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There was no one quite like my father —— in our town of Victor. When any other man in town had an extra dollar, he bought a drink; when Father had an extra dollar, he bought a book. Other people had pictures on their walls, or at least a calendar; we had books, 3000 of them, lining every vertical surface of our little four - room house, on every subject from astronomy to zoology. Father was the most persistent scholar I ever knew. Every summer he took a month or so off to attend classes in Denver or Omaha or Chicago. Twice a week, a neighbor recently arrived from Germany came over to converse with him in German because he hoped some day to study with the great professors of medicine in Vienna. Eventually, he earned seven degrees, attended 11 different colleges and universities, and in 1951, when he was 82 sent us a cheerful little note from England to say that he had just enrolled for a graduate course in Elizabethan literature at Oxford. My sister, Pherbia, and I were the immediate beneficiaries of Father's insatiable hunger to learn. Every spring, carrying his geologist's hammer, he would take us hiking through the mountains to study mineral formations and search for rocks and wildflowers for his specimen collections. We were expected to identify all specimens without hesitation. On winter nights, when the skies were especially clear from our, 10,000-foot vantage point in the Rockies, he would set up a telescope and wake us to come view the stars, which he then named with the affectionate familiarity of a local tour guide. For the rest of my life, wherever I traveled around this earth, the stars remained my friends. | 
