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GEORGE GOLDSMITH |
George Goldsmith; physicist at BC was known for his compassion; at 86
From an attic laboratory in his parents’ home to a 40-year tenure in Boston College’s physics department, Dr. George Goldsmith devoted his life to science, family said. Beyond his professional and academic success, colleagues and relatives recalled him as a pillar of compassion.
“What’s outstanding about George is that he was an accomplished scientist, an accomplished educator, and he also was the most compassionate man I ever knew,’’ said Dr. Michael Graf, a physics professor and a 22-year colleague at BC.
Dr. Goldsmith died Monday at River Bend Rehabilitation Center in South Natick. He was 86 and had lived in Sherborn.
Born in Newburyport as the only child of shop owners Abe and Betty Goldsmith, he took an early interest in how things worked.
“As a boy, he was very interested in taking apart radios,’’ said his wife of 64 years, Sonia (Perkins). He and his childhood friends even set up a workshop devoted to breaking down and rebuilding electronics in the attic, family said.
After graduating from Newburyport High School in 1941, Dr. Goldsmith enrolled in the University of Vermont to study chemistry.
On the first day of his junior year, he introduced himself to freshman Sonia Perkins.
Dr. Goldsmith completed an accelerated program and graduated in 1944. He then began working as an analytical chemist at
Before he was hired at Celanese, family said, representatives from the Manhattan Project approached Dr. Goldsmith about a job. But because of the secretive nature of the atomic bomb program, Dr. Goldsmith rejected the offer and was always pleased with his decision, his wife said.
A year later, he enlisted in the Navy, preempting his possible draft into a less desirable division of the military, family said. With a background in science, he served as a radio technician.
In June 1945, he married his college sweetheart at Anacostia Naval Station in Washington, D.C.
A year later, the couple celebrated their one-year wedding anniversary with the birth of their first child, Lynn.
That fall, Dr. Goldsmith began pursuing a master’s degree in analytical chemistry at Purdue University in Indiana. But by the time he achieved the graduate degree two years later, his focus had turned to physics.
“He found he liked physics better,’’ his wife said.
“One of the reasons was he liked the people better in the physics department. Karl Lark-Horovitz, the famous physicist who headed the department at Purdue, acted as a mentor for George for some time.’’
During his doctoral studies in physics at Purdue, Dr. Goldsmith had two sons, Robert and Peter, and coauthored his only book, “Experimental Nucleonics.’’
In 1954, he received his PhD and was hired by RCA David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, N.J., to work on semiconductors, ferroelectrics, and fluorescents.
Four years later, the research lab sent Dr. Goldsmith to Zurich.
“Oh, it was absolutely marvelous,’’ his wife said.
“We had a house there, and our oldest one went into the Zurich school system.’’
Those 10 months in Switzerland made a lasting impression. The family’s eldest daughter, Lynn Goldberg of Bedford, N.H., learned basketry in the Swiss school and has continued the hobby today, family said.
And Mrs. Goldsmith home-schooled her eldest son in Zurich, fostering her love of teaching, which she did for 23 years in Sherborn.
In 1963, the couple had their final child, Laurie, who is a preschool teacher in Roxbury.
In 1965, RCA loaned Dr. Goldsmith to Princeton University for a three-year study on plasma, giving him his first taste of teaching.
When the study ended, RCA wanted him back, but he sought out a professorship.
“When he worked at [Princeton] helping students, he discovered he adored teaching much more than corporate research,’’ his wife said.
In 1968, Boston College hired him to fill an opening in its physics department.
For the next 40 years, Dr. Goldsmith taught courses in physics, photography, optics, and nuclear science. He did some of his most important research on the electrical properties of semiconductors, Graf said.
The job also led him to several countries, including two 10-week stints in China to teach at Beijing Normal University.
“He always reminded us of the human side of our business, the students who we were dealing with on a day to day basis,’’ Graf said.
More than 20 times, Dr. Goldsmith invited foreign graduate students to stay at his Sherborn home while they attained housing, family said.
“He was a very intense person, incredibly smart,’’ said his son, Robert of New York City, who remembers stumbling upon many of his father’s papers online.
The papers “were in another language, completely unintelligible to most of us. And I realized he was someone who couldn’t bring his work home,’’ his son said. “The intellectual kernel of it was another dimension of him that I could only appreciate in the abstract.’’
Dr. Goldsmith developed Alzheimer’s disease in his later years, but continued to teach until late last year.
In 2004, his eldest son, Peter, a former dean of Oberlin College in Ohio, died of pancreatic cancer.
In addition to his wife and three children, Dr. Goldberg leaves six grandchildren.
In lieu of formal services, the family is gathering today and tomorrow from 2 to 6 p.m. in Goldsmith home at 45 Eliot St. in Sherborn.
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.