Donald S. McClure, 97, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Princeton University, died on Friday, November 17, 2017 following an attack of pneumonia. He had lived in Princeton for the last 50 years of his life.
Born in Yonkers, New York, on August 27, 1920, Don decided by age 12 to pursue a scientific career. By the tine of his graduation from Yonkers High School in 1938, he had worked for several years in his basement chemistry laboratory and had acquired wide experience building radios and other electronic equipment.
As an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, Don’s knowledge of electronics found application in the mass-spectrometry laboratory of A.O.C. Nier. There, Don was involved in several important projects, including the first separation of the isotopes of uranium.
After receiving his B.S. in Chemistry from the U. of Minnesota in 1942, Don worked with the War Research Division at Columbia University, later called the Manhattan Project. At Columbia, he worked with Joseph and Maria Mayer and others on the possibility of photochemical separation of uranium isotopes. This was his first work in the field of spectroscopy, the focus of the remainder of his career.
Upon his release from the Manhattan Project in 1946, Don went to the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D in Chemistry in 1948. Don built all the equipment he needed for his thesis work (“with the help of the Berkeley machine shop” he always said), measured the phosphorescence lifetimes of many organic compounds, discovered an effect that had not been expected, and used the quantum mechanics that he had learned at Berkeley to explain what he had found. He was proud of the fact that his first published paper, based on his thesis work, bore no other name than his own. But his allegiance was to science rather than to himself. When a colleague referred to the effect Don had discovered as “the McClure effect”, Don forbade use of this term.
While at Berkeley, Don met Laura Lee Thompson, then an undergraduate at Mills College. The two were married in 1949 and their first two children were born in Berkeley. He remained at Berkeley as Lecturer and then Assistant Professor until 1955, when he became a group leader at RCA Laboratories in Princeton, NJ. A third child was born in Princeton. In 1962, Don returned to academia, accepting a professorship at the University of Chicago. After it became apparent that Chicago’s air pollution was affecting Laura Lee’s health, Don made his final move when he accepted a professorship in Chemistry at Princeton University in 1967.
Don was a dedicated laboratory scientist, reluctant to stay away from the lab for very long. Nevertheless, he traveled widely, lecturing and visiting laboratories in most countries in the world where spectroscopic research was being done. He was a visiting professor at the Universities of Tokyo, Paris and Southern California, among other universities. He was a Guggenheim Fellow at the University of Oxford, England and a Humboldt Fellow at Technical University in Munich, Germany. Laura Lee accompanied him on most of his travels.
When Don took time away from his scientific pursuits, he frequently climbed mountains. He and a Columbia colleague, Thomas Crowell, were on the summit of Mt. Katahdin in Northern Maine when another climber came up and gave them the news that Japan had surrendered, ending World War II. Decades later, some of his graduate students were surprised when, during a break in meetings at a conference in the Great Smoky Mountains, Don said suddenly, “Let’s go for a hike.” Then, he strode out of the conference center, wearing a suit, tie and dress shoes, and led his students up the slopes of nearby Mt. LeConte.
Don was also an enthusiastic skier. He continued to ski into his seventies and took his family on ski trips to Colorado, Quebec and North Carolina. Classical music was another of his passions. His taste was for the most substantial works of the most serious composers; Beethoven and Bach were his favorites. He attended concerts up to the last few months of his life, and he was a generous patron of musical and theatrical organizations.
Following Laura Lee’s death in 2009, Don married his widowed sister-in-law, Gloria. Together, they enjoyed trips to France, the Hawaiian Islands, and other destinations. After Gloria’s death in 2013, he travelled to visit scientific colleagues within the U.S.
Don is survived by a brother, Richard B. McClure of Ellicott City, MD; children Edward of Princeton, Katherine of Kingston, NJ, and Kevin of Austin, TX, and their spouses; and grandchildren Nicholas, William, AmiLin, and Ian.
A memorial gathering in celebration of his life will be held at a future date. In lieu of flowers, kindly consider a donation to the Sierra Club.
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