Dr. Donald Spoon

FATHER FRANCIS HEYDEN OBSERVATORY AND MEMORIAL GARDENS

Remembrances by Dr. Donald Matthews Spoon, October 20, 2017

Father Francis Joseph Heyden S.J. (1907-1991) received an official letter from the Chairman of the Harvard University Astronomy Department congratulating him as their only Ph.D. graduate who had an observatory named for him. Georgetown University named the nearly one-acre of gardens surrounding the Main Observatory Building as the Francis Heyden Memorial Gardens.

Under the direction of Father Heyden, the Astronomy Department at Georgetown University obtained a high ranking for its graduate and science program. One of Father Heyden’s first doctoral candidates, Dr. John P. Hagen, was made the head of the Vanguard Project that launched our first space satellite in America’s successful race to the moon with the Soviet Union. When the Vatican asked Father Heyden in 1971 to return to the Manila Astronomical Observatory, where he had worked before the Second World War, he left Georgetown University after 26 years of service. He began, in 1945, as an Assistant Professor of Astronomy. In 1972, the Georgetown University Directors ended the Astronomy program. The buildings and grounds were assigned to the Department of Biology to use and oversee their development and maintenance.

In 1972, began my work under the direction of Biology Department Chairman, Dr. George Bunker Chapman (1925-2017), to do the cleanup and alterations needed to create an Environmental Biology Laboratory on Observatory Hill. I outfitted the Observatory Cottage annex that had been used as a classroom into two identical experimental rivers for my funded research on blooms of algae and fish kills in the Potomac River. Biology Department Professor, Father Joseph Allan (Al) Panuska S.J. and his graduate students turned the Block House beside the Observatory into a laboratory for study of hypothermia in mammals. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Cryobiology. (Father Panuska passed away at 89 years old in February, 2017 after a successful academic career including serving as the acknowledged greatest President of the University of Scranton from 1982 to 1998.) Father Panuska placed a large, profile photograph of Father Heyden at the entrance into the renovated Block House. We were able to secure good building material and laboratory furniture from the remodeling of the Pharmacy School at the Medical School Complex. Professor Irving Gray developed the west end of the observatory basement for his research on rainbow trout physiology. Having just earned my Ph. D. degree from Emory University, Dr. Gray invited me to give a departmental seminar in the spring of 1972 that led to my being offered a one-year appointment to fill the position vacated by Associate Professor Dr. Rita Rossi Colwell who left GU to move to the University of Maryland as a full Professor where she has had a remarkably distinguished career including serving as the Head of the National Science Foundation.

Our first tasks were to secure all the buildings by changing all the locks and keys, treat all wooden buildings for termites, and have all the buildings painted including the metal domes. In the 22 years I was at GU, all the buildings were painted three times with non-lead-based paint, about every seven years. However, the older paint that probably contained lead oxide was not completely scraped off. Much of the metal roofs were repaired or replaced so we insured that the internal wooden beams supporting each floor in the Main Observatory Building stayed dry to prevent rot damage from mold. With graduate and undergraduate student paid workers, we scraped and painted all internal walls and cleaned all the flooring. In my sixteenth year at GU, the ceiling tiles in the Observatory Building had to be safely and carefully replaced. In a major renovation effort a water sprinkler system was added, and all new floorings and tiles added that included the dome room. Also, there was a complete inside painting of the main Observatory Building. Much of the electrical wiring was replaced. The building was brought up to code, such as having entrance doors open outwards, not inwards. (Shortly after I left, a long wooden ramp was added on the south side of the main observatory building to allow Father Richard McSorley S.J., who was wheel-chair bound at that time, to have access to his office on the first floor.) We replaced the oil stove with a new, more efficient one and replaced the buried oil tank that had a slow leak. This new stove heated the hot water system that flowed to the registers on each floor.

When I left the Observatory Building to Entomologist Dr. Edward M. Barrows, he replaced me as Astronomy Club faculty advisor. Our former Department Chairman, Dr. George B. Chapman made a complete walk around inspection with me. He was very pleased with all we had accomplished to renovate and maintain the buildings on Observatory Hill. The Observatory had been officially designated a National Landmark in the National Register of Historic Places. (Check their website and publications for the details.) The Heyden Observatory and Memorial Gardens should be well maintained so they can continue to serve the University and the Nation. Many historical observatories with the grounds surrounding them, like the Washington, DC Naval Observatory and many others across America, have been well-preserved for future generations.

In my sixth year at GU, I was asked to give Phycologist Dr. Phillip Sze my office and research space in the Reiss Science Building. I spent a summer building an office and research room on the second floor of the Main Observatory Building. This was quite a task, working on scaffolding to reach the 14-foot ceilings. Two undergraduate students, whose fathers were contractors, did much of the work that included building a small office for the use of the Astronomy Club. The officers of the club had keys to the building, this room, and the dome room for their nightly observations with club members and visitors. To reduce vibrations, the inner parts of the construction had to not touch the square concrete mount for the 12-inch refracting telescope by maintaining a one-inch clearance. This square concrete support became larger at each floor, going down from dome room, second floor, first floor, basement, and extending many more feet to bedrock. Around the building is a three-foot deep, concrete lined moat that reduces vibrations from vehicles that drive around the building.

The first construction of the Georgetown College Observatory Building, under the direction of Father James Curley S.J. of the Physics Department, began in 1841, and was completed in 1844. A metal fence surrounded the observatory grounds with a pair of wrought iron gates at the east entrance of the road that encircled the main Observatory Building. This fence was necessary to keep out the farm animals that grazed freely around the building complex. This fence was gone when Father Heyden was Director of the Observatory. He related to me how his two boxer dogs would go over to what is now Glover-Archibald Park and bark at and chase Mrs. Glover’s fenced-in donkeys. He wondered if this aggravation might have had some influence on her decision to give this large parcel of land to the National Park Service, rather than to Georgetown University. The one story building at the west end of the Main Observatory Building housed the carriage house that still shows where doors were once hung. Another building on the northwest corner, since completely removed, had the stable for the carriage horse and an upstairs at ground level to store hay. In the archives is a magnificent color painting of the horse, carriage, and rider with the view across the wide valley to the main Georgetown College campus buildings. In 1972, these two outbuildings, with constantly running dehumidifiers, housed part of the library that was acquired by the University of Maryland Astronomy Department. In 1879, with Observatory Director Dr. Johann Goerg Hagen S.J., a much larger telescope, a 12-inch American-built Galilean refracter replaced the 4-inch London-built refracting telescope that was then moved to be operational in a small domed building on the south side of the Main Observatory Building.

I served as Astronomy Club faculty advisor during my 22 years at GU, as a Biology Department tenured, graduate faculty Assistant Professor, having mentored five Ph. D dissertations and eight M. S. theses. I accepted early retirement at 55 ½ years old to become a Senior Scientist at the Biosphere 2 Environmental Project in Oracle, AZ. There is a plaque at the Biosphere 2 site commemorating my discovery of Euhyperamoeba biospherica. See our publication in 1995 Invertebrate Biology - vol. 114.3, pages 189-201, with second author Chris Hogan - now a medical doctor - who did his senior thesis on this giant amoeba, and electron microscopist Dr. George B. Chapman, as third author. I safely transported this giant amoeba from the Biosphere 2 tropical ocean biome that I managed and established the amoeba in two identical experimental tropical ocean biomes, built by GU senior thesis students, that had controlled lighting that simulated natural sunlight. These two model ocean biomes were located in the Main Observatory Building west end basement room. This giant - up to 7 mm in diameter - multinucleated amoeba feeds on filamentous blue green algae. It has primitive nuclei that divide by simple fissure and bacteria instead of mitochondria. At one end of the crawling amoeba is a tuft of many long, thin axopodia, supported by microtubules, used to find its food. It has a form of sexual reproduction by spontaneously fragmenting and randomly rejoining. E. biospherica may be the most primitive eukaryotic - truly nucleated - organism ever discovered and studied using the electron microscope. The prokaryotes, like the types of bacteria, lack membrane-bound nuclei or organelles, and have cytoplasmic DNA. E. biospherica may have remained essentially unchanged as a living fossil, like the primitive lobed coelacanth fish, since it diverged from the lineage that eventually led to eukayotic organisms, be they single-cellular protists - protozoa and single-celled algae - or multi-cellular fungi, algae, plants, and all animals including humans.

The spring before I left Georgetown University in 1972, Dr. Chapman presented at a Friday evening Department seminar, our published findings on E.biospherica. He also presented our unpublished studies on other possibly related living fossil organisms that I had discovered, and we had studied with our graduate and senior thesis students. He joked to the audience that we were waiting for our call from the Nobel Committee. Our publication on E. biospherica received the most reprint requests of the 130+ papers that Dr. Chapman authored or co-authored.

The club had some splendid events like observing the return of Halley’s comet in 1986, showing this once in a lifetime event to hundreds of Georgetown University students. Father Royden B. Davis S.J. authorized the Astronomy Club to purchase a portable Meade 4.5-inch Newtonian reflecting telescope with automatic computerized positioning that we took on club excursions for mountaintop observations where the stars in the pitch dark sky were crystal clear. Seeing the horse head nebulae, with its ancient light striking directly onto your own retina, was an awesome experience. One night, we viewed the eclipse of the moon using our 12-inch refracting telescope with an image for the observer that appeared about six feet across, edged on one side in jagged light. What a spectacular sight! We also had a fine 80-mm refracting telescope that I obtained from the DC government surplus. When needed to observe the moon, it was set up on the south side balcony. We had a complete set of large, thick paper photographs of the whole sky made with a 26-inch refracting telescope. The club members assembled in the first floor bookshelf, the published works of Matthew Maury who had worked at the Georgetown College Observatory. A large plaque on the wall commemorated his many contributions to Astronomy and newly found knowledge of ocean currents and trade winds. Above this plaque was a magnificent photograph of a total eclipse by Father Heyden taken on one of seven trips abroad with his graduate students. The club members cherished our collection of historic implements held in glass cabinets on the first floor and stored in the basement east room. Club members assembled the parts of a short wave radio found in a storage box in the dome room that they tried to make fully operational.

Through the leadership of astronomy club president, Maurice Dolcich, the Georgetown University Directors were convinced to make a complete renovation of the 12-inch telescope, the dome room, plus the dome motors and gears that made it revolve into position. (Maurice is a Dominican in Croatia, the country from which his grandparents migrated to the USA. His sister, Ann, received her M.S. degree in Biology, mentored by me. She wrote her thesis on r and k adaptation. Georgetown Theology Professor, Father Thomas M. King S.J., served on her graduate committee.) An astronomer from the Navel Observatory in Washington, DC that had recently renovated their nearly identical American-built 12-inch refractor and their expert machinist spent months completing this renovation. They removed the London-built four-inch refracting telescope housed in the small domed building on the south side of the Main Observatory Building and mounted it on the 12-inch refractor as a spotting telescope. When they finished with the final coat of paint, the telescopes looked brand new. The club members also reassembled in the basement east room the parts of the solar diffraction apparatus Father Heyden had used as a spectrograph to study the elements in the sun. They had it completely assembled with the original mirrors to bring sunlight from a window into the basement to be separated by a 6-inch diffraction gradient and make a photograph of the distinctive emission lines of the sun.

Knowing that Father Heyden was traveling in the fall from Manila to the States to obtain a heart pacemaker, the Astronomy club officers planned a special evening to honor him at the Observatory. Administrative Assistant, Laura DeJoseph, coordinated the planning for the event and sent out hundreds of invitations. On the night of the event, it was a bit chilly with a cloudless sky. On the north side of the Observatory, we had a big, enclosed tent set up with portable heaters. Hot drinks and cookies were served later over in the Block House. Father Royden B. Davis, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, gave a spirited introductory speech. Father Martin F. McCarthy S.J., as a visiting lecturer in the Physics Department to Georgetown University from the Vatican Astronomy Observatory, spoke eloquently of Father Heyden’s many accomplishments as an Astronomer and educator. (It was Father McCarthy who wrote and published the definitive obituary for Father Heyden in the 1992 – Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society vol. 33, pages 265-267.) Several of Father Heyden’s former students made short presentations. It was so interesting to talk with these former students and faculty members who were overjoyed to see the 4-inch and 12-inch telescopes so beautifully restored and to find many pieces of scientific equipment they had used that Astronomy club members had saved.

After our conversations, Father McCarthy asked me if I would give the lecture to his undergraduate/graduate Astronomy class on the various theories of how the planets of our solar system formed. He had to miss one lecture to fly to Arizona where the Vatican was building a giant 1.8 meter telescope on the top of Mt. Graham. I had been an avid amateur astronomer, reading Sky and Telescope and other Astronomy sources, since I was 14 years old. I had built a large moveable, lighted teaching model of the solar system for my high school physics class as a science fair project. It was a great honor and privilege for me to lecture to Father McCarthy’s enthusiastic, inquisitive GU students, including several Astronomy Club members.

Our evening event honoring Father Heyden was alive with joyous excitement and fond memories. We set up a platform in the Observatory first floor lobby with a big, comfortable leather armchair for Father Heyden to greet, at eye level, his former students and faculty members, members of the Jesuit community, Astronomy Club members, and Biology and Physic Department students and faculty. About 200 attended this historic event. All, who wanted to, had the chance to speak with Father Heyden. Everyone had the chance to go up to the dome room and, if they wished, to climb out onto the south side balcony and enjoy the panoramic view of the Capitol, Crystal City across the river, Georgetown, and Georgetown University Campus. The next day, Father Heyden came back to the observatory to have a personal look around. He spent the afternoon with me for a taped interview as we walked about and inside the buildings. I gave the tapes of this interview to the Astronomy Club who had intended to make a transcript of them. Unfortunately, the tapes may have been lost. Maurice and I had spent many hours going through all the many boxes of historic documents and photographs about the Observatory in the rare book collection of the GU library. Maybe, those tapes ended up there. A few days after our event, Father Heyden received a pacemaker that gave his heart a strong, steady beat. This pacemaker allowed him to visit family members and friends and return to the Philippines to pursue his astronomical observations at the Manila Observatory and teach at the Ateneo de Manila, a Jesuit College.

Father Heyden had lucid memories and extensive knowledge of the history of Observatory Hill. Before the arrival of English settlers, the Native Americans had encampments on Observatory Hill that gave easy access to the river and its spring shad runs. A few hundred yards down in Glover-Archibald Park was a permanent spring providing good potable water. (Presently, it has too many enteric bacteria for human consumption.). Under the white wooden sideboards of the Observatory Cottage, located on the eastern side of the Main Observatory Building, are a few timbers of the original two-story log cabin built by the first settlers who cleared the land for farming. Maurice and I made a four-foot square dig down two feet on the north side of the Observatory Cottage and found numerous interesting metal and pottery relics, plus historic handmade bricks. When the metal roof of the Cottage was replaced just before I left GU, the roofers discovered the remnants of a stick-and-daub chimney, as chimney bricks were unavailable to the first homesteaders who cut down the virgin forests to built log cabins. I asked the roofers to leave the chimney remnants in place as the growth rings could help to determine the year the log cabin was built. I taught an undergraduate/graduate course entitled “Ecology of the Potomac River Basin” in the Biology Department for fifteen summers. Dr. Phil Ogilvie, the official District of Columbia Historian, was one of my seven guest speakers in the course. He said that the Observatory Cottage was of significant historical value. He dated the wood sideboard building, excluding the annex, as circa 1765 - the year of the unpopular Stamp Act. He said the original log cabin on the site was most likely built decades before, in the early 1700s, maybe over 300! years ago. He said the Observatory Cottage was probably the only remaining farmhouse of the many that once surrounded Washington, DC and Georgetown. Hopefully, it will be considered part of the Observatory National Historic Site and preserved for future generations.

Father Heyden knew in detail the important role Joseph West played in the history of GU starting with his arrival on campus in 1843. Joseph West was a Montgomery County farmer who lost his wife and children to then common infectious diseases. He sold his farm and moved to Georgetown College. The Observatory Cottage where Joseph West lived had a long rectangular annex with a brick chimney - recently removed - for the exhaust pipe for the Franklin stove. Upstairs there was a low ceiling bedroom under the sloping roof of this east annex. When workers removed the leaky metal roof from this annex, they found in large printing a former roofer’s name “Norman, 1840”. This gives a definitive date for when this annex was added to the Observatory Cottage, one year before construction began on the Main Observatory Building.

Joseph West could not live with the Jesuit community, so he was allowed to live in the renovated Observatory Cottage with its new east annex. It had an upstairs bathroom with large tub and downstairs a kitchen and dining room. His farming skills were greatly valued. He built large vegetable gardens for the Georgetown College. Also, he built the system of trails that led among the giant virgin trees in the Valley. This meandering circular woodland pathway was a favorite place for faculty and students to take a stroll. He used the money he earned from selling his farm to buy a large tract of land north of the campus. When it was sold, after greatly appreciating in value, the proceeds were used to help fund construction of the Healy Building, named to honor the first Healy President of GU. There is a carved stone memorial to Joseph West on campus. It is the word “West” above the southwest entrance of the Undergraduate Admissions Building.

After Joseph West died, the Observatory Cottage served as the home for various university workers and their families. I got to meet, as adults, four of the Gilbridge children who had lived there many years when Father Paul McNally S. J. was director of the Georgetown Observatory. They told of enduring some extremely harsh winter nights in the Observatory Cottage with their mother and father. Their father was a master carpenter and all across the GU campus are still standing structures he built or repaired. For many years while I was at GU, an Italian immigrant named Mario, who was a master carpenter, repaired or replicated precisely many wooden structures, such as complete doors and window frames, on Observatory Hill.

Father Heyden told me that starting with the building of the Observatory in 1841, there had been flowerbeds on the grounds especially around the Observatory Cottage and north side of the Main Observatory Building, including one he built and tended. Beginning in 1978, I began building flower gardens on Observatory Hill. I grew about 800 varieties of irises and hybridized irises in these many Observatory gardens that served as a beautiful site for two - 1989 and 1991 - American Iris Society National Conventions with hundreds of visitors from across America and foreign countries. (My ultimate goal was to develop disease-resistant bearded iris hybrid cultivars that could be used as a new staple food for humans and their livestock in collaboration with Biology Department Botanist Dr. Peter Chen with graduate student Peter Thaler.) I could not have established these gardens without the help of many work study students like Maurice Dolcich who worked with me for three years as an undergraduate. Also, many adjudicated GU students were workers at the gardens. I encouraged the students to design the various flowerbeds. One work-study student, a linguistics major named Ellen, did a lion’s share of the designing including the positioning of the six-foot tall wooden fences. When she submitted her design to Dean Royden B. Davis, he found the necessary funds to complete all of her design. Years later, when she visited the gardens, she told me she had completed her training to become a landscape architect and had her own successful firm. I told her how very proud I was of her.

Maurice also played a major role in acquiring for the gardens the white marble statue of the Madonna that is a valued feature of the Francis Heyden Memorial Garden. Maurice found it stored in the Crypt Chapel in the basement of Copley Residential Hall. He asked Father Tom King and the Jesuit Community Rector to approve it being set up in the observatory gardens. It took six strong laborers to gently place the reclined statue on a dolly, transport it in a van, and then set it upright in the garden. One of the immigrant Italian stone masons who worked for Buildings and Grounds Department had relatives who made fine marble statues in Italy. He said that this Madonna statue was the work of a master stone carver who with two or three assistants would have taken nearly a year to complete it. He said that it would cost over $50,000 to commission such an exquisite statue. This statue of the Blessed Mother is obviously a Lady of Lourdes, because it has roses on her feet. No one on campus knew the origin of this Madonna statue. Maybe, this marble Madonna statue with her delicate string of rosary beads was saved from a Catholic Church in Maryland before the American Revolution during the period when the Protestant Church of England outlawed all Catholic Churches. On the field trips with my Ecology classes to spend the weekend at Greenbackville in coastal, southern Maryland, we stopped at sites where all that remained of Catholic Churches were cleared sites.

For me, this Madonna statue will always hold a beautiful mystery. For many years during the bloom season, almost every morning, before any of us arrived, someone would secretly place a fresh, cut flower from the gardens in the hands of the Madonna. A fully opened, red rose blossom was their favorite choice. We asked many suspects, but never discovered who was responsible.

Since this October 28, 2017 memorial event for Father Heyden is being held just before Halloween, I will relate an Observatory Hill ghost story that Father Heyden told me. When a Physics Department Professor passed on, his wife asked Father Heyden if her husband’s ashes could be buried on Observatory Hill. Father Heyden graciously agreed. She brought over a tightly closed, light green tin box containing her husband’s ashes. After saying some appropriately reverent words, they buried the tin about two feet underground in a area where the McDonough Gymnasium now stands and placed an unmarked flat stone at ground level. When workers with heavy equipment began excavating to build the Gym, Father Heyden realized that the tin box would be scooped up and lost. Father Heyden got his two observatory workers, who were descendents of African slaves, to help him dig up the tin. Father Heyden persuaded them to sprinkle the ashes in the woods at the western end of the Main Observatory Building. For several yeas, the two workers told of being thoroughly spooked when they saw the ghost of the Physics Professor wandering about in the woods where the ashes were spread.

One dark, fall night just before Halloween, I heard the dome moving to a new position and went up to the dome room to find that the door was locked and no one was there. When this reoccurred on two other dark nights that winter, I asked myself, “Could this be the ghost of the Physics Professor haunting the Observatory Building?” When electricians, who were working in the dome room, touched the old wires to the electric motor that rotated the dome, the switch turned on and the dome ran on its own for a number of seconds. Thankfully, after those old wires and switch were replaced, never again did the dome rotate spontaneously on its own.

Submitted by Dr. Spoon to Laura Caron via email October 22, 2017.