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2002—Memoirs: Carl |
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Near the end of his life, Walter Carlyle Barber reached out to connect with his earliest memories. He had grown up in a Mormon family in Logan, Utah, but had maintained only marginal contact over the years with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We met one morning, when Carl and Katie came to the regular Sunday meetings of the Arlington congregation, whose boundary includes their home in Lexington. Physically, Katie brought Carl to church; his health was failing, and he wouldn’t have been able to make it on his own. As a lifelong Catholic, though, she was clearly and luminously there “with him.” Carl and I shared associations with the Physics Department at MIT that afforded us common ground, which rapidly developed into an intergenerational friendship that I still treasure.
Carl and Katie had lived for many years on the edge of the Great Meadow in Lexington, raising four daughters and sending them forth in a typical 20th-century familial diaspora. As a young college graduate, Carl worked on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge. After the war he became professor of physics and director of the High Energy Physics Laboratory at Stanford, where he built the first medical linear accelerator for the treatment of cancer. At MIT since 1968, Carl had continued his distinguished research, shaped many young lives, and achieved the status of professor emeritus. And in the late 1980s, he sensed open circles that he wanted to close. In this project, time was not Carl’s friend. By the time I knew him, his liver was trying hard to give up. One cannot help wondering what he might have accomplished if achievement had not shared his energies with the alcoholism that killed him. When we played |
chess in a series of nursing homes, I could tell how recently the doctors had propped him up with transfusions. We could see the veins through his translucent skin; if the blood in them was fresh, he’d wipe up the chess-board with me, reliably and gleefully. If it had been a while, though, he would see only a couple of moves ahead, and I’d have a much easier time. Under those conditions, if I occasionally threw a game his way, he was too muddled to know.
We’d do lunch, now and then, or take a drive through the countryside. When we walked together—slowly, and never very far—he’d lean as heavily on my arm as his diminished frame allowed, and I’d occasionally remark on the curious dissonance in our roles: while depending on me in some ways like one of my little children, he was also in a sense the big brother I’d never had. One evening, I brought Carl a videotape of a PBS broadcast entitled “Day One,” which dramatized the Manhattan Project leading up through Trinity. Can’t recall whether that was at Fairlawn in Lexington or at Bear Hill in Wakefield. He was fairly low that day but perked up at one point to inquire with a chuckle, “Is that pretty lady supposed to be Lise Meitner?” In the spring of 1990, Carl abruptly fired the doctors, hired a retired British naval officer as companion and attendant, and moved to a rented house on the beach in Fort Myers, Florida, where he died on Armistice Day. His family buried him in Utah. The MIT physics department held a memorial service for Professor Emeritus Walter Carlyle Barber on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 1990, at 3pm in the MIT Chapel. Katie asked me to be the final speaker and, in particular, to close my remarks
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