William Zielenbach

Bill Zielenbach graduated from Georgetown with a PhD in astronomy in 1969.

Father Heyden entered my life in 1965 and I see his influence on me in one way or another to this day. He was willing to take a gamble on my somewhat checkered academic record at Holy Cross and gave me the support and encouragement to achieve a Georgetown Ph.D. and a job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Much of what I associate with the Society of Jesus is a result of him. Although I never knew him in a classroom setting, his willingness to assist in matters personal as well as academic earned him the sobriquet avuncular.

A respected scientist in his own right, he brought in professionals from a variety of Washington area institutions as professors and/or mentors. The Naval Observatory, the Bureau of Standards, NASA Goddard and Howard University are just a few of the resources he tapped for the benefit of his graduate students.

The graduate students themselves were drawn from many quarters. Many were fresh out of undergraduate school, including a respectable number of females for that time. There were also older individuals, married, with jobs in various nearby facilities, who were able to attend because classes were generally held in the evening. Because of the Society’s long involvement with astronomy, Jesuits were frequently among the students. I remember two, one a contemporary, and one a late vocation fellow who had just been ordained and whom we chose to baptize our first born. (The pastor at Holy Trinity worried that he might not do the job correctly because he was so newly minted.)

I would describe the syllabus as a liberal arts introduction to graduate astronomy. Students were exposed to the discipline as a whole though basic courses in each of the major subfields. Master and Doctoral degrees were the opportunities for deeper specialization.

The foreign language requirement had an interesting twist. One had to pass tests in 2 foreign languages, and the testing was done by members of the astronomy department faculty, who the night before the exam, would give the student a bound volume of a journal in the language being tested to study. During the test, the tester would open randomly to a page and ask the student to start translating. The student was expected to have sufficient grasp of the language to determine whether the article was critically important to his field of study, and if he/she couldn’t get all the nuances, he/she could get it translated professionally. Father Heyden was the examiner for one of the older students, a 40-50’ish gentleman from Taiwan who knew French much, much better than English. Although in an article on photographic processes, “cliche” should have been translated “plate”, it came out as “saucer”. I suspect Father took liquid fortification before the exam, and I’m sure he had plenty afterwards.

Some vignettes:

Father was rolly polly, about 5’7”, with rimless glasses, and was always dressed in a black suit and a faded “dickey”, the bib-like appendage attached to his clerical collar. He had a bald pate, and what seemed like a perpetual twinkle in his eye. In a red suit, he would easily be mistaken for St. Nick. His handkerchief was half as big as he was, and after use was stuffed back unfolded into his trouser pocket.

His secretary when I was there was a quiet wiry ex-marine named Tom, who knew him like a book. Tom’s office was outside Father’s, and by contrast, always shipshape. More than once when Tom was absent, I’d hear in a nasally voice “Who stole my………, Oh, here it is!”

Father must have suffered nasal drip because he frequently pulled air in thru his nose to clear it, giving a short burst of what sounded like snoring. The less respectful of us referred to this as a “snort”. During my tenure, another professor had the opposite problem of frequent uncontrolled exhaling of audible short bursts through the nose, which were naturally dubbed “trons” (which is “snort” spelled backwards). Imagine the stereo affect of these two!

There was a resident feline around the observatory who answered to “Dammit”, apparently because its exasperated master, when leaving the observatory, would frequently tell it “get in here, dammit!”

Most offices in the observatory had a Friden electromechanical calculator, and there would often be symphonies of whirring and clicking sounds as users employed them. One back room had a veritable dinosaur of an early computer, of which Father was very proud, and which only he and a scant few of the older students knew how to program. For my studies of asteroid orbits, I did the graveyard shift at the main campus science building’s computer center. The other contenders for that time were Physics Department grad students, and we each had programs that would run for 4-6 hours unattended before printing out results and stopping. It was ethically unthinkable at 2:00 AM to stop the other guy’s job even though it had gone well beyond its expected run time, since it might be just minutes away from that critical printout. We resorted to rain dances for thunderstorms, which could solve our ethical problems with a 2 second power outage.

The grad students did have offices on campus, but for some reason they were infrequently used. They were located above the fragrant locker rooms of the gymnasium, bordered on the west by dank forested land, so hot humid days in early fall and late springtime found us anywhere but there.

The geographic and age diversity of the grad students along with the variety of institutions from which the professors came somehow contributed to an overall feeling of mutual respect among the students and faculty, and a surprising absence of the competitive nature sometimes seen among undergraduates.

The professor who was my thesis mentor, Doug O’Handley, got me the job at JPL, and soon did the same for another of my favorite professors, Henry Fliegel. Once in California, the three of us became lifelong friends. I was anxious to meet a Jesuit astronomer who was at Georgetown before my time, and finally had occasion to visit George Coyne, S.J., at Kino house in Tuscon. We became backpacking buddies; he hosted our family at the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gondolfo; we still visit him regularly at LeMoyne where he is teaching in retirement.

In my mind the atmosphere of respect, professionalism and congeniality that pervaded the observatory was a result of the man for whom the building is now named.

Submitted by email to Laura Caron October 18, 2017