Emeritus Professor

In 1990, I became the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Emeritus Professor at NU. Mary, the children (then adults with their own families), and I looked forward to this day. Of course, this meant that I would be free of teaching and research at NU. Thus, our family could spend more time together, something I had not done earlier because of my travels here and abroad to give invited lectures at universities or at international scientific conferences or symposia Add to that the years I was President of the ACS and, as described earlier, had to travel worldwide as its representative. Furthermore, my seven years on a NATO science research panel required that I go twice a year to the NATO headquarters in Brussels, and one time a year to a NATO science developing country (see pp. 148–152). There were times when I felt as though I was spending all my time in airports, due to delayed or canceled flights. Once I told this to my brother, Martin, who owned the only grocery store in Coello, named “Basolo’s Groceries” (Fig. 7–1). Martin, who had never left Coello nor had ever seen an ocean or a mountain, said to me, “You are crazy running all over the world, when you could have stayed here and taken it easy.” There were times when I was waiting in an airport that I would think about what my brother had said. Fortunately, I did not take his advice, because I may have been a coal miner dying at an early age of “black lung.”