08/02/06

CONTENTS

Professional Bio

1 Page Biography

Ancestry

Childhood (1924-34)

Adolescence (1934-38)

Holocaust (1938-39)

Music (1931-)

New York (1939-40)

Philadelphia (1940-41)

Military (Jun 43-Mr 46)

Paperclip (1945-46)

MIT-Undergraduate (1946-50)

MIT-Post-graduate (1950-55)

MIT-Lincoln Labs

MIT-Magnetic Lab (1961-82)

Weir Meadow (1954-)

Motorcycling

Aviation (1959-97)

Enterprise

Elizabeth

When young couples ask about the secret of our long and happy marriage I like to make my point with a puzzle:

Two astronomers stand on a rooftop. One looks East and the other looks West. Suddenly one says to the other "You have a black smudge around your right eye." How does he know? I get a variety of explanations but rarely the obvious one. "Because they are facing each other!" The point is that Elizabeth goes through life looking backward, while I mostly look forward; yet we look at each other. We share and support each other’s diverse interests and values. Elizabeth cherishes her great-grandfather’s rosewood dining room table and oriental carpets and hand-writes all her letters, while I cherish my latest computer, tools, airplane avionics and tractor, and always use a word-processor. Elizabeth reads mostly fiction and historic novels and newspapers, while I read mostly technical and scientific journals and textbooks. Yet we share our interests daily. We read and talk to each other in the bedroom, in the dining room , in the bathroom, in the car, and in the family airplane. . We share.

My half century with Elizabeth was a loving partnership dedicated to creating an environment in which we both had enough companionship and enough solitude to grow and prosper in our individual ways. Our interests complemented each other remarkably well. Elizabeth was a B-type person and loved people, although she also had a need for solitude. I am an A-type person and love science more than people. I am not good at small-talk, although I do enjoy intellectual companionship, particularly on a one-on-one basis. Elizabeth did flowers and I did forestry and firewood. Elizabeth was very close to her father, who died while she was in high school. She was very proud of her ancestry, particularly the landscape architect Frederick Olmstead, who designed Central Park in New York, and the "Emerald Necklace", the park system in and around Boston. She was also very proud of the reverend Bigelow who built the church in Sudbury. Her ancestors on father’s side settled in Hingham, where the Cushing House is a historic monument. To her, our settling in Wayland was a "coming home" coincidence. Elizabeth wanted very little in material possessions and left a very small footprint. I wanted very much in terms of tools, equipment, truck, cars, motorcycles, , airplanes. We had and we did everything we wanted. And as death was about to do us part, we reminisced and agreed that there is nothing we would have done differently. I am grateful for the loving family and the many loving friends Elizabeth left me. Not an hour passes that I don’t think of her and want to share some thought or experience with her. I admire the dignity, humor and courage with which she faced death for fourteen months.

I was introduced to Elizabeth in 1952 by army friend Arno Mayer who knew her because his army friend Leslie Wilson married Elizabeth’s Bryn Mawr classmate Jeanne Redrow with whom she had shared a junior year in Switzerland at the University of Zurich. It was a highlight of her life, and she came back with a fluent knowledge of German, one of the things we shared. Our life together can be divided into six epochs.

I work on my PhD thesis at MIT and Elizabeth quits her job at the Harvard ophthalmology lab at Mass General to earn her MS in Linguistics at Harvard. She spends many long nights helping me stabilize the ultra-low temperature in my thesis experiment at the MIT cryogenics lab, and jokes for many years that I married her only because I needed a 4^th order servo- mechanism. We were married in 1953 by Mel Herlin, my thesis supervisor and head of the Mormon church in Cambridge, in the house of Prof. Jerrold and Leona Zacharias, respectively my mentor and Elizabeth’s co-worker at Harvard. We listen to Wagner operas on Saturday afternoons, go backpacking in the White Mountains every weekend, motorcycle to Vermont and Maine often, and work to further increase our shared interests and friends. I take up folk dancing and Elizabeth starts studying the violin After finishing her MS Elizabeth works at Harvard, first assisting Karl Terzaghi and the Casagrande brothers, famous founders of the science of soil mechanics, and then for David Riesman, famous sociologist and author . After a round of nation-wide interviews and job offers I accept a job at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory for less than I was offered by Bell Labs. We both love New England.

Nest-building years, Weir Meadow 54-63,

First joint venture, started even before marriage. We buy a classic but worn-out MG-TC roadster and completely rebuild it in an Army surplus hospital tent in the backyard of Alan and Ellen Stoney in Lexington. Then we find our dream property in Wayland, borrow most of the ten thousand dollar price from my parents and Elizabeth’s mother (all of which we repaid with interest), and turn the existing hunting cabin into our dream house. Most relatives and friends think we are crazy. Elizabeth regrets sacrificing almost all her social life. Only a few loyal friends visit, prepared to help. They include the Kings, the Scherrers, Harvard friends from Switzerland, and Margaret Guenther, Elizabeth’s Harvard classmate and soulmate. We bring in a power line (to replace the 32 volt gas generator and battery system), we install fuse boxes and wiring (old Homer MacDonald, the building inspector trusted me to do it all myself), drill a well, start digging a basement, buy a baby grand piano from the Zachariases, and install indoor plumbing and heating, in that order. Every night, after digging out 30 wheelbarrows of basement, we play a Mozart violin-piano sonata. We play trios weekly at the house of class mates John and Betty King in Dover, after dinner and a shower. We turn an old wood shed into a chicken coop and buy two dozen Rhode Island Reds. We buy oxy-acetylene welding equipment and build a snow plow for our old Ford, a gift from my father. Walter Bergquist, a Swedish shipwright turned carpenter and his teen son Robert help us with framing, siding and roofing, while Elizabeth and I lay oak flooring and build interior walls and ceilings. We lay the last floor in 1957, when Elizabeth is eight months pregnant with our first-born, Margaret. Our only social life except chamber music with the Kings is weekly folk-dancing with caller Ted Sanella in Cambridge.

The house is weathertight and heated. Although we are still finishing interior walls and laying floors, Elizabeth approaches 30 and decides it is time for children.

It was Wednesday the tenth of July, 1957, a typical sunny summer day with lapse rate clouds, fair weather clouds. At about six a.m. I woke up as usual, and found mummy’s side of the bed empty, and a smell of roast beef in the air. I found mummy in the kitchen with the oven hot. She was making breakfast and smiling. She reported that she had contractions all night, and their frequency had increased. She was sure it was time to go to the hospital. She had called Dr Kaknes, and he had told her he would meet her in the maternity ward at eight or nine. Did she have transportation or should he send an ambulance? She had assured him that she had transportation.

After a hurried breakfast on the balcony I made sure our motorcycle was fueled. It was a new triumph Tiger One Ten, 750cc, well sprung and far faster and more comfortable than the MG-TC or the old wood-bodied Ford station wagon. We talked briefly about using the canoe, but decided it was too slow and not fit for an emergency delivery. Better stay on the roads.

Elizabeth was admitted to the maternity ward, but I was not. Fathers were not welcome in those days. I waited an hour or so, but nothing happened. Dr. Kaknes came out and told me to go home. I waited some more, and went home about noon. I had a sandwich for lunch.

After lunch I rounded up our chickens, because it was the day for them to be slaughtered. I eventually got them all into two chicken boxes, but it was not easy. There were about two dozen Rhode Island Reds, and they didn’t cooperate. Chicken boxes are two sheets of plywood, about four feet square, held together by wooden dowels all around, about a foot long.

I put the two chicken boxes on top of each other into the station wagon. Yes, in those days station wagons were still four feet wide inside. I delivered them to the poultry butcher on route 2 in West Concord he was going to pluck them and put them into a freezer locker.

I returned by way of Emerson Hospital. It was about three or four p.m and still nothing had happened.

Later that evening Dr. Kaknes called and said "It’s a girl". I went to Emerson on my motorcycle. . They allowed me to go to mummy’s room. She was weak and tired, but looked very happy. Then I went to the nursery, where a nurse held up the baby for me to see through the window.

By the time I got home it was midnight or perhaps later. I took a shower, but I couldn’t sleep all night. I was overwhelmed by the responsibility of fatherhood. I was at the hospital at eight when visiting hours began. All that day I went back and forth between Emerson and Lincoln Lab, where I worked at that time. Mummy came home about three days later.

Parenthood had begun.

.

Margaret, born in 57, is followed by Juliet in 59, Edna in 63, and Cornelia in 65.. All births are normal and all girls are healthy and as different as can be, although they all seem to look alike to other people. I clear and fence a riding ring in the valley and build two stalls to accommodate a pony, then two ponies, and ultimately two horses, Margaret’s Jamie and Cornelia’s Ulysses. There follow years of ballet, piano, swimming, riding lessons. On Margaret’s fourteenth birthday she asks to take Tae-Kwon-Do (Korean Karate) instead of ballet. Twice weekly I meet Margaret at the Cambridge train station and both of us do karate, followed by dinner and a drive home with Margaret at the wheel. Suk-Yong-Chung, sixth dan black belt and twice Korean national Champion, is a perfectionist. He can break a concrete block ith his "knife-hand strike". We make friends with people we never would have met otherwise, and Margaret and I get to know each other.. Margaret quits after earning her blue belt and I continue many years beyond my black belt, until my office moves to Hudson in 1988. In 59 I achieve my life-long ambition to fly. I earn a private license, followed by a seaplane rating, a commercial license and an instrument rating. I start a flying club with ultimately sixty members and six single engine planes kept at Hanscom field in Bedford. I serve as maintenance manager, and Elizabeth hosts our quarterly meetings at Weir Meadow. Elizabeth dislikes flying, but bravely goes along anyway. A much appreciated act of love.

I take early retirement from MIT, motivated by dislike of the increasingly arrogant MIT bureaucracy, by pleasure in my successful and lucrative industry consulting, and by not having an airplane large enough to carry our growing family, which I considered an unacceptable level of poverty. I start several companies, earn my multi-engine rating, and within a year I buy a Navajo Chieftain, a 700 hp, turbo-charged 200 mph, 10 passenger, executive twin with a bathroom and air conditioning. It has more avionics than many airliners. Radar, radar altimeter, full de-icing equipment, Loran, Global positioning system. Now we can cruise at smoother altitudes, and Elizabeth is getting over her dislike of flying, and beginning to enjoy it and the camaraderie of talking with air traffic controllers and professional pilots. She quickly learns the vernacular and how to operate the Loran and GPS navigators, and I let her take over navigation and other co-pilot duties. I hand her the computer-generated flight plan, and she "tells me where to go", as she liked to joke. She would never admit in my presence that she is beginning to enjoy flying, but she told Chloe and Peter Wentz (a professional pilot friend) in strict confidence. Chloe told me only a year after Elizabeth had died. I was impressed by how quickly she mastered the high-tech world of the airways. She even plays with the Microsoft Flight Simulator, and has fun landing at Chicago’s Lakefront airport, and then taxying through downtown Chicago to O’Hare airport for take-off, with giggles and giggles. Every spring and fall we fly to Lakeland, Florida, where I do simulator training at Flight Safety International, like all professional pilots. I also have an office, a laboratory, and several business associates and friends in Lakeland. Enroute to Lakeland I drop Elizabeth at an Elderhostel (Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina), and enroute to and from Lakeland we visit interesting towns. Elizabeth has gone to twenty-four Elderhostels before I start going with her on cruises. Elderhostel, Lindblad, MIT alumni. Baja California, Arizona, Havasupai in the Grand Canyon. We also start visiting relatives and friends in Austria , the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Norway. Abruptly in 1997 our luck turns bad. A week after returning from Europe I develop shingles in my right eye, which precipitates a post-herpatic stroke, leaving my left side paralyzed. Prognosis: life in a wheelchair. But after a month of intensive rehab with twice daily visits by Elizabeth, I have regained 90 percent of my neurological functions. I am left with fuzzy peripheral vision, a slight limp, and poor left hand control. Flying is no longer an option. I sell the Navajo, and concentrate on regaining some of my piano and organ skills.

Retirement 1978

I retire from Magplane and Micromag, leaving leadership to Bruce Montgomery and Peter Marston respectively. I remain president and treasurer, write all checks, and inject funds periodically, while we seek investors, so far without success. Elizabeth intensifies her travel plans. We are barely home for three weeks between trips to do our laundry and re-pack. St. George in the Caribbean, Greece, Egypt, Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, Bermuda, Bahamas, Venice, Zurich, Geneva, Norway, Sweden, Vienna and Brno every odd-numbered year. Elizabeth researches every single trip. She reads every book she can find on the history, geography, anthropology of our destination, and reads to me over breakfast, bathroom and dinner every single day. I am stunned by her thirst for knowledge and her delight at learning new things. I discover a new side of Elizabeth. Her profound intellectual curiosity.

Cancer.

In May 2001 we take Margaret on our Europe trip. Elizabeth has arthritis in her right knee, but bravely walks many stairs and bridges during a week in Venice, a week in Vienna, a week in Brünn and Brüsau, and two days in Petronnel (the Roman excavations) and Rohrau, (Haydn’s birthplace). Elizabeth is increasingly ill and is beginning to turn yellow. Jaundice. On our return she is diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer blocking her bile duct. In July Dr Warshaw, world’s foremost pancreatic surgeon, attemps a radical Whipple Operation, but fails. The cancer has spread. His prognosis is three months to live, without chemo-therapy.

Dr. Susan Sajer at Emerson Hospital oncology clinic begins chemotherapy in August 01.. Gemzar works for six months. 5FU doesn’t work at all. Camptosar works for three months. We fit frequent trips into the chemotherapy schedule. A wonderful four days on Stocking Island off Exuma in the Bahamas with a wonderful couple who run a solar-powered resort. I have never seen Elizabeth enjoy a place as much as she enjoyed Stocking Island. Five days at at AMC camp on Echo Lake. Five days on Baker Island with Joanne and Margaret. A week in Shunk with Joanne, and finally a second trip to Alaska, a week on the Lindblad Special Expedition Sea Lion, with wonderful humpback whale sightings. But Elizabeth got very ill. We returned on Labor Day. Dr. Sajer started her on the final resort, a chemotherapy taken by pill three times a day called Xeloda.



 

After one week of increasing nausea and pain, Elizabeth announces that she has no fight left in her, and wants to stop chemotherapy and go to the Wayside Hospice to die in comfort. She was admitted on the 30^th of September and welcomed by Dianne Oelberger, her primary care nurse, a wonderful person to whom she related intimately. Dianne gave her new pain and nausea medicine, and Elizabeth had her first night’s sleep in a month. Next day she was cheerful and talkative, saw about 25 visitors, and spent most of next night talking to her night nurse Carol Barnes, a Scottish dancer and lawyer-turned-nurse .Elizabeth was serene, said good-bye to all her friends and family, and never lost her dignity or her sense of humor. On the seventh of October she asked to be wheeled into the "healing garden" to say good-bye to the world. She greeted a flock of geese migrating south, and said with an impish smile and a wink at me "Take me along, geese! I don’t weigh much and I love to fly!" Next morning she said "this is the day" and was angry when she awoke the morning after. She was a pitiful creature of skin and bones, with her knitted hat, too weak to sit up and unable to eat anything more than popsicles and water from a sponge. but she never lost her sense of humor or her impish smile. She hugged all of us as we took turns at her bedside, thanked us for being wonderful to her, and joked with the night nurses. On the twelfth of October at eight thirty in the morning she died in her sleep, just six years after her friend Barbara Brown had died. She wanted a fun party, not a service, a celebration of her life by her friends, not long speeches. And music and her bell choir. No clergy, except Margaret Guenther if she wanted to come! She had made a list of her favorite music. In the words of Joanne, her closest friend: "she showed us how to live, and now she is showing us how to die.".

On the twenty-fourth of November, a beautiful fall day that Elizabeth would have loved, over 150 people came to her party at the Pierce House in Lincoln, some from as far away as Virginia, Maine, and California. There were display panels of Elizabeth’s photographs, catered food, and music all day long.. Both of her recorder groups performed, as well as her handbell choir, and a piano trio played her favorite music. At noon Gus Sebring, a good friend and neighbor, announced a remembrance by playing a melody from Brahm’s first symphony on the alphorn. Elizabeth’s brother Prentice Cushing spoke of her childhood as kid sister, her best friend Joanne Ford spoke of their forty-three years of shared life and travels, her four daughters spoke of her as mother, and finally I spoke of our fifty year companionship. There were many smiles, but also many tears. Elizabeth would have been pleased and proud. Elizabeth asked Joanne to make two velvet bags in which to bury her ashes, some at Weir Meadow and some on Baker Island. Prentice is having a monument placed on the Cushing family plot in the Greene-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, and we are having a flush stone set in the Kolm family plot in the North Wayland Cemetery.

In spring 2003 we placed a granite bench-boulder inscribed in Elizabeth’s memory on a knoll overlooking the Sudbury River, now named Elizabeth’s Knoll, and we gave the Sudbury Valley Trustees a perpetual conservation restriction and the means to enforce it to prevent human encroachment on this wilderness which she adored and preserved for half a century. There will never be more than one house here. And the granite boulder will be her primary memorial, a place to relax and meditate, and one of the most beautiful places on earth. Elizabeth’s rock is inscribed:

Henry, Margaret, Juliet, Edna, Cornelia.

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