Jeff Martoff's memories of Ken Crowe
I started working for Ken as a graduate student at Berkeley in 1978. The first intense experience I had with Ken was an incredible 50-hour-straight µSR run at TRIUMF. It was a fantastic experience for me, the first time I had experienced such an intellectually, technically and physically demanding task, and I was in heaven. We had a jury-rigged cryostat/sample holder with a huge heat capacity, an overpowered heater, and a poor thermal link between the heater and the sample. You all know what that does. Oh, did I mention that we had NO temperature controller and that temperature control was the whole point of the experiment?
It took us until about hour 20 to get the thing going and the beam tuned. Ken then proceeded to manually control the temperature in this nightmare apparatus for the next twenty hours well with in the requirements. Throughout the ordeal he was also explaining what he was doing to me, and playing and winning at one of those little hand-held mini-pinball type puzzles. To me this was his signature characteristic -- incredible intuition for physics. When the run was over we stumbled out into the sunshine (yes, it was actually shining in Vancouver that day) and went looking for breakfast. I had hair down to my backside at the time and Ken's habitual suit and tie were rather the worse for wear -- I'm surprised we didn't get picked up by the campus police.
Ken's humanity and kindness don't play a big role in many people's memory of him, but I certainly recall how he took graduate student Cynthia Cattell (my girlfriend at the time) under his wing, tutoring her for hours through her multiple tries at the dreaded Prelims, and then reputedly speaking up for her in the faculty's decision meeting. She's now a full professor at the University of Minnesota and a Fellow of the AGU and the APS, so his intuition for people was apparently as good as that for physics.
One last story abut how Ken brought out the best performance in people. We arrived at LAMPF when it was relatively new, at the very beginning of Ken's experience with what he called "traveling suitcase physics", doing experiments away from Berkeley. This was a pair spectrometer experiment on radiative pion capture, another one of those fields Ken seeded, which was to be my thesis experiment. First off Bill Zajc and I spent a month or six weeks in a room in the basement of the LOB repairing all the trigger scintillators that had been broken during shipping, while Jim Bistirlich labored shirtless in a tent inside the experimental hall to repair the big MWPCs that had suffered a similar fate. Finally the detector system was installed (an epic job involving among other things six or eight guys moving the 30-ton "twin-C" magnet into position in the cement block cave on un-guided air pads, a death-defying maneuver that would never be permitted today), Ken then told me to go up to the counting house and wait for the guy from the electronics pool to deliver the trigger electronics. When the modules arrived and were unceremoniously dumped on the floor, Ken handed me an old logbook from the previous pair spectrometer run in Berkeley, and told me to put together the trigger electronics! This was just about one rack of NIM electronics, nothing by current standards, but I didn't know what a discriminator was at the time. Nevertheless Ken said to build the trigger and build it I did, with distracted assistance from postdocs. When I was finished my fingers were bleeding from doing and undoing BNC's in the dry air of the mesa, but I had done it and it worked.
Ken was always intensely aware of what was going on around him, always sensitive to a new possible branch-line or application or improvement. He was not always aware of (or concerned with) his effect on other people, but he contributed a tremendous amount to the development of science and of his many students and other associates, and engendered great loyalty in them.
