Sun-Chaser: Marvin J. Vann, an American Life

Distractions

On arriving at Albion College in the fall of 1936, Marvin arranged to share a room in the home of a local pharmacist with two other students, Dave Daniels and Morrie Dunbar. Marv was determined to work hard and earn a scholarship. He discovered, however, that Albion provided numerous distractions. First among these were the women. Second, the social life provided by the fraternities occupied his attention. Third was the unspoken pressure to excel at some form of athletics. The three combined to keep Marvin from becoming as assiduous a student as he had intended. He ran track, played baseball, began partying with members of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity, played the field among the coeds, and made generally passing though undistinguished grades.

In due course, the Delts invited Marvin to their house and assigned a member named Robert Bemer to host him for the evening. Bemer was later to become one of the people responsible for developing the computer codes Page  6that made early operating systems a reality. The two young men hit it off immediately and discovered mutual interests in the sciences, particularly astronomy, and complementary skills with tools. Marvin also recalls that, on their first encounter, Bemer led him to a small cedar chest stocked with an enviable selection of potables.

Once established in the college, Marvin at last paid a visit to the observatory. To his disappointment, he found it locked. Upon inquiring, he discovered what the college recruiters had neglected to tell him. Yes, there was indeed an observatory, and, yes it did contain an extraordinarily fine astronomical telescope—one whose optics had been crafted by a famous telescope builder of the nineteenth century, Alvan Clark. Those optics included the last nine-inch lens that Clark had ground. On seeing the telescope in the late 1960s the famous British astronomer, Harlow Shapley, observed, "I see you have a Rembrandt."

Unfortunately, there was no professor of astronomy and, regrettably, no one had even been inside the observatory since the end of World War I. During the war the building had been used to billet troops. As Marvin had already paid his $120.00 tuition, and as it was too late to recover it, he decided to ascertain the condition of the building with a view to refurbishing it, if possible. Accordingly he requested permission to inspect the building. At first the college's administrators were dubious. Convinced, however, by Marvin's enthusiasm and by the fact that the young man had built a telescope of his own that his was no merely idle curiosity, the college administration eventually agreed to let Marvin look around. The dean granted him access to the long disused building. Marvin took Bob Bemer along. He had already come to respect Bemer's mind at least as much as his private stock of alcoholic beverages, and the two planned to become roommates. Equipped with the keys and flashlights, and feeling as if they had discovered King Tut's tomb, Marvin and Robert picked their way through more than two decades' accumulation of dust and rodent droppings, not to mention the rodents themselves. Enduring the cobwebs, the scuttling in the shadows, and the stench, they climbed a staircase that wound its way up the red brick cone at whose summit the telescope and its housing reposed. Marvin's inspection revealed that, although the telescope and the dome were both filthy and inoperable, and though the brass fittings were badly Page  7tarnished, they seemed nonetheless reparable. The optics, particularly, had been kept capped and appeared to be in perfect condition.

Fig. 1.2

The Albion College Observatory. (Dave Trumpie, 1999, with permission of Albion College.)

Even as a college freshman, Marvin had already acquired the savoir-faire and volunteer spirit that would characterize him throughout his life. He discovered that physics professor Raymond Spenser had a fully equipped machine shop, and he was able to convince Spenser that he had the skills to use it. Accordingly, with Spenser's blessing, Marvin drafted a proposal to President John Lawrence Seaton, offering, with Bemer's help, to clean up and repaint the observatory and to repair and refurbish the telescope and its mounting.

A man of vision, Seaton, after carefully cross-examining Marvin and Robert, made a leap of faith and approved the project. Perhaps the president thought the college had nothing to lose. Given the condition of the observatory, the two students couldn't make things worse. More likely he was impressed by the extent of Marvin's knowledge and the apparent feasibility of the carefully considered work plan with its clear priorities and realistic time line. Certainly Seaton considered the possibility that a student who felt he had been lured with false expectations might choose to transfer elsewhere. In any case, with Seaton's blessing and with very modest support, the young men set to work, consuming the greater part of the free time of Marvin's freshman year with the project. Of course, their academic work, particularly Marvin's, suffered. Although both survived, neither wants too close a review of his academic record for that year. Marvin, however, has always been clear about a central principle: "I never," he says, "let academics interfere with my education. I didn't work for grades, I followed my interests." Refurbishing the telescope and rendering the observatory building usable Marvin generally found more edifying than some of his first-year classes.

To Spenser and Seaton's delight, the friends pulled off what the president must, initially at least, have deemed utterly improbable. The building be- Page  8came habitable and the telescope worked! This despite the fact that Marvin had been obliged to re-machine some of the delicate moving parts for its mounting. "I was pretty handy," Marvin modestly recalls.

Fig. 1.3

The Alvan [sic] Clark Telescope. (John Williams, with permission of Albion College.)

In recompense, President Seaton did something that pleased Marvin more than any stipend would have done. Seaton asked a qualified physics professor, Dr. Clement Rood, to re-institute the long defunct astronomy curriculum—a curriculum that still survives in expanded form. Marvin's refurbishing job lasted from 1937 until a team from the Yerkes observatory cleaned the telescope and updated the drive mechanism in 1965. Around 1990, another interested freshman, Jim Ehlers, took on the job of once again restoring the dome and the telescope, this time with some professional help, though perhaps with no greater functional result than Marvin had originally achieved. Now on the National Register of Historic Buildings, the Albion College Observatory continues to serve astronomy students and, on special occasions, the citizens of the community. It has also become the headquarters of the Albion College Honors program. On all counts, Marvin is pleased. He likes to maintain that the current astronomy professor owes his position to a former freshman's initiative.

Student initiative seems to have been the norm rather than the exception in periodically reinvigorating the Albion astronomy curriculum. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a number of Albion students became astronomers. L. Wesley Underwood (1886) became a professor of astronomy at Lawrence College, where the observatory is named for him. Forest Ray Moulton (1894) became professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago and, later (1919-24), a trustee of Albion college. Wilbur Cogshill (1895) taught astronomy at the University of Indiana. Clement Rood (1894) him Page  9self, Marvin's astronomical mentor, taught at Carthage and Beloit Colleges and at the Michigan College of Mines before returning to Albion. Rood's brother Paul and another pair of siblings, Charles and Ralph Huffer, also became astronomers and physicists. So did Will Carl Rufus (1902), later a Professor at the University of Michigan. There John Abram Aldrich (date uncertain) also earned his Ph.D. Elton J. Moulton, who attended Albion from 1904-1906, later completed his doctorate at Chicago and taught astronomy at Northwestern. These men were all pupils of Charles Barr, a biologist conscripted as an astronomer. A current historian of astronomy, Keith Snedegar, thinks that as undergraduates these future astronomers provided the impetus for periodic 19th and early 20th century resuscitation of Albion's astronomy curriculum.[1] Marvin Vann thus unknowingly joined a long line of students who successfully insisted that a small college's administration meet their interests.

Snedegar also posits that in the 1920s and 30s, perhaps because Moulton was a trustee, Albion may have served as a training ground for a trio of University of Chicago graduate students: Konrad Lee, Joyce Clennam Stearns, and Raymond Spenser, all of whom held Albion instructorships while finishing their Ph.D. theses.[2]

During his freshman year, Marvin Vann had neither the money nor the time for full participation in a fraternity. In fact, after his initial year, Marvin had to interrupt his education to work for a year to afford to continue. As a result, in his sophomore year, the time and money situation had eased a bit, and recruited by Bemer, Marvin joined Delta Tau Delta. Encouraged by their brother's influential work on the observatory, all the Delts took astronomy from Professor Rood. In addition to learning more about the heavens, the Delts found that the observatory proved to be a great place to take girls for a little stargazing. (To their fraternity brothers' delight, Marvin Page  10and Bob Bemer had shown the foresight to retain their keys to the building!) Perhaps Marvin once felt disappointed that, despite the Delta Tau Delta's enthusiastic support, the astronomy curriculum did not generate enough demand to make an astronomy major at Albion College a reality. Marvin therefore began his undergraduate career intending to major in physics. But by the time Marvin had to declare a major, his interests had broadened to include the social sciences, and though he always avidly continued his interest in the heavens, he pursued a degree in psychology instead, focusing particularly on psychological measurement and testing.