ANNA AKELEY
"Just A Simple Physics Teacher" Looks Back On Her Purdue Career
- by Steve Weiss and Samuel Harris
Anna Akeley, 84, worked in the Physics Department for 29 years teaching survey courses to non-physics majors and receiving College of Science honors for instructor of the year in 1966. Her late husband, Edward Akeley, was a theoretical physicist at Purdue for over 30 years. Anna retired in 1971, and still resides in West Lafayette.
Akeley at the time of her retirement, surrounded by colleagues Hubert
Yearian, Ralph Lefler and the late Isidore Walterstein (l. to r.). A
portrait of Karl Lark-Horovitz provides the backdrop.
"I was in the right place at the right time," says Anna
Akeley, sipping
her coffee and looking back on a remarkable life. Seated in her dining
room, its
walls covered with modern art originals collected from around the world, she
spoke with PURDUE PHYSICS about her early life, the circumstances that brought
her to Purdue, her years as an instructor, and her recollections of a few
of the
personalities that colored life in the Department
in the '40s, '50s, and '60s.
"That was all," she repeats in a marked Viennese accent,
"just the
right time and place." Indeed, Akeley's
memoirs could be a testament to such timeliness. Born in Vienna in 1904 and
raised in
an upper-middle class family, Anna enjoyed a liberal upbringing at a time
when European royalty was waning (she has vivid childhood memories of
meeting Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and Tsar Nicholas of Russia). Anna's
parents allowed her to pursue her choice of university study, comparative
religion,
if she would also agree to study "something with which I could make a
living,"
she says. "I was interested in X-rays, which required the study of
physics and
math, so I did that instead of going skiing. I don't regret it."
Personal circumstances forced Anna to leave school early, and she
eventually went to work as an editor for a Jewish publisher in Vienna. When
Hitler rose
to power, Anna's employer was forced to leave Europe, and Anna was put
in charge of liquidating the business under the watchful eyes of the Gestapo.
Times were tense, and it was in this atmosphere of suspicion that Anna met her
future husband. Edward Akeley was visiting Europe, and at the request of his
boss, Purdue Physics Department Head Karl Lark-Horovitz, he had agreed to
visit Anna's sister, whom Lark-Horovitz knew. Anna's sister, living in Prague,
asked Edward to visit Anna (the Nazis had restricted normal communication
channels) in Vienna. but Anna didn't know about this, and Edward failed to
explain the situation, assuming Anna knew.
"He came to me and introduced himself as Edward Akeley from
Lafayette, and I thought, "You are a dirty liar,
because Lafayette must be in France, and you have the wrong accent,"
recalls Anna. Anna thought Edward was a spy, but after her friends in the
underground checked him out, she learned that he
was a physicist from Lafayette, Indiana,
U.S.A. Eventually the misunderstanding was straightened out, and Anna and
Edward got to know one another. Edward spent the rest of his trip in
Vienna, and
vowed to return as soon as possible. One month later, he did, and this time
he proposed
to Anna. She accepted, but on the condition that she would reimburse him for
the money he would loan her after her arrival in America. Anna was unable
to get
a passport, Edward had to return to America, and Europe was on the precipice
of war. But with the help of a network of Quakers using their contacts
throughout Europe and the Orient, Anna was able to make a long, arduous,
but ultimately
safe journey of escape through Russia, Korea, Japan, and across the
Pacific, landing
in California. Anna finally arrived in Lafayette in 1942, and she and Edward
were married. She was now the wife of a physics professor.
Anna remembers that graduate students at Purdue in the early '40s had
a tough time getting by on average wages of $30 per week. "There was
no place
for many of these students to stay," she
says. "I remember one man stayed in a women's rest room at night for a
time, before he was discovered."
Scarcely a month after arriving at Purdue, Anna learned she would
be teaching physics herself. "I had been introduced to Lark-Horovitz,
and he
was very kind, calling me Annie and such," she says. "And a short
time later, I
was told to send my credentials over to him; I learned that I had two weeks
to prepare
to begin teaching a physics lab for Naval officer students. Imagine! I had
never done physics in English, I had had no physics since 1924. Edward said,
'The war is on, you will learn." And so came
a crash course in basic physics (in English), given each night by Akeley
the Ph.D.
to Akeley the instructor-to-be. In two weeks she was ready.
"I was terribly excited," she says about her first course.
"The
induced current experiment was my introduction to the class. And I said,
'Gentlemen,
we are going to make an experiment in the seduced
current" The students howled. "I was not aware of what I had
said."
She asked one of the amused students to tell her what was wrong, and the young
wag asked if she would like an experimental or a theoretical explanation.
It was then
that Anna met a future Nobel Prize winner. "Before I responded, I saw
a young
man looking at me, shaking his head, a very nice man. So I told the other
student
to sit down, and I made the class work very hard on the experiment."
The young
man who tried to help Anna save face was Ben Mottelson, 1975 Nobel Laureate.
"He knew more in his little finger about physics than I ever knew in
my whole
life. He never embarrassed me, even though he could have easily. When he got
an honorary doctorate from Purdue years later, he came back. When he saw me
he said, "Mrs. Akeley, I did it in spite of you!"
After that first summer in the basic physics lab, Anna was asked to assist
in the physics lab for home economics students, and eventually she was
placed in charge of the entire course. "Most
of my students took half an hour just to use a slide rule," she
remembers. "I
asked around if there were any basic high school-type math courses being
offered
at the University, and I found out there were none. So, I began using the
first two
or three hours of each semester's course to brush up on trigonometry and
geometry, as well as basic math skills. I was the
first one to try this at Purdue, as far as I know."
Anna taught not just about physics, but also about famous physicists.
"I
read up on the famous men who were mentioned in the course, and I tried to
bring them to life for the students," she
says. "How many knew that Isaac Newton thought he was going to be a great
religious writer, or that Galileo was threatened with excommunication for
his scientific theories? You see, the students began to see these men as
real people,
not just scientists working and studying day and night."
Anna admits that not having a degree in physics had its definite
drawbacks. "It was sometimes very tough, because the more I taught,
and the
more that physics developed, the more I realized how little I knew.
Students would
ask me about the atomic bomb or the evolution of the universe, and I would have
to admit to them, I am not a physicist, I am just a simple physics
teacher."
The students appreciated their "simple physics teacher," though.
In 1966, on a sunny spring afternoon, Anna was lured to a large gathering of
University staff and administrators, "me, not dressed up, wondering
why I have
been asked to sit with all of these important people," she says. She
was given a
Best Instructor Award, "In Recognition
of Outstanding Works Being Done in the Classroom, This Award is Given on
the Basis of the Student Body Election to Anna M. Akeley by Purdue
Student Government."
The award also reflected her popularity as a counselor for women's
residence halls and her rapport with her students. "Counseling gave us a
chance to just talk, to get to know each
other," she remembers. "Not as in the class
room. We could discuss politics, religion, what life in Europe was
like." In 1969, she
also received the Helen B. Schlemen Gold Medal Award
for outstanding contributions to women students at Purdue.
Anna says that over the years, the biggest change in the Physics
Department was its growth, and the effect it had
on the atmosphere of closeness. "When I first came to the Department,
it was one
unit. We all stood together, instructors, researchers, experimentalists, and
theorists." Christmas, in particular, brings back memories. "Each
year we had a
big Christmas party, and everybody came. All of the wives would make food, and
we would hold a big party in the largest lecture room. I remember one year,
Dr. Karl Meissner, a spectroscopist, played Santa Claus, and as he gave the
gifts
out to the children, one little boy kept saying, "Santa has an accent,
Santa has
an accent."
With the influx of students, government money, and new research fields,
the Department couldn't help but grow larger and more diversified, Anna
says, but
she still misses those simpler days of Purdue Physics. "We lost that
sense of unity."
Anna retired in 1971, an occasion she remembers with much sadness.
She retired with tenure, the only member of the Physics Department to do so
without a physics degree. That may be the biggest honor of them all, to be
recognized for
her efforts, year in and year out, to make physics a little easier to learn for
those who were just passing through. Simple
physics from a simple physics teacher. Says Anna,
"It was 29 years of sheer delight."
Anna Akeley remembers Karl Lark-Horovitz:
"A great man. It was his idea to try to bring
refugee scientists from Europe to America, both during the
pre- and post-war years. He offered them positions and
built his grad school with many of these people. He
offered decent salaries, he got theoreticians the books they
needed, and he got experimentalists the equipment
they needed.
"He also put together one of the best physics
libraries in the Midwest. Every time there was a change in
the Purdue Administration, he insisted that the Physics
Library not be in the main library. He also gave the grad
students keys to the library so they could go in at any time to
study. He was a late night person himself, and he understood
that not everybody does their best work during
regular hours.
"He worked you very hard, but he was fair. He
insisted that everybody be at work by eight a.m., Sunday
through Friday. He would hold inspection to make sure
everybody was at work. He usually held two staff meetings
a week. Nobody missed a staff meeting. They weren't very
long, and they usually ended with him making a
proposal. Saying 'no' to a proposal was very much frowned upon.
"He expected his people to put in a lot of time at
the Physics Department. In order to enhance their recreation
time, he had a piano moved in to the lounge, so
people could have music playing when they took a break.
"He was very much a gentleman. He held
beautiful, lavish dinners at his house; he held string recitals
there on Sunday afternoons (he only required staff
to work mornings on Sundays). He was just very good
at impressing people."
