A centennial for Ben Peery

(Author’s note: Yes, I know I have not updated this blog in a long time. I plan to fix that shortly.)

Today’s the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ben Peery, one of the very first people I met when I started attending a Unitarian Universalist congregation in 1993. He wasn’t a particularly tall man, but his smile was wide and strong, his warm baritone voice posed engaging questions, and he was meticulously polite.

But that wasn’t all about Benjamin Franklin Peery! Ben was only the SECOND Black American to earn a doctorate in astronomy. At Indiana University he was a noted spectroscopist who studied how elements are formed inside stars. In his later years he taught at Howard University, where he worked to increase the number of Black students going into STEM careers. Even in retirement he found a niche: giving astronomy talks on cruise ships.

When we met, he was only about a year into his retirement from Howard. I was a graduate student in astronomy, and in my newcomer’s zeal I thought I would organize a congregational expedition to watch the Perseid meteor shower. I took the group out to an undeveloped lot up in Laurel, Maryland, to try to escape the skyglow of Our Nation’s Capital, but it quickly became evident that clouds were rolling in. I didn’t know what to say. But then Ben piped up: “Meteors come from the material left over after the solar system was born….” He continued with his impromptu talk for about 20 minutes, so those assembled could leave with something.

On one of my visits to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, I was talking to an optical scientist named H. John Wood, who had worked on the mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope in the early 1990s. He happened to mention that he wanted to study under Ben Peery at Indiana because of his spectroscopic skills. We quickly figured out that we knew the same man, and John asked, “How is he doing these days?” I had to tell him Ben’s health was not that great. When Ben died, John spoke at Ben’s memorial service to give us an idea of what his professional life had been like. (H. John Wood has also passed away since then.)

Another one of Ben’s colleagues wrote a nice obituary about him for the Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, which is that group’s repository for abstracts and historical reports. You can also find a few photos of Ben in the Emilio Segre Visual Archives at the American Institute of Physics, which also conducted a fascinating oral history interview with Ben. When I read his words on my screen, my mind hears them in his rich baritone voice.