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Early Days   Early Graduate Students   Missions to the Moon   Telescopes & Research

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Richard Greenberg He was an old-world kind of guy. Little things: He wore a jacket and tie to work all the time. He pretty much left me to do whatever I wanted. Once he was working on a paper that had to do the origin of the solar system, and he arranged that I’d come in every afternoon to answer questions for him. He would dictate to his secretary [Ida Edwards]. I’d tell him stuff, he’d convert it into paragraphs that he’d speak to her, and she’d write them. She was his secretary for a long, long time. Lyn Doose I think the longest conversation I ever had with him was, I was observing up at the 61-inch, and he was very worried that I was going to back my car up over his flowers that he planted up there. He was intimidating in those days, is my main memory, but once you broke the ice he was an okay guy. William Hartmann Even though he was intimidating to us, he had this very gracious side. I remember an incident that happened—there was another student, actually an undergraduate, named Charles Wood. He’s quite well known in volcanic studies today, and writes a column for Sky & Telescope and had done all kinds of wonderful and interesting things. Chuck was an assistant in the lab. He had kind of fallen in love with a young lady who here someplace on campus, and seemed to be in kind of a daze over this. One day I’m walking down the hall and Kuiper calls me in and suddenly he’s talking about Chuck and he says, “Is there some problem or something with Chuck?” I said, “Well, I think maybe it’s that he likes this girl and he’s really interested in her…” “Oh, he’s in love. I understand now perfectly.” He was so worldly but it was so gracious. He was like, “Oh, now I understand; we’ll make allowances.” That was sort of nice.	Charles Wood Kuiper was a great, Germanic authority. He was very civilized, very august: The world expert on any topic. At least that’s the way he came across. He was very nice to me. I was an undergraduate student—we didn’t have many undergraduate students who worked at the Lunar Lab; most were grad students—and when I left to join the Peace Corps he had a little going-away party at his house for me, which was unusual, I thought. When he had various get-togethers at his house, when astronomers came to visit, he nicely invited me a number of times. I remember one rainy, rainy Tucson summer thunderstorm, he called me to his office and he said, “I need you to take this proposal we’re sending to NASA to President Harvill’s office at the center of campus and have it signed.” I looked out the window and said, “But, Dr. Kuiper, there’s a huge thunderstorm going on. I’ll get drenched.” He said, “If we want to get to the Moon, you have to walk through the rain.” And I did. And we got to the Moon, so he was absolutely right.

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