Milton Cole has had the unique experience of being a roommate of Sherman Teichman when we were students at TWO universities: Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago. Those who know Sherman can appreciate what a stimulating and enjoyable “education” he may thereby have provided me with! Lots of stories to tell….if you’re interested.
At Hopkins I earned a B.A. degree in physics (a degree that is pretty unusual, but it reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the JHU program). At Chicago, my Ph.D. degree characterizes the typical scientific endeavor one might expect. However, living on the city’s South Side provided a much broader and richer experience than the graduate program per se was designed to provide. In particular, the neighborhood of the university is surrounded by African American ghetto areas, which provided a close-up view of urban poverty and the disaster of the Daleyrun Democratic machine. This was a radicalizing experience. Occurring at the same time was the Vietnam War. I was a very active protester of that War, which led me, among other things, to canvas in the adjacent Woodlawn ghetto; I remember going door-to-door, where I learned that while everyone thought the War to be stupid, the typical refrain was “why isn’t the government addressing our community’s problems of racism and poverty”? Nothing new!
After getting my Ph.D. degree, I decided to leave the US. I applied to just three places and was offered positions in each—Toronto, Berlin and Ljubljana (in then Yugoslavia). For family reasons, I chose Toronto. In October, 1970, one month after my arrival, the country awoke to the so-called “FLQ crisis”, involving the Front de Liberation du Quebec. Radicals within this Quebec independence movement had kidnapped both the Deputy Minister of Quebec and a representative of the English government; the former was soon found dead. Martial law was declared throughout the country, which was in a state of panic and anger. My personal, very surprising experience with that period was this: among my Toronto physics colleagues I encountered outspoken racism (anti-Quebecois). I’d never personally witnessed anything similar in the US concerning Blacks. The experience helped to cure me of my naive view that the US was worse than other nations.
I returned to the US in 1972; over the 49 years since then I held physics positions in Seattle, Pasadena, Providence, Brooklyn, Padua, Paris, Marseille, Rome and Oxford….but mostly in the town of State College, PA, where I currently reside, having retired from Penn State University in 2017.
I have written books about surface physics, medical physics and climate change; I also translated a play, The Bomb and the Swastika, written by Amand Lucas. That reminds me of a “Sherman story”. Ca. 1965 he once used the word holocaust; he was really surprised that I had never heard the term.
My current focus is working to slow climate change, in collaboration with organizations like Citizens’ Climate Lobby (nonpartisan) and Extinction Rebellion (highly partisan), especially through programs involving public talks concerning climate change and ways to understand and fight ignorance about that subject.
My wife, Pamela, is a faculty member within Penn State’s Department of Classics and Mediterranean Studies, where she teaches Latin language, literature and culture. My children live happily with their partners in Brooklyn and Chelsea, Manhattan.