Who Is This? 1994 Gibbs Ceremony (Hawthorne)
by Josh Kurutz, Section Historian
(for February 2019 Chemical Bulletin)
Photographic documentation of the 1994 Willard Gibbs Award meeting needs help, especially with identifications of people at the head table. We have 26 photos from the event, which are now posted to a gallery on our website:
https://chicagoacs.org/gallery.php?id=77
The images show a lively event at Café Continental (on Lincoln, in Chicago), with musicians and a large number of chemists, but in most photos of the audience it is difficult to determine people’s identities. The Historian would appreciate any identifications or insights about the meeting; please drop a note to [email protected].
Two photos show august denizens of the head table, but not all are identified. Photo #1 shows three unknown people plus Chicago Section Chair Sandy Angelos (S.A.), medalist M. Frederick Hawthorne (M.F.H.), and ACS President Ned Heindel (N.H., who bears a remarkable resemblance to former Section Chair Keith Kostecka). Photo #2 shows six people this Historian could not identify. However, we know that some appear in several photos from other Chicago ACS events, and it will be very useful to identify them. 9405-D and 9405-E, for instance, appear regularly in photos of this era, especially at Gibbs meetings. 9405-K spoke at the lectern, probably introducing the medalist, but the May 1994 issue of the Bulletin only identifies the person doing the introduction as “To Be Announced”.
Photo #3 shows a small cluster of people admiring the medal, including Prof. Hawthorne (M.F.H.), two people who are obscured (possibly Sandy Angelos and Jim Shoffner), and a fourth person, who remains unidentified. Your Historian suspects 9405-M may be Luis Echegoyen , who is now the 2019 ACS President-Elect. What do you think?
The title of Prof. Hawthorne’s talk was not printed in the Bulletin. If you know the title or can identify anyone in the photos, please send the Historian an email at [email protected].
To help provide an impression of the evening and perhaps jog your memory, consider Prof. Hawthorne’s award citation: "For outstanding contributions to the fields of inorganic chemistry and organometallic chemistry through his seminal discoveries in the rapidly expanding area of borane clusters. In particular, his work has provided pioneering insights into the syntheses, structures, bonding, and reactivity patterns of polyhedral borane anions, carboranes, and metallocarboranes. His research has made possible major new advances at the interfaces of chemistry with the biosciences, medicine, and other fields of contemporary importance such as molecular recognition."
