van Landuyt, Declerck, Amelinckx and Van Overstraeten as authors. Notice, the ONLY one I can be sure of getting right is the second – probably because I go on one every so often. Correspondence with referees tended to be in rhyme, ranging from ‘‘On behalf of the Dutch Thanks much!’’ to ‘‘Many thanks for the chores, which you handled apace (the ‘letter’ improved, with your usual grace). The reffing for *** was adroit and discreet. Now, God willing, he’ll get out from under my feet. As hinted, we’ll titillate Pozzi awhile, then accepta-da-scripta and end, with a smile’’. In 1977, Elmar Zeitler succeeded Ernst Ruska as director of the Institute of Electron Microscopy at the Fritz-Haber-Institute of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and the editorial office moved to Berlin. Judith knew no German and set to work to acquire a basic knowledge of the language before she moved. Her son David remembers seeing lists of German prepositions pinned up in her office. In Germany, a new problem arose, which meant that her interaction with referees could be active (rather than passive): Ach, you’re going to hate me. This manuscript, written by one of our own people and translated by one of our own translators, has been giving me a big headache. The original translations are always a bit rough and it’s my job to make them smoother, before submitting them to any journal. In this case, most of the smoothing was firmly rejected by the author, and so the
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manuscript submitted to Ultramicroscopy still contains awkward spots which, because of the two very separate hats we wear here, are difficult to treat. The dialogue goes something likey INSTITUTE EDITOR: We have made a few changes, for clarity and English. AUTHOR: How dare you! One says it this way in German. INSTITUTE EDITOR: ja, ja, liebchen, but you want it for an English journal. AUTHOR: Okay, klug-Arsch, I am the author and I submit it any way I want. Let the journal tell me it’s wrong (author submits manuscript). ULTRAMICROSCOPY EDITOR: Aha! A nice little manuscript! hmmmm. hmmmmm. uh, oh jeez, this sounds kind of funny. AUTHOR: Vat you mean funny!! I know you. You thought it was funny when you saw it before, but I fix you, kiddo. All what you changed I put back, haha. You reject this artikel, you tell me to change, I accuse you are prejudiced. How you like that word, huh? ULTRAMICROSCOPY EDITOR (stroking his wings and adjusting his halo): Awri’. Let’s get another opinion. Can you cough up three referees? AUTHOR: y.oh, you are refereeing? ULTRAMICROSCOPY EDITOR: It’s journal policy. AUTHOR: vell, who you think should be referees? ULTRAMICROSCOPY EDITOR (cool as you please): I’ll give you a list of twenty. You choose. AUTHOR (falling into the trap): I choose ***, *** and Hawkes. My first exchange with her concerned the name of the journal [1,5], as I was one of those who replied (in verse) to her appeal for suggestions for a new name or defences of the existing one. Soon after this, we corresponded over an editorial about units and conventions [6]; this produced a postcard: Thou shalt not have in thine house divers measures, a great and a small. But thou shalt have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just measure shalt thou have. Deuteronomy 25: 14–15
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(In case you want to stick this into your SI Short Note.) I noted appreciatively that she quoted from the 17th century translation but it was unfortunately too late to include it. It was in 1980 that I wrote to offer an occasional article, drawing attention to electron microscopy publications that might be overlooked, which provoked an enthusiastic reply: ‘‘On behalf of the journal, Prof. Z. showed me your letter and told me of your idea for calling attention to other published material. This will be a lovely feature (would the other members of our editorial board could come up with some nice ideas like that!). It will be a task for you with all this reviewing and obtaining, so please ask for help from me’’. In fact, she generously and rapidly typed many of my articles (laying numerous traps in her typescripts, some of which I only detected at proof stage). A word would occasionally catch her attention: ‘‘I want to go to Araby and find me an Effendia, Inspired, as I must be, by your stunning word COMPENDIA. I’ll sit around at home tonight and catch up with my mendia, I’ll light the stove and fry myself a couple of pork tendia. Bright makeup and a dress I’ll wear, to reinstate my gendia, ‘What’s more I’ll stuff my bra, and everyone will say STUPENDIA! And should you come around for twenty bucks that I should lendia, Do not expect a dime–instead I’ll ripia and rendia. Complaints will not be heard: I’ll claim I do not understendia, For to be left alone is my fond wish, and my intendia. Yes, lares and penates I must pack (plus my compendia), And I shall off to Araby–that is, when things are frendlia’’.
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And on another occasion: ‘‘I promise, liebchen, I haven’t done one slimy underhanded thing this time. Not yet, that is. Which is not to say that I am going to take stridden lying down. (Yes, yes, it is all legal I know, but that is what the german drivers shout when they run you down because they have the right of way.) N*O*R did you fail to evoke some inner protest from me when you went on and on about how those computers could gussey up conferences when programmed properly’’. Judith was faithful to her old typewriter and relished the description of her (by Wolfgang Baumeister and Manfred Ru¨hle) as the person who made word-processors obsolete. And finally, her reaction to a paper containing the word ‘thelytoky’. ‘‘I never thought you’d leave such a fabulous word unused,’’ I wrote, and she replied: ‘‘I didn’t’’. With song or with hymn, I’m full to the brim But the outlook is grim when we come to ‘‘HER/HIM’’. It’s confusing, God knows, when we take off our clothes, for not everything shows (like our tits and our toes). How does one define, with nary a sign, but faced with appendages subtle and fine, what sex to assign to your corpus or mine? (Though one or the other’d be equally fine.) And now smart-ass scientists join in the fray. With all of their labels they get in the way. They call us ‘‘Eutardi’’ or worse, ‘‘Thelatoky’’. For this they should surely be put in the pokey. Okey-dokey??? (I should just mention that thelytoky relates to the sex of creatures conceived by parthenogenesis: thelytoky if they are females, arrhenotoky if they are males.) Challenges to verbal jousts were often included in the envelope. The Saturday Review competitions were a frequent source: here are some of her responses to their call for ‘Double dactyls’ [7]: Lackaday lackaday Judith Reiffel gets all her journals in one big load.
Still she endeavors to offer some quatrains in NONcompetitional friendly mode. (actually, factually Judith Reiffel Steals her SR from the desk of her boss. She doesn’t repent Rather, she is content as he quite conscientiously makes up his loss.) Gobbledy gobbledy Joseph R. Goebbels called for a look at the family line: ‘‘Accepted are blue eyes and big tits and blond hair and orthopodiacal black boots like mine’’. Goebbels also occurs in a comment on the weather in Berlin (21 March 1985): TODAY IS SPRING! THEY SAID SO OVER THE RADIO! (but then, one must remember Goebbels used to make similar reports over the same frequency, which probably accounts for the freezing temperature and icy rain today). I cannot quote all her bons mots but will just mention a puzzle that circulated at one time: it contained a list of numbers and letters and one had to spell out the words (e.g., 7 ¼ D in a W; solution, days in a week). Here is her reaction to my effort: But I am amazed. The only individual to get them all (with the exception of 200 ¼ D for PG in M, which even the Almighty missed and so did I) was a ladyy SHE got 8 ¼ S on a SS, which I didn’t AND NEITHER DID YOU. Teacher comments on your test: You may be excused for 57 ¼ Happy Virgins, considering. Since I am far more orally oriented, immediately I recognized Heinz Varieties, although I wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot lip. I shall
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also excuse 13 Stars on the American Flag, since probably in your time there were only 13y. I met her only once, at the Ultramicroscopy lunch at the EUREM in Hamburg (1982), after which I sent her a parody of the wooden prose of C.P. Snow. I defy you to identify the point at which I halted and she took over: So there they were at last—he sipping the humble refreshments generously provided by the N.H.P.C., she hostessing and shepherding and topping upy after so many months of letters, phone calls, telegrams, this first meeting. To begin with a little formal, a little stiff, but soon—quite soon, he noticed a certain tremor about her brow, a barely detectable twitch at the right side of her mouth, as if she needed urgently to express some carefully stifled but now about to erupt emotion that had been, throughout the meeting, nudging, gripping, raging to escape. His eyes said ‘‘speak’’. She shook her head, helplessly. His eyes commanded, ‘‘SPEAK’’. And she knew what she had to say. Their relationship had always been one of subtle nuance, elevating ideas clothed, for fear of detection, in the coarse language of the common man. But she knew he understood, he always hady. Her reaction to Ruska’s Nobel prize was again typical: ‘‘Just after your call the telephone rang again, and didn’t stop ringing until five minutes ago. Because Ruska got the Nobel prize, sharing it with Binnig and Rohrer. Isn’t that a gas? Ruska is on holiday, and the BZ (Berliner Zeitung) (yellow journal) sent a helicopter and found him taking a walk and schlepped him back to the hotel, where they interviewed him. jesus, it’s a good thing we’ve got a festschrift in press’’. In 1994, Elmar Zeitler handed over the editorship of Ultramicroscopy to Pieter Kruit, whose wife Jenny Denman took over Judith’s role. Judith sold her dacha in Eiterfeld and her apartment in the WundtstraXe: What I’m trying to do, trying like hell, is sell my place in Berlin and also sell the slum in Eiterfeld. It’s not easy, probably because what I think is desirable other people think is strange.
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Yesterday, however, the owner of a low place next door (Cafe´ Melangey) rang my bell to tell me that he had a friend looking for just such an appartment as miney.But while he was snooping over the place, at my invitation, he spied this huge painting I’ve got in the bedroom (never mind asking whyy) kind of Romeo/ Juliet thing, 100 150 cm, all pinkie-bluie and total schnulzig, and he stopped in his tracks and exclaimed and exclaimed and said he had to have it (which delighted me because I’d, only two weeks ago, advertised the thing only to meet with disdainful rejection by potential customers who wanted something morey THICK (honest, that’s what they said, the paint should be thicker))y. She then moved back to the US, to Jamaica Plain (in the Boston area): My appartment is roomy, and my neighborhood is wonderfully funky. A complete mix, black and white and beige and yellow, and some idiots from halfway houses, and people who eat biologically correctly or whatever, gays, straights, olds, youngs. Elegant it surely is not, but it’s directly on the 39 busline which gets you downtown in about 20 min. Upstairs lived a poet whose poems didn’t rhyme ‘‘at least to my ears. We feed each other’s already smug opinion of ourselves through endless compliment and politesse. He thinks I’m actually a charming old lady (har de har har) and we drink a lot of sherry and act old world.’’ The move provoked musings on what she would buy if she came into a fortune: You know, if I were rich I would really know how to live. First off, I’d buy a Bing & Grondahl or whatever they’re called music system. I hate music systems and other things that are black with knobs and switches because I cannot determine what I’m looking at—an electric shaver, a hi-fi system, a computer, a camera, a clock, a computer—they all look alike to me. But this Bing & Grondahl thing, my god it was just beautiful. And I didn’t even dare ask the price.
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It’s sobering to think that perhaps I will not ever own something I think is just beautiful, at least this particular thing. Oh well, maybe I’ll buy a new T-shirt instead, one that says DIE YUPPIE PIG. Next thing I’d buy, a sable coat. Long, and full, and I would wear it to the grocery store, especially to the environmentally correct grocery store, where the conservationists and nature lovers shop. I hate them. Maybe I should buy a whaleskin coat. Embroidered with seed pearls. No, it’s the sable. During the next few years, many friends from Europe and America came to stay in her guest room. In 2001, her health began to deteriorate and on the morning of 7 February 2002, she did not wake up. Her sons Evan and David invited relations and friends to assemble at her beloved ‘‘Point’’ (Albert Crewe, Elmar Zeitler, Leonard Reiffel and others); her ashes were then scattered on Lake Michigan, as she had wished. Peter Hawkes
References [1] E. Zeitler, In memory of Judith Reiffel, Ultramicroscopy 100 (2004) vii–ix. [2] J. Reiffel, Not for publication, Ultramicroscopy 49 (1993) 443–446. [3] L. Gandolfi, J. Reiffel, Enhancement of contrast in the CEM and STEM using bumpy specimens and employing the ‘‘dappled field’’ mode of operation, in: C.J. Arcenaux, G.W. Bailey (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting EMSA, Claitor, Baton Rouge, 1974, pp. 552–553. [4] L. Gandolfi, Publication scam, Phys. Today 36 (2) (1983) 108. [5] P.W. Hawkes (Ed.), Letter to the editor, Ultramicroscopy 4 (1979) 355. [6] P.W. Hawkes, Units and conventions in electron microscopy, for use in Ultramicroscopy, Ultramicroscopy 5 (1980) 67–70. [7] A. Hecht, J. Hollander (Eds.), Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls, Atheneum, New York, 1967.
Ultramicroscopy 102 (2005) 173–180 www.elsevier.com/locate/ultramic
Judith Reiffel (1931–2002): Life and Letters
J. REIFFEL
Anyone who published, or attempted to publish, an article in Ultramicroscopy in the ‘‘Zeitler years’’ (1975–1993) will know the name of Judith Reiffel. But few of us have any picture of the person behind the name. Elmar Zeitler has dedicated his Editorial in Volume 100 to her [1] and she has given us a glimpse of herself in her contribution to the Zeitler festschrift [2], but who was she really? These lines are intended to record a few more details of her life and are illustrated by anecdotes sent to me by her family and friends as well as extracts from some of her correspondence with me over the years. doi:10.1016/j.ultramic.2004.10.001
First, the facts: Judith Reiffel was born Judith Eve Blumenthal on 5 November 1931 in Omaha (Nebraska), the third child and only daughter of a family of four. Her parents were Edgar Blumenthal, a precision machinist and Laverne, ne´e Wilson. When Judith was still very young, the family moved to Chicago and settled not far from the University of Chicago, where Judith first attended Wadsworth Grammar School and then progressed to the Hyde Park High School. Her brother David, only a year older than she, recalls that her favourite haunts were Lake Shore Park,
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called ‘The Point’ at 57th street, the Museum of Science and Industry and the Art Institute; the two of them formed a gang whose pleasure was to harass the pretentious and ‘‘punch holes in personal balloons’’. She continued to do this all her life. In 1950, she was working as a secretary in the Public Relations Department of the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she met Leonard Reiffel; they married in 1951. (This Institute will be known indirectly to many electron microscopists since the IIT Research Institute, IITRI, published the proceedings of the Scanning Electron Microscopy meetings for many years.) She then became a travel writer for the Chicago American (a daily newspaper, now defunct) but had never visited the places she described: her accounts drew upon published travel stories and guidebooks. She wrote imaginatively and fluently; all her life she felt that her word skills were her ‘‘only saleable asset’’. In the mid-1950s, two sons were born, Evan Carl (a graduate of Arizona State University who has his own business in Chicago) and David Lee (a graduate of Harvard School of Music, now a composer and book-designer). In 1960, Judith and Leonard separated and were divorced a year later. Judith then obtained a post as secretary in the Public Relations Department of the University of Chicago, which entrusted her with organizing many of the events in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the university. At a commemorative concert, she played the tambourine while perched high on a balcony on the tower of the university’s Rockefeller Chapel. A little later, she heard (via the grapevine, the vacancy had not been posted) that Albert Crewe, Director of Argonne National Laboratory (1961–1967) and professor in the university, was looking for a new secretary. ‘‘She popped her head into my office’’, Crewe recalls, and said ‘You need a secretary and I am a good one’. Without hesitation, I hired her! How she knew about the vacancy I never found out but it was typical of her to know everything about everyone. She was a good secretary but she was much more. She rapidly took over the lab, especially the graduate students. On one occasion (at least one), she objected to their hairstyles and proceeded to give everyone a haircut
in the lab. She also paid for gossip. Twenty-five cents for a good piece of gossip and only a nickel for a piece of low quality. ‘‘As I recall, Elmar Zeitler came to Chicago shortly afterwards and Judith took care of him as well. She was always happy to expand her empire, so it was natural for her to take over his new Journal as well as all the other activities of our two labs’’. Another reason why Crewe accepted her was surely her appearance. She has a flair for choosing the clothes that would suit her and was always ‘stylish’. She was petite with dark wavy hair. The 1960s clearly brought out the best in Judith (or worst, depending on your point of view). She and a group of friends created the imaginary figure of Rose Bimler, a liberal-minded woman who had supposedly disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. ‘Rose Bimler’ became the subject of a documentary on public television, complete with footage of children chanting ‘‘Free Rose Bimler’’; the hoax was famous enough to make the Chicago Tribune’s list of memorable events of that memorable decade! I have googled ‘Rose Bimler’ to see whether any account of the hoax has found its way onto the web. She is indeed there, but with no mention of the hoax: in connection with children’s clothes, on eBay, and on the Greg Kihn Band Homepage Guestbook where a certain David asks ‘Who is Rose Bimler?’ but the question is unfortunately undated. Nor was Albert Crewe spared: ‘‘I was lucky to escape one of her best efforts. I was in the habit of preparing my talks by putting my slides in order and then relying on them to prompt my memory when delivering the talk. On one occasion she slipped a slide of her own into my collection. It was one of Adolf Hitler sitting in a chair with his right hand supporting the breast of a naked woman standing beside him. Fortunately I checked my slides once more just prior to giving my talk and found the intruder’’. How disappointed she must have been! Her spoof EMSA paper is another delightful example [3]. Again, I quote Albert Crewe: ‘‘The first I knew about it was the day before I left for the meeting. I said that I would see her the next week and she replied, ‘But I will see you tomorrow’. With some astonishment I asked why
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she was going and she said that she had to give a paper. Eventually, the full story came out. She had noticed that the main topic of the lab was various types of contrast so she wanted to express her own thoughts. I recall that [the paper] included a photo of the moon over Lake Michigan1 and gave reference to a Papal encyclical,2 but otherwise it was nonsensical. Nevertheless, it had been accepted for publication. With some difficulty I persuaded her not to go to the meeting. In response she sent a message to the chairman to the effect that one of the ‘authors’, one Dr. Gandolfi, had passed away and so they were not able to attend the meeting. I understood that the chairman of the session solemnly gave the sad news to the audience’’. He also used the vacant 15 min to provoke a discussion of the quality to be expected of material for the EMSA proceedings. The ‘missing’ paper clearly revealed shortcomings in the EMSA refereeing machinery, which was subsequently distinctly more rigorous. Her paper is as amusing today as when it was written. Two microscopes are required, a CEM and a STEM, and ‘‘the CEM is usually placed on the left, the STEM occupying a superior position on the right (as the investigator faces the microscopes). That this particular positioning is crucial to the success of specimen observation will become obvious when one considers that (1) most investigators are righthanded, (2) the signal intensity of the STEM is 104 times greater than that for CEM, which means that, (3) the juice must be able to be turned off and on the STEM almost instantaneously. With the CEM set for operating in the ‘bright field’ mode and the STEM set for the ‘dark field’ mode, the specimen is inserted in the specimen chamber for the conventional microscope, which is attached to a conveyor belt connecting it with the specimen chamber for the STEM. In the initial design stages, the conveyor–specimen chambers presented almost insurmountable problems, because of the requirement that the specimens be transported from the left-side ma1 The caption reads: ‘‘Dappled field effect on Tobacco Mosaic Virus. Moon over Lake Michigan (on right) is an artifact due to specimen preparation. 750,000 X mag’’. 2 In fact, the reference is to Caesar, J., in Act I, Sc. 2.
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chine to the right (or conversely) with great speed, combined with minimum loss of vacuum to insure minimum specimen contamination. We have experienced fair success employing a standard Garrard turntable which supports the lightweight chamber on a woven horsehair conveyor belt which is attached, spring-like, to the spindle with the rotational speed set at 99 rpm. Horsehair was chosen because of its little-realized elasticity and durability, which lends itself very well to the stretching and snapping required for the speed at which the system must travel’’. Lily Gandolfi was resurrected a few years later in the pages of Physics Today [4], where she protested about congress participants who failed to attend, somewhat ironically in view of her own behaviour at EMSA. Many years later (1994), she remembered those days: I was just reading that the latest employee affliction for which employers can be sued (and we’re always looking for these, aren’t we?) is something described as REPEATED MOVEMENT malady. It seems that people who sit on computers get sore hands fromytyping? They showed pictures of them little hooks, hands poised and fingers actually having to touch the keys, REPEATEDLY. When we get old we like to schrei about the old days, you know, and my old days consisted of typing VERY FAST on a manual machine, for whole days, in fact I got paid for doing that. Also, to get money for European trips I used to type theses. No mistakes allowed, no corrections, no nothin’. Merely, perfection, and fast, and 30 b a page, double spaced. Of course, those were the days when a scientist would send his important peers real preprints, which had been produced using carbon paper, meaning if a guy had ten peers at least two of them were going to get almost unreadable copies, and that was with the poor typist doing the opus two times. Some awfully good science was done then, I hear, and there was genuine working together toward a goal instead of trying to beat out the other guy. On the other hand, we did not have hard rock ‘music’ to listen to on CDs.
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In what leisure remained to her, her son David tells me that She dabbled in painting (I and my brother have several of her canvases), writing, and miniatures at various times in her life, and always seemed to have a bohemian crowd around her – I feel very lucky to have grown up in such an artistic and stimulating atmosphere. She taught herself to bake seriously after a disastrous incident with a cherry pie, and ended up very good at it indeed – doing a great job at kougelhopf and lebkuchen. Her interest in such things would flutter like a butterfly from flower to flower. She knew how to enjoy life. She also knew how to compose limericksy here is one for ultramicroscopists: An electron microscopy whiz Is involved in some dubious biz. When interests conflict He is quick to predict Great profit to mankind (all his). In July 1975, after preliminary discussion with H. Wimmers, one of the founders of the North Holland Publishing Co. (which amalgamated with Elsevier in 1971), the first issue of Ultramicroscopy appeared, with Elmar Zeitler as editor and Judith Reiffel as editorial secretary, and most of us would agree, ruefully in some cases, that these were her finest hours. Once the editor had examined incoming manuscripts, she took over all correspondence with the authors, the referees and her crony at Elsevier, Mrs Franc- oise VerploeghChasse´e, whom she forgave for her nameyFlemish names were one of her nightmares: REF. MS***, co-authored by (immediately one’s skin begins to prickle, anticipating a veritable shit-load of unpronounceable and unspellable names, obvious hangers-on to the real go-getter in the laboratory—the one who is generous to a fault in allowing every meat-head who handled a test-tube or swept off a laboratory bank to claim co-authorship)ydoes it matter what their names are? And as luck would have it, these choo-choo trains
of authorship always seem to come from Belgiumy After a lengthy diatribe, she resumes: Anyway, what I’ve got today is a Short Note, three-and-a-half pages long, with (are you ready) Vanhellemont, Bender, Claeys, Van Landuyt, Declerck, Amelinckx and Van Overstraeten as authors. Notice, the ONLY one I can be sure of getting right is the second – probably because I go on one every so often. Correspondence with referees tended to be in rhyme, ranging from ‘‘On behalf of the Dutch Thanks much!’’ to ‘‘Many thanks for the chores, which you handled apace (the ‘letter’ improved, with your usual grace). The reffing for *** was adroit and discreet. Now, God willing, he’ll get out from under my feet. As hinted, we’ll titillate Pozzi awhile, then accepta-da-scripta and end, with a smile’’. In 1977, Elmar Zeitler succeeded Ernst Ruska as director of the Institute of Electron Microscopy at the Fritz-Haber-Institute of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and the editorial office moved to Berlin. Judith knew no German and set to work to acquire a basic knowledge of the language before she moved. Her son David remembers seeing lists of German prepositions pinned up in her office. In Germany, a new problem arose, which meant that her interaction with referees could be active (rather than passive): Ach, you’re going to hate me. This manuscript, written by one of our own people and translated by one of our own translators, has been giving me a big headache. The original translations are always a bit rough and it’s my job to make them smoother, before submitting them to any journal. In this case, most of the smoothing was firmly rejected by the author, and so the
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manuscript submitted to Ultramicroscopy still contains awkward spots which, because of the two very separate hats we wear here, are difficult to treat. The dialogue goes something likey INSTITUTE EDITOR: We have made a few changes, for clarity and English. AUTHOR: How dare you! One says it this way in German. INSTITUTE EDITOR: ja, ja, liebchen, but you want it for an English journal. AUTHOR: Okay, klug-Arsch, I am the author and I submit it any way I want. Let the journal tell me it’s wrong (author submits manuscript). ULTRAMICROSCOPY EDITOR: Aha! A nice little manuscript! hmmmm. hmmmmm. uh, oh jeez, this sounds kind of funny. AUTHOR: Vat you mean funny!! I know you. You thought it was funny when you saw it before, but I fix you, kiddo. All what you changed I put back, haha. You reject this artikel, you tell me to change, I accuse you are prejudiced. How you like that word, huh? ULTRAMICROSCOPY EDITOR (stroking his wings and adjusting his halo): Awri’. Let’s get another opinion. Can you cough up three referees? AUTHOR: y.oh, you are refereeing? ULTRAMICROSCOPY EDITOR: It’s journal policy. AUTHOR: vell, who you think should be referees? ULTRAMICROSCOPY EDITOR (cool as you please): I’ll give you a list of twenty. You choose. AUTHOR (falling into the trap): I choose ***, *** and Hawkes. My first exchange with her concerned the name of the journal [1,5], as I was one of those who replied (in verse) to her appeal for suggestions for a new name or defences of the existing one. Soon after this, we corresponded over an editorial about units and conventions [6]; this produced a postcard: Thou shalt not have in thine house divers measures, a great and a small. But thou shalt have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just measure shalt thou have. Deuteronomy 25: 14–15
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(In case you want to stick this into your SI Short Note.) I noted appreciatively that she quoted from the 17th century translation but it was unfortunately too late to include it. It was in 1980 that I wrote to offer an occasional article, drawing attention to electron microscopy publications that might be overlooked, which provoked an enthusiastic reply: ‘‘On behalf of the journal, Prof. Z. showed me your letter and told me of your idea for calling attention to other published material. This will be a lovely feature (would the other members of our editorial board could come up with some nice ideas like that!). It will be a task for you with all this reviewing and obtaining, so please ask for help from me’’. In fact, she generously and rapidly typed many of my articles (laying numerous traps in her typescripts, some of which I only detected at proof stage). A word would occasionally catch her attention: ‘‘I want to go to Araby and find me an Effendia, Inspired, as I must be, by your stunning word COMPENDIA. I’ll sit around at home tonight and catch up with my mendia, I’ll light the stove and fry myself a couple of pork tendia. Bright makeup and a dress I’ll wear, to reinstate my gendia, ‘What’s more I’ll stuff my bra, and everyone will say STUPENDIA! And should you come around for twenty bucks that I should lendia, Do not expect a dime–instead I’ll ripia and rendia. Complaints will not be heard: I’ll claim I do not understendia, For to be left alone is my fond wish, and my intendia. Yes, lares and penates I must pack (plus my compendia), And I shall off to Araby–that is, when things are frendlia’’.
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And on another occasion: ‘‘I promise, liebchen, I haven’t done one slimy underhanded thing this time. Not yet, that is. Which is not to say that I am going to take stridden lying down. (Yes, yes, it is all legal I know, but that is what the german drivers shout when they run you down because they have the right of way.) N*O*R did you fail to evoke some inner protest from me when you went on and on about how those computers could gussey up conferences when programmed properly’’. Judith was faithful to her old typewriter and relished the description of her (by Wolfgang Baumeister and Manfred Ru¨hle) as the person who made word-processors obsolete. And finally, her reaction to a paper containing the word ‘thelytoky’. ‘‘I never thought you’d leave such a fabulous word unused,’’ I wrote, and she replied: ‘‘I didn’t’’. With song or with hymn, I’m full to the brim But the outlook is grim when we come to ‘‘HER/HIM’’. It’s confusing, God knows, when we take off our clothes, for not everything shows (like our tits and our toes). How does one define, with nary a sign, but faced with appendages subtle and fine, what sex to assign to your corpus or mine? (Though one or the other’d be equally fine.) And now smart-ass scientists join in the fray. With all of their labels they get in the way. They call us ‘‘Eutardi’’ or worse, ‘‘Thelatoky’’. For this they should surely be put in the pokey. Okey-dokey??? (I should just mention that thelytoky relates to the sex of creatures conceived by parthenogenesis: thelytoky if they are females, arrhenotoky if they are males.) Challenges to verbal jousts were often included in the envelope. The Saturday Review competitions were a frequent source: here are some of her responses to their call for ‘Double dactyls’ [7]: Lackaday lackaday Judith Reiffel gets all her journals in one big load.
Still she endeavors to offer some quatrains in NONcompetitional friendly mode. (actually, factually Judith Reiffel Steals her SR from the desk of her boss. She doesn’t repent Rather, she is content as he quite conscientiously makes up his loss.) Gobbledy gobbledy Joseph R. Goebbels called for a look at the family line: ‘‘Accepted are blue eyes and big tits and blond hair and orthopodiacal black boots like mine’’. Goebbels also occurs in a comment on the weather in Berlin (21 March 1985): TODAY IS SPRING! THEY SAID SO OVER THE RADIO! (but then, one must remember Goebbels used to make similar reports over the same frequency, which probably accounts for the freezing temperature and icy rain today). I cannot quote all her bons mots but will just mention a puzzle that circulated at one time: it contained a list of numbers and letters and one had to spell out the words (e.g., 7 ¼ D in a W; solution, days in a week). Here is her reaction to my effort: But I am amazed. The only individual to get them all (with the exception of 200 ¼ D for PG in M, which even the Almighty missed and so did I) was a ladyy SHE got 8 ¼ S on a SS, which I didn’t AND NEITHER DID YOU. Teacher comments on your test: You may be excused for 57 ¼ Happy Virgins, considering. Since I am far more orally oriented, immediately I recognized Heinz Varieties, although I wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot lip. I shall
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also excuse 13 Stars on the American Flag, since probably in your time there were only 13y. I met her only once, at the Ultramicroscopy lunch at the EUREM in Hamburg (1982), after which I sent her a parody of the wooden prose of C.P. Snow. I defy you to identify the point at which I halted and she took over: So there they were at last—he sipping the humble refreshments generously provided by the N.H.P.C., she hostessing and shepherding and topping upy after so many months of letters, phone calls, telegrams, this first meeting. To begin with a little formal, a little stiff, but soon—quite soon, he noticed a certain tremor about her brow, a barely detectable twitch at the right side of her mouth, as if she needed urgently to express some carefully stifled but now about to erupt emotion that had been, throughout the meeting, nudging, gripping, raging to escape. His eyes said ‘‘speak’’. She shook her head, helplessly. His eyes commanded, ‘‘SPEAK’’. And she knew what she had to say. Their relationship had always been one of subtle nuance, elevating ideas clothed, for fear of detection, in the coarse language of the common man. But she knew he understood, he always hady. Her reaction to Ruska’s Nobel prize was again typical: ‘‘Just after your call the telephone rang again, and didn’t stop ringing until five minutes ago. Because Ruska got the Nobel prize, sharing it with Binnig and Rohrer. Isn’t that a gas? Ruska is on holiday, and the BZ (Berliner Zeitung) (yellow journal) sent a helicopter and found him taking a walk and schlepped him back to the hotel, where they interviewed him. jesus, it’s a good thing we’ve got a festschrift in press’’. In 1994, Elmar Zeitler handed over the editorship of Ultramicroscopy to Pieter Kruit, whose wife Jenny Denman took over Judith’s role. Judith sold her dacha in Eiterfeld and her apartment in the WundtstraXe: What I’m trying to do, trying like hell, is sell my place in Berlin and also sell the slum in Eiterfeld. It’s not easy, probably because what I think is desirable other people think is strange.
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Yesterday, however, the owner of a low place next door (Cafe´ Melangey) rang my bell to tell me that he had a friend looking for just such an appartment as miney.But while he was snooping over the place, at my invitation, he spied this huge painting I’ve got in the bedroom (never mind asking whyy) kind of Romeo/ Juliet thing, 100 150 cm, all pinkie-bluie and total schnulzig, and he stopped in his tracks and exclaimed and exclaimed and said he had to have it (which delighted me because I’d, only two weeks ago, advertised the thing only to meet with disdainful rejection by potential customers who wanted something morey THICK (honest, that’s what they said, the paint should be thicker))y. She then moved back to the US, to Jamaica Plain (in the Boston area): My appartment is roomy, and my neighborhood is wonderfully funky. A complete mix, black and white and beige and yellow, and some idiots from halfway houses, and people who eat biologically correctly or whatever, gays, straights, olds, youngs. Elegant it surely is not, but it’s directly on the 39 busline which gets you downtown in about 20 min. Upstairs lived a poet whose poems didn’t rhyme ‘‘at least to my ears. We feed each other’s already smug opinion of ourselves through endless compliment and politesse. He thinks I’m actually a charming old lady (har de har har) and we drink a lot of sherry and act old world.’’ The move provoked musings on what she would buy if she came into a fortune: You know, if I were rich I would really know how to live. First off, I’d buy a Bing & Grondahl or whatever they’re called music system. I hate music systems and other things that are black with knobs and switches because I cannot determine what I’m looking at—an electric shaver, a hi-fi system, a computer, a camera, a clock, a computer—they all look alike to me. But this Bing & Grondahl thing, my god it was just beautiful. And I didn’t even dare ask the price.
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It’s sobering to think that perhaps I will not ever own something I think is just beautiful, at least this particular thing. Oh well, maybe I’ll buy a new T-shirt instead, one that says DIE YUPPIE PIG. Next thing I’d buy, a sable coat. Long, and full, and I would wear it to the grocery store, especially to the environmentally correct grocery store, where the conservationists and nature lovers shop. I hate them. Maybe I should buy a whaleskin coat. Embroidered with seed pearls. No, it’s the sable. During the next few years, many friends from Europe and America came to stay in her guest room. In 2001, her health began to deteriorate and on the morning of 7 February 2002, she did not wake up. Her sons Evan and David invited relations and friends to assemble at her beloved ‘‘Point’’ (Albert Crewe, Elmar Zeitler, Leonard Reiffel and others); her ashes were then scattered on Lake Michigan, as she had wished. Peter Hawkes
References [1] E. Zeitler, In memory of Judith Reiffel, Ultramicroscopy 100 (2004) vii–ix. [2] J. Reiffel, Not for publication, Ultramicroscopy 49 (1993) 443–446. [3] L. Gandolfi, J. Reiffel, Enhancement of contrast in the CEM and STEM using bumpy specimens and employing the ‘‘dappled field’’ mode of operation, in: C.J. Arcenaux, G.W. Bailey (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting EMSA, Claitor, Baton Rouge, 1974, pp. 552–553. [4] L. Gandolfi, Publication scam, Phys. Today 36 (2) (1983) 108. [5] P.W. Hawkes (Ed.), Letter to the editor, Ultramicroscopy 4 (1979) 355. [6] P.W. Hawkes, Units and conventions in electron microscopy, for use in Ultramicroscopy, Ultramicroscopy 5 (1980) 67–70. [7] A. Hecht, J. Hollander (Eds.), Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls, Atheneum, New York, 1967.