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Atom smasher advocate Carruthers of UA dies
Renowned physicist Peter A. Carruthers, who pushed the University of Arizona into the national spotlight and made the state a contender in the heated competition for a $4.4 billion ”atom smasher” in the late 1980s, has died at 61.
Known as much for his feisty personality as his brilliant mind, Mr. Carruthers two years ago recovered from severe head injuries from a car accident that doctors at the time said he would not survive.
The scientist, author, poet, musician and outdoorsman died Sunday at his Tucson home after a long battle with liver disease.
”He was not content to live just one life,” said his wife. ”He lived in Technicolor.”
Former UA President Henry Koffler praised Mr. Carruthers for strengthening the quality and stature of the university’s physics department through his work and international reputation.
”Peter was an outstanding physicist who brought to the university not only his own talents but attracted exceptionally qualified faculty members,” Koffler said. ”He was an exceptionally talented person.”
Mr. Carruthers was the youngest professor ever to earn tenure at Cornell University, at the age of 28, and his theories opened new fields of study in such areas as the existence of quarks and the idea of ”complexity and chaos” in physical matter.
The New York Times Magazine described him as ”a thinker pushing the frontiers of knowledge in those areas, also in quantum optics, particle physics and relative nuclear physics.”
UA physics chair Daniel Stein, who was hired during Mr. Carruthers’ chairmanship, expressed ”deep personal sorrow at the loss of a close personal friend and mentor,” his assistant, Nancy Kern, said quoting remarks Stein made in an e-mail message to the faculty.
He brought in quality faculty
Mr. Carruthers is credited with bringing 16 faculty members on board – including a core of experimental elementary particle physicists who now lead and work on national and international high-energy physics research.
He was the force behind the growth of physics research at UA, said physics Professor Emeritus Robert Thews.
”His lasting impact is the people he hired,” Thews said. ”He came at a time when the department had shrunk, and he had the opportunity to hire a number of good people. He strengthened some areas of research that already were good and he built others that weren’t.”
A former student of Nobel laureate Hans A. Bethe at Cornell, Mr. Carruthers was the first to theorize the existence of quarks, a form of matter unlike protons, neutrons or electrons, Thews said.
Mr. Carruthers came to UA in 1986 from Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico, where he was credited with bringing in more than 200 scientists and turning the site once known only for nuclear testing into a world-renowned research facility.
He had joined Los Alamos in 1973 as director of the theoretical division, and thought of it as one of the highlights of his physics career, according to his wife, Lucy Carruthers, a research computing specialist at UA.
Led fight for ‘atom smasher’
But he left Los Alamos for Arizona to head this state’s bid for the Superconducting Super Collider, a massive underground laboratory where scientists envisioned studying the effects of minute particles smashed into one another at the speed of light.
Arizona was in contention until the decision was made to grant the project to a Texas group, but Koffler said Mr. Carruthers’ fight for the SSC helped the UA’s reputation in the world of physics.
”He was the main driving force here in Arizona when the state competed for the Super Collider,” Koffler said. ”The fact that we were that successful in that competition was not lost to the physics community in the United States.”
In the midst of the battle for the SSC, Mr. Carruthers was among those who blew the whistle on former Gov. Evan Mecham, reporting that Mecham made threats to withdraw support for the project unless one of his cronies was awarded part of the construction bid.
The day after Texas won the ”atom smasher,” later scrapped by the federal government, Mr. Carruthers said the massive project that consumed his professional life wouldn’t pull him away from UA.
He leaped into another project, the Institute for the Study of Complex Systems, a research center intended to explore concepts of nonlinear ”chaotic” systems in seemingly unrelated events.
Although his mind was occupied with myriad theories of physics, Mr. Carruthers was a ”Renaissance man” who honed considerable skills in more artistic endeavors, such as playing violin and piano, writing poetry and watercolor painting.
Some of his 800 watercolors were exhibited in two shows in Tucson this year, and many of his 1,200 poems will be printed in a book to be published in Romania.
Passionate also about trout fishing, Mr. Carruthers wrote a book on that subject, to be published in Scotland.
A complex man
”He was a sponge for knowledge and experience – he was always reading, always absorbing,” said his daughter, Debra Carruthers. ”He understood cultures from all over the world, he spoke several languages. You cannot sum him up in a few sentences.
”My father was not a sheep, not a follower. He followed his own path. He broke the rules. His thinking always pushed the boundaries. He was a very complex person.”
Mr. Carruthers was born in Lafayette, Ind. He earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, followed by his doctorate in theoretical physics at Cornell.
As head of the UA physics department, Mr. Carruthers was known as a staunch supporter of his faculty, once threatening to resign if state budget cuts killed a longstanding solar research program.
He also found himself in the middle of controversy.
In February 1992, he came under fire from UA President Manuel Pacheco and members of the faculty and staff when a ”joke” flier poking fun at sexual harassment policies was posted on a physics office filing cabinet.
Facing charges of insensitivity, Mr. Carruthers refused to divulge the name of a female employee he said posted the flier.
About two weeks later, he angered members of a gay and lesbian student organization by issuing a memo comparing homosexuals to Gila monsters and members of political parties.
Mr. Carruthers issued the memo in response to UA’s spending of money on a survey gauging campus attitudes on homosexuality. In his memo, he suggested UA also fund surveys on attitude concerning ”Gila monsters, democrats, communists and other worthy causes.”
Thews said those controversial incidents were the result of flip comments by a man who was dedicated to diversity at UA.
”Those are pretty much off-thecuff sort of things that just happened to get some publicity,” Thews said. ”He hired the first two women faculty members this department ever had. He certainly was not a bigot or a racist. His only prejudice concerned the quality of work that was being done.”
Mr. Carruthers resigned from the UA faculty to pursue other interests in August 1992.
Three years later, he stunned his doctors by not only surviving, but also recovering from a single-car rollover on North Campbell Avenue.
Mr. Carruthers is survived by his wife, Lucy, of Tucson; three children, Peter of Ithaca, N.Y.; Debra of Espae±ola, N.M.; and Kathrin Daniels of Norfolk, Va. Also three stepchildren: Glen Gross of Los Angeles; Susanna Gross of Boulder, Colo.; and Katheryn Hinkle of Rohnert, Calif.
A memorial service will be held this month at the Aspen Physics Center in Aspen, Colo., where Mr. Carruthers kept a summer home.
A memorial service may be held this year at the University of Arizona, but no funeral services are planned for Tucson, Lucy Carruthers said.
Mr. Carruthers will be cremated, and his ashes will be scattered ”high on a Colorado mountain,” she said.
The family said a fund in Mr. Carruthers’ memory may be established to benefit the Aspen Physics Center library, 700 W. Gillespie St., Aspen, Colo. 81611.
(Dated Aug 05, 1997)
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Services tomorrow for girl in car wreck
• Mourners will remember Katrina Ann ‘Katie’ Clark at St. Francis in the Foothills.
Services are planned tomorrow for Katrina Ann ”Katie” Clark, 9, who died in a car accident Wednesday.
”She was a really special kid,” said her mother, Sheryl Joan Clark. ”She loved to travel and read and had a lot of friends. People were really important to her. She always cared about other people.”
Katie died when a pickup truck she was riding in was struck Wednesday by a flatbed truck towing a forklift.
Katie was about to begin fourth grade at Butterfield elementary school. She played soccer, softball, swam and loved to read and play games. She left behind her beloved cat, Choco.
She volunteered with her mother at Casa Maria, a Tucson homeless shelter. Workers there gave Katie a crate to stand on so she could make sandwiches for the homeless.
On a recent trip to San Francisco, Katie offered her money to the homeless people she encountered.
Katie’s friends plan to get together to make friendship bracelets in her honor, her mother said.
At the services tomorrow, friends are asked to bring mementos that Katie had given to them.
”It’s going to be a celebration of her life and we’re encouraging any friends that knew her to come,” her mother said. ”We’re going to ask people to share memories that they had of her . . . She touched so many lives in such a short time.”
Services will be held at 6 p.m. tomorrow at St. Francis in the Foothills, 4625 E. River Road. Mourners may make donations to the Katie Clark Memorial Fund for the Homeless, handled by St. Francis in the Foothills.
Katie is survived by her mother, Sheryl; father, David, of Atlanta; sister, Danielle Breen of Virginia; grandparents Robert and Bernice Gohrke, and Jeannine Clark of Pinetop; uncles Randy Clark, Thomas Gohrke of Alpine, Calif., and Terry and Tim Mullins of Arkansas.
(Dated Aug 16, 1997)
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Editor Richard Vonier shaped many careers
Richard S. Vonier, a former Tucson Citizen writer and editor whose skills helped shape the careers of award-winning journalists, has died at age 59.
He died of ”fall-related head injuries” suffered at his Tucson home Friday night or early Saturday, said Dr. Bruce Parks, chief medical examiner for Pima County. Mr. Vonier had battled alcoholism for years.
After working at the Citizen from 1972 to 1984, Mr. Vonier was an editor for three magazines, including Tucson’s now-defunct City Magazine and Phoenix Magazine. He was an editorial consultant for Tucson Monthly, which unveiled its premier issue last week.
”He was absolutely the finest editor that I’ve ever worked with,” said former Citizen reporter Ed Humes, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his coverage of military affairs for the Orange County Register in California.
”At the time (of working under Mr. Vonier) I was a young reporter just a couple of years into my career, and I learned from his able direction how to tell a story. He really had a gift for teaching writers how to tell a story in a way that captures the reader’s imagination.”
Humes, now an author of nonfiction books, said Mr. Vonier was ”good at helping young writers find that voice of their own instead of forcing his own on that writer. That is truly a gift in an editor.”
He was ”an old-fashioned newsman” but ”not hard-bitten. He was a very gentle man.”
Mr. Vonier was born and raised in Milwaukee and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
He began his newspaper career at the Milwaukee Journal, where he worked 11 years. He also was the Wisconsin correspondent for Life magazine for two years.
Mr. Vonier joined the Citizen in 1972 as the state editor. He moved to the Focus section – now the Citizen’s Living section – where he wrote stories on family issues.
It was during his tenure with Focus that Mr. Vonier began accumulating writing awards at the local, state and national levels.
”He was the best damned feature writer who ever walked the face of this Earth,” said David Mitchell, a former Citizen managing editor who also worked with Mr. Vonier in Milwaukee.
Mr. Vonier’s 1977 series on bureaucratic abuses in the state’s foster care system earned him numerous awards, and he was a finalist for the Arizona Press Club’s Virg Hill Award for the state’s top newsperson in 1979.
His feature on a rehabilitation program for disoriented senior citizens won the 1980 Penney-Missouri Newspaper Awards competition. He also won several writing awards in annual ”Best of Gannett” competitions.
He held the positions of city editor and assistant managing editor before leaving the Citizen in 1984.
Shawn Hubler, a former Citizen reporter who now writes a column for the Los Angeles Times, said Vonier’s writing and his ability to bring out the best in reporters served his readers well.
”I’m just really saddened,” Hubler said. ”It’s a real loss to his friends and the people who loved him – and to his readers, who got a smarter, wiser brand of journalism than they otherwise would have.
”He still remains one of the most talented people I’ve ever known in the business. He was really a model as a journalist – someone I really looked up to. He was just really such a smart and funny and light and talented writer. He had such a kind heart, and he wore it on his sleeve.”
He is survived by his ex-wife, Nancy Vonier, and his children, Andrew of Tucson, Peter and Carrie of New Orleans and Jaime of Washington.
A memorial gathering will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday at 500 E. Rudasill Road.
His family suggests donations to the charity of the donor’s choice.
(Dated Aug 26, 1997)
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