Among the items I found were some photos dating from all the way back in 1998, for my final days in New Haven and my first days in Boston.
The first photo was a shot of the senior class of Trumbull College, Class of 1998:
It’s a rather impressive looking photo--probably the best we had as a class. Our commencement photo would not have been nearly as “glamorous,” although that had more to do with the torrential downpour that soaked all of our clothes underneath the commencement robes (which are, in fact, dyed with a deep red dye rather than a truly black dye).
I also suspect that there haven’t been that many times where so many of my fellow classmates would have worn dresses or suites (as appropriate) at one time--maybe the senior dinner, perhaps, but outside of that, it probably hasn’t happened collectively since 1998.
The other photo is the first photo taken of me following my move to Cambridge.
The man on the right is Glenn Seaborg, who was a Nobel laureate and arguably one of the great chemists of the twentieth century. This photo was taken as part of a ceremony honoring a number of chemistry Nobel laureates held during the ACS Fall meeting held in Boston. What was not shown in the photo was that my “job” that evening was basically acting as a paparazzi, snapping photos of other people with Dr. Seaborg. This was basically the last shot available, so I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to get a photo. The most memorable thing about Dr. Seaborg was his hands--I couldn’t figure out what was the cause, but his fingers were seriously gnarled, such that each looked like a staircase--each knuckle was offset about a third of an inch from the knuckle above.
While this was my first photo, this was probably one of the last photos taken of Dr. Seaborg. A few nights later, he suffered a stroke; he never really recovered from the injuries, and died six months later.
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