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The following conversation between former ASEB participant Lynn Stephenson and ASEB Board President Lance Reynolds took place at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco on April 23, 2009. It provides a glimpse into the amazing collection of stories that surround us every day!
Lance Reynolds: My name is Lance Reynolds, I’m 69 (at least for another month), and I’m a friend of Professor Lynn Stephenson.
Lynn Stephenson: My name is M. Lynn Stephenson, my age is 85, and the date is April 23, 2009. My relationship to my discussion partner is that we are colleagues.
LR: Lynn, this is a great treat for me this afternoon to be sitting here talking to you because I really enjoy the chats we have and I think a good time to start is at the beginning of World War II when you were an undergraduate in Utah. What happened?
LS: Well they announced a new program called the Enlisted Reserve Corps which according to the book Tuxedo Park was a specialized army training program in anticipation of the war in Germany. There were two choices you could choose from, to go into the Navy or to go into the Army. My father, who was a fantastic adviser for people’s future, never forgave me for not talking to him ahead of time. Because I had to wear glasses I didn’t feel I could qualify for the Navy program so I joined the Army program.
At that time, as I was in Utah, the place that one was sent to be selected was Fort Douglas, Utah. But at that time a friend of mine and I came down with an illness that delayed our going with the regular people. And as a result of this I got sent to Fort Custer, Michigan to be trained as a combat military policeman. And while there after being trained to fire a Thompson submachine gun I learned that I should have been sent to join the Air Force in Atlantic City where they had a lot of fancy hotels. And I remember a high-ranking sergeant came up to me with tears in his eyes and asked, “How did you pull it off?” And I said “Pull off what?” And he said, “You are being transferred to Atlantic City,” and I said “I had no idea.” And in any case I had been almost through my basic training when they found this out and that was a tough, tough basic training up there. You had to be able to handle yourself. They had bayonet practice and all that stuff.
Once down there I thought the Air Force basic training was a bunch of nonsense. It was just marching up and down the boardwalk singing songs and very little exercise. I became convinced that this was not what I wanted to do. And for the first time and in my military career I decided I would not go through channels to get things rectified. So I really jumped over everything. I said that I wanted to be trained as an aeronautical engineer. At that time I had not yet discovered how important physics was. Well, ultimately they corrected their mistake and transferred me to the City College of New York at about 137th Street on the west side and they housed us in a little Jewish orphan asylum. We were across from the Lewison stadium where in the summer they held open-air concerts. And it was there that I met up again with my old friend Jennings Olson whose father was a physician and who found out that we both had the same problem. We got delayed and displaced.
It turned out that City College of New York was a place where they then decided where to send various people. I had really not understood how important City College of New York was. It was where you got an absolutely superb education. And I was one of the lucky ones who stayed right at City College. The rest got distributed all over the country. And you have to remember that this was a program designed I think by this man Alfred Loomis and others to fight in the European theatre of war. I took topographical drafting and photo interpreting and all those necessary things you need for their strategy. The night before the attack they would fly airplanes over the enemy territory taking aerial photographs and bring them back. We would then interpret them to find out where the gun emplacements were.
LR:Is that what ultimately got you to Okinawa?
LS: That was at a later date. I had been trained to work in the European theater and all my training was based on that. They then decided I should be assigned to the combat engineers at Fort Belvoir Virginia near Washington DC. And that I think was the toughest of all my assignments. Because those people had to defuse mine territory, they had to be able to set their own minefields and it was certainly the most dangerous thing I ever did. After that, they then sent me back up to some place near New York City.
LR: Was that when you ended up in Army Intelligence?
LS: Ultimately I ended up in Army Intelligence. I was fortunate not to be sent to Europe with many of the combat engineers who lost their lives in the Battle of the Bulge
LR: What I would like to do if you wouldn’t mind is for you to take us to Okinawa, there were some very interesting things that happened to you on Okinawa. At one time you got blown out of your hut by a typhoon.
LS: Oh those things were terrible. I think we shipped out of Fort Lewis, Washington. Anyway once we got out of Puget Sound then I understood what seasickness was. We took a very circuitous route. The war in Germany had not ended yet so we cruised from island to island It was a long time before we found our destination was Okinawa. When we arrived on Okinawa we went in under Kamikaze attack. We landed safely, got ashore OK, got established.
At that time I had never driven a car except my Dad’s 1937 Dodge and I ended up running into my uncle Bill’s cherry tree and I was not allowed to drive that anymore. Now because we were in Intelligence we got on to other parts of the island that nobody else was allowed to go to because they kept the women at the north end of the island. Intelligence was able to get up into there and I was the person who was supposed to service the Jeep. I knew very little about servicing anything. I remember the sergeant who drove the Jeep mostly and he did it mostly by taking pictures that he would sell to others because it was beautiful scenery up there. I remember he got so angry at me. By then I had risen to the high rank of Pfc. I was supposed to service his jeep so he could make money off his pictures. He said, “Stephenson if you were Corporal I would bust you.” I often felt that was the highlight of my military career.
By then the European theater of war was over and I had been trained for the European theater of war. In the Japanese theater of war things were completely different and especially on Okinawa. I remember they would fly over the night before. I would look at the photographs and try to interpret them but I couldn’t make any sense out of anything. It was a useless program but it got me attached to the so-called Military Intelligence.
The surrender of Japan took place in two places. One was on the battleship Missouri to General MacArthur, the other was on Okinawa to the general who replaced General Buckner who was killed, General Stillwell. I had great admiration for General Stillwell. I thought he was the greatest man.
Well it turned out that the surrender ceremonies were getting to take place simultaneously on the battleship Missouri and on Okinawa. I was called out I think a day or two before the surrender ceremony was to take place and they said “Stephenson, fall out for the motor pool. We want you to drive the generals to the surrender ceremony.” I remember he was a wonderful sergeant, this is a different sergeant, his name was Sergeant Washington. He held onto the sides of the Jeep and his knuckles were white and I can assure you that a Jeep responds much quicker than a 1937 Dodge. Well we finally ended up in a ditch and they wisely said “Stephenson, we think for your sake and the generals’ we better have somebody else do the driving.” This is the greatest thing that ever happened to me and I am sure the generals too as I would probably have killed them.
LR: It was when you were on Okinawa I think that you met a major in the typhoon.
LS: That’s correct we were hit by three typhoons that were just murderous. When the typhoons came you loosen your tent pegs and the only way to keep the tents down was to drive a Jeep onto them and that’s what I used to do.
And this time it was this military intelligence major who happened to be a physicist. We were sitting with our feet deep in water. We chatted and I said “I’m no longer interested in being an aeronautical engineer I want to be a physicist. What would be your advice on where I should go?” He said “There are two places I would recommend to you, one is Berkeley, and the other is Caltech.” Caltech is a private institution and I had no way of paying for that. This was the period when a senator in Utah established the G.I. Bill of Rights. It was the best thing done after the war; we were able to get an education under the G.I. Bill of Rights.
LR: When you went to Berkeley did you do a Master’s degree first?
LS: No, no. For some of the institutions the Army specialized training program was not up to par. The City College of New York was very much up to par but they did not care when I decided to go to Berkeley. I had to retake some of the exams and some of the courses and I’ll never forget it must have been in 1947 I was supposed to take a freshman physics exam. So I go to the room I am assigned to, then take my seat and in comes this blond kid who turns out to be Louis Alvarez and he gave a lecture that was absolutely spectacular.
LR: And you became a member of his research team?.
LS: Ultimately I did but that was a long circuitous journey. By 53 I had received my Ph.D. I had done a very important experiment with protons and hydrogen.
LR: Was this in the liquid hydrogen bubble chamber?
LS: No, no, that had not existed then. In any case we found that when a proton hits liquid hydrogen it produces both neutrons and protons. We were looking for the case where a proton and neutron would form deuterium. And we did find it and Frank (Crawford) was really the better student. That was basically under the work of Wolfgang Penovsky who was an extremely brilliant guy. At Princeton there was a smart Penovsky and a dumb Penovsky. The smart Penovsky went into biology and the dumb Penovsky went with physics.
When we became faculty members we all had to sign a loyalty oath and then the regents decided we had to sign again. The physics department came close to losing nearly all the theoretical department. Most went elsewhere, they would not sign. Frank Crawford and I and Ken Crowe became known as the Penovsky orphans. So the problem for physics department was what to do with these orphans and so it turned out to we had three mentors. One was Herb York one of the best and an extremely bright guy. Then there was Ed McMillan who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering plutonium.
What we were trying to do was to extract from the Bevatron not protons but pions. On the East Coast they had succeeded in doing that. We wanted to do the same thing. We tried various schemes but nothing worked.
LR: I have here something you wrote in 1959. (Shows a drawing by M.L. Stephenson dated 2-17-59, 4” Quadrupole Layout for 72” Test Beam).
LS: This is the Bevatron for getting the protons outside and headed for the bubble chamber. It was always how to get the polarity of the magnets right the first time but I forgot the magnets were reversed so the things that went into the chamber had the wrong signature. I still remember Bob Watt who was a very smart and capable technician came out shouting “6 foot long tracks”. So we got the polarity right and finally got that straightened out and at last got taking pictures of protons and anti-protons and so we collected as many of these pictures as we could.
Bonnie Glaser found the most beautiful tracks. One went in, there was a gap, and two came out. All sorts of magical things happened. And it is that picture that was in the Museum of Modern Art for quite some time
LR: Was it this kind of work that led to Luis Alvarez getting the Nobel Prize?
LS: By that time bombarding with an antiproton on protons just produced an enormous number of new particles that could not have been found any other way. With help from my colleagues I wrote the nomination of Louis Alvarez for the Nobel Prize and part of it was that Alvarez used the bubble chamber to discover more particles than any other person.
LR: And you and Lois went with him to Stockholm?
LS: Yes and several others.
LR: Did you have fun?
LS: Yes it was an incredible experience. After that they built a very much bigger machine in the Fermilab.
I knew from the beginning we had to move to a place where there was much more area and it was ultimately Glenn Seaborg who was then head of the AEC finally made the decision to build the lab near O’Hare Airport.
LR: And you went to the Fermilab quite a lot I gather?
LS: Yes I did. I went there when Wilson would be working outside just on a picnic bench. He was a very creative man. He made lots of mistakes but he was an environmentalist. He insisted on building his buildings out of Coke cans and things like that turned out to be a disaster because they leaked. He was extremely frugal.
LR: Is that what led to his undoing? Who succeeded him?
LS: Lederman. You know who was supposed to have replaced him? The man who built the Bevatron–Ed Lofgren. But they sabotaged it. So it was the young Lederman who replaced him.
LR: And one day when you were out jogging you met someone?
LS: Yes. It was four miles around the track and every year we were supposed to run around the track. So all the young people got there on time and the thing usually started on time but Lederman was nowhere to be seen and we didn’t know when to start. So people started running and out of the woods came this gal Lillian Hoddeson who wrote this incredible book, (Fermilab), an extremely important book. And she was very good-looking. Lederman had a way of attracting young women. Anyway we were jogging around and finally we meet up with Lederman and he was mad as hell as we were running the wrong direction and I was running with his girlfriend.
LR: So physics isn’t all just doing difficult experiments?
LS: No it’s having fun and working and (chuckles) slaving.
LR: Did you meet Feynman?
LS: Oh yeah he was a great man.
LR: You met all the greats. I think you met Oppenheimer
LS: Yes I met Oppenheimer after Teller him stripped him of his clearance. He was gray-haired and on his deathbed. He was a great man.
LR: Teller, what did you think of him?
LS: I had mixed feelings about him. He was a great man but could be extremely mean. He was terribly mean to his wife.
LR: And Lawrence?
LS: I remember on the cyclotron and this is not about the Bevatron, I learned to operate the cyclotron and be at the controls and Lawrence would come in and sit down and ask how things were going. He was a great man.
LR: Do you think he was the greatest you knew?
LS: I think Feynman was a fantastic man–one of the greatest. He did lots of practical things. Murray-Gelman was a very smart guy. He and Feynman would have arguments all the time. Murray even stayed in our home.
LR: Well Lynn you a very modest about yourself but you are one of the great physicists of the 20th century too.
LS: I would not count myself as one of the greats.
LR: Well I do, talking to you is just a delight but I think we’ve run out of time. Thank you.
LS: Thank you