Guy Consolmagno

About 1976, so I’d been a student for a year, I was sharing an apartment, a little dumpy house on a road that’s not there anymore, much less the apartment house is not there anymore—I was sharing it with another student named Bob Howell, who’s the fourth one who came in my year. It was a miserable place. It was up by Grant and Alvernon.

Of course we would ride our bicycles in the morning because none of us could afford cars or anything like that. It’s cold riding your bike that far when it’s January in Tucson. We heard about one of the other guys who was looking for a place to live, and had found a house that was close to campus, on Hawthorne Street near Country Club. Only it had five rooms. It was the only way that any of us could afford to live in it—we were making 300 dollars a month. That was our entire stipend that we had to live off of and pay rent. So rent was like 90 dollars a month; that was a third of your stipend. But if we could find four other guys to move in, we could rent the place. This was the origin of Hawthorne House.

Hawthorne House was an institution among graduate students from’76 until about three years ago. Because after each of us graduated, someone else would move in, and it was a regular house for grad students in the Lunar Lab. I was one of the originals, Bob Howell was one of the originals, I believe John Wacker was one of the originals, Mike Feierberg, and I want to say Bruce Wilking.

Then Bob Howell decided to move out because it was too close to campus, and he wanted to bicycle. Bob was a biking fanatic. Sundays he would get on his bike, bike to Kitt Peak, bike up the mountain, visit whoever was observing that he knew that day, and bike home. 108 miles. That was his Sunday entertainment. After Bob moved out, I believe this was when Nick Gautier moved in, so that was the core of Hawthorne House.

William Bottke

I just found out that someone has bought the house and put it on sale for 900 thousand. If that house gets 900 thousand I’m going to be very sorry, because there’s no way that house is worth that much. The house had five rooms, maybe 1,900 square feet or so, and just a backyard of dirt. That became the house where four or five grad students stayed, and because there was a concentration of grad students, the parties would always migrate there. It always gave people someplace to go when they didn’t want to go home.

We always had people bouncing around the house for one reason or another. Some people have a hard time living in a house with a lot of other people, so there will always be some turnover. I can honestly say I’ve lived with a fair fraction of the field.

Paul Geissler

The first thing that happened when I got to LPL was the graduate students all took me in. They were very protective and sharing and open with one another, and they formed a gang. Typically we would do a lot of things together, especially as I continued on, but even right away they took me under their wing. Individuals would ask me out for lunch. The interesting thing was they had a map of the world up on the wall, and they told me to stick in a pin in the place that I called home.

I said, “Is this where I’m born?”

They said, “No, the place you call home.” So I stuck it right in Tasmania, which is the area in Australia that I spent most of my time, and I’m still very fond of. There were pins from all over the world. That made it easy too.

John Spencer

For a while we were having dinners in the evening on a regular basis, mid-week—I forget what day—when we might have the inhabitants of Hawthorne House and then another three or four outside people would also come. Or we would just spontaneously say, “Oh, let’s make spaghetti this evening” and then we’d all head over there on a Saturday evening.

There was always something going on. Sometimes it was just a couple people watching TV, drinking a beer in the evening. It was a great place to be social. It was always a mess, as you can imagine, with five graduate students living there. No one was ever sure who was supposed to wash the dishes or clean the floor or anything. Some people kind of recoiled when they came in the door. We got used to it.

Guy Consolmagno

One of the things that we did as grad students was that we had Journal Club once a week—either a regular, some professor giving a talk or a couple of students giving talks, and they’d have cookies and milk and tea and that sort of thing. It all came from the University and it was all dreadful. Plastic cookies.

We went to the Department Head and said, “You know, we’ve all got apartments. We could cook, we’ll take turns. If you’d pay us we could make the cookies.” They agreed to that, and we did it for one semester, and then they were told that the University would only pay the University for food; you couldn’t get it from an outside vendor. So the grad students couldn’t get paid for this.

We wanted to figure out a way of making money so we could continue to pay for the cookies. John Grady and Cliff Stoll, who were two of the students at the time, had decided that they wanted to get T-shirts printed that had the emblem of the Lunar Lab. I remember I wrote the Latin inscription on the bottom, which was supposed to mean, “Out of the solar nebula, planets.” Four words. I got the Latin grammar wrong on three of the four words.

When they went to get the T-shirts printed, they saw the guy who had this company printing T-shirts, and he showed them how they did everything, and they said to themselves, “We could do that.” So we started our own T-shirt printing company. We called it “Nocturnal Aviation” because it was a real fly-by-night company. We got the contract from Kitt Peak to print the T-shirts that would be sold at the gift shop—because, you know, somebody knew somebody who, that’s how all these things are done—and we printed the T-shirts in the backyard of Hawthorne House.

About that time, I think it was Nick Gautier who was trying to get some lab equipment and just wrote off to a couple of companies that might have what he was looking for—you know, “We’re trying to get equipment for our lab”—and people started shipping him surplus lab equipment; two-year-old terminals. At one point, word came down: “There’s three boxes and a thing on wheels!” I forget what the three boxes were; they may have been old terminals. But the thing on wheels was about the size of a telephone booth, on wheels, that was a high-energy, high-electricity, high-voltage source that you could use for vaporizing aluminum. I don’t know what happened to it, if they ever used it or not.

But they started just writing to everybody. Part of it was they said, “We will print T-shirts for cool stuff.” Texas Instruments wrote back saying that they would send them four sets of all the chips you need to make a mini-computer—unassembled of course, you’d have to design and build the circuits yourself—in exchange for five thousand T-shirts. An enormous number! They would pay for the T-shirts; we had to do the printing. Just endless printing of T-shirts in the backyard.

But they got the free terminal and this free set of chips. This was 1976, years before mini-computers or micro-computers, Apple or IBM, and they were building their own computers, literally on pieces of wood that we set up on the kitchen table at Hawthorne House. 

Nicholas Schneider

The summer of ’79, I was new. Gordy Bjoraker and Bill Merline had been there a year, a year and a half. We were saying, “Boy, we miss the old country”—meaning Wisconsin, where all three of us were from—and we said, “I wonder if you can get good bratwurst in this city?” So we shopped around, tried a few places, found out that you could, and we decided we’d have to share this gourmet delicacy with all of our friends. We jokingly called it the first annual Bratfest. The first one came off as a reasonably small event, but obviously it has taken on a life of its own.

William Merline

Gordy was there one semester before me, and I showed up mid-year, and Nick showed up the next fall. It was that first semester of the school year, the ’79-80 school year. We all got together over at the Big A, which I don’t think is even there anymore. We were grumbling because we couldn’t find any bratwurst anywhere. All three of us were from Wisconsin, and bratwurst and Bratfests were common in Wisconsin. We couldn’t find any at the store to buy. Of course now you can buy them anywhere. I don’t think we’re necessarily responsible for that, but you never know.

William Bottke

One of the big highlights of the year was what we call the Bratfest. When I found myself living in the grad student house, I didn’t realize that all of the sudden you became one of the major organizers for a serious party.

In general we’d get 120 pounds of bratwurst. We would bake the night before about 20 cheesecakes. We’d get lots of corn on the cob. We’d get many kegs of beer. This would be an all-day, all-night party. We usually had on the order of between 150 and 200 people coming. This is all in the backyard of this grad student house. It was amazing.

It started off small—there were some misplaced Wisconsinites, Nick Schneider and Bill Merline, that decided they wanted to have their Oktoberfest party here in Tucson, and they named it the Bratfest. Year by year it got a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger, and then it turned into this gargantuan proportion at some point, because everyone had so much fun they kept coming back and the crowds kept getting bigger.

There was always a major fear that we were going to lose money on this thing. Every now and then we would come close. It would always be about two weeks out of my life getting ready for it, but it was so much fun. All the faculty would come. The party, of course, would pretty much go till dawn. By morning it would pretty much clear out except for the people that couldn’t move anymore.

I still have a lot of the Bratfest T-shirts. I have a lot of fond memories from that. It’s sort of a rite of passage for all the students; you go through this and then you remember it and you want to keep doing it. The students who have done it so far, as far as I can see, have done a good job of carrying on the traditions. My theory is that some of these traditions are going to drop off, but somehow they keep going year after year. We’ll see what happens. Maybe we’ll have Bratfest 100 Year, when I’m an old guy.

Paul Geissler

Hawthorne House was already a fixture by the time I got there in 1986. It was rented initially by some folks from the Midwest, like Wisconsin and Michigan, around there. When October came around they wanted to have their Oktoberfest. That’s how the Bratfest started. Originally it was brats and corn and beer and cheesecakes, and it was to relieve the homesickness of the Midwesterners.

I visited there frequently. Of course, I knew lots of people who lived there, and it was a place where you could always drop in. We were there for every party and every social occasion. There was one notorious Bratfest where they had a booth where you could dunk your favorite professor. You would toss bean bags and if you got it just right, there was a dunking chair, so your favorite professor would get dunked. That was a breakdown of protocol and status. Certain professors, Jay Melosh in particular, made a lot of money that way.

We had that beautiful mural of Saturn, a Voyager picture, that was blown up to the size of an entire wall. I’m sure it was the only picture that wasn’t destroyed—I mean, it was a museum-quality picture.

There were probably a lot of romances that took place. We had all these graduate students who did nothing but study, so they don’t have the opportunity to meet anybody else but another graduate student. If you ask me, it’s the very worst form of inbreeding, but it happens.

Nicholas Schneider

There was a party called Bacchanal, and one of themes there was bizarre-flavored daiquiris. Usually it was Bill Merline in charge of the blender. One of them was fish-and-chips daiquiri; snow-pea-and-onion daiquiri. For years people would try to top it.

The other tradition that was very strong and really helped build up a sense of camaraderie were the graduate student skits. Mark Sykes was a key player in those in our years. We would do things not only to amuse but also to inform. Sometimes we had to let certain faculty members know that their behavior didn’t meet the standards for one reason or other, personal or professional, so we would put that right into the skit. Sometimes we were reprimanded for doing it, but it didn’t necessarily change what we did.

Guy Consolmagno

We would have a Christmas party every year, usually at the Director’s residence. The first year we wrote a little skit among the graduates for the Christmas party, and that started a tradition which as far as I know continues, what, thirty-odd years: Student plays making fun of the faculty, in what we hoped was a gentle way.

Mark Sykes

We had these Christmas skits that had some national notoriety, in fact, because they were not very respectful. For instance, one was a Christmas Pageant—the Annunciation, the traveling to Bethlehem, the giving birth to the Savior and all that, except I played the Blessed Virgin. Different students portrayed different faculty members playing different characters, so I played the part of chairman, who was Laurel Wilkening. Then the Three Wise Men following the star, and I gave birth to the savior of planetary science, who we then crucified. That’s the kind of stuff that we did.

It was a long tradition in the graduate student population. When I was there, usually we had me writing things, and when Faith Vilas finally broke down into hysterical laughter, we’d say, “Okay, now we’re getting there.”

William Bottke

One of the other big things we did here is that every winter we had the Christmas party. The students would always do Christmas skits, and they’d do skits about the faculty. Then we started to videotape some of the skits.

The faculty looked forward to them; everybody looked forward to them. A lot of times we would have to write these things a day or two before the Christmas skits. We’d stay up all night trying to come up with something that would be funny. But somehow we always pulled it off. A lot of my memories go back to these Christmas skits and some of the things we did. Almost all the faculty members were a great sport. If we asked them to do something, they’d be a part of it. Sometimes it would be a great embarrassment to them as well, but they always went through with it.

I think that was another thing that helped bind everybody together: The faculty members, while being very good, did not take themselves too seriously. It made things more of a family feeling here.

Humberto Campins

One of the things that I thought was absolutely delightful was the irreverent group of students that I encountered when I first got to LPL, and their Christmas skits. I quickly became involved in those, and I had a great time. When I left as a post-doc, at the University of Maryland, I tried to instigate a similar type of activity among the graduate students there, and they were terrified. They wouldn’t dare do that.

So that was definitely very pleasant. Oh, I have so many stories. One of them that comes to mind is a time when a colleague, Nick Gautier—somebody was stealing cookies from his cookie can in his office, down on the first floor of LPL. He decided that he needed to catch whoever this person was, so he set up a video camera that was rigged to the light, and whenever somebody turned on the light in his office, this video camera would start.

He eventually did catch the culprit, but in addition to the culprit, all of these interesting characters started to show up in his office. The first one was the Cookie Monster. Somebody dressed as the Cookie Monster came and went through his desk, found the cookies, tasted them and said, “Oh, these are no good,” and he had a bag of cookies, and he added cookies to Nick’s can.

This went on. So it was the Cookie Monster, the Munchkin, the Thug, the Unknown Scholar, the Flasher. All of these characters would come in the middle of the night. Then Nick put a clock right next to the wall so the camera would pick up when this was happening. However, these characters picked up on that, and they would move the clock, or come in and not turn on the light and then change the time, so things did not happen in sequence. Even though this was sequential on the videotape, the hours were all wrong.

We would gather in his office every morning to find out who the characters were. I remember that we were joking about who each character was and nobody knew. They figured out eventually that the Cookie Monster was George Rieke. I was the Flasher. George said something about how I didn’t fool anybody; the moment I walked in they knew who I was, and I didn’t have them fooled for a moment, but he had them fooled for about two days or something.

I said, “Yeah, George, but if we could only figure out who the Unknown Scholar is.” The Unknown Scholar came in dressed in a cap and gown, and he was reading Icarus. He would read Icarus and eat the cookies and all of these things.

It must have been two or three weeks that I let it go, and then I said, “George, how long was it that you had them fooled?”

He said, “Oh, like three days.”

Then I said, “Okay, I want to tell you, it’s been about three weeks. I was the Unknown Scholar.”

Anyway, Frank Low, who was Nick’s boss, would come and shoo us away from the monitor every day, because we would all gather there to see what happened the night before. Frank Low would say, “Oh, you guys are wasting time, you’ve got to work! Work!” He would come by and we would all scatter. Then as soon as Frank was gone we would all come back to watch what was going on. That went on for about two weeks, and it was a very memorable time. It had nothing to do with science, but it had to do with the camaraderie that we all had during that time.

Paul Geissler

We originally didn’t have that big extension to the building. We just had the front part of the [Kuiper] Building. We were really cramped. It was way too small of a space. They had great parking in the back, though. But it was small compensation, because the offices were tiny and nobody had an office to themselves.

Behind the Business Office is now a little lecture hall. That space was occupied by maybe 20 graduate students. It was called the ghetto. That one space had these little tiny cubicles put into it, and the individual space would be about as big as a table. Typically there were two of us to a cubicle, and the doors were decorated with all kinds of outrageous stuff; clippings and preprints and cartoons. All kinds of stuff—just what people were working on or were interested in, pictures of their motorcycle or their kids or whatever.

So that was the ghetto. That forged some solidarity among the graduate students, because you’re literally on top of each other. I moved from there to a little tiny closet that Mike Nolan and I shared. It was no bigger than one of these little tiny cubicles, and we literally couldn’t swing a cat, but what was funny about it was we couldn’t both put our chairs back at the same time.

Mark Sykes

The graduate students back then lived in a ghetto behind the main office. There was an absorption tube that ran the length of the building at the time that Uwe Fink would do experiments with, measuring absorption lines of gases. They’d put gases in there and bounce light back and forth over a huge path length, and then see how much of it was absorbed in different wavelengths.

This tube ran right through the graduate student ghetto, so those of us who had an office on the outside wall of the building would have the tube going through it, like a shelf in our office. I put up curtains and a bed, and it was pretty cool.

We were a pretty close-knit bunch back then. When I came in they were also something of an older group. As a consequence we didn’t respect authority a whole lot. We gave the poor faculty a bit of a hard time through our tenure.

That was also the era of magic keys, where all the graduate students would file keys down so you could open all the doors in the building. It was kind of a rite of passage. Everybody would always deny it.

Nicholas Schneider

One of the fun projects that I was involved in, and contributed to the delay of my graduation, was we build a prototype Mars rover called the Mars Ball. There was an idea that a French scientist had had about how to make a rover that had squishy wheels. Each sector of a wheel could be inflated and deflated, and if you had a flat part of the wheel on the bottom you could sort of fall forwards by deflating one sector and then raise up in back by moving the air there. It sounded like a really cool approach to roving on Mars, where something could be big and dumb; just roll over these obstacles.

We built the prototype of this. At one point we thought it was going to be 16 feet tall. That slid over sideways, so we made it six or eight feet tall. It was a very challenging project: We were there with sewing machines, sewing bags, and buying blowers. We got a NASA grant for it. In the end we were able to show that this device would work. We took it to a Mars conference in Washington D.C. where it rolled around and climbed over obstacles.

But the idea was hinged on the idea that you wanted to send something to Mars that was big and dumb. The lesson that I’ve adhered to ever since then is never bet against the computer, because small and smart has turned out, as you can tell from the current rovers, to be the way to go. But it was a fun project. Most of the students were involved and had different roles. I did the computers; other people did the blowers or the fabric of the wheels. It was fun to do something that was so different from the other work.

John Spencer

Other things that started in my tenure were Jay Melosh’s field geology trips. I have very good memories of the first of those, where we went up to the Flagstaff area and got to hike down into Meteor Crater. I remember seeing impact melt, real impact melt, there on the crater wall and being very excited about that. That was in the spring of ’85. I guess those have continued since then. So that was a fine tradition to get going.

We had star parties sometimes. There were a lot of people who were interested in astronomy on an amateur level as well as on a professional level, and we’d borrow the Celestron 14”s that we used for occultation work, and we’d take them up to Mt. Hopkins and camp out overnight and see the sights of the sky out there. That was another highlight.

There was the Friday evenings at the Big A. I don’t know if the Big A is still there, but that was a little bar up on Speedway and Campbell where Brad Smith and Mike Drake and whatever grad students felt like going along would spend the last couple hours of the day, every Friday evening there. That was a nice start to our Friday evening socializing.

William Bottke

Once every few months we’d have a field trip to some region of Arizona. There are all sorts of great memories from that. Everyone loved the field trips. The Pinacates in Mexico was a standard trip. Jay Melosh was the professor that taught us. He taught a planetary surfaces class, and planetary geophysics. But he thought it was important to get the students out of this Department and get them out in the field. There are a lot of things you just can’t teach by sitting in a classroom. I think all of my friends agree that we probably learned more on those field trips than we ever learned in class.

Jay would have assignments where every student would have to prepare a presentation for some stop you’d make along the road, so it would be some mountain or some feature or some fault you’d have to describe. Then you’d have to give handouts to everyone, and then for 15, 20 minutes you’d have to lead the discussion on what was interesting about that feature. Then we’d drive on to the next place.

So we went to the Pinacates in Mexico; we also went to Meteor Crater and also some other things up in near Flagstaff. We did other field trips to a lot of different other places: White Sands, New Mexico; Canyonlands; we went to southwest California where you have a number of playas, dry lakes, and the Blackhawk Landslide.

Almost everything that one could drive to, we went to, over the course of five or six years. We always got big turnouts, because they were fun. You had to actually do science, but on the other hand, you would see a lot of things, and then night would come, you’d break out the beer and sit around the campfire and everyone just had a great time.

Guy Consolmagno

A professor who was here at the time, Laurel Wilkening, had organized a trip for us to go to see Meteor Crater, and actually get a tour of the crater, with a professor who was an expert in meteor craters. The idea was, we would go up, camp out in Oak Creek Canyon, and the next day go up to Meteor Crater. Well, Cliff Stoll and Bob Howell, who were both big bicyclists, decided that the thing they would do was actually bicycle to Oak Creek Canyon. They took off a week early, and of course it’s hard to find roads that aren’t freeways that connect parts of the state. They rode back roads, all the way from here to Flagstaff.

The day before they were supposed to arrive—we were going to all meet in this camp in Oak Creek Canyon—it snowed. It snowed in Flagstaff, and they cancelled the tour. But there was no way we could get in touch with these two guys. So all the other students looked at each other and said, “What the heck, let’s go up there anyway.” So we drove up just to meet these guys and rescue them, and camped out overnight and drove back down to Tucson. But that’s the only time I’ve heard of anybody bicycling to Flagstaff.

John Spencer

We had this wonderful trip up to the Grand Canyon in February 1981. About seven or eight of us headed up there in a couple of cars, and we had CB radio going up I-17 toward the Grand Canyon, and listening to each other’s favorite music very loud on the tape deck. Just that great feeling of camaraderie—I think it was the first time in my life that I felt surrounded by like minds, people who really understood and enjoyed the same kinds of things that I did.

Guy Consolmagno

The other big thing, of course, the big cultural shift that occurred which changed everything, changed everybody’s life, was the movie Star Wars. After the movie came out, for about a year there was endless discussion of everything in that film, how they did it—It was just the only thing that people could talk about. We went and saw it I think about eighteen times. Because we didn’t have VCRs in those times, so the only way you could go and see it was to go to the movie theater.

The movie came out in the summer of ’77. In the fall of ’77, NASA was going to test the first mock-up of the shuttle. Not by launching it, because of course the shuttle lands without any power, and NASA had built a 747 that could carry the shuttle on top of it, which I guess they still use. What they were going to do was fly the shuttle on top of the 747, release it, and then just let it fall to Earth and see if you could actually land the thing. Somebody said it was like flying a brick. They were going to land it at Edwards Air Force Base.

On the spur of the moment, Nick Gautier—who was not actually a LPL student, he was a Steward student, but he hung out with us because he was doing infrared astronomy—Nick, and John Wacker, and it might have been Bob Howell I want to say—hopped into a car, probably John’s green Volvo, and drove from Tucson to Edwards Air Force Base in time to see the shuttle land, which was called the shuttle Enterprise. It never flew, it was just the mock-up. Then [they] continued from there into Los Angeles, which had one of the three theaters in the world that was showing Star Wars in 70 millimeters. Somebody knew someone that they could crash on the floor of. That was the kind of stuff that we’d do as grad students. I have a feeling that grad students today are doing equally crazy things.

Nicholas Schneider

When I was applying for graduate school, my astronomy advisors—because there were no planetary advisors—said, “Nick, you’re giving in to the Dark Side,” a term which was two or three years old. I’m very proud of it, and I feel very lucky that the timing worked out to realize that this was the wave of future. But clearly there were very few places in the world where you could do planetary science. The fact that there was a whole building for it was pretty astonishing to me.

William Bottke

Being in Arizona, you’re at a hub. You’re in the middle of where everybody comes to you eventually. When you go to conferences, you see all your friends, like a class reunion every six months. It’s almost inevitable that at every conference we’ll get together and start reminiscing.

I’m getting more involved with missions. More and more—you’d think you’d get away from it—you start seeing these people that you grew up with now being at the same level as you, also being involved in the same missions, and you realize: Why is it that all the Arizona people are here? You start to wonder, is it just because you have so many friends that ultimately you’re going to be paired with them, or is it just that they did a good job teaching us, so we’re all still in the field? I think it’s some combination of the two. There were good people and good education and it all worked together.

Dale Cruikshank

The people that come out of LPL are very well-trained, and they’re dynamic, vigorous researchers. They’re just great. It’s a tremendous resource for all of planetary science to have the quality and breadth of the young people coming out of the Lunar Lab program.

William Merline

All these different disciplines seemed to come together and work well together without any prejudice against each other, and that was really probably the most surprising thing that I found. There didn’t seem to be any bias against people who wanted do astronomy for their thesis verses geology or physics or anything else. That really helped contribute to the environment there.

Nicholas Schneider

It really felt like this was where planetary science was happening. It was pretty clear that there were very few places at that time that deeply into planetary science. The field was young; it was broad; we didn’t really know what we were going to see as we went out into the solar system. It seemed like Arizona just had all these experts in all these different areas. It was just a wonderful time to see all those opportunities.

I hope that you can reconstruct the pay that graduate students earned verses year, because it’ll make you laugh to hear how grateful we all were for this level of support. The people in the year before me—I think it might’ve been measured in the hundreds of dollars per month, or a thousand dollars per month or something like that. It was really pitiful, and several of them I believe were on food stamps, and you just buy the Brand X macaroni and cheese. Nonetheless, we were delighted to have it, and it went up rapidly thereafter. It became a very good life as a graduate student, and some would say we got too comfortable as graduate students. My particular story is that for a while I held the record for the longest time at LPL as a graduate student—eight and a half years. Bill Merline doubled my record. For a while I was very concerned that he drive safely and cross the street carefully so that he would successfully graduate and I wouldn’t hold the record anymore.

William Bottke

I really think here in Arizona there was a special rapport between the students and the faculty. We had a really good group of students; we really cared about one another, we liked to have fun together and do things together, and the faculty tried to encourage that.

Also, we took on a lot of traditions that had been passed down through the years by the older grad students. I think that helped the connections a bit. A few faculty would come out to beers with us from time to time, and they also went to field trips and everything else. So I always felt closeness to them. In my later grad student years I heard a complaint through the grapevine that grad students were too happy, so they never want to leave. There was some truth to that. We were having so much fun. You’re not getting paid much money, but you don’t have any responsibility except your science.

In some ways you have extreme freedom: You’re young, you can do what you want, you can work in the science you want, you don’t have to worry about writing proposals to bring in the bills or anything else, and we all enjoyed one another. We enjoyed the place. We just had a great time. It probably did take us a year or two longer to get out because we were having too much fun.

Guy Consolmagno

There was tremendous pressure being a grad student. The pressure was mostly in ourselves; we pushed ourselves harder than any faculty could. But you could get overwhelmed by it, and sometimes for relief the best thing would be when we were invited to go talk to grade school kids. Then you could show the pictures and then you remembered why you were doing this in the first place.

Nicholas Schneider 

When I was a student, there was a tradition [when you graduated] that would you take your nametag—they were all made in a particular form; they were exactly the same size and same font—and you would transfer it to a certain bulletin board. We were not the first generation of students there, but to realize that you were part of this—it was like manning a ship. We knew that we were building the field of planetary science, and that list now is probably ten times longer than when I was there. I don’t know how long that tradition lasted or if anybody’s taken a photo of it. It was the great ritual: Pulling my nametag off the door and putting it on the list of PhD’s from this Department.

Mark Sykes

We all had these little cardboard nametags that were taped to our doors. When you went to the ghetto, there was a corkboard up there. The door tags of every person who got their degree were put up on this board. When I arrived there was half a dozen or so people up there. By the time I left, of course, there was more. Everybody who got their PhD would put their name up there, and it went back to the very first graduate of the Department, Wayne Slattery.

Unfortunately when they got rid of the ghetto, it disappeared. There’s no memorial, if you will, to all the people who have gone through that Department. And the Department’s generated a lot of people in the profession over the years.