Archie Spencer Wilson
1921-2000

Archie S. Wilson was born in Tekoa, Washington on January 19, 1921, the son of Andrew Hamilton Wilson and Viola Sledge Wilson. Both of his parents' parents had homesteaded land in central Washington east of the Columbia River near Ephrata. At the time of Archie's birth, however, his father was a wheat farmer near Farmington (south of Tekoa), in extreme eastern Washington near the Idaho state line, south of Spokane and north of Pullman. His older brother Andy (Andrew) was born in Ephrata in 1918 before the move to Farmington. After the wheat market collapsed in 1921, their father sold the ranch in Farmington and moved to Portland, Oregon to attend chiropractic school, putting himself through school as a salesman. Archie's younger brother, Milton, was born in Portland in 1923. After completing his Doctor of Chiropractic degree, their father moved the family to Forest Grove, Oregon, a town west of Portland, to start a practice. Archie began first grade in Forest Grove, but signs of the Depression were developing and people did not pay their bills (and there was no health insurance in those days), so Archie's father closed his practice and the family moved briefly back east to Spokane, Washington, where Archie's maternal grandparents managed an apartment house, the Blackstone. His father found some jobs selling cars. Archie finished the first half of second grade in Spokane, and then the family moved back to Portland, where Archie finished second grade at a school in southeast Portland. The family then moved to 49th Street off Prescott in the Beaumont school district. After two more moves, Archie graduated from Beaumont and, ultimately, from U.S. Grant High School, in January 1939. Since his family always rented, he lived in at least 12 houses during this stay in Portland, usually in the northeast part.

During the remainder of the 1939 academic year, Archie enrolled at Washington High School to fill out some math requirements for college entrance in advanced algebra and trigonometry. He had to drop out because he came down with tularemia ("rabbit fever"), which almost did him in, but was diagnosed in time and the antidote administered so that he recovered and was able to start college in the fall of 1939. His Aunt Grace, whose husband was a faculty member, invited him to go to Iowa State College (now University) in Ames and stay with them, which he did. He enrolled in the chemical technician curriculum. He stayed at Iowa State during the summer of 1940, finishing the math requirements for entrance. The summers of the war years of 1941 and 1942 were spent in Portland with his mother. During the summer of 1942 he worked as an assistant welder on a machine welding bottoms, decks, and bulkheads of ships at the Albina Kaiser shipyard. In January 1943 Archie joined the Manhattan Project at the Ames Iowa Laboratory, as a Research Associate, in X-ray diffraction studies of solid structures, and as an assistant to Prof. Robert E. Rundle, a well-known crystallographer. He worked on the crystal structures of uranium, thorium, and their alloys, hydrides, carbides, nitrides, and oxides. The work was initially classified; Archie was a coauthor of four reports, which led to his becoming a coauthor of four journal articles (during 1948-50) after the war was over. The project ended when the atomic bomb was dropped, but Archie was allowed to stay on until he could resume and finish his B.S. degree in Chemistry at Iowa State, in August 1946.

Archie met Ivon Marie Teeter, a Home Economics student at Iowa State, in the fall of 1941, and they became engaged in 1943 and were married on June 11, 1944 in Ames, Iowa. In 1946 Archie was selected as a winner in a nationwide competition in which the awardees attended one of three graduate schools at U.S. Army expense, while on active duty. As a result, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Quartermaster Corps and entered graduate school at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1946. His daughter, Andrea, was born November 25, 1946. His wife Ivon contracted poliomyelitis in July 1948, during her pregnancy with Ronald, their oldest son. In the same week, Archie passed his written preliminary exams (and his oral exams two weeks later). Fortunately, Ronald was born without complications, on November 12, 1948. Ivon took a while to recover, however, as the polio affected her legs, hip, and back muscles. Archie served daily as her physical therapist, while starting his Ph.D. research. Fortunately, his mother-in-law, Agnes Louise Baird Teeter, came to Chicago and took care of the whole family during the recovery period. Ivon was eventually able to lay aside her crutches and walk some little distance before tiring, but could never run again. Unfortunately, forty years later the post-polio syndrome appeared, the weakness returned, and she now uses a walker for assistance in walking. Archie received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1950 and June 1951, respectively, under the direction of Prof. Henry Taube, who later moved to Stanford and received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1983. Archie's Ph.D. thesis, in the field of physical inorganic chemistry, was entitled "The Stabilities of Chromic Fluoride and Gallium Halide Complexes in Aqueous Solutions." The work was subsequently published with Henry Taube (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 74, 3509 (1952)). Archie was an Instructor in Chemistry at the University of Nebraska from 1950 to 1951 .

The Hanford Years

Upon receiving his Ph.D. degree in June 1951, Archie took a position as a research Chemist and later became a Senior Scientist at the Hanford Laboratories of the Hanford Works of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, administered by the General Electric Company, in Richland, Washington. The Hanford Works are on the Columbia River in south central Washington just north of where the Yakima River joins the Columbia from the west. A little further downstream, just below Pasco (northeast bank) and Kennewick (southwest bank), the Snake River joins the Columbia from the northeast, so the Tri-Cities Region is a region of confluence of major rivers. On August 30, 1952, his youngest son, Steve, was born. Archie remained at the Hanford Laboratories for 20 years. In January 1965, the administration of the Hanford Works changed and the laboratory became the Pacific Northwest Laboratories of Battelle Memorial Institute and Archie's title became Research Associate in the Applied Chemistry Section, but his duties remained the same. He specialized in the inorganic chemistry of nuclear fission products, mainly ruthenium, and the actinide elements, especially plutonium and uranium, and in computer techniques for indexing X-ray powder patterns. His work involved aqueous complex ion chemistry, ruthenium chemistry, solvent extraction processes for nuclear fuels, plutonium fuel reprocessing, and amine extraction of anions. Most of the work was classified and applied and was reported in 16 HW (Hanford Works) reports and, later, in 3 BNWL (Battelle Northwest Laboratories) reports. Part of the work was published subsequently, however, in 13 journal articles (including 2 crystallographic papers from Minnesota, one in 1978 and one in 1982), 4 U.S. patents, 9 papers at American Chemical Society Northwest Regional Meetings, 3 papers at international meetings, and 2 invited lectures.

During his time at Hanford, Archie served the American Chemical Society, of which he had been a member since 1950, as Secretary, 1953, and Chairman-elect, 1969, of the Richland, Washington Section and Program Chairman of the 1960 Pacific Northwest Regional Meeting. He served as a Lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry at the Joint Center for Graduate Studies in Richland, from 1954-71, and was elected to the Faculty Executive Committee in 1968-70. He was a Scientific Adviser (as well as a speaker) at the 2nd International Conference on the Peaceful uses of Atomic Energy, Geneva, Switzerland in 1958 and a Member of the U.S. Delegation to the Joint U.S./U.K. Conference on Ruthenium Chemistry, Harwell, England, also in 1958. He taught Advanced Inorganic Chemistry for one semester as a Visiting Lecturer at Washington State University in Pullman in 1964. He was a Guest Associate at the Oregon Graduate Center in Beaverton (Portland) on a Battelle-Northwest Staff-Exchange Leave, March-December 1970. Archie was appointed by the Governor as a trustee for Central Washington State College in Ellensburg, beginning in 1959, reappointed in 1963, and continued into 1969. Ellensburg is a city on the Yakima River upstream from the city of Yakima and northwest of Richland. As a trustee, Archie immersed himself in academic administration, serving as Chairman of the Board, 1964-65, 1968-69; Presidential Search Secretary, 1960; Chairman, Joint Board of Trustees, 1964; and Member of the Personnel Board, elected 1960, Chairman 1965-69. Archie was also very active in community affairs, serving as a member of the City of Richland Ethics Committee, Vice Chairman, 1967-68, and the Public Law 221 Committee on Expenditure and Projections; P.T.A., President, Jason Lee School, 1955; City P.T.A. Council, Vice-President, 1956; Boy Scouts of America, various offices 1944-67; American Association for the United Nations, Tri-Cities Chapter, President, 1963-64; Washington Environmental Council; Yakima Conservancy; the American Civil Liberties Union, Benton-Franklin Counties Chapter, President, 1962, Board Member 1963-64, 1966-67, and the Richland Sword and Mask Club. Archie considered himself a life-long Democrat and was active in support of Democratic party candidates wherever he lived. In Richland he was a Democratic Precinct Committeeman, 1954-70, Delegate to the State Convention 1954-60, 1962, 1964, 1968, and held numerous other committee offices and functions.

The Minnesota Years

In June 1971 Archie accepted a position as Professor of Chemistry and Associate Chairman in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota. In this capacity, he worked closely with Professor Robert M. Hexter, who had come from Carnegie-Mellon University to become Chairman of the Chemistry Department in 1969. Archie served as a very hardworking administrator of the department and taught beginning (general) chemistry. In his administrative capacity, Archie pioneered, with the help of the Civil Service staff, a departmental computerized accounting system which worked, when previously there had been none. At the end of 1977 Archie relinquished his administrative duties and began full-time teaching and research. Working under an extremely heavy teaching load in general chemistry, teaching partly on the St. Paul Campus, Archie was much beloved by his students, who appreciated his down-to-earth practical style of teaching. He worked actively with the Area Chemistry Teachers group and the National Science Teachers Association. His research at Minnesota was directed primarily toward the teaching of chemistry and especially the nature of examinations and their interpretation, where he collaborated with Prof. Paul W. Fox, Professor of Psychology, in publishing two papers on these topics in J. Chem. Ed., 59, 576, 857 (with David Alden) (1982). He also published papers with Vernon R. Petersen (a Lecture Demonstrator in the Department of Chemistry) on "The Bakelite Demonstration: A Safer Procedure" in J. Chem. Ed., 55, 652 (1978) and with James W. Long on "A Visual Demonstration of Raoult's Law" in J. Chem. Ed., 67, 598 (1990).. He gave popular talks on chemistry such as "Plutonium-Friend or Foe," before 140 people at the Adult Forum of the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis on October 29, 1978. He was a much-valued and utilized consultant on chemical questions from the public within the Department of Chemistry and by the "Mr. Fixit" column of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. On January 18, 1989 Archie was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The citation read "For research in the chemistry of the constituents of irradiated nuclear fuels, for teaching, and for academic administration." During the Minnesota years, Archie and Ivon lived in St. Paul, at 866 West Larpenteur Avenue, just east of north Victoria Street, and, facing, to the north, Roselawn cemetery in the suburb of Roseville. Archie retired from the University of Minnesota on June 15, 1989, and became Professor Emeritus.

The Retirement Years

Following his retirement, Archie and Ivon moved to Snohomish County, Washington, in his native state, overlooking Puget Sound just north of Edmonds, a northern suburb of Seattle. All three of their children live in the state of Washington, two of them in the Seattle area. He maintained an active correspondence by E-mail with some of his former colleagues and enjoyed visits from those who made it out his way, including Rufus Lumry (who has two sons in the Seattle area) and Barb Edgar, a colleague in General Chemistry. He remained active in the affairs of the Democratic party, this time in the 1st Congressional District of Washington.

Archie was a lover of the outdoors and an avid environmentalist. As a youth and young man, he enjoyed hiking and camping in the woods and mountains of Oregon and Washington. While in Minnesota, he learned sailing and cross-country skiing. I remember with pleasure a mushroom and fungus identifying (not picking) expedition I took with him and other friends in the wet woods by Twin Lake in Minneapolis' Theodore Wirth Park in Golden Valley. The "puff balls" were really impressive.

In 1953 Archie was diagnosed with sarcoidosis of the lungs. He was a non-smoker. It can be speculated that the sarcoid might have been caused by occupational exposure to ruthenium, which resembles osmium when heated in air, evolving fumes which are injurious to the eyes and lungs. While it caused the radiologists some excitement, it was not a serious health problem for Archie until about 1997, when the reduced surface area in the lungs caused an oxygen deficiency which put a strain on the heart, leading to pulmonary hypertension. This limited his physical activity and required that he be tethered to an oxygen source. Archie died on June 6, 2000 from pulmonary hypertension. A memorial ceremony to celebrate his life was held on June 17 at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Kinney in Edmonds. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered over the meadow in Paradise Park at Mount Rainier National Park. He is survived by his devoted wife of just 5 days short of 56 years, Ivon, of Edmonds; his daughter Andrea and son-in-law, Chris Larson, and grandson, Geoffrey Larson, of Seattle; his older son, Ronald, daughter-in-law, Karen, and granddaughter, Arika Wilson, of Vancouver, Washington; his younger son, Steve, of Seattle; two brothers , Andrew Wilson and sister-in-law, Betty, Vancouver, Washington, and Milton Wilson, Portland, Oregon, and sister-in-law, Mariol Wilson, Forest Grove, Oregon; and six` nieces and nephews. At his request, charitable contributions may be made to the Nature Conservancy, 4245 N. Fairfax Drive, Suite 100, Arlington, VA 22203. There are many happy memories of Archie's broad interests, cheerful and perky demeanor, and willingness to discuss a wide variety of subjects, including chemistry. Archie Wilson was a warm friend to many of us, "one of the nicest people you will ever meet."

- Wayland E. Noland
June 22, 2001