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

Obsessions

"Marv, I'm sorry, we're closing. You'll have to turn the book in now."

Distracted from the book that absorbed him, the eleven-year-old Marvin Vann looked up from the reference volume entitled Macro and Microcosms at the slightly impatient librarian. For as long as he could remember, Marvin had always been interested in stars, and here was a book that taught him the shape of the constellations in the heavens. Macro and Microcosms so fascinated Marvin that, on the evening he found it, he couldn't put it down. The book struck a spark in Marvin's mind and kindled a passion that consumed him for the rest of his life.

"Please, ma'am," Marvin pled, "Isn't there something about the stars that I can check out?"

Moved by his evident interest, the librarian responded to his urgent request by suggesting that he check out W. T. Olcott's A Field Book of Stars. Opening it, Marvin chanced upon the pages concerning Orion. The familiar constellation, with its three prominent stars forming the hunter's belt, seared itself, he recalls, instantly into his memory. Emerging from the library into a clear fall evening, Marvin found the stars he had just studied twinkling above and ahead of him as if they were guiding him home. He felt, he says, a mystical union with those stars, and that feeling continues to consume him to this day whenever he studies the heavens through a telescope or with his naked eye.

He continued checking out the field guide, again and again, until his father one day presented him with his own copy. That copy Marvin kept for more than seventy years. Recently he passed it, freshly bound, along to a young woman whose questions convinced him she had the same sort of interest in the heavens that he had early evinced. "She worked where we now live, and she kept bugging me with questions about the stars," he smilingly reports.

Marvin's father, perceiving that the degree of the lad's fascination seemed unusual for an eleven-year-old boy, arranged for Marvin to become the youngest—indeed a charter—member of the fledgling Detroit Astronomical Society. Marvin was faithful in his attendance at meetings and diligent in his studies. But he soon wearied of studying about the heavens only in books. He wanted to view them directly and on a more intimate basis than the naked eye made possible. A small telescope in the window of Van Vliet's Jewelers in downtown Detroit caught his eye. He asked his father about it, but at thirty dollars the price was higher than his dad could afford in those depression years.

A less expensive solution, however, occurred to Marvin's father. He invested in a much less costly book entitled Amateur Telescope Making. Studying it together, Marv and his dad decided that they could build a reflecting telescope. From the Vanns' viewpoint, a reflecting telescope had the principal advantage of using only one glass surface that required accurate grinding and polishing. The alternative, a refracting telescope, would have required preparing four surfaces. Moreover, building a reflecting telescope made possible a much larger instrument than the tiny, expensive one in the jewelry store window, and the glass for the reflector could be less perfect than that required for refracting instruments since the star-light would not pass through it but would rather bounce from its mirrored surface to the eye-piece. The father-son team ambitiously decided to build a six-inch instrument.

Most of the supplies required were readily obtainable, mainly free of charge. A cardboard carpet tube painted black made a housing for the optical elements. Part of an automobile's salvaged rear axle provided the mounting. Marvin fabricated the diagonal holder from materials at hand and mounted it on ball bearings for smooth operation. He and his dad cannibalized an Page  3old microscope for its rack and pinion as the telescope's focusing device and used the microscope's viewer for the one-and-one-quarter-inch eyepiece. But finding glass blanks for grinding a six-inch objective mirror presented a more daunting challenge, at least initially.

Marvin now attributes his own remarkable ingenuity to his father's example and points to this situation as a prime instance. As it happened, the King of Siam had just ordered from the Packard Motor Car Company a bulletproof, custom limousine. The car's specifications included an instrument panel whose gauges were covered by glass just the right circumference and thickness to make the mirror for Marvin's telescope. As Packard had ordered twice the number of glass blanks necessary to allow for breakage, and as the extras weren't required, Marv's dad was able to scrounge the blanks for the telescope.

Making the mirror proved, of course, to be by far the most challenging aspect of building the instrument. The Vanns worked in their basement, using as a work stand an oil drum filled with water for stability. Marvin remembers the smell of the kerosene lamp that the two used to test the mirror. Step-by-step the work progressed over several weeks.

It may seem improbable to a generation accustomed to instant gratification that so young a child would be able to sustain his interest in such a project for so long. But Marvin's interest, far from abating, continued to flower throughout his working life and beyond. The other members of the Detroit Astronomical Society helped fuel Marvin's fascination. They treated the eleven-year-old as an equal and discussed the telescope with him, offering many helpful suggestions.

Fig. 1.1

Marvin, age 12, with finished telescope.

Eventually, except for silvering the mirror and assembling the parts, the telescope was finished. The silvering process, however, required the purchase of some chemicals and had to be conducted with Page  4extreme care since the compound used in this final step was explosive. Unable to wait any longer for the fruit of his labors, Marvin successfully pled with his father to try the telescope out before they silvered the mirror. His dad agreed, so they put the parts together, and that night they trained the telescope on Saturn—an object bright enough to see without a coated mirror. "There it was," says Marvin, "rings and all." The thrill and his sense of accomplishment remain fresh for him after all the intervening years.

In due course, despite Marvin's mother's fears that the house might explode in the process, the telescope's mirror got silvered. "The trouble with building telescopes, however," says Marvin, "is that it's like buying sailboats: The last one is never big enough!" As we shall see, Marvin kept building telescopes throughout his life, and the last and largest of them would be twenty-two inches in diameter.

Today's young people will doubtless find it strange that someone with Marvin's evident intelligence and capacities did not even consider going to college until late in his high-school career. That, nevertheless, was indeed the case. Marvin had always tacitly assumed that he would likely follow in his father's footsteps and work in an auto plant. His interest in telescopes, happily, changed all that. One day in the fall of 1935, while visiting David Charles Hughes, a cousin his own age, Marv came across a catalogue from Albion College, a Methodist-related, liberal-arts college in south-central Michigan. Glancing idly through the catalogue, he discovered that the college had an observatory and that in it was a fine telescope. Intrigued, Marvin asked his cousin to loan him the catalogue. The cousin refused, saying that Marvin could write for one of his own. This Marvin did.

To his utter amazement, his letter produced not only a catalogue but also two college representatives who turned up at the Vann's door during breakfast one Saturday morning with the requested material in hand. Marvin Pahl, the college registrar, and Les Harger, the admissions officer, selflessly devoted themselves to recruiting students for the perennially under-enrolled but nonetheless excellent small school. In the course of the ensuing conversation, the two administrators skillfully led Marvin to realize that he wanted to go to college. Then, however, the awkward question of money arose. In high school, Marvin had never been a grade grubber, so significant scholarship money seemed out of the question. Nevertheless, the Page  5combination of a chance to pursue his passion for astronomy, the personal interest that the college officials displayed in him, and the unanticipated opportunity to earn a degree proved irresistible. Marvin set about finding the money that would enable him to enroll the next fall.

Marvin's father by that time had become the chief inspector in the Small Car Division of the Packard Motor Company. In that capacity he had contact with a man named Ray Gardner, the president of Albion Malleable Iron, a firm that produced gray metal castings for Packard. Gardner, on learning of Marvin's skills with machine tools, offered a part-time job pouring metal that, at the princely wage of 32 cents an hour, would help defray expenses. The Knight's Templar Union responded to Marvin's application with a $2000 loan. What only weeks before had seemed an impossibility became a reality.

The first member of his family to attend an institution of higher learning, Marvin also was the first to be born a Vann. His grandfather had immigrated to the United States and settled in Louisville, Kentucky. During the First World War, some Kentuckians thought the Belgian family name, Van den Driessche, sounded German. To avoid that impression, Marvin's father had the name legally changed to the more neutral "Vann."

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.

Star Gazing

The stars in the firmament were not the only ones, at that time, to command Marvin's rapt attention. Early in his sophomore year of 1937-38, he found himself at least equally fascinated by those in the eyes of an attractive freshman, Veronica Argyle Ransom. They met on a blind date at a football game and enjoyed each other's company.

The other girls that Marvin had dated had been, as he puts it, on an "I-only-want-a-buddy-not-a-sweetheart basis." But his feelings for Ronnie were different. He mounted a determined assault on her affections, asking her to dances and picnics and the many other then carefully chaperoned diversions the college offered its students.

By 21st century undergraduate standards, the late 1930s in a church-related liberal arts college would have certainly seemed socially repressive. On the (largely mistaken) theory that if the women were inaccessible, the men would behave themselves better, freshman women were required to be in their dormitories by eight p.m. on weekdays and ten on weekends. On special occasions, one might obtain permission to be out later, but a firmly in loco parentis supervision was theoretically constant—if de facto occasionally avoidable. Over the four years, the rules governing women's behavior were gradually relaxed, but never fully withdrawn, and they were always required to wear gloves and hats as a part of their church-going ensemble.

For many young women who came from devoutly religious families and small farming communities, these rules provided welcome excuses for escaping escorts whose attentions proved less than welcome or over-ardent. Page  11To her co-residents in the freshman women's residence, however, Ronnie's willingness to see Marvin on a more or less regular basis came as a surprise. Ronnie was known to be young woman of high moral values who believed in the rule of law and in her principles, while Marvin—well—by the time he was a sophomore, Marvin had acquired a reputation as something of a scapegrace who thumbed his nose at any expectations but his own.

Fig. 1.4

Marv and friend thumbing noses at the world.

Today, his behavior would merely be attributed to high spirits and to an inquiring and active intellect. Then, however, his mercurial temperament expressed itself in pursuing what he found interesting instead of the assigned homework. Beyond this, he had aligned himself with the fastest men on campus by joining the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. To the Albion students of Marvin's era, the D. T. D. stood for Down Town Drunks.

Although, in keeping with its Methodist tradition, Albion had a fearsome policy against the use of alcohol (one known drink anywhere in the world provided theoretical grounds for instant expulsion) the policy was much more widely observed in the breach than in the enforcement. A local bar owner named Ivansky cooperated with the students by letting them drink in the basement of his establishment. When college representatives or when the police entered the place, Ivansky would stamp on the floor and the boys below quieted down until Ivansky signaled the all clear. No one, as far as we can discover, was ever actually expelled for drinking, though one faculty member had assigned himself the frequent task of standing guard near the local watering holes and taking the names of the students he observed entering. The Page  12administration always accepted the names graciously, no doubt considering the professor's obsession harmless, and usually took no further action. On one occasion, however, two star basketball players so flagrantly transgressed the rules that the college grounded them on campus just before the championship game against archrival Hope College. The entire student body felt so incensed at what they viewed as an arbitrary and capricious enforcement of policy that they rebelled. They boycotted their classes until the administration caved in and reinstated the players. Partly as a result, Albion did win the Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association's basketball title that year (1935). Anyway, Marvin and his brothers did in fact drink a bit, and sometimes a bit too much. Marvin's Lutheran forebears did not value the prohibition against alcohol to the degree the Methodists did.

Fig. 1.5

Students boycotting classes gathered in front of original Eatshop. (Warren B. Highstone, with permission of Albion College).

Perhaps it was this bibulous behavior that Veronica's Methodist girl friends and Zeta Tau Alpha sorority sisters felt she should find objectionable.[3] And from time to time she did object to something Marvin did, as when he and Bob Bemer had drunk too much and the two, trying hard to remain upright, sang slurred duets under her window. Once or twice this behavior annoyed her seriously enough that she stopped seeing Marvin for a while. The day after the drunken duet she ripped off the fraternity pin Marvin had given her and told Marv it was over. After a couple of weeks she relented and accepted the pin once again. Then as now, the pin signified being engaged to be engaged.

Courtship at the Delta Tau Delta house was conducted perforce under the watchful chaperonage of Mrs. Eastman, the Delts' housemother. (House-mothering was a quaint institution that has now fallen utterly into desuetude. It was perhaps forced there by the fact that a fraternity at a large state institution once hired a twenty-two-year-old house mom.) At any rate, Mom Eastman, as the young men called her, had cleverly constructed a system of mirrors by which she could, in theory, oversee much of the ground floor of the Delt house while sitting in her apartment and peering through her open door into the looking glass beyond it. The brothers and their dates, taking turns at visiting her through the course of the house parties, would accidentally bump the door partway shut or stand where they blocked her view. On the dance floor in the basement and on the couches of the living room, much fevered necking and petting went on despite the housemother's best efforts to the contrary. Of course, in that pre-birth control pill era, both the training of women and the fear of pre-marital pregnancy usually served to repress the couples' fuller expression of their ardor. At some point, nonetheless, Marvin realized that the college's administration and its representatives were playing games with all their parietal rules.

"Their lax enforcement of the regulations," he recalls, "convinced me that they finally approved of our behavior as long as no scandal resulted." He was right, of course. A famous professor of Biology in that era, Dr. Merton Chickering, often greeted incoming freshman classes by explaining: "Albion is a Coo-educational college, one of whose principal functions is to provide Methodist young men and women a place to meet."

Aside from fraternity parties, the campus and the surrounding community offered many other opportunities for young people to enjoy themselves. Marvin and Ronnie took long walks along the railroad tracks, often to neighboring communities. They canoed on the Kalamazoo River. They attended games and formal dances. Of course, from time to time on clear evenings they gazed at the stars through the Clark telescope. Their college years together proved idyllic most of the time. On one occasion, riding in a friend's car to a neighboring town, they were involved in an accident that proved fatal to the other car's driver—an accident from which Marvin and Ronnie were fortunate to walk away virtually unscathed.

Occasional tiffs and two further unpinnings and repinnings notwithstanding, on the whole Veronica liked her boyfriend's direct and different approach to the world. Particularly, she remembers, Marvin won her heart by appearing sober under her dormitory window with all his fraternity brothers and serenading her properly. She liked his style enough that, in her senior year, she agreed to marry him.

As we have seen, financial considerations had obliged Marvin to interrupt his education after his freshman year and work full time to earn some money. The fraternity life had demanded more of his limited resources than expected, and the hoped-for scholarship failed to materialize. Jobs in Detroit, however, proved hard to come by, and Marvin turned his hand to whatever he could find. Back at home he worked for a while at Sam's Cut Rate Corner Drug Store where, solely because of his college experience, he was hired as a stocking clerk in women's wear. Impressed by his industry and reliability, Sam's owners, the Gottisch Brothers, offered Marvin a chance to become a buyer. Retail, however, did not long appeal to Marvin, and his dad helped him move to the Packard Motor Company as a file clerk.

His superiors at Packard soon considered him seriously underemployed. They encouraged him to finish his degree at Albion. One of them, Charlie Reynolds, promised him an apprenticeship in process engineering when his B. A. was finished. At the same time, his superiors at Packard arranged a manufacturing job for Marvin on the night shift, which paid a premium wage. Accordingly, after a frugal year away from school, Marvin returned to complete his undergraduate studies. The money he managed to save covered his tuition, a job as House Manager in his fraternity defrayed the cost of his room, and working in the kitchen paid his board. In those final three undergraduate years, Marvin compiled his best academic records.

He also, according to the college's records, absented himself from mandatory chapel often enough to lose credit. As a result, if Marvin were to graduate on schedule, he would have to attend summer school and take extra courses. Ironically, Marvin had in fact attended all sessions of the chapel that year. But he apparently never twigged to the fact that the responsible factotums took attendance by recording the numbers of the vacant seats to which the missing students had been assigned. If you weren't in your seat, by gum, you weren't there! The theoretically absent Marvin recalls Page  15much benefit from chapel his senior year, particularly from those sessions led by Dr. Frederick S. Goodrich, a remarkable theologue whose distinctions included the capacity to quote the Bible from memory, cover to cover. Only six other persons of his era were known to have achieved this accomplishment. Marvin also recalls with pleasure having once met the Reverend Mr. George Bennard, the composer of the famous hymn, "The Old Rugged Cross."

The bureaucrats in the registrar's office who administered the system that deducted credit for absences showed no sympathy for Marvin's explanations. They refused even to review their decision. Summer school it would have to be. Perhaps coincidentally, Ronnie also planned to go to summer school to complete the requirements for a teacher's certificate.

Although Albion College is in south-central Michigan, its summer school in those days convened at Bay View near Petoskey, a lovely resort and cottage community on the shores of Lake Michigan. Summer school proved a paradise for the two young people who had worked out whatever differences they had earlier experienced and were facing life together. Especially wonderful were their placid evenings on the beach when the stars over Lake Michigan seemed extraordinarily resplendent and reflective of the mood of the two young lovers. True to her principles, however, Ronnie lodged in a college-run residence that observed the same draconian rules about women's hours as had the on-campus dormitories. This meant that Marvin and his buddies had the evenings to themselves. For their evening escapades the young men had essentially two options: either the town of Petoskey or that of Harbor Springs. Marvin recalls that the two Petoskey bars were full of young Greek laborers looking for trouble. The college boys wisely decided to avoid that venue. Instead they drove to Harbor Springs, where they often closed the local emporiums and arrived back at Bay View at two or three in the morning.

Marvin had arrived early for summer school so he could find work and a place to stay. He rented a private room and secured two jobs, one waiting table and another maintaining a clay tennis court. Between classes and late night partying and his two jobs, Marvin was hard-pressed at first to find sleeping time. Happily, he could do the tennis court job just before sun-up, then wait tables for breakfast, and then attend classes, which ended at noon. Page  16After that, he served the noon meal. Ronnie had a similar job at another restaurant. Early in the afternoon, they gathered their books, met, and headed for a favorite spot on the Lake Michigan beach. There, surrounded by sand dunes, they studied and planned their future, and Marvin slept.

When summer school ended, Marvin had a degree in psychology (souped-up with a few extra courses), and Ronnie had earned a teacher's certificate she was destined never to use. Reflecting on their college days, Marvin and Ronnie agree that, until they married and had a family, those years were the happiest times of their lives. Neither social repression nor the absence of electronic gear and on-demand access to automobiles undermined the quality of the undergraduate experiences they shared.

Summer school ended in early July. Marvin went to Detroit to assume his apprenticeship as a process engineer at Packard, and Ronnie returned, first to Kalamazoo, and then, in the fall, to Albion for her senior year. Assured of a steady income, Marvin borrowed $750.00 and with it put a down payment on a brand new Chevrolet, five-passenger coupe. That Sunday he drove to Kalamazoo to show Ronnie the car. They decided to drive to Chicago, but changed their plans when they discovered that Gone with the Wind was playing at a local cinema. Deeply affected by the film's mood, they decided they should marry as soon as possible and set a date of 26 July, after Ronnie's graduation.

Every weekend, Marvin risked his life driving to Albion as fast as he dared to see Ronnie. Both sets of parents approved the match, and Ronnie's folks were planning a gala nuptial celebration. Neither of the young people, however, wanted a big wedding. So they informed their parents of their decision, and on the morning of July 26, 1941, Marvin drove to Kalamazoo to collect his bride and her parents' gifts to the young couple. On the way, as he was passing through Albion, he stopped and asked the college President, Dr. Seaton (who was also a clergyman), if he would perform the service. Even on such short notice, Dr. Seaton was pleased to oblige and, while Marvin went to fetch Ronnie, Seaton found Marvin Pahl and his wife as witnesses. Pahl was the registrar who had six years earlier recruited Marvin Vann for Albion. So attended, Ronnie and Marvin were married in the college chapel, and after a stop in Detroit to call on Marvin's folks and receive their gifts and congratulations, they headed for Canada and Page  17Algonquin Park for a two-week honeymoon that pretty well exhausted the couple's slender bank account.

Fig. 1.6

Newlywed Ronnie on Algonquin honeymoon.

Back home, they moved into a nice apartment building, The Abbey, on Detroit's East Grand Boulevard, and Marvin returned to Packard where he soon became a full-fledged process engineer. Almost anyone with a brain could see that the European war would soon engulf the U. S., and Packard was already building the Rolls-Royce Aircraft Engine under license from the British company.