Don Voet R. I. P.

One of the bad things about making to 85.5 later this month is losing old friends such as Don Voet.  We met as first year chemistry grad students almost exactly 63 years ago.  Another grad student described him as amiable, but he was more than that with a very dry sense of humor.  The first lecture of every course seemed to be about units.  Voet said he preferred the hand stone fortnight system.  We weren’t that far from World War II and the place was filled with emigrees.  Voet said that the universal scientific language was broken English.

Later on, he and his wife Judy wrote a fabulously successful textbook of Biochemistry which sold over 250,000 copies.  The illustrations were terrific. If you want to see how dull Biochemistry books were in the 50’s and 60’s, go to the library and look at Fruton and Simmonds.

Typical of his unusual thought patterns is the introduction to water (p. 39 third edition of their book).  “Water is so familiar, we generally consider it to be a rather bland fluid of simple character.  It is, however, a chemically reactive liquid with such extraordinary physical properties that, if chemists had discovered it in recent times, it would undoubtedly have been classified as an exotic substance.”

After our first year, Don wanted to see some old friends from Cal Tech in LA and Berkeley.  So we saved up some money from our NSF grants and money made by acting as lab teaching assistants and drove across the country in the summer of 1961 on 25 cent a gallon gas and 5 or 10 cent Hershey bars.  What do you think our yearly income was?  Answer at the end.

It was the first time I really saw the country as it should be seen.   In Rapid City South Dakota, I went into a fairly scummy looking motel, asking for a room for two.  The clerk had two questions.  Is he drunk?  Is he Indian?  My answers were satisfactory so he rented us a room.  We pretty much got up with the sun and went to bed with it not wishing to miss anything, and saw people lined up outside bars in little Wyoming towns at 7AM waiting for to open so they could have a drink.  We swam in the Great Salt Lake and drove across the desert at night to avoid the heat (car air conditioning didn’t exist).  We arrived in Reno at 2 AM.  The place was jumping and all the motels were full.  Finally we found a place with a vacancy sign, but when we went in the clerk asked us how long we wanted the room for.  So we slept in the car out in the desert that night.

One of Don’s old Cal Tech profs had us out to his house in Malibu (something I think would be impossible for a Cal Tech prof today).

On they way back, I dropped Don off at his parent’s house in Borger Texas, the carbon black capital of the world, about 50 miles north of Amarillo.  It’s hard to believe but I had a conversation with his parents which is incredibly relevant today.

Voet is a Dutch name, and his parents (a chemist and an ophthalmologist) were Dutch Jews.  They got out before WWII.  I asked them why they left and they said that there had been some sort of incident at the German embassy, and the Germans went crazy about it. “This is not the act of a friendly country” and they left.

Fast forward 62 years

The response of various political and cultural figures to the massacre in Israel is a moment of clarity, showing who is and who is not a friend of the Jews.

Virtue signaling is easy, virtue acting is not.