Jim Miller's memories of Ken Crowe

I first got to know Ken in the late seventies when I was a postdoctoral fellow in his group. He had his own way of running a group. He knew what he wanted, but it was up to you to get the details right. And if you didn't, he would recognize it right away and he would let you know how it should have been done. Ken always had great ideas, and he often let the younger members of the group run with them. He was also receptive to ideas from other members of the group, it didn't matter how green you were as a physicist, he'd listen. Ken had a nose for physics and he knew a good idea when he saw it, and if it was a lousy idea, he'd tell you that too! Working with Ken turned out to be an incredible learning experience for me, as it no doubt was for the many other students and postdocs who passed through his group over the years. In physics it is sometimes easy to find your niche and work on that in all your experiments, be it DAQ, analysis, electronics, detectors, or.... You couldn't get away with that in Ken's group, and as a result I found plenty of holes in my own training and I hopefully filled a number of them, for which I'm indebted to Ken.

I can look back now at some of the incidents that are amusing now but maybe not so much then. Like dealing with a highly radioactive liquid tritium target at Los Alamos, or dealing with water dripping on wire chambers at Berkeley every time it rained, or fixing detectors that are massively damaged in shipment, or watching melted copper drip from a magnet power supply while I was mapping the magnet, or whiling away precious run time while chambers were being repaired, or building a monstrosity of a tape reading module to try to get around all the data tape reading errors we had. In the end the experiments succeeded -- Ken had a way of drawing the best from his people and they got it done. Through it all Ken's groups were remarkably productive from a physics point of view, and the training he gave to people has launched many a great career. There are a lot of people indebted to Ken.

Ken's interests were wide and this was reflected in the fact that he typically had several projects going on at once. For example, in addition to the radiative pion capture and heavy ion experiments I was working on, he was also working on muon spin rotation. Most (all?) of our projects were cash-limited and held together with tape. This didn't stop Ken. He was a whiz with building mechanical things -- usually out of junk lying around. On one occasion we needed a remote target positioning device asap, since it was during a data run. He cobbled one together in record time using surplus items he found laying around the lab.

Over the years, I'd see Ken from time to time at conferences, having a chat about physics, or the old times, Ken was great that way. I will miss him. Physics will miss him.