John Luetzelschwab

Professional

After graduating form Earlham, I spent 6 years at Washington University earning a PhD in nuclear physics in 1968. With diploma in hand (the ink was not dry), I started teaching physics at Dickinson College in Carlisle Pennsylvania. Over the years I progressed from Assistant to Associate to Full Professor (and now, since 2003, professor emeritus).

Over the years I taught just about every course in the department. However, most of my courses included the introductory course for pre-med students, modern physics, and upper level mechanics and electricity and magnetism. In 1986 several of us in the department decided to change the format of the introductory courses from lecture/lab to workshop. Students have a series of short lab exercises to perform then answer a series of questions so they had to think about what they observed. One colleague, Priscilla Laws, carried the torch for the program and it has gotten international recognition. Personally, I could never do a physics lecture again!

Spurred on by my summer research at Earlham on radioactivity in soils, and with a background in nuclear physics, I continued with research in radioactivity and radiation. Because the Health Physics Society (radiation protection) seemed to be a professional organization that suited my interests, I joined them in 1971. With help from members of the society, Dickinson was able to start up a Health Physics program for our physics majors. Over the years I conducted research on a variety of topics such as radioactivity in gas lantern mantles, radon emanation from soils, and radon released from well water. All of my projects involved students, so all my papers were co-authored by students, many of whom went on to successful careers in Health Physics.

The most active several weeks of my professional career were in 1979, just after the Three Mile Island incident. Because we lived less than 2 miles from the plant, I was able to use my backyard and neighborhood as a laboratory. The results of our work are posted on the “official” web site for TMI: www.threemileisland.org; click on the “Science” section. To complete my association with nuclear incidents, in 1992 Marcia and I were part of a People-to-People trip to Chernobyl where we were able to see the damaged plant (not inside!) and tour the surrounding area.

Since retiring, I have been a bit active professionally. Until recently, when cases ran low, I did part-time work on a government project that compensates nuclear weapons workers for their cancers supposedly from their work (although all studies showed that their cancer rates were no higher than normal). Every year I do a workshop on radiation for middle and high school teachers. And, I am on a committee for the National Commission for Radiological Protection and a committee for the Health Physics Society.

Personal

Marcia Bonnemort (EC class of 1964) and I were married in September, 1963. After finishing her senior year at WU, Marcia got her PhT (Putting hubby through) degree by working for five years, first for a year at an insurance company, then teaching mathematics. We moved to Pennsylvania when I started teaching. We were lucky to find a nice house with an acre of land between two farmers’ fields. We lived in this house until we retired in 2003 (when the two fields of crops were changing to fields of houses!).

Just after we moved to Pennsylvania in 1968, our daughter, Dana, was born. Two years later our son, Mark, was born. Marcia stayed at home until Mark entered school, then she went back to teaching. After a year of part time teaching at a middle school, she spent the rest of her career teaching mathematics at the local high school.

Our children have done their share to keep educators busy. After graduating from Earlham in 1990, Dana got her CPA and later a law degree. She is now working for a law firm in Indianapolis. Mark graduated with bachelor degrees from Dickinson and from RPI (he did the 3-2 binary engineering program), then a Masters in Nuclear Engineering at RPI.  After working for a software firm for a few years, he went back for his PhD in Educational Technology, finishing this past June.

About the age of 40 I realized that I needed more exercise than I was getting teaching and doing yard work, so I took up swimming and bicycling. Dickinson has a nice pool for my use during the school year and Pennsylvania has lots of nice roads for bicycling. When Mark was in Boy Scouts, and I was on the leadership committee, we did some camping together. He also liked riding a bicycle, so we merged the two activities and did one-week bicycling/camping trips, starting when he was 15. We continued them on a nearly annual basis until 1997. For an encore, we did a 10-week cross country ride during the summer of 1998 before he headed to Texas, graduate school, marriage, and kids.

Both Marcia and I retired in 2003 and moved to a retirement community in Chambersburg, PA (south-central PA – near I-81). The main reason for the move was to be able to travel without worrying about the care of a house and yard. Besides trips to Indiana and Texas to see children and grandchildren, we have been, among other places, to Nova Scotia/Prince Edward Island, Cape Cod, a cruise through the Panama Canal, the southwest National Parks, and some bicycling trips to Maine and Vermont.

leutzelj@dickinson.edu