Obituaries - Jan. 11, 2000
Karl Strauch; Physicist Found Evidence of Quarks
Karl Strauch, 77, a Harvard physicist who led experiments that produced early evidence of the existence of quarks. German-born Strauch immigrated with his family to Lafayette, Calif., in 1939 and attended UC Berkeley, earning a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1943 and a doctorate in physics in 1950. He joined Harvard’s faculty in 1950. In 1967, he was named director of the Cambridge Electron Accelerator after an explosion had badly disabled it and was credited with restoring the laboratory to full operation. In the early 1970s, he led experiments that produced some of the early evidence of the existence of quarks, then a new category of matter. He later participated in major experiments at the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva, the Stanford Linear Accelerator at Stanford University and DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany. In 1975, he headed the Strauch Committee, whose findings resulted in the merger of Harvard and Radcliffe’s admissions offices and an admissions policy of equal access for women. Strauch struggled with Parkinson’s disease for 15 years. On Jan. 3 of pneumonia at Beth Israel Medical Center in Boston.
Robert Thomas Jr.; New York Times Obituary Writer
Robert McGill Thomas Jr., 60, an obituary writer for the New York Times who had an ability to craft magical pieces from seemingly mundane material. Thomas began writing obituaries exclusively in 1995 after serving as a police reporter, a rewrite man, a society news reporter and a sportswriter for the Times. He was credited with using a fresh approach to writing obituaries, finding key details to illuminate lives that might otherwise have been overlooked or underreported. Among the people he chronicled were Johnny Sylvester, who died in 1990, 64 years after he came to fame as a bedridden boy who inspired Babe Ruth; pilot Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan, who in 1938 left New York for California and landed his small plane in Dublin 28 hours later; and Edward Lowe, a sawdust merchant from Cassopolis, Mich., who found a new use for the kiln-dried, granulated clay he had been selling for use in cleaning up grease spills, a product eventually marketed as Kitty Litter. Born in Shelbyville, Tenn., Thomas went to Yale University, where he worked on the student newspaper and flunked out as a result of a decision, he said, “to major in New York rather than anything academic.” After joining the Times as a copy boy in 1959, Thomas spent the next four decades in a variety of reporting assignments, often prowling police stations and working the phones in the late hours to produce fast-breaking stories. On Thursday of abdominal cancer at his family’s summer home in Rehoboth Beach, Del.
