Cindy Kelly: This is Wednesday, March 20.
Inge-Juliana Sackmann Christy: March 20.
Kelly: 2019.
I’m Cindy Kelly, and I’m in Pasadena,
California.
And I’m with Inge-Juliana Sackmann Christy.
So what I want you to do is say your full
name and then spell it.
Sackmann Christy: Inge-Juliana Sackmann Christy.
And should I spell it?
Kelly: Yes, please.
Sackmann Christy: I-n-g-e, Juliana, J-u-l-i-a-n-a,
Sackmann, S like Sam, a-c-k-m-a-n-n, Christy,
C-h-r-i-s-t-y.
Kelly: But I want to start with you.
I want you to tell us about where you were
born and when, and how you became interested
in science.
About your family’s background, and how
you emigrated to Canada.
Sackmann Christy: Well, that’s a long story.
My family background—we are Germans.
My ancestors were fed up with the wars in
Europe.
They had a fair amount of property and they
sold all their property in Germany—mostly
they were in Prussia.
They could either go to the United States,
west, or they could go east.
They made the mistake of going east.
They were offered something by the Russian
Czar, that they could go to a territory that
had just been taken by war from the Turks
by the Black Sea.
They would be able to live their life there
without any service to the Russian military.
They could keep their own religions and their
own language and their own school systems.
And they wouldn’t pay taxes for a certain
period.
They could basically live there like in a
German colony.
Napoleon had just gone through much of Europe,
and he’d invaded much of Europe and Russia
and so on.
Most of my ancestors came from Prussia, and
they were fed up having to serve another conqueror
and sacrifice their sons.
So they decided not to go to the West, which
I very much regret.
They could have gone to the United States.
They instead went into Russia, because they
could keep their animals.
They were horse-lovers—they were animal-lovers.
And they could take their animals with them.
They had carriages and you could load them
up.
They could take all their belongings that
you couldn’t take in a trunk on the boat,
which I did later.
They emigrated with their animals into this
Russian area by the Black Sea.
When they came there, it was a shock.
It was very different from Europe that they
were accustomed to, Germany, with the gorgeous
forests and lakes and everything is so attractive.
There were no trees.
It was just grassland.
Nothing to build a house with, no rocks.
Two-thirds of them died.
They had with their shovels—there was no
machinery then—dug themselves into the ground
and lived underground to survive the first
bitter winters.
There was no decent water around.
They had to drill their own.
Not drill – they had to make their wells.
So it was a very tough beginning and only
very few survived.
I’m the child of some of these survivors.
The women were extremely important in that
period, so that’s why we have strong women
in my family.
I love horses and it comes from that period
still.
My children are top-notch riders.
It’s in the blood, it just goes for generations.
They became very well-to-do, and they sent
their children back to the homeland to go
to school.
Oh, and they had to serve in the military
in Russia.
After a few generations, the papers were all
torn up and they had to go into the military
again.
Some of them were fed up that Russia broke
their promises, and some of them went to the
United States at that time.
Unfortunately, my family still stayed.
They were still attached to everything they
had, and they didn’t want to leave everything.
So they stayed in their well-to-do houses
with chandeliers from Switzerland and who
knows what and lived a very nice life there.
They imported cars.
The cars were driven by the women.
The men had chauffeurs.
That’s the kind of environment that I come
from.
The First World War was pretty lousy.
Then came the Second World War and they had
a choice, because they were well-to-do.
[Adolf] Hitler and [Joseph] Stalin made a
pact.
Either you went to Siberia or you got executed—especially
when you had money, which we had—or you
followed Hitler’s invitation and go back
to the mother country.
They had no choice.
They didn’t want to go to Siberia, so they
left and went back to the mother country,
where they were really not wanted.
They had lived outside for over 100 years.
They spoke German with a slightly different,
older tone and so on.
They were not really welcome in the homeland.
But they established themselves again in Prussia.
They were still against warfare.
This hadn’t passed away.
But my father was drafted.
He was the right age—in his 20s—and so
he served in Italy fighting the Americans,
against his will.
They were involved in war again, and it was
very bad, the Second World War.
I have many memories of it.
I lived through the bombardment from the American
airplanes.
I saw that.
I heard it.
I grew up in the ruins of Western Germany.
We fled from the communist East.
We fled several times.
First we fled from Russia into Prussia.
Then we left from Prussia into East Germany
near Berlin, near where that big bombardment
was.
I was right there.
Dresden was very much—I was on the outskirts
as a refugee as a three-year-old.
So I heard all that coming down.
Then we fled for years without property, smuggled—I
became a good smuggler as a child—from East
Germany to West Germany.
Whole trainloads of machinery were smuggled
by my father successfully.
Then I grew up in West Germany, and among
all the ruins caused mostly by the American
airplanes.
It’s a difficult past and I have pictures
in this book that I dug up, where you can
see the things that I saw.
Then the times were so difficult that my parents
split up.
They had an ugly divorce because of the stress
of the war.
They were both stressed out.
My father was at the Italian front, being
shot through by the Americans.
Right through the limbs, right through the
arm, while my mother was at home with an officer
and 18 soldiers guarding our estate.
Our estate was a big deal.
We had our own private lake and who knows
what else.
My grandfather had dozens of secretaries.
We were very wealthy.
A lot of conflicts arose, and my father was
far away on the front trying to survive.
He owes his life to kind Americans, he says,
who could have shot him many times and they
chose not to.
I don’t know how many he shot of them, but
anyway, he didn’t want to shoot either.
But it was one of those forced things.
You have to go when you are the right age.
So they had a lot of conflicts in their personal
life, because he was more or less ruined.
My father was ruined emotionally after the
war.
So they had this ugly divorce, which went
on for three years before it was finally signed.
Then they had another fight for five years:
who would get the children.
I was awarded to him—I was the oldest and
I had the most energy—he wanted me.
Then my second sister was awarded to him too,
and the little one was awarded to my mother
by court.
It was a very ugly divorce.
My mother got zero alimony and next to no
child support.
That’s what German courts would do.
My mother said, “To heck with Germany.”
She didn’t want to live in that country
either.
She applied for the United States.
She had no profession—she was a dilettante.
She could play the piano, she could arrange
flowers, but she was not a professional.
And she had no husband.
She was a divorced woman with three young
kids.
So the United States said, “Absolutely not.
We don’t take people like that.”
So she applied to Canada and she was in the
bottom of the pile.
She tried to learn English and she worked
for the PX [Post Exchange].
She wouldn’t even get a job.
She was too old, in her 20s, and she didn’t
have an education for jobs.
Germany wouldn’t give her a job, so she
worked for the Americans—for the Army as
a sales clerk in the Army stores.
She learned more English there and she liked
the Americans and the Canadians.
One day, a Canadian family came in and they
had a child that had a schizophrenic attack
right there in the store.
My mother bent down and took this child in
her lap.
She was a good mother.
She got this child to calm down and not suffer
so much.
The father was very impressed by my mother
– and the wife, too – and said, “You
know, is there anything I can do for you in
your life?”
She said, “Yes, I want to leave Germany.
I want to get out of this country.
My children are taken away and the courts
are so impossible.”
He took all the money and she got nothing.
It was my mother’s money, mostly.
10% was his, but he got it all by Germany.
He bribed the court; he bribed the lawyers.
It was an awful story.
Anyway, she said, “I don’t want to live
in this country, where women can be treated
this way.
I want to leave for Australia or New Zealand,
U.S. Anybody who will take me, but out of
this country.”
The man said, “You know, I’m the consul
of the Canadian country.
Come to my office.
If that’s what you want more than anything
else, come to my office.”
She came to his office, and he said, “Well,
I found your applications below in this bottom
of the pile, and here, I’ll sign it.
You can go to Canada.”
She hugged the man.
She had a way of getting out of this country.
She left with the next boat.
She left her three children behind with her
parents knowing she might never see us again.
My father had custody of me and my middle
sister, and she only had the little one.
I was 13.
12 and 11.
And [inaudible] was one more child.
Anyway, my father also had a fondness for
me, because he saw my energy and he wanted
me at his right hand in his business.
He had business in Brazil.
He had business all over Germany.
He liked horses.
He was a fantastic horseback rider.
I liked horses.
So he had a certain connection with me—although
he had another wife, children and so on.
He would give me favors, and I asked him for
a favor to go and see my mother in Canada.
Because I was very close.
“I want to see her.”
I knew once he would give me that piece of
paper that I could leave the boundary of this
country, I would never come back.
He gave me that piece of paper and $60, because
he wanted me to come back.
I traveled on a boat for 11 days with $60
in my pocket, just a little bit of English
that I’d learned in school.
But I didn’t understand English.
I could just read and write.
I left by myself with someone supposed to
take care of me as an immigrant, but they
didn’t speak English and I was pretty independent.
I left at age 13 to go to Canada a few months
after my mother, and I arrived in Montreal.
I got myself—my mother didn’t have money
to pick me up, she was five hours away in
Toronto—I had $60 so I got myself a cab.
I had a big trunk and I asked my mother, “What
do you want me to bring?”
She said, “Books, china, silver, oriental
rugs.”
So I brought a trunk with much of that stuff
and I got into a cab and I got it with some
porter into the train.
I went from Montreal by train to Toronto,
where she stood at the station.
Then I was there.
I was very lucky.
She lived in the area of immigrants, but these
were intelligent immigrants.
She had one room; we shared a kitchen and
a bathroom with other immigrants, a very nice
family from Estonia.
This is close to where my family had come
from and we got along very well.
My mother made $30 a week working at Sears
Roebuck selling things.
But you couldn’t live very well for $30
a week—we had to pay rent, too.
So I got myself a job.
I lied about my age.
You couldn’t work below the age of 16, so
I said I was 16.
I put on high heels, I put on makeup, nail
polish, and dressed myself like a big teenager.
And I got myself a job after school.
I was very lucky.
I ended up in a very good school.
I wanted to get out of school as fast as I
could to get my little sisters over.
I had another sister, 12, and another, 11.
We needed money to be able to eat.
I told the principal in the school that I’d
had three years of high school.
I was 13 years old, but he didn’t understand
the system in Germany.
I had three and a half years of what’s called
public school, and then you continue to grade
eight in public school, which is a school
for ordinary people.
Or, you’re one of the elite few percent
and you go to the gymnasium, and you have
special exams.
I barely passed those—I wasn’t a very
good student with the divorce of my parents
in the background.
I was a very bad student, but I got in with
some luck, and I had three and a half years
of high school.
When I came to Canada, and he wanted—all
of the immigrants were put back.
After all, they’re immigrants.
So I told him that I had three and a half
years of high school, and so he thought he
was putting me back in grade ten.
I wanted to get out of school as fast as I
could and get a job and help my mother.
That was my aim in life.
And he thought grade ten was putting me back.
Well, I was jumping three grades.
I’d only had seven years of very good school,
three and a half public and then that gymnasium.
Three and a half makes seven.
So I was jumping three grades.
I had to get into Latin.
It was a very good school.
They were teaching Latin and French and German
and—not Hebrew—but a lot of languages.
They were very advanced in physics and all
the sciences.
Anyway, I worked my butt off to not get put
back to grade nine, and I did very well.
Because I wanted to get out of school.
Remember, that was my aim in life—to get
out of school.
I became a top student because I wanted to
get out of school.
I won every prize they had, and my picture
still hangs in that school.
I used to stay in school until 8 o’clock
to study, because we only had one room anyway
and there was no food anyway.
The teachers were so kind in that Canadian
country.
They allowed me to stay myself in the school
with the custodians.
They left the light on for me that I could
study, study, study.
I studied and at 8 o’clock I went home.
Then I got myself a job Thursday night after
school, Friday night after school, Saturday.
Seven cents an hour.
Sunday I studied again.
So I helped my mother, seven cents an hour.
In a few months we had enough money that we
could spend something bigger—rent another
room and get my second sister over.
She did exactly the same thing that I did.
I was always kind of a threat to her, so she
had to do what I did and better.
She came in half a year and she went in as
a babysitter and so she worked.
Then a half a year after that, we got the
little one.
My father, of course, thought that I would
come back to Germany.
But after we got all the three children—and
he sent zero money to Canada—I stopped all
correspondence.
I was angry at him, very angry, because he
had a house near a river with his own inside
swimming pool.
He had a place at the Italian Riviera to do
his vacations at.
He had a place in the Alps to do his skiing
at.
And we were so poor.
He had all my mother’s money.
He had 10% and she had written over 90% in
order to keep the marriage together.
He’d taken it all and then he kicked her
out.
I was very angry at him and I broke all contact
with him for five years.
Then after two years, we bought a house—my
mother bought a house with the savings of
myself and my second sister.
The little one we didn’t allow to work.
She was always so thin-looking and sickly-looking.
We said, “You stay home.
We’ll do the job.”
My grandparents sent over some money, and
between the three parties, we were able to
buy a house.
My mother wouldn’t get any old house.
It had to be a brand-new house that she picked.
We rented rooms and I continued working, as
I’d always done.
I continued to get better in school all the
time.
Finally, it was time to go to university.
I wanted to stay in Toronto to help my mother,
and I was admitted to the University of Toronto
with every prize they had.
I had free tuition and lots of money.
I always liked money, frankly, because we
had so little.
So I continued there and we bought our house.
When I was 18, there were other immigrants
living in our house.
They became too interested in my little sisters
and in me and my mother.
So I wanted to kick them all out, and I didn’t
want to have tenants in the house anymore.
I started up contact with my father after
five years of no contact.
I said I wanted to go back to Germany and
meet with him again.
He sent me an airplane ticket and I went with
a propeller plane from Toronto back to Stuttgart.
I didn’t know if I’d end up in jail, because
I had broken a contract and he was angry.
Or whether he would be nice for a change.
Well, he picked me up at the airport and he
was so nice.
He did not put me in jail [inaudible] for
breaking his contract.
He said, “What can I do for you?”
I said, “Well, we need everything.
First of all, I need monthly money.
We can kick all these tenants out.
Secondly, we need lots of clothing.
We have no winter coats in bitter Toronto.
And we need—"
He said, “Come to my department stores.”
He owned something like Bullock’s.
While he was sitting in with his executives,
I went shopping.
He says, “Just give somebody the tickets
and I’ll have it sent over to Canada.”
So I shopped—you can’t believe how much
in one hour or two, for all four of us.
I even shopped furniture, and he sent it all
and he sent us the monthly amount—exactly
what I asked for years.
So he behaved, and then I took up contact
with him again and I continued visiting him.
We continued to have a decent relationship,
and he finally visited us in Canada.
Anyway, I took up contact and we had good
contact until the end of his life.
He married a friend of my mother.
He had three more little girls with his second
wife.
He actually had a lot of property in Brazil,
because he loved the country.
He had rubber plantations and everything imaginable—mines
and so on.
He started a city there, where each of his
children got one street named after them.
So I have one street there after my name.
When he did all this Brazilian stuff, he actually
came to North America, and he visited us in
our house.
He was so impressed, and he was sorry that
he had divorced my mother.
So I began to forgive him a little bit.
He came to be a decent father.
Every time I went to Europe, I visited him.
I was invited to astronomical meetings in
Hamburg and in Greece and so on, and every
time I went over there, I made a point of
visiting him.
He always gave me a car to travel around.
Then he said, “I want to do something for
you.
I want to give you an early inheritance.
But I’m going to give it to you at age 25
in four installments.
If you buy yourself fur coats like my second
wife does, or if you drive a Mercedes sports
car like my second children do, you will get
zero.
You have to show me that you can do something
with the money I give you, and not just spend
it for a good life.
I want to have reports, how much money you
make from the money I give you.”
Now, the exchange rate was lousy.
Today, the [US dollar and the] Deutschmark
– well, the European dollar – are almost
equal.
At that time, it was 4.25 for one, so you
got a lousy exchange rate for the Deutschmark
at that time.
So I didn’t get very much.
I got basically $6,700—which is peanuts—for
my first installment.
Then it went up to $7,000 and then the fourth
installment was $10,000.
So it went up with the currency exchange rate.
I had to show him what I could do with the
money.
If I wouldn’t invest it well, then my sisters
wouldn’t get theirs.
So I owed it to my sisters to be [inaudible]
to the bitter end.
With that money, I worked very hard to make
money.
I was okay financially.
I wasn’t poor after a certain time any more
due to this European stuff that I had to invest.
I bought houses—I owned four houses at the
end and I had money to buy a fifth.
When I buried my husband, I held four houses
and I had money sitting the bank to buy a
fifth one.
I bought single-family houses in Vancouver,
where I wanted to live.
That was my dream city.
Sort of two—three-bedroom houses in a medium
area—not slums, not high-class, something
that people could afford.
My mother lived in Vancouver at the time,
and she would look after my houses while I
was off having fun in Europe.
Because I had such a bitter feeling with Germany.
Many of the Jewish people do too, and they
are right.
They have much more reason than I had, but
even as a German, I was pretty bitter.
So I wanted to get over my bitterness.
When I won a NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization]
award at the University of Toronto I could
go to any NATO country.
No taxes paid on that award, and a fair amount
of money.
I thought of going to Princeton, where some
of the astrophysics was going on.
I wanted to work with Martin Schwarzschild
and other people at Princeton.
I never wanted to come to California, no way,
no way.
To Caltech and this smog city, L.A. That’s
the last place in the country I would go to.
And Germany was another one.
The Cambridge of Germany was always Gottingen.
That’s where [Werner] Heisenberg was, that’s
where many of the great people that I read
about were.
The great mathematicians and physicists were
in Gottingen.
So I very much wanted to use this opportunity
and see what the place is like.
I used my money to go to Gottingen—my award.
The award was for two years.
While I was at Gottingen, I was very disappointed.
This is not the place that it had been in
the past.
Everyone that’s great is gone.
They lived in their shadow.
The man I went for was [Rudolf] Kippenhahn.
Turned out he was a close colleague of my
husband, working on variable stars.
We moved in a very close society.
I knew all the people he knew and vice versa.
We moved in the same area, but there was no
romantic interest in those days between my
husband.
This was ’69, in December, just before Christmas.
I went to join Kippenhahn in Gottingen.
He saw that I was very disappointed.
We had a very good relationship, Kippenhahn
and I, always.
He said, “You know, Fraulein Sackmann, why
don’t you go to Munich?
That’s where Heisenberg is today.
That’s where all the action is.
Why don’t you give a talk down there and
see if they are interested in you coming?”
So I went down, and I gave a talk and I met
Saul Peter, an American, here.
I met many interesting people from Scotland,
from England.
I said, “Yeah, that’s the place I want
to go to—to Munich, to Heisenberg’s institute
[Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics].”
I was there for almost three years.
My fellowship ran out—my Canadian NATO fellowship.
But I got a German one, the von Humboldt’s
Award.
I got the senior one.
It was again a pretty high award.
I mean, I was higher paid than Kippenhahn
was with the exchange rate the first time.
The second time was also pretty good.
Since I had been so poor, I was always interested
in having enough to live on.
Because there were many years when my hair
fell out and I was starving in Toronto.
When I was 18, I had a bald head.
My hair was falling out, undernourished.
When I went to Germany, I went with a scarf
and I told my father, “Can you take me to
any institute in Germany where they can do
something?”
Yes, he took me.
There was some institute from Rome and he
paid a lot of money.
My hair came back, but it took years.
But we were poor.
We could buy meat once a week at the most,
and that went to the little one who needed
it the most.
The rest of us, we got an apple.
So I knew what poverty was like.
I’ve gone from being very rich, I had my
own nanny—to being extremely poor, my hair
was falling out.
So I knew both sides of the coin.
Well, anyway, I have hair again, as you can
see.
I was at Heisenberg [Max Planck Institute],
and there I got promptly engaged to the son
of the co-director, [Ludwig] Biermann.
He [Peter Biermann] was a young man my own
age and he spoke 10 languages like they do
in Europe.
I barely had a little French and I knew English
and I knew German and a little Latin.
But he spoke Hebrew—he spoke everything
around.
That’s what the Europeans do.
He was an astrophysicist and very intellectual
and I liked him, and he liked me.
For him, I was a person coming from North
America.
He was ready to leave Germany, too.
He was fed up with Germany, just like we had
been.
So I took him to Canada on a trip and he met
my mother and everything.
I took him to my university.
He looked for a job offer in the U.S.—this
is important, that’s why I mention it—at
Santa Cruz, where my husband was later—possible
administration.
We went to Santa Cruz.
He was behind me—the same age, but he hadn’t
jumped grades like I had.
He was maybe two years in education behind
me and he got the job.
I did not.
Here I had won tons of prizes, but he was
a male and I was a female.
They had limited money.
They could only give [a] postdoc to one of
the couple, so it would always be the male.
It was the same thing at Caltech.
If there was something, it would go to the
male and the woman just had to find her own
way somehow.
That made me think, “Well, marrying someone
my own age has handicaps in the same field.”
Then he—his father didn’t drive a car,
they had chauffeurs—and then when he described
the poor life that my mother had led in Canada,
his parents said, “Hands off.
Don’t get involved with this girl.”
So I was turned down by his father, who was
a co-director of Heisenberg.
Well, those were pretty bitter.
I was very proud of what we had done, but
this didn’t count.
Then I went to the IAU, the International
Astronomical Union, shortly afterwards in
Brighton, [UK] where Mrs. Biermann was there
with all her daughters.
Then we ended up in a train looking at the
countryside of England.
I happened to be in the department with the
Portuguese, and I had already bought a ticket
to go back to Greece, where I had been before,
to a NATO conference.
These international conferences, where they
come from 50 countries—we always had satellite
conferences in specific fields afterward,
normally two weeks.
I’d already paid airplane ticket, hotel,
registration fee, to go to a NATO conference
in Greece where I had been before.
I loved Greece.
So I ended up in the department where all
the Portuguese delegation was sitting.
We started talking, and then the next day
they came to me and they said, “Miss Sackmann,
we want you to come to our NATO conference
in Portugal.”
I said, “Well, I’m already signed up for
the one in Greece.”
And they said, “We want you to come.”
So they came the next day and they said, “You
know what, you don’t have to pay a registration
fee and you don’t have to pay for the hotel
room if you share it with another young lady
from somewhere.
So you don’t have those expenses.”
I said, “Okay, interesting.”
Because somebody who came to Munich who took
me to the ballet there and to all kinds of
nice things—a professor from England, he
wanted to have a romance with me when I was
in Munich.
When I was in England—he was British—he
wanted me to see his country estate.
So, he rented—he got himself a bus with
60 seats, and he wanted me to come to his
country estate.
And together with the other 59 astronomers
from all over, I come to his country estate.
It was indeed very beautiful, very British
beautiful.
There was [Robert F.] Christy—he was one
of the 60.
And he started talking the whole night in
the kitchen—where he came from, where he
had studied.
He told me about [J. Robert] Oppenheimer and
Berkeley.
He was born in Vancouver.
I hooked right on.
Born in Vancouver?
My dream city?
Canada?
Oooh, even more attractive.
We had a wonderful conversation and he asked
me all about what I had done for my PhD thesis
and I asked him what he had done in his PhD.
It went on and on and on, the whole night.
That night, I knew I would marry this man.
After the evening in the kitchen, the bus
took us back to our town where the conference
was, and I couldn’t sleep.
I went down to the ocean where the waves are
breaking in, in the middle of the night.
I looked at these ocean waves breaking over
these big rocks.
And I said, “Christy’s going to be like
one of these ocean waves breaking over the
rocks.
This man is going to break into my life.”
I studied his hand, there was no ring there.
I knew nothing about his—he never mentioned
anything about his private life.
So I know this man.
He’s it, as far as I’m concerned.
I looked at him the next day.
He was tall, so was sticking out, so I find
him among all these—there were 2,000 people
at that meeting.
I found him in one of the breaks among the
2,000 people and I said, “Professor Christy,
the Portuguese”—and he told me he was
going to Portugal—“the Portuguese delegation.
I was in their department, and they very much
want me to come to their place and to contribute
astrophysics.”
He didn’t blink an eye.
Didn’t interest him at all.
So I said, okay, the man is happily married.
I don’t break up marriages.
That’s nothing I do.
Let him go.
I went back to the Portuguese and I said,
“I’m not coming.”
I used the airplane ticket as an excuse, I’d
already bought the airplane ticket, costing
so and so much.
They looked me up the next day, said, “Oh,
our committee has said we’re going to pay
for your airplane ticket.
We insist you come to Portugal.”
I said, “Well, I don’t want to go.
I’m more interested in this thing in Greece
anyway.”
So I go off to my boss.
I said, “Boss, I want to go to Greece.
These Portuguese want me to go to Portugal.
You are going to Portugal—you tell me what
I should do.”
He said, “Miss Sackmann, I want you to go
to Portugal where I go.
There’s all my students there and my wife
is there.
You like to sit with her anyway.
You come to Portugal.”
I said, “Okay, Boss, your will is my command.
If you say I’ll go to Portugal, I will go.”
So I came late.
I had to go to Munich, wash my clothing, change
to other kinds of clothing in Britain, and
I came late.
I said, “Christy is passé.
He’s happily married, and I don’t get
involved with people like that, just because
he doesn’t wear a ring.
I’m going to ignore him.
I’m going to have fun with my German colleagues
there, with my Italian colleagues there, with
my British colleagues there, with my Scottish
friends.
Christy can do what he wants to do.
I’m not going to talk to him once in any
of the breaks.”
I sat by the pool one day, having fun with
my German colleagues, with a big hat.
He has the guts to come from the back where
I didn’t see him, lift my hat, in public—a
big white hat.
He said, “Who’s hiding under this hat?”
Boy, this man has guts.
He lifts my hat, he touches my clothing with
all my colleagues here, and he asks me such
questions.
“Miss Sackmann, would you accompany me on
a walk down to the ocean?”
I said, “Oh, nothing can happen from a walk
on the ocean.”
We walked and walked and walked and not a
single word was exchanged.
I didn’t want anything to do with him anyway.
He didn’t say anything either.
Then, fine, a walk doesn’t hurt anybody.
After the end of the walk, he says, “I have
two sons, age 26 and 24.”
That’s all he said.
I said, “Oh, interesting news, he has two
sons.”
I was 28 – almost my age.
Then the next day he comes to me in some break,
“Will you walk with me at the ocean again?”
Okay, we could walk.
I didn’t say a word; I wasn’t interested.
He says, “I’m in the middle of a divorce.”
I said, “Okay, now it becomes interesting.”
“My wife has moved out already.”
He’s trying to tell me something.
Then he said, “Are you willing to go into
the ocean with me?”
I said, “Well, I’ve never been in the
ocean with big waves and I don’t know how
to swim.”
He says, “I’ll show you how to handle
big waves.”
And he went in.
He was like a statesman.
I thought, “Gosh, this is not a scientist.
This is an athlete.”
He showed me how to handle these big waves,
and that’s how it continued.
Then he wrote many letters.
I have letters here where he never published
papers.
He’s famous in physics for not publishing
papers.
He sent around preprints, and other people
walked away with his ideas.
They got all kinds of recognition for what
they published, and he was the one who gave
them the idea.
That was his style.
He did research for its own sake, not for
getting recognition.
He loved research.
It was his big love.
The other big love was Caltech.
He did it because he liked it.
And so I pulled out things where he said,
“You know, I don’t write.
People complain I’m not answering letters,
not writing letters, not writing papers.”
Gerry Brown—who was a colleague of Hans
Bethe, who wrote a book on Hans Bethe—told
me, “Juliana, he opened up whole fields
in physics and never published.”
We had a big romance going on in Portugal
for the almost two weeks we were there.
He left by plane to go back to the west and
I left by plane to go back to the east.
Then there was a letter exchange—three,
four, five letters a week.
He wrote to me, “I have never written so
many letters to anyone.”
Three letters a week starting off with.
And then he wanted to come to Europe, and
he actually came.
Well, after changing Caltech so that women
could come here—he did that first, and then
he actually came.
He wanted to see how I could ski.
Well, I wasn’t much of a skier.
He was a much better skier.
We went skiing in Switzerland and Austria
together.
Two rooms, because I didn’t trust that whole
situation.
Two rooms, two people.
I told him before he came.
But he wanted to get to know me more, because
he’d had such a bad experience the first
time.
So he studied me from top to bottom.
It was an incredible romance, and I concluded
the same thing like in Britain—that I could
spend a life with this man, even though he
was 26 years older.
I figured I’d only have ten years with him
because of the age difference.
Then all of a sudden, the romance was off.
He decided after a super-duper time—and
I said, “I’m going to look over this Caltech
place and I’m going to see if I can get
a job in Stanford, in Seattle, Boulder, Colorado,
Vancouver—somewhere on the West Coast.”
I really preferred the East Coast, but I was
making a sacrifice coming to the West Coast
for him.
I came here, and I introduced myself.
I kept the romance very, how should I say,
private.
Nobody knew except the colleagues in Portugal
who saw us together all the time.
But nobody saw our letters.
Nobody saw that he flew over for two weeks.
I kept it very private.
I didn’t want to be attached to such a famous
man.
I wanted to make my name in science on my
own and not as connected to him.
But the father of my second fiancé, he knew.
He asked me, “What’s going on between
you and Christy?”
I said, “I won’t discuss it.”
It was none of his business.
But anyway, it was a pretty strong romance.
I came to Caltech to introduce myself, to
see if I could get a chance against all odds
as a postdoc here.
I was hired on the spot.
[William] Fowler said in his office he had
plenty of research money.
“I want you here.
You can come anytime you want.”
But I had just won an award in Germany, so
I couldn’t just leave that either.
I had to stay there for nine months or 12
months, because I was very pleased to get
that award.
So I couldn’t come immediately.
I could come at the end of the year.
By that time, the romance was kaput.
Christy decided, “The age difference is
just too much,” and all the other things
that age differences brought.
He knew that I would want children in my life.
He already had children—didn’t go very
well, he wanted no more children.
Other things, he always figured I would flirt
with others and I was just too young, that
men would be after me in science and—you
know, there are not that many women.
So he figured I’m unsafe, and so he says
no, he’s going to find somebody who’s
more in his own age bracket, someone who doesn’t
want children anymore.
He recognized that I needed children in my
life.
Someone who doesn’t come with all this burden.
So I decided not to come.
But I had this thing, this fellowship.
I went to my boss—he was in Gottingen, I
was in Munich.
That’s eight hours by train.
So I got myself a plane [misspoke: train]
ride, eight hours up and eight hours back,
and staying a night over there—to ask my
boss, “What should I do?
I don’t want to go to Caltech anymore.
I have no interest.
I want to get this position in Hamburg.”
Same thing like Portugal.
He says, “Fraulein Sackmann, it is my command
that you go to Caltech and you tell us here
in Germany what they’re doing.
You can learn.
We need more exchanges.
I want you to go back.
Go for two years, and I’ll make sure you
get that position in Hamburg.
You come back.”
I said, like before, “Boss, your will is
my command,” and I left.
I stayed at the Athenaeum and I was not going
to have any contact with this man who was
challenging, difficult.
I wasn’t interested in marriage under all
these circumstances.
Too difficult for me, too.
Well, it did finally happen.
His colleagues at Caltech, his buddies, persuaded
him that he’s lucky if he gets me.
So we finally married.
I was going to go and have a wedding in Germany—just
two people and a witness.
Then Caltech, the president, Harold Brown—he
says he wants to invite all of Caltech once
it became known that the provost was going
to marry an astrophysicist.
He invited all the professors and all the
wives.
Invited all the children, too.
So it was a big event with a lot of dancing,
candlelit in his garden.
Just before that wedding, I wanted to jump
out.
I got cold feet again.
Either he got cold feet, or I got cold feet.
One of us always had cold feet.
But because his secretary had already written
all of these invitations and they had already
gone to such big expense, I said, “I’m
not going to embarrass them.”
So I went through with it against my fears,
and it turned out to be—oh, and that night
of the wedding, Caltech professors came to
our house with pots and pans and all kinds
of things to make music on our wedding night.
It’s in my book—it’s one of the books
I haven’t published yet.
It was quite something, and it’s the best
thing I ever did.
But it was meant to happen.
Bosses and people all over—his boss, my
boss, they made this happen.
Then I got to know his world, which was very
different from my world.
I noticed that we’re all in the same group
of people.
Biermann, the father who turned me down—the
father of my second fiancé—he had been
to dinner in Christy’s home.
He used to come to the United States regularly
each summer.
He came to Caltech, of course.
He was hosted by Professor Christy and his
first wife.
He couldn’t believe that Christy would marry
somebody like me.
He actually came to this house, seeing Professor
Christy.
But I was a new wife now, and already had
a little baby.
Anyway, life is very strange.
But we had the same circle, everybody we met.
When I went through the letters for you to
prepare myself, we knew all the same people.
There were exchanges.
It was just meant to be.
It’s fate, and I would marry him again in
the next life.
It was a very good, dangerous thing to do.
Kelly: Tell us about what you know of his
experience and background and life in Los
Alamos.
Or, you know, whatever you think is the best
way to present the rest of this story.
Sackmann Christy: Well, he, unlike myself,
had no parents.
His father was a Jewish engineer who couldn’t
get jobs in Vancouver.
Where he married a beautiful woman, who was
a fellow student.
They were both at McGill [University], and
they fell very much in love.
His [Christy’s] English grandmother—the
mother of this particular father—came on
the Titanic to meet this young woman.
She was totally against her.
There was a marriage contract made that none
of the British money would ever end up with
these Canadian children, if there would be
any.
She would get a certain amount at the beginning
from her husband, so she could have a proper
household with the proper silver and the proper
who knows what.
And then he would give her a certain amount,
$10,000—which is a lot of money at that
time—later.
But children, if there are any, would get
zero from England.
As I say, she inherited a tremendous of money.
She could buy a boat ticket together with
the richest people on that Titanic boat which
went down.
Every boat she went on went down.
This was 1912, this boat went down, April
15, 1912.
1907, she came to Canada also to meet her
beloved son.
That boat [Empress of Ireland] went down [later],
too.
But she wasn’t on it.
That went down a couple of years later, just
before the First World War, which started
in 1914.
Anyway, she was very much against this young
woman.
They married nevertheless, and he couldn’t—he
looked very Jewish, the facial bones and everything.
He lived in British Columbia, very British,
and he couldn’t find work as an engineer.
He joined the Canadian Air Force to become
a little bit more Canadian, serving in the
military in the First World War.
He also had a Jewish name, Cohen.
His name was Moise Cohen, so his name was
also in that direction.
So he had trouble with jobs and supporting
his family.
Nothing came from Britain, so he finally went
to Oshawa, Ontario, where he got a job as
an engineer.
He was electrocuted by accident when—my
husband only saw him when he was one year
old, and after that the man was in the Air
Force, and then he got electrocuted.
So he lost his beloved father that he always
was intrigued by.
He always gravitated towards fatherly figures.
Bethe was about 10 years older.
[Enrico] Fermi, about one and a half dozen
years older.
Oppenheimer.
He always gravitated to older physicists,
and I think that’s one of the reasons.
Because he always missed having a father figure.
All the men in that family died.
The Canadian grandmother that brought him
up and got him the education, her husband
died while she was still pregnant with her
fourth child.
In that family, men didn’t last very long.
That’s why it’s a miracle that my man
made it to age 96.
But I think I had something to do with that.
Not only did we have a fantastic life together,
I also did the shopping and I controlled the
food.
I’m very much into health food.
Him getting up to age 96 is quite unusual
in that family, because they all died in their
30s—the men.
His brother died very young, too, which was
around food.
He had some heart attack, very young.
So anyway, there’s a history of men dying
young and the women being stuck without the
men.
His grandmother in England—her name was
Jones-Cohen, and then she married a Mr. Christy,
who was incredibly wealthy.
He had left Germany, probably due to all the
reasons that my family left Germany, and emigrated
to England.
He was very technically apt.
His father had emigrated—actually, he was
born in England.
The father emigrated and he had made surgical
instruments, so the family was very well-to-do
in England, due to the surgical instruments
discoveries.
The son worked in the textile machinery business,
importing them, so they were very wealthy.
This grandmother in England who would have
had a pretty rough—because her husband died
also young, leaving her with toddlers, five,
three and one.
She had a terrible time, too.
She married this older man in his 50s, who
was incredibly wealthy—this Mr. Christy.
And that’s where the name Christy comes
from.
So this father, who couldn’t get jobs in
England—this Moise Cohen, he changed his
name to Christy to help him get a job.
And so my husband was born as Cohen, but later
he became a Christy.
That’s where the name Christy comes from.
It was by marriage and it was not by the German
background.
My husband was stuck with German wives twice,
and then this Christy name, which came from
Germany.
All these talents came from there.
He grew up without a father in the big Depression.
It was hard.
Only one aunt had a job as a secretary, and
she supplied many, many people with only the
income.
My husband had to work when he was 10 years
old.
His mother died at home after surgery on the
thyroid.
He had piano classes until then.
They went to a horse farm.
He had a nice life.
His mother managed a nice life with what her
husband had left behind, insurance money—little
bit of workman’s comp, a little bit of money
he had here and there.
They had a pretty decent time with luxuries.
She bought a very nice house in a very good
area of Vancouver.
But she all of a sudden was found dead in
bed due to a third surgery of thyroid.
When she was sent home, the children were
left with nobody—no father and no money
in a Depression.
Two little boys, older brother and himself.
The grandmother then moved into the house
and took care of them and made sure that they
got an education.
That was the solution for the problem.
Then when my husband was 21—that was in
1937, it was still Depression time—his grandmother
from England sent a lot of money.
She sent this $10,000 that had been promised
in the contract, hoping that the young men
could use it for education.
Well, what did my husband do with—he got
five and the brother got five.
It was enough money to buy several houses
to rent to have some income.
Because that’s what I did.
I had four houses with money for the fifth.
He could’ve done the same in the Depression.
He gave every penny away.
This is something—one of the reasons I married
him.
He was so incredibly selfless and generous.
At Berkeley, he worked as a waiter just to
get some free milk and some rice.
He didn’t have much to eat, and he gave
every penny in that period to his maternal
grandmother, so that she could eat.
He did that kind of thing, which is totally
in contrast from what my father did with us,
again and again.
When his wife wanted to move out and she asked
for a divorce—he didn’t do it, it was
her.
He asked her, “What do you want?
How can I help you?”
He had a salary at that time as a professor
of Caltech.
This was 1969, 1970.
$26,000 gross [income].
He had a little bit from a consultation at
RAND and the Atomic Energy Commission and
who knows what.
So he got a little above that, but it was
still, maybe $28,000.
He had to pay $7,000 in income tax, so he
ended up in the early 20s.
He gave her between $13,000 and $14,000.
She had more money than he did.
That’s why he couldn’t marry me.
He had no money.
It went to his first wife.
Then he said, “Do you want all the savings
we have, or do you want to have our house?”
She said, “The house needs a lot of repair.
There’s roofing leaks.”
She was a heavy smoker.
It was all smoked up.
It needed a lot of things.
“You keep the house with all the damage.
I want the money.”
So she got all the money, which was worth
a lot more than the house.
This is what he did, starting when he was
a student, and he did this all his life.
With his sons—he wouldn’t go and eat with
his colleagues so he could pay the private
tuition for Harvard and for another college
the other son went to.
He bought himself six-dollar shoes, so that
he could have a good life for his sons.
He did that, he was incredibly selfless everywhere
I looked.
That’s why he broke off with me, because
he knew I wanted children.
He couldn’t afford another child.
He knew how much the first ones cost.
After being involved in the weapons of the
Second World War, he didn’t want any more
weapons to be built.
He was active in all these things against
[Edward] Teller.
He didn’t want the hydrogen bomb—the super
bomb, which was much stronger than the little
Christy bomb.
He didn’t want all this testing in the upper
atmosphere, and he was partially successful
there.
He worked on that for decades.
He thought we should exchange things with
the Russians, so there wouldn’t be this
race.
He actually had a thing with the Atomic Energy
Commission like Oppenheimer, which is generally
not known.
I have it on the table here.
He was put into an interview—whether he
was a possible spy, whether he was trustworthy.
But unlike Oppenheimer, he survived and he
continued giving classified information to
the Atomic Energy—it was the Atomic Energy
Commission that made all the trouble for Oppenheimer
the year before.
That didn’t happen in ’54.
That started already in ’49, because of
Oppenheimer’s views.
Christy had the same views, but he sailed
through it.
He didn’t have a Teller on the other end,
and he did things differently than Oppenheimer
did.
I’ve surveyed it several times and I applaud
how he handled it.
He was considered clear and he could continue
working at the top level of these secrets.
But he worked all his life on eliminating
weapons and testing of weapons.
Harold Brown did the same.
His new boss at Caltech, the new president,
he had been Secretary of the Air Force in
[the] Vietnam [War].
He was very much tied up with the military,
and later he became the Secretary of Defense,
of all military in the U.S.
That’s why he left Caltech.
That was the reason he wanted to have the
job—Secretary of Defense—is to stop the
arms race, to stop this weapons production.
He was on the same wavelength like Oppenheimer
and like Christy.
My husband had a good reason to work with
Harold Brown, because together they tried
to stop the weapons development.
And they did.
Harold Brown constantly would travel to Helsinki
where he would talk with Russian delegations.
And he would travel to Vienna.
Christy would be stuck at home doing the provost
job, which meant all the professorial stuff
and the money.
Harold Brown would—I have many letters where
he was gone, and for four weeks, six weeks—Christy
was the acting president and the provost at
the same time.
This went on for many years, from 1970 until
the Carter election in ’76.
Then he was gone, not for six weeks, he was
gone for months at a time.
Then Christy had things during and afterwards,
he would keep the interim president.
He used to call Harold in Helsinki, “What
would you like me to do here?”
Because he was the president.
“What do you like, what is your decision?”
They were always on the same wavelength.
They always had the same—they were a very
compatible pair.
There’s several reasons my husband went
out of theoretical physics.
One of them to support his first wife—two
households at a high level.
She wasn’t thrown into poverty like my mother
was.
Secondly, for the arms control race, he worked
on this all his life.
That was very important to him.
He continued in that direction, even in his
retirement years.
He did strange stuff when he was in the administration
of Caltech.
He wanted young blood to come here, and Caltech
was in the hole financially.
They had hired too many professors and they
were in the hole.
The expenditures were bigger than the income.
My husband started an austerity program, together
with Harold Brown when they were the administration.
No more hiring of professors, no more hiring
of secretaries.
All the postdocs like me, we had to pay for
it, too.
Our pension fund was cut to zero.
Yeah, it was a sacrifice for me, too.
In any case, they wanted to get Caltech into
the black, which Washington hasn’t done
very often, but Caltech did.
Christy and Brown got [it] into the black.
In that period, he wanted the professors to
retire at age 65, so that they would have
money for the young people coming in.
Young professors who were most dynamic – and
to save money.
He figured Social Security should start paying
our retirees at age 65.
Actually, Caltech professors would have more
income if they retired and they didn’t have
to do teaching, they didn’t have to do research,
they had no committee work.
Good life, they had a life of what they wanted
to do and more money with the Washington Social
Security money.
So he was able to persuade a lot of Caltech
professors to take this retirement at age
65.
The strange thing is, he never took it.
Here he made a policy, but he worked into
his late 80s on a big thing with Japan.
He felt strongly about that.
I’ll get to this later.
He did many strange things.
The word was out not to hire young professors,
because Caltech was trying to get into the
black financially.
What does he do?
He gives lots of money to Kip Thorne—$2
million in those days—so that Kip Thorne
could start the gravitational wave detection
experiment.
Which was something—it was a dream in those
days.
They were so far away.
I just learned—we had this lecture on the
27th, Kip Thorne and my husband’s professor
thing—that money from little Caltech went
all the way to the Soviet Union to support
starving scientists there, who didn’t get
support on this experiment.
And to MIT, where they didn’t have much
money.
I just learned that.
In this time that Caltech was in the hole,
the money that my husband squeezed out went
far.
But that was his philosophy.
That we’re an international community, we’ve
got to help each other, even if it’s the
Soviet Union.
Then the other thing he did is he hired [Ronald]
Drever, who was the expert.
Kip was a theorist.
He needed an experimental [physicist].
So in the time of hardship, he makes the exception
and Ron Drever gets hired to get the experiment
going.
They built a little lean-to.
They couldn’t afford a big building, so
they built a lean-to with just one wall, 40
meters, and two doors and a shingle roof.
That’s how it started, 40 meters.
The instrument where they finally detected
it—100 years after Einstein had predicted.
Einstein predicted it in 1915, Caltech detected
it in 2015, exactly 100 years later, in September,
was four kilometers long at the site of Hanford.
Hanford was the thing that was developed in
Washington State to prepare the plutonium
for the Christy gadget.
It’s such a small world.
The site was polluted.
They couldn’t do much, so they built the
gravitation wave experiment there, four kilometers
in one direction plus another direction.
They thought they might have a fluke observation,
so they built another in Louisiana, somewhere
there, so that if both would detect it, then
they would believe it.
Well, it did happen, and they now have about
ten detections already since then.
Anyway, that’s a talk we just had a few
weeks ago, where we got the details.
But my husband did this hiring and it was
a difficult time.
[When] my husband came to Caltech, there were
only ten professors in physics.
Caltech was a very quiet place.
It wasn’t like Berkeley, it wasn’t like
Princeton, it wasn’t like MIT.
It was a very quiet place, and of these ten
professors in physics, one was Oppenheimer,
who was the only theorist, part-time.
He only came here for the spring semester.
The other semesters, he would be in Berkeley
or in the East somewhere.
Then they had nine experimentalists, so the
total of ten professors.
My husband got his job because—Feynman always
said my husband is one of the best in the
world, that’s how he would describe him.
He wanted Christy to get Oppenheimer’s job
at Caltech.
When Oppenheimer felt he had to be more near
Washington to help control things, he recommended
Christy to get his job here and Christy got
it.
That was in 1946, after Los Alamos and after
Chicago.
So there were ten professors here.
In this period when Caltech was under austerity—no
hiring was going on—he hired [Hugh David]
Politzer, who got the Nobel Prize.
He hired a whole bunch of people in that period.
Drever—he did not get the Nobel Prize.
There were—I can’t think of their names
right now, but these people that he hired
brought four Nobel Prizes to Caltech.
One was in chemistry, Ahmed Zewail, was hired
in that period also.
By the time he was ready to retire—at that
time it was 70, not 65—the physics department
he built up from 10 professors to nearly 70.
He had brought a whole bunch of Nobel Prizes
to physics.
We have more in physics than any other department
at Caltech.
We have 38 Nobel Prizes now, among a faculty
less than 300.
[Rudolf] Mössbauer—he was here also as
a guest from Munich—he got a Nobel Prize,
too, because my husband recognized him.
Feynman was one of those, of course, that
my husband hired [inaudible].
[Murray] Gell-Mann, now I remember the name.
Feynman first, then Gell-Mann, then came Politzer—who
wrote a little thing in my book, too.
Willy Fowler got one, too, but that was experimental—had
nothing to do with Christy.
And then Ahmed Zewail, in chemistry.
Yes, these were all people that he hired when
there was no money.
He did strange things like this all his life.
He went against the wave, against the reputations,
against his own rules.
He knew how to break rules.
I was one of them, when marrying me was very
courageous.
And it was wonderful.
This is something he did all his life.
He went against the rules.
Today’s administration, they make rules,
or they have inherited rules and they follow
them slavishly.
Christy never followed rules slavishly.
He made his own and he broke them, and then
he went back to his rules.
So this is something about the man.
What else could I help you with?
Oppenheimer or Hans Bethe or Feynman, I think
you said?
Kelly: Sure.
Sackmann Christy: [Robert] Serber?
Well, Oppenheimer, he [Christy] considered
a natural leader.
He called him “a god.”
Oppenheimer didn’t just share physics.
He shared his other things in life, his poetry,
his political opinions.
He cared for them as people.
For example, when Feynman was asked to come
to Los Alamos, he remembered that Feynman
had a very sick wife with [an] incurable disease,
tuberculosis, and he didn’t want to separate
the young couple.
He had done the investigation how to put her
into a hospital where she would live in Albuquerque,
which was two hours away by car.
But when Oppenheimer invited Feynman to come,
he immediately had something lined up helpful
for the wife, too.
He did that for everybody.
He always remembered their wives and their
personal problems, and he tried to look after
them, which most people don’t.
He was very caring.
He was charismatic.
My husband called him “charismatic.”
He was extremely upset that anything — that
the injustice would be done to him.
My husband shared a house with Teller, so
he knew him very well.
After Los Alamos, housing was very difficult
in the United States, because nothing was
built during the Second World War.
Everything went into the military, all the
funding and so on.
When they went back to Chicago, Teller and
Christy, they rented a mansion together and
they both lived in the mansion.
There was a main kitchen and then there was
a butler’s pantry, and Christy and his young
wife took the butler’s pantry for their
kitchen and Teller got the big kitchen.
And they divided up the floors.
One floor Christy got with his two little
babies; the other one Teller got.
They housed a lot of physicists coming through
Chicago.
There was a lot of upheaval after the Second
World War and housing was difficult.
They were basically a free hotel to the physicists
wanting to come to Chicago.
Chicago was a very lively place.
That’s where Fermi was and [Eugene] Wigner
and many of the other greats, [Leo] Szilard.
It was a fascinating place.
Caltech was very quiet in those days.
I’m surprised my husband didn’t stay in
Chicago.
He wanted to stay in Chicago.
It was his first wife who said, “No, let’s
go to California.”
She was the one who picked it and he always
followed his wife, what she said was his command.
He got a job in Santa Cruz in ’66, or was
it ’67, somewhere in there.
He asked her, you know, “I would like to
take this job.
Should I?”
She said, “No, we stay at Caltech.”
So he came back to Caltech.
He gave her a lot of freedom in his life.
But they had a good relationship in many ways,
like camaraderie.
But as far as Oppenheimer goes—he was always
very upset that Oppenheimer was treated so
unjustly, just because of Teller’s comment.
But it wasn’t just Teller, others before
him had already—he [Christy] refused people
like [Lewis] Strauss for the rest of his life.
He wouldn’t sign letters, he wouldn’t
go to any place where Strauss was involved.
He was very upset about Strauss, what he had
engineered for Oppenheimer.
So he was very loyal to the very end.
I was surprised.
He also suggested General [Leslie] Groves
for the Fermi Award, because he felt Groves
was an incredibly skilled leader.
Not many people would’ve been able to pull
off what he did.
Groves knew how to make exceptions, too, like
Christy.
You know, he let his physicists get away a
lot in this top-secret place.
Feynman, he was always having fun.
He was cracking safes, he was going around
the guards and coming in multiple times.
He always had fun there.
Groves must’ve been aware of these things,
but he let it go.
Feynman was such an important part of the
project.
He closed his eyes in many things, like Oppenheimer
would’ve done also.
They worked very well together, just like
Brown and Christy worked well together for
the arms control business and the administration
of Caltech and all the rest.
Those two worked very well together.
After Fermi, Oppenheimer got the award shortly
before he died.
He wanted Groves to get the award, but people
didn’t go along.
So he very much respected Groves.
The people had a lot of fun at Los Alamos.
The European scientists that had left Germany
and Italy and Switzerland, they knew how to
do a lot of things in nature, they knew how
to hike.
The physics in Gottingen was always done in
the hills around Gottingen, and they continued
that in Los Alamos, a beautiful area.
They did a lot of hiking.
They did cross-country skiing.
They had no lifts.
A funny story about Oppenheimer.
He gave my husband—they didn’t ride horses.
Oppenheimer rode horses, he had a little horse
farm there.
He gave half a horse to my husband and half
a horse to the son of a scientist.
They were always arguing, the two people who
owned half-and-half, who had to clean up daily
the back, and who had to put up the money
to feed the front.
So they had jokes going on like this all the
time.
But Oppenheimer took Christy on horseback
riding trips.
Christy didn’t know how to ride; he barely
stayed on.
Sometimes, they almost parted company when
Christy wanted to go one way, but the horse
wanted to go the other way.
But Oppenheimer could ride okay, so they did
physics on horseback.
They designed the atomic bombs on horseback,
which to me was very interesting, because
I come from the horse background, too.
Not many people know about that.
They did talking, talking, talking on horseback.
He would ride almost into Colorado, Oppenheimer,
especially with his brother also—Frank—and
so on.
They had big horse expeditions—Christy was
the only one of the scientists that I know
was willing to do this.
This is a little story you might enjoy, the
horseback story and doing physics on horseback.
Sackmann Christy: Anyway, I understand they
worked very hard, long days, you know, 10,
12, 14-hour days at Los Alamos.
But they took off some time, too, into the
neighborhood and hiking and skiing.
The Europeans brought that with them.
Szilard and Bethe and all those people, they
were accustomed doing that in Europe.
So they learned a lot, the young American
scientists like my husband.
That’s where they picked it up and they
continued this all their life.
I wanted to tell you a little bit about the
water that I just served you.
They all loved nature.
Feynman used to sleep under the trees in Los
Alamos.
In 1983, when it was the first trip that these
people would meet each other again, it was
a 40-year reunion from 1943—plus 40 makes
’83.
They were getting together, and I think it’s
the last time they all got together.
I went there for the first time also in ’83,
and Feynman asked me before—Feynman and
I, we always had a very intriguing relationship.
I was always intrigued by him and he was always
intrigued by me.
So we liked to spend time together.
He was parked in front of our house on Arden
Road, and we walked together to Caltech.
He would stop at the stoplight and he would
ask me strange questions.
And we couldn’t cross the street until he
had his question answered.
We always had many conversations, and when
we went to Los Alamos and we were planning
that trip in ’83, Feynman asked me, “Can
I sit next to you in the airplane?
It’s a very difficult trip for me to go
back to Los Alamos, because that’s where
I had time with my big love.”
And then he said, “Could you sit next to
me in the taxi as we pass that hospital where
Arline and I, we used to cook together.
We had a barbecue thing and we would play
husband and wife next to the road, next to
the hospital.
And just try to make out, you know, the best
life as we could.”
When we finally got to Los Alamos, he asked
me if I could sit next to him, because it
was a very emotional trip for him.
He said, “You see those pine trees over
there?
I used to sleep under them.”
Or we would pass something on the road in
the taxi going—it’s a two-hour trip from
the airport in Albuquerque to Los Alamos—he
says, “Now, this is where I used to stand
on the street corner, thumb up, trying to
get a ride to see my wife.”
Nobody had cars, they were not paid enough.
The one who had a car was Klaus Fuchs, the
spy.
He had a car, and Feynman used to say, “Well,
Fuchs was nice.
He let me use his car so I could get to the
hospital.”
There were many stories about that car, and
then things went wrong and so on.
But later, when my husband got in somewhat
of a depression—I would say professional
depression.
I said, “We got to do something to get you
out of this.”
This was 1980.
He had been provost from 1970 to 1980, and
he felt he’d lost his connection to his
big love, theoretical physics.
He couldn’t get back.
He didn’t enjoy the teaching anymore; he
didn’t enjoy his students anymore that he
enjoyed before.
He didn’t have the right things; he didn’t
go to meetings anymore.
He had just lost his connection and he was
depressed.
I said, “You know, there are ways to deal
with this.
Why don’t we do something wild?
Why don’t we take a big loan on our house
and we buy something that you always wanted?
You always wanted to go back to Los Alamos
and buy some land and go hiking there again
like your colleagues have done.”
Some of his colleagues did do it.
Professor [Robert] Walker did that and a couple
of others.
I said, “It’s too much trouble going with
the children to Los Alamos.”
We had all these dogs and so on and can’t
take the dogs in the airplane so easily.
So we thought he’d learn how to fly, we
could use a plane, if he and I could fly.
But I said, “You know, they come down so
often, these little planes.
Then with the dogs and so on, it’s not a
good thing.
Why don’t you buy something within driving
distance, where we can pack everything and
the children, their friends, the dogs, everything.”
He always wanted something near Mammoth [Mountain]
where he used to ski with—Harold Brown skied
there, too.
I said, “Well, there’s more skiing there.”
But he found a place close to LA, 90 minutes
from Caltech, so it’s easy to go there on
Sunday afternoon and be back that same night.
You can go there for half a day and you can
pack everything, you know, dogs and children
and everything.
We found this place, which is a private mountain
valley.
It had no house on it.
We couldn’t afford anything with a house.
It was just a lot of land embedded in a national
forest, very much like Los Alamos.
So we made a bid on it and we got it.
That water that you’re drinking, there are
48 springs on that particular piece of land,
comes from those springs.
There’s no fluorine, no chlorine.
It’s granite mountain water.
The mountains go up to roughly 9,000 feet.
We’re at 6,000, and so there’s lots of
snow melt from granite and so on.
So we bought that place to get him out of
the depression, and it helped, it made a huge
difference.
Later, Feynman went there, too.
Feynman used to tell me about how he slept
under the trees in Los Alamos.
Well, we slept under the trees there.
There was no house there, we didn’t have
a trailer.
So we slept under the trees with $8 tarps,
just like they did at Los Alamos.
I used to worry a little bit, because it’s
embedded in national forest, and there’s
bears around—brown bears, and there’s
coyotes and lots of birds.
There’s mountain lions, pretty good-sized
mountain lions.
Christy said, oh, that doesn’t bother him.
That didn’t bother Feynman either.
They could sleep in the middle of nowhere.
He said he went to a meeting once and slept
outside, and he had a bottle with drinking
water next to his head.
In the morning, when he came up, he saw that
a bear had visited him and the drinking water
and had made holes in the drinking water to
suck it out, but didn’t touch him.
So he always told me the story that they’re
not interested in us, they’re interested
in candies and water and stuff like this.
Yes, the water that you’re drinking, I just
use these bottles to fill it up—a glass
bottle.
I fill up about 100 bottles when I go.
We now have a house and we have everything
there.
We built a house, and Feynman went there several
times, sleeping like Los Alamos under our
place.
Then later, he wanted to own a place like
this himself.
The nearby mountains, there are cottages,
and he bought himself one little piece of
land there with a little cottage on a hill
and no road.
He would have a wheelbarrow to put his groceries
in, to take it by wheelbarrow through the
bushes up to his little cabin.
He had that just before he died.
He didn’t enjoy it very long.
That’s a little story on Feynman.
Another story I wanted to tell you about Feynman,
I met him eating where the students eat, in
the “Greasy” of Caltech.
I never used to go where the professors eat.
I always ate with the students when I was
a postdoc here.
Feynman chose to eat there, too.
He was always interested in students.
We met among the students and I was new here,
so he would immediately zero in on me.
He wanted to know what you do at Caltech and
he started throwing physics questions on neutrinos
on me, because he knew I was in Willy Fowler’s
laboratory.
“What are you doing about the neutrinos?”
I said, “Professor Feynman, I know nothing
about neutrinos, but I’m going to find out.”
Then he never asked me another science question
in all the conversations he had.
But he asked me about everything else.
He would ask me on our walks here from my
house to Caltech, “Now, tell me, Juliana,
what is it between you and Bob that you still
have that magic spark flying between the two
of us?”
I had never thought about that question.
You know, what is it that our life is still
so animated and there’s such a force between
us?
I didn’t have an answer, because I never
thought about it.
And he didn’t cross the street until I gave
him an answer.
What I told him is, “You know, he gives
me room to grow.
He leaves me a lot of room in this relationship.
I think that’s one of the reasons the spark
is still here.”
And then he was quiet, very quiet.
I had another—he would come to every invitation
I had.
When I later was getting engaged to Christy
and then married, Christy would give a lot
of dinners and I was then the hostess.
Just before we married, there was one of these
events.
I always liked candlelight.
Coming from Europe, I liked candlelight, so
I would have no electric light.
It was all candlelight at my wedding, at dinners
I gave later in this house.
Many, many candles.
One dinner that I came to, and that Feynman
came to at the beginning—I had a big bowl,
glass bowl with water in it, and there were
flames coming out.
Then I had these little sea petals, little
leaves of flowers floating around.
He got down on hands and knees and he says,
“Juliana, how did you get the flame going
in water?”
I said, “Well, you figure it out.”
He would get down on hands and knees and look
through the bottom and would look on the top.
I finally had to tell him there were little—it
was pretty dark—there were little plastic
dishes in there and you wouldn’t see any
color.
And there was a tiny wick in there and I had
put a match to the tiny wicks and then I had
hid things with rose petals.
He had to get to the bottom of it.
So that’s another story that I enjoy.
When he had his big surgery—his cancer surgery—he
explained it all to me in great detail.
This was at Los Alamos.
We sat at a table.
He said, “Juliana, they took this big chunk
out of my thigh here and they put it here.”
When he was diagnosed with cancer, he went
to the hospital here in Pasadena.
The Huntington Hospital, it was called at
the time.
He went to the library and he studied the
original papers in the jargon in medicine
and he figured out the solution to cancer
himself.
He wasn’t going to trust cancer experts.
Later, when cancer hit me, I did exactly the
same thing.
I had cancer starting in the breast, like
for many women, but then I had let it go too
long.
I had tumors not only in the lymph, but I
had tumors in the kidney and in the liver.
I wanted to live, just like Feynman wanted
to live.
Because my husband, we had a good relationship,
I wanted to live for him.
I went in Feynman’s footsteps and I went
to the Huntington Hospital, which is only
a few miles away.
I went to the library there and I studied
about chemo, radiation, surgery, just like
he had done.
He came to the conclusion that chemo wasn’t
going to do much.
He had cancer up here.
There was another famous physicist who had
the same—Fermi had the same thing in the
‘50s.
He also had cancer in the upper abdomen, in
the stomach.
Anyway, Feynman figured out that chemo would
be only a few percent, it wasn’t worth it.
And radiation wouldn’t do it either.
It had to be a drastic surgery.
So he explained, showed me how all that was
cut away, and he was very dramatic about it.
He was an actor.
How it was stuffed in here and they stuffed
this full with other stuff.
When he had that surgery, he only wanted Caltech
blood.
He was Type O, which is not the most common
blood, and all of Caltech was ready to donate.
It was a big deal, and he made it.
This was in 1980.
I had a big thing going here once and he didn’t
come, because he was facing the cancer doctors,
and then you know, he had that.
But later he got cancer again.
It came back.
What he hated the most is administration in
Washington.
Then we had the Challenger Seven accident,
the seven astronauts were killed.
There was a committee to find out what went
wrong with this Challenger Seven thing.
They were all NASA-paid people.
You couldn’t persuade Feynman to say anything
that he didn’t believe in.
He was very honest about everything, even
if it was unpopular.
His wife persuaded him that he has to go to
Washington, and he has to sit on the committee,
and he has to get to the truth why things
went wrong that far.
That basically killed him, because he worked
15 hours a day.
He went to the laboratories, interviewed low-down
engineers.
They took too much of a gamble with this O-ring.
There was a high probability that the O-ring
would go wrong and that the whole thing would
come down and people would die.
That was well-established, but the administration
wanted to keep their time schedule, and they
were saying, “Oh, the probability is so
little, and we’ll just go ahead anyway.”
And then it happened.
When they had finally an interview where they
were all telling what went wrong, the NASA
people all said the same thing.
He had his own interview and he stated what
he had found out, which was the case.
But it was so difficult on him that basically,
the cancer came back and he died not too long
after that.
I think he would have lived had he looked
out more for himself.
But his wife, his third wife—he was married
three times—she persuaded him that he had
to make the service to the country.
When my boss, Willy Fowler, got the Nobel
Prize in ’83, I was trying—he wasn’t
home, he was in Chicago somewhere, some observatory
somewhere—I wanted to do something special
before he got home.
He was expected home on a Friday, and it was
announced on Thursday that he got the Nobel
Prize.
I wanted to do something for him, so I decided
a banner would be a good thing.
The highest building is ten stories high at
Caltech, and I figured I couldn’t afford
the banner.
And it would be professionally made, and I
wanted to do something homemade.
I figured I could afford bedsheets, so I bought
eight king-size bedsheets, and then made stencils
with the students of Caltech.
Eight feet big, two feet wide.
“Whoopee [inaudible] Willy,” you know,
alliteration.
While I was doing this banner, Feynman came
by.
We were working on it, the students and I,
and he said, “Juliana, what’s going on?”
I said, “You know, Willy got a Nobel Prize.
This is a big surprise.”
Because [Alfred] Nobel did not like to give
anything connected to astronomy and astrophysics.
He had this lady friend and she had a romance
with an astronomer or astrophysicist, something
like this, so none of his money would ever
go in that direction.
Willy’s was for that direction, nuclear
reactions in stars and stuff like this, element
creation in stars.
This was against Mr. Nobel’s direction,
so we were very surprised.
Not that he didn’t deserve it, that he got
it for that subject.
Feynman comes by and sees us working on it,
and I said, “He got the Nobel Prize against
all expectations.”
He was so happy; he was jumping with joy.
Then later, when he got very ill after going
to Washington and finding out about these
astronauts, I did it for him, too.
I figured I had to do it for him, and I heard
that he was supposed to go through—he only
had one kidney.
It had been operated on due to this cancer
business.
Seven years later, he died, exactly like my
husband.
My husband only one kidney, too.
They both died exactly seven years later.
I don’t know why, but that is what I observed.
He was supposed to have this kidney treatment
every so often—and what is it called?
Kelly: Dialysis.
Sackmann Christy: Dialysis, right.
He had his first dialysis on a Thursday, and
he figured out that he could get another six
months of life—they told him—out of this.
After his first treatment, he decided six
months of life isn’t worth it for the stuff
he would go through.
In addition to that, he always told me he
would—he always talked about his father.
He had a fascination with his father, and
his son.
He was a very good son [misspoke: father]
to the only child he had, and then one was—Michelle
was adopted, of course.
But he always talked about the father in his
walks to me and that he died so young, and
that he expected to die young, too.
He always predicted his death.
His father died in his 50s and Feynman died
when he was 69, expecting it.
He almost pushed it, I would say.
When he had this dialysis, he figured it’s
not worth it to go through that for another
six months when he was expecting to die young
anyway.
He was 69 already, ten years more than his
father.
I learned, Friday morning, my husband comes
home at 11:00 to pick up something.
You know, we were only three doors from his
office.
He says, “Guess what?
He finally decided to die.
He doesn’t want to go through these treatments
anymore.”
I said, “Oh, my, oh, my.
I don’t like it.
I got to do something for him.
The banner that he liked so much for Willy
Fowler, we got to do that for him.”
That was just before 12:00, so I march over
to the student houses where we had good climbers.
Those climbers—they sit in hammocks doing
their homework, and they were well-known going
to the mountains and doing difficult climbing.
Because I’m not a climber, and it’s a
very difficult project doing this thing.
The tenth floor doesn’t go to the top.
The top is the ninth floor, then you’ve
got to get ladders up there and you have to
carry them up.
They don’t fit in the elevator.
Then you have to—the building kind of projects
out many feet—you have to lean over and
get that thing over.
When we did it for Willy Fowler, we went to
the construction sites of Caltech and we borrowed
PVC pipes to put them in, so that it would
not fly in the wind.
And they fell out—could’ve killed someone
up there.
I asked Christy to help me.
That’s the only joint publication we ever
did, “Whoopee Willy.”
I said, “Christy, you got to help me with
this.
How do we prevent this thing from flying and
flipping?”
He says, “Use ropes.
They sew on ropes and we take the ropes from
nine stories down and we anchor it in the
floor, and that thing will be rigid up there.
It won’t go anywhere.”
I had the president of Caltech, I told him
what I was doing with the students, and he
was down there and he was praying that nothing
would happen.
I did it with the permission of the administration.
Anyway, when Feynman’s thing came, I went
to the same student house—new students.
This was in ’68 [misspoke: 1986] and before
it was ’83, so new students.
They turn over every four years.
I said, “Will you help?
Another climber getting this done is out there.
So Feynman can still have a smile on his face.
He’d like a practical joke.”
I knew he was at UCLA [University of California,
Los Angeles].
I called the photographer at Caltech.
I said, “Can you make a good picture of
this and make a print immediately in an 8x10
print or something big?
Let’s get it down to his hospital bed so
he can smile.”
I wanted to put on it, “We love you, Dick.”
It’s a lot, much more than “Whoopee Willy.”
I got the students to agree, and so we did
it.
We were ready before it got dark to start
mounting it.
Because Feynman was predicted to die Saturday
evening, and I wanted to get it down Saturday
morning before he died.
I needed the photographer and the whole works
Saturday morning with the sunshine, we’re
going to do it.
So I went to the secretary of Feynman and
Christy – they always had the same secretary.
I said, “Helen Tuck, I’m doing this, I
just want you to know.
We’re going to get a picture down to Feynman
tomorrow.”
[She] says, “Juliana, if you do this, I’ll
never talk to you another day of your life.”
I said, “Why?
I want a smile out of him.”
She says, “You must leave the family in
peace.
He’s dying.
He wants to spend the last hours with his
family, but when you put this big thing up,
eight king-size sheets, it’s going to get
in the newspapers and he won’t have any
peace.
They’ll come down to the hospital and bother
the family.
You can’t do it.”
I said, “Okay, makes sense.
I won’t do it.”
She says, “You can do it after he died as
an expression of Caltech feeling towards him.”
He didn’t die Saturday night, he didn’t
die Sunday night.
He didn’t die Monday, and then on Tuesday
morning—the LA Times, my husband comes back
with, “Feynman died last night late.”
Then I went to student houses shortly after.
They’re all sleeping at 7 o’clock.
It’s dangerous.
We got a man from JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory]
who’s accustomed going to work at 8 o’clock
in the morning.
Our students show up anytime they want, they’re
up half the night.
Then later we got the students involved and
we did it.
I’m very proud of that, how it all happened.
We didn’t tie it down with Christy ropes.
Later, the wind disturbed it and it became
like a ghost flying in the wind.
I want to show it to you later, okay.
Anyway, that is another Feynman episode.
Feynman had a daughter, Michelle.
She loved horses like we did, and we ended
up at the same stable.
She had her horse and she called it Sir.
We had other horses, we had two horses, we
had different names.
Anyway, we used to talk to each other because
of the horse business.
He was not a horse person.
Feynman was not very athletic.
He walked and he slept under trees, but he
did not go into the waves, he did not go skiing.
All of that was not his cup of tea.
Sackmann Christy: He would go out of his way.
He used to park his car right in front of
our house.
It was the most modest car of the period,
very humble car, because his money would go
to Sir.
He strongly supported Michelle in whatever
she wanted to do.
When he gave talks in Greece, he would come
back and he would have the most beautiful
little statue from Greece, a horse statue,
for his daughter.
He was a very loving father, all I could judge.
For his son, he used to walk early in the
mornings with his son and explain physics
to him, just like his own father had explained
physics to him.
He wanted to continue this tradition.
He went out of his way to support whatever
Michelle wanted to do.
So I always admired him as a father.
And, he didn’t accept any invitation that
I gave him unless he had checked with his
wife, Gweneth.
She was in control, just like my husband’s
first wife.
She controlled where he would work and all
the other details.
He controlled the physics and she controlled
the life.
It was the same thing with Feynman’s wife.
They had a very good relationship and he very
much respected her and let her have whatever
she wanted.
He always talked about his big love, but I
saw a very nice relationship that he had with
Gweneth.
When he died, she started traveling a lot,
and she died within a year.
Because it was just too much.
They are buried in the same place where my
husband is buried, and where I’ll be buried.
I looked for a burial place before he died,
and the place that I found was all filled
up and I didn’t want him next to a freeway
or anything.
It’s called Mountain View Cemetery.
It’s close to the mountains that Feynman
always loved.
It’s a private cemetery and it’s close—well,
Christy always loved the mountains.
Then I found there was a little path that
these people used to walk on.
In that path, they’re making new graves
available where there never had been any graves,
few steps away from Feynman.
I was able to buy a grave in this path, right
next to another Caltech person called Rudy
Marcus, another Canadian, whose wife had died
before him with cancer.
She’s buried there already.
Right next to them, and then there’s a road
and there’s a couple more graves, and there
is Feynman, all in one exact line pointing
towards Caltech.
I thought that is kind of strange how that
goes that way.
What else do I want to say about Feynman.
I have many memories with him.
Anyway, I admired him in many ways, and he
was always on the same wavelength.
As I was preparing myself for your visit today,
I was reading all these challenging things
that Christy started with arms control and
Feynman would always be on the same side.
They had the same opinions and so on about
almost everything.
They were like two brothers.
My husband went out of his way to have Feynman
come here, and so did Bob Bacher.
They used Hollywood, they used that he could
go to sabbatical for the first year to Brazil
without coming to Caltech.
And they used that he wouldn’t have to have
many students, that Christy would take the
load of students.
Because Feynman always felt he could solve
it so much faster than his students could.
It was no fun working with students.
But I looked up the number of students my
husband had, and I figured he had one student
every four years, PhD.
I found the theses.
When he passed away, I had to get the boxes
out of his office, and I found all these PhD
theses that he had kept, but I don’t know
what there was in addition to that.
I found actual theses that he kept—one every
four years.
Then we looked into Feynman, who came here
so that he wouldn’t have to have so many
students, he had one every three years.
So he actually had more students than I can
prove for my husband.
I don’t know everything about my husband,
but the little I found out, he had an amazing
number of students.
I ran into one student, an eye doctor, that
I liked very much.
Well, this eye specialist was a student of
Feynman.
He had impact in many different fields.
It was due to Feynman that I’m sitting here
today and living after this cancer that I
had.
Because in my family, the predominant cause
of death is cancer.
My father died of cancer, my grandmother died
of cancer, all my aunts, sisters died of cancer.
We have cancer in the family, you might say.
The cancer hit me in 2003.
It was done within 2005.
So I’m still here, 14 years after getting
rid of it.
You know, it’s quite a long time.
I went in Feynman’s footsteps.
I did what he did.
He went to the nearby hospital to study the
probability of the original—read the original
papers.
Don’t ask an oncologist, get to the bottom
yourself.
Then I went to UCLA just like he did—the
eighth floor of UCLA where all the medical
journals are.
I read the original papers.
Then like Feynman, I designed my own cure.
Feynman had this big surgery in 1980, where
he had multiple surgeons working on him.
When he was on the gurney being shoved into
the surgery, he was still giving out orders
to the surgeons.
They were basically following his orders.
He said, this and this specialist should be
there, some blood, vein specialist has to
be there.
And he was totally right.
Later, one of his things broke and that specialist
was able to put it together again.
He designed his own recovery.
When the cancer hit me, I did exactly the
same thing.
Huntington Hospital, UCLA, and that’s why
I’m here today.
But I tried not to get into the stress that
Feynman got into.
It was too much for him and his body was weak.
But he was a very impressive man in many different
ways.
Bob Bacher, he was another man I have some
little stories for.
Bethe was in charge of the theoretical aspect
of the atomic bomb, and Bacher was in charge
of the practical aspects.
The first atomic bomb experiment—the one
that exploded in Alamogordo, July 16, 1945,
was brought not by the Army.
It was brought in the personal station wagon
of Bob Bacher.
He didn’t trust anybody.
Even though Caltech was a very quiet place
when my husband accepted the job of Oppenheimer
here, it became the center of the atomic bomb
people.
Not only did he get Bacher and Feynman, he
got Bethe.
He was here every year for many years, giving
wonderful talks and inspiring everyone around
here.
Many, many of the physicists ended up here
one way or the other, visiting or permanently.
The station wagon, I had to tell you.
His car had another important role.
He offered his car when Feynman was persuaded
to visit from Cornell.
He said, “You can use my car to go to Hollywood.”
That was another thing that persuaded Feynman
to break his ties, Hollywood.
Then he got Bethe here.
He also needed a fatherly figure, just like
Christy did.
Bethe was a fatherly figure to him.
So they got Bethe here, too.
That was Bob Bacher’s thing, too.
Sackmann Christy: I wanted to say a few words
about Bethe.
He was extremely nice to interact with.
He was so humble, just like Christy.
Oppenheimer was not humble.
Oppenheimer would make you scared quite often
with his intellect and put you right in the
corner and so on.
Oppenheimer used to talk so fast in his lectures
that it took two people to follow a lecture.
One would listen and one would write, and
then later they exchanged things.
Christy was one of the very few who had no
pal.
He listened and wrote at the same time.
But Oppenheimer was challenging.
Bethe was so calm and easy to talk with.
He was so supportive.
I was a little nobody here at Caltech, and
I went to accompany my husband to Hiroshima
once.
I wanted to visit my own colleagues in astrophysics
in Tokyo and in Kyoto.
Then I visited my own colleagues and they
showed me how they had made with a little
home camera—inexpensive thing—a computer
graphics movie of stuff that was going on
in the generation of stars, formation of stars.
I was so impressed with it on a shoestring
budget that I came home, and I said, “If
they can do it, we can do it.”
So I wanted to make a movie—computer graphic
movies with my home camera.
But then I got the JPL camera for free.
It cost tons of money, but they allowed me
to use their camera, which was very nice of
them.
I used a SURF [Summer Undergraduate Research
Fellowship] student, an undergrad, and it
wasn’t a job for eight weeks.
The job went on for one and a half years,
but he got it done.
I showed the nuclear reactions inside stars,
the runaway nuclear—not bombs—runaway
nuclear explosions.
And they repeat and repeat and they repeat
and the sun’s going to—one day, like this,
too—the sun’s going to expand out to earth.
I was showing what’s happening in aging
stars with these nuclear runaway actions and
the stars contracting and collapsing.
These are my calculations.
When Bethe came here, I thought, “Ah, I’ll
show him my own little computer graphics movie.”
He was so supportive, and he didn’t demolish
me with questions.
He was just nice.
Everybody felt that way about it.
He did everything with brain and slide rules.
He was famous for his slide rule.
So were a few other physicists, whose name—but,
he inspired people in that direction.
When he came here, he had lots of visitors
always—his office was always full of people
that he was treating very nicely.
He gave excellent talks about the construction
of the atomic bomb and this and that.
But he was also very clear when we met privately
that he missed his wife, Rose, terribly.
She stayed home most of the time taking care
of her older parents.
He needed a housekeeper, so he had another
physicist, Gerry Brown—a student of Szilard,
top physicist—be his housekeeper.
Brown made sure they had food in the house,
Brown made sure about all—they shared an
apartment just around the corner from Caltech—Brown
took care of everything.
I was very impressed always how one physicist
would help another physicist when it came
down to even daily jobs like that.
[Robert] Serber—I met him in 1983 when we
went back after the 40th reunion.
He also struck me—he was so humble and so
nice.
I’ve also found a lot of letters from him
that strike me the same way.
He had a beautiful young wife there with a
little child, a little boy, two years old.
Now, he was the generation of my husband and
also shows up with a young woman my age.
I lost track of them.
That’s the only interaction I had with him,
but his letters were always very nice.
These people were always inviting each other,
and I found letters of Christy wanting Serber
to come very much to Caltech.
He wouldn’t come, because his wife, Charlotte,
didn’t wish to drive and didn’t want the
upheaval of packing and all that.
All these men gave a tremendous amount of
everything to their wives.
They were a very giving group, all of them.
And I met many.
Another incident in ’83—here were these
scientists from the bomb construction meeting
for the first time.
Victor Weisskopf and many, many others were
there.
I met them for the first time.
There was a protest going on by reporters
outside, newspapers and other people outside
the conference room, to give hell to these
people who had constructed the atomic bomb
and all these weapons.
It was a very negative protest for the people
inside.
I was amazed.
When they heard that all these people were
outside with candles and throwing dirty words,
they got up and they all marched out and they
joined with these protestors and said, “Let
us share the candles, we have the same opinion.”
To me, that was shocking that they kind of
regretted what had come of the atomic bomb.
I had many discussions with Christy on the
atomic bomb business.
Because I came from Germany and I witnessed
as a toddler these bombs coming down.
As I was growing up, seeing all these buildings
demolished, these brick buildings.
I had to walk around the ruins going shopping
in Stuttgart and so on.
I had not very pleasant memories of these
bombs.
I fear the bomb would’ve been thrown on
Berlin.
Or I was close to that city that was totally
destroyed almost, Dresden.
It was not a military city.
It was full of churches and castles and refugees.
We were one of the refugees.
So I had divided feelings on this bomb business.
I used to question my husband, whether it
was really necessary to get into this nuclear
business.
He said yes, and Bethe thought the same way.
I discussed it with Bethe, too.
Their argument was that they were trying to
save American boys.
That the war in the Pacific was so ugly, it
was so destructive on American soldiers.
There was this air bombing going on by this
general [Curtis LeMay], who made these fire
bombs on Tokyo and many of the other cities,
where they lost 100,000 or 90,000 in one night.
Because the houses are out of wood in Japan,
and they all burned.
One atomic bomb was roughly one firebombing
as far as loss of life goes.
In addition to that, the Japanese were defending
their emperor.
The [Japanese] generals claimed they could
not give up because they wanted—the emperor
was their god to them, and they had to save
their god.
And the generals in Japan did not wish their
emperor to suffer a similar fate as the generals
of Hitler.
So they would’ve fought to the bitter end.
Their children, ten years old, were already
trained in the schools, when the American
soldiers would land on the shores of Japan—which
was planned pretty soon—that the children
would get into the fight, the little boys
with swords.
It would’ve been a bloodbath of armed American
boys against these little Japanese boys—a
terrible bloodbath.
And it was coming.
Now, the bomb was built not for the Japanese.
They didn’t anticipate the Japanese war.
That was a surprise to them.
It was built because of the German war.
It was built because Hitler wanted to dominate
the world, they thought.
But coming from Germany, I know that isn’t
quite true.
He wanted to get neighboring areas.
He did not wish a war with England.
He fought very hard not to get into war with
England, but Churchill wanted that war.
But in any case, he wanted to just get the
boundaries for his people that had been taken
away in the First World War and before.
He wanted to get that.
But people in this country thought he wanted
world domination.
Well, after he attacked, after the war with
England happened, he probably would’ve gone
further—yes, there’s no doubt about it.
No doubt about it with me either.
But the bomb was built against Hitler and
that was basically a good thing.
Because, Hitler was terrible, and he was terrible
to his own people, including us.
My grandfather was almost shot because of
Hitler.
He was not Jewish—because he was assisting
people that you weren’t allowed to assist.
You know, we Germans did good stuff, too.
Hitler was a terrible menace, and we all—my
grandfather was always praying that somehow,
he would be gone sooner or later.
But we had to suffer under him.
People tried to assassinate him, they were
unsuccessful.
So yes, it was built against Hitler.
There was this notion that the center of physics
was in Germany and that they could do it.
It was discovered by Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner.
They had the know-how, they had the manpower,
and they had the uranium through Belgium that
they would build an atomic bomb.
Bohr was pushing that also—Niels Bohr—he
traveled here.
They were not wrong about that.
He would have built it.
The strange thing of fate is the Americans
got their money in the Depression from the
military budget.
And the Germans used money from the military
budget also, exactly the same, to build an
atomic bomb.
But what the Americans didn’t know, but
what I know, is that most of the German scientists
who were not Jewish who were left behind sympathized
with the Jewish scientists who had to leave.
Otto Hahn [misspoke: Fritz Strassmann] was
hiding them in his own apartment.
He was risking his own life.
There was an incredible camaraderie internationally
in physics.
There were a few idiots who were not that
way, but the majority, as far as I could tell
when I went back—and I was at the Heisenberg
Institute and I met those people.
They were against Hitler.
Heisenberg almost disappeared like the Jewish
scientists disappeared, himself, without having
Jewish blood.
He almost disappeared.
It was his mother who rescued him, I learned
in Munich.
A lady rescued his life, a mother.
That’s another story.
I’m going to put that in this book.
There’s a very interesting history there.
When I went through my letters here for you,
reading for the first time that Heisenberg—who
was the center of physics in the world for
a long time, before Oppenheimer became so
prominent—he traveled when he was still
unmarried, in 1930, to America.
America was an idol for him.
He traveled to China and some other countries,
big trips.
He traveled to America again after Hitler
was in power and he actually went to see Oppenheimer
at Berkeley.
He wanted to tell Berkeley, “I’m not going
to do it.”
But there was language, a communication problem.
German, like Japanese, is a very convoluted
language.
I can write a whole sentence for one page.
You don’t get to the point until you get
to the verb at the end.
English is very short and very direct, and
you get to the point quickly.
An educated German doesn’t talk like that.
An educated person talks—I know there’s
various levels of Japanese, too.
You have to talk at a certain level.
So he didn’t communicate.
He was also being observed all the time, what
he was doing in America in the Hitler time.
But he was trying to tell Oppenheimer, “I’m
not going to do it.”
The other thing is he had just gotten married.
He had a big flame who was an aristocrat connected
to—what’s his student, the one that also
worked with him—[Carl Friedrich] Von Weizsacker,
was a big family in Germany, aristocratic
family.
They were very good in politics; they were
very good in physics.
Anyway, he was in love with a sister, I believe,
of this von Weizsacker family, or one of these
people there.
He was turned down by the family; he wasn’t
good enough.
He had a grudge for a long time and then he
finally found a lady, Elisabeth, who he married
in the ‘30s.
They had six or so children, very good marriage.
She was a musician, a pianist like himself.
All these German scientists were musicians,
by the way.
Anyway, they had a very good life together.
When you became an immigrant to the United
States, you couldn’t bring your family with
you.
It was just a wife and your children.
He actually was discussing with his wife,
Elisabeth, whether they should leave Hitler’s
Germany just like the other physicists had
done.
With his Nobel Prize, he could’ve gotten
a job at Columbia or anywhere around there.
He was actually contemplating doing it, and
Elisabeth said, “If my parents can’t come,
I can’t go.”
Due to the parents, they stayed in Germany.
Then of course, the war came.
This was ‘30s.
Yeah, he was in the States several times,
and the war broke out for Germany, September
1, 1939.
He actually was in the States in the month
before he had to go back.
He had to learn how to shoot, himself, and
do army training.
I don’t think Oppenheimer ever had to do
this, but Heisenberg did.
And he made sure that Hitler would not get
the atomic bomb.
I was arguing to the bitter end with Robert
F. Christy about this.
I could never persuade him.
He stuck to his point; it was developed to
throw on Hitler.
Of course, then it wasn’t necessary anymore.
Germany capitulated in May ’45.
The bomb wasn’t ready.
But I agree with the Japanese.
They had—well, several ideas.
They should’ve done just an experiment in
the air and shown Japan that they could do
it.
But the argument was it wouldn’t have persuaded
them.
What the Americans should have done is persuaded
Japan that there was nothing going to happen
to their emperor.
The generals in Germany [misspoke: Japan]
did bad stuff, but the emperor didn’t.
And they should’ve given them guarantees
that he would be safeguarded and that nothing
would happen to their god, which is the case.
You know, after the war, nothing happened
to the emperor and he could still visit Washington
many years later, and he stayed alive.
He was not degraded in any way.
That was a mistake on the American side, that
they didn’t.
We wouldn’t have all these weapons today.
But of course, Christy didn’t only work
on weapons and trying to stop them.
He worked also on nuclear energy generation
and he—with Fermi—was in that [Chicago
Met] Lab.
December 2, 1942, they got the self-sustaining
nuclear reaction going at Chicago.
Then he worked with Fermi the next few months
for the first nuclear reactor they developed
at Argonne later.
He worked with nuclear reactors all his life.
He went to meeting after meeting, and until
his very end, he believed that that is a good
source of energy, the sun and nuclear reactors.
The problem with the nuclear reactors was
that they didn’t do enough inspection, and
they didn’t go enough into safety.
It was a problem of the American government
that they should’ve provided more funds
to make these reactors perfectly safe.
He felt that everything else was more unsafe
than the nuclear reactors would’ve been.
So he worked on that all his life.
What he did at the end of his life, when most
people retire, he was invited to be the head
of a committee to figure out what happened
in Japan with these only two bombs that exploded—the
Hiroshima and the Nagasaki one.
It was a very difficult project, because this
was 40 years later.
He was given that job in 1982, so that’s
40 years later.
How do you figure out what happened 40 years
before with radiation?
There were so many shielding effects.
First of all, when you picture the Christy
gadget, they had this plutonium at the center,
the plutonium-239.
Then they had a lot of dynamite around that,
directed dynamite.
And so these neutrons that came from the plutonium
had to go through the dynamite.
The dynamite consisted of a whole bunch of
different elements and that gave off more
neutrons and they interacted with each other.
Then it had to go through the iron shell,
whatever it was, and that made more neutrons
and things that had to be studied.
Then it went into the atmosphere with nitrogen
and oxygen.
There were multiple interactions between all
these neutrons and all the stuff that flew
out.
And, then what would actually happen to people?
You had to study the shielding of the houses
and of clouds, and a lot of shielding calculations
that were very, very difficult.
This thing went on for—it’s still going
on.
I can give you the telephone number of someone
who’s still working on it, Steve Egbert
from the Science Applications International
Corporation in San Diego.
This was a big American project and they collaborate
with Japanese physicists.
They had 100,000 patients that they were studying—survivors—where
they were and all the details over there,
where they could figure out.
The end result was—after these very difficult
things, they had to examine cement walls,
they had to excavate dead people from the
radiation and study their teeth.
They found an interesting thing, that women
are three times as susceptible to radiation
as men are.
If there’s a radiation, women get three
times as much.
I never knew that before.
Because, radiation is used in every dentist’s
office and every medical clinic, you have
radiation.
Well, anyway, it affects women more than men,
that’s one of the things that came out.
They said where the Hiroshima bomb fell, nobody
could ever live there again.
That territory was polluted for eternity.
Well, they built a nice hotel there in which
we slept, and life is going on there like
before.
It didn’t last all that long.
The two radiations which were kind of known
to come out is neutrons produced by the bomb
and gamma rays.
What the study found out under my husband’s
direction is that the neutrons were not the
main problem, it was the gamma rays.
Because the neutrons went into gamma rays,
so the Fat Boy [misspoke: Man] bomb in Nagasaki
was mostly damage due to gamma rays.
The same with the other, the Hiroshima one.
That the Hiroshima bomb did not explode where
they think it exploded.
They couldn’t fit observations from the
ground.
It exploded a little higher up, 25 meters,
but it was a little higher.
That made a significant difference for what
happened below.
To the bitter end, my husband had certain
opinions and he found out a lot of other stuff.
He was very unusual in many different ways.
He was so selfless; he was so giving.
He loved his physics so much.
He did so much for Caltech.
He brought so many Nobel—it’s not a quiet
place anymore, it’s a very lively place,
and he made it so.
He was involved in the defense—I found letters,
it shocked me.
You know, you needed two-kiloton to defeat
an airplane from the Soviet Union at 200 meters
or something like that.
All this defense stuff on the defense of Europe
he worked on.
I mean, he didn’t just work on physics and
students and all that at Caltech.
He did an awful lot on an international basis,
and to eliminate the bombs as much he could,
and the testing.
I think that’s one of the best things of
his life.
His students worshiped him, just like Oppenheimer
was worshipped by Christy and many of his
associates.
Christy’s students worshipped him.
He went out of his way helping them when they
were ill or this or that family problem or
inspiring them with this and that.
He went out of his way.
I think he was this nature, but he also took
over Oppenheimer’s ways.
You know about Teller and so on, right.
He became rather cool and didn’t have much
contact.
Sackmann Christy: My husband knew that I had
this passion for horses, and in post-war Germany,
there was no way you could ride.
The country was destroyed, so I had to start
riding as an adult when your body’s already
pretty stiff and, you know, your fall isn’t
so easy.
He asked me when he wanted to keep me in California,
“What can I do to keep you in Los Angeles?”
which wasn’t my first choice with the smog
and all the rest.
I said, “Get me up on a horse.”
We used to go to places in LA up on a horse,
and then he asked the trustees, “Where do
I take a young lady who wants to be up on
a horse?”
And they told him about a ranch out in Northern
California, where they have 200 riding horses
and you ride every day, morning and afternoon.
You don’t have to cook, and everything’s
done for you.
You just ride horses at different levels that
you fit into.
And that’s where he took me to.
We’re still going there.
He was an incredible rider.
These creeks, six feet wide, he always used
to jump them, and he rode a horse until he
was 93 years old, holding hands with me.
Sackmann Christy: Christy got the PhD May
30th, 1941, I am born February 8, 1942.
If you make a subtraction, I was born nine
months after he married his first wife.
It’s a very strange coincidence, to live
through the German warfare and then to marry
one of the top people on this side of the
warfare.
I wrote a little thing a couple of years ago
that I called, “On Opposite Sides of the
Fence.”
In warfare, you always have a fence, and I
came from the opposite side.
Both sides had heroes in it.
Heisenberg, to me, is very much a hero and
I want to write a book on him, too, because
I know a lot.
How his mother got him out of the clutches
of Hitler, how she did it.
His name is Heisenberg, H-e-i-s-e-n-b-e-r-g,
Werner.
He was the center of physics in Germany and
he trained many of the American physicists.
I have a list there, but Teller was one of
his students.
Oppenheimer was also in Gottingen.
He got his PhD, by the way, but not under
Heisenberg, somebody else.
But anyway, he was kind of the guru in Germany.
He very much wanted the professorship of [Arnold]
Sommerfeld, who was another great man [inaudible].
He didn’t get it, because of his political
views against Hitler.
He did not get this position.
So he was very bitter.
Then shortly afterwards, he was called something,
a derogatory word which meant “the white
Jew” in Germany.
That’s what they called physicists who were
not Jewish but who were against what Hitler
was doing and were sympathizing with the others.
They were called white Jews.
It appeared in, I think, newspapers – and
I must find all that stuff – that he was
called a white Jew.
That’s one of the reasons he didn’t get
the Sommerfeld position.
It was clear that people were disappearing.
It wasn’t clear to my family.
We lived close to Auschwitz.
Later I lived close to Dachau, near Munich,
when I went back.
None of the local people seemed to know about
these terrible places, Auschwitz and Dachau,
not from what I could learn.
They knew something was going on, but they
didn’t know about the murderous stuff.
They knew they were disappearing.
But anyway, I never found out that anybody
knew of the circles that I was in.
Anyway, people were disappearing, so they
were expecting Heisenberg to disappear also
to an unknown place.
His mother feared for him.
His mother was a socialite.
She did a lot of entertaining.
She made an appointment with the mother of
another giant [Heinrich Himmler] in Germany—can’t
think of his name right now—but he was in
charge of the secret police.
He caused all these criminal things.
Mother didn’t know.
This one mother of Heisenberg’s goes to
the mother of the chief of the secret police
and said to her, “Do you remember our fathers
used to be friends?
They used to go hiking together in the Alps,
and they had such similar interests.
It would be nice if our boys could be nice
to each other, too.”
The mother of this terrible criminal did not
know that her son was doing such things.
And so the two women decided that their sons
should be friendly with each other.
Then Heisenberg’s mother said, “Why don’t
you tell your son to be a nice boy and be
nice to my boy?”
That’s how they talked.
The mother actually went out and talked to
her boy, not knowing what criminal acts he
was doing.
The boy [Himmler] sent out two letters, one
to the military, which are historic things
which I’ll put in my book, to spare Heisenberg.
And another one—two letters are known, signed
by him, to spare Heisenberg.
Heisenberg was spared.
These women did it.
That’s how important women can be.
That’s why Heisenberg was spared.
He did everything that nobody would—there
were six Kaiser Wilhelm Institutions.
Hahn, the chemist in Berlin, was in charge
of one, and then there were others in physics.
He [Heisenberg] very much wanted the directorship
of one Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, they had
a lot of funding and so on.
I think Einstein was in one of them.
Then his student, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker—while
he didn’t get his bride there, he was in
charge of another physics institute.
They were cahoots under the same wavelength.
They were both against Hitler.
So they controlled three of the six Kaiser
Wilhelm Institutes.
That’s a lot, and I don’t know at the
moment who the other ones were controlled
by.
He did everything he could to have no bomb
business in his institutes—there were three,
the chemistry and the two physics ones.
I know a lot about that stuff, and I have
a lot of evidence for it.
I have six books there written, some of them
in German, that people don’t read, but I
can read them and I’m going to use them.
Letters that he wrote to his parents, letters
that he wrote to his wife, which all substantiates
what I’m saying.
But he had to be very careful.
He would’ve been executed like this had
it been known what he was doing.
He carried that thing through until he was
imprisoned at Farm Hall in Britain.
He was always claiming you needed too much
uranium, and he covered up to the bitter end,
but it was a coverup.
I’ve seen in letters from his wife and to
his parents.
It’s wonderful that people like that exist
when you have a villain in the top government
position who can order anything he wants to
order, that you have some responsible parties
among the people who do what they can do.
We need people like that in every country.
In Germany, certainly.
I’m proud of him.
Kelly: Did you know him personally?
Sackmann Christy: A little bit.
It was the same institute.
He once came to the United States when I was
here.
He came to Caltech and I met him.
I was very angry at my husband and at Caltech.
We had very nice auditoriums there that he
would get in Germany everywhere.
And they put him into a little classroom,
where minor people come to give a minor talk.
They did not give him any official, nice—Christy
thought to the very end that Heisenberg was
a villain.
I could never persuade him.
They treated him in this way when he came
to Caltech.
Kelly: That would be in the ‘50s, ‘60s?
Sackmann Christy: Shortly before he died.
It would’ve been in the ‘70s.
I went to his talk, and he knew who I was
from Munich.
I was engaged to the son of his co-director,
Biermann.
He knew very much who I was, and he met me
here as the wife of Christy, and he was upset.
I saw a lot of upset on the Caltech side,
but on his side, too.
I greeted him in German with a Bavarian greeting,
which is normally not used anywhere else.
Grüß Gott, it’s “Greet God,” it’s
a dialect form and I tried to do it in a dialect
way.
He looked me over from scalp to toe.
“How could you do it.”
That’s what he told me without words.
He wouldn’t take my hand.
And I worshipped the man.
That’s life.
I’m going to do some good for him still.
“How could you marry Christy?”
Kelly: Heisenberg.
Sackmann Christy: Implied that to me.
He didn’t say it verbally, but his eyes
told me that.
I was damned angry that he wasn’t received
in a way that he would’ve been received
anywhere else.
But it wasn’t my doing.
But that’s life.
He did do a lot that was very good.
And as an example for future countries to
do likewise when they get into trouble in
the administration.
Kelly: There are lessons here.
Sackmann Christy: Yes, yes.
Things always repeat.
That stupid Hitler, why did he invade Russia?
Napoleon’s empire got killed that way.
He does it again.
It always repeats, yeah.
Kelly: What do you think, and you can answer
this however you’d like, about how the role
of women in science has changed over the course
of your lifetime?
Sackmann Christy: It has changed.
It’s better.
We have between 20 and 30% women now at Caltech
and I’m grateful for everyone.
But Stanford has over 50%, where my students
went.
My oldest daughter got into Caltech and she
turned it down as a protest, because they’re
still not good enough to women.
We have two division chairmen among six, which
is progress, in chemistry and in physics,
the first women chairmen.
We still have a long ways to go, and we’ve
only come part of the way.
The way they treated us at the beginning,
like myself or Catherine Cesarsky, who was
a big woman in science.
Or Beatrice Tinsley, who lost her life due
to that, or Olga Taussky-Todd, who got the
first professorships in mathematics at Caltech.
It’s sad.
Olga Taussky-Todd was married to a mathematician.
She came from, I think, Hungary [misspoke:
Austria], and then she was educated in Vienna.
She went to England, because she was also
Jewish.
From England, she came to the United States
working in Washington somewhere, the Bureau
of Standards and so on.
She desperately wanted a child.
Later, when I met her in Pasadena, she used
to ask me, “Juliana” – when we met in
supermarkets buying vegetables – “Let
me hold your child.”
She could never have a child, because she
would’ve never gotten a job.
She cried about that all her life.
So I let her hold my firstborn: “Hold it
as long you want.”
She was made the first professor at Caltech
in science, due to my husband.
I have a picture of her in my book.
She had so many high awards from countries
outside the United States.
She had 300 papers published.
She opened up whole new fields in mathematics,
and she had a little postdoc, it was a low-down
research position, at Caltech.
I told Robert, “Caltech should be ashamed.”
She made a quantum jump from a low-down research
position.
Her husband had the position and she became
full professor.
But it was near the end of her life.
She sacrificed too much already.
Another scientist that very much inspired
me was Beatrice Tinsley.
She came from New Zealand.
She married an astronomer from New Zealand.
They came to the United States.
He got the position, just like it would’ve
been with me and Biermann in Santa Cruz.
She got the position in Texas.
No, he got the position, and she had nothing.
She was sitting at home for four years wanting
to do science also.
She was so tense, they couldn’t have children,
and she finally adopted two children.
Then finally, she got a little job at Caltech
for three months or so and that’s when I
met her for the first time.
She came with her two children here in a station
wagon, all alone.
Her husband was at home in Texas.
She had to get these kids to school, she had
to shop for them, she had to wash for them.
She had to do everything for the kids and
do science, since it’s the only chance she
had for three months or so.
She worked herself to death, and she told
me, “Juliana, you’re married now.
If you ever consider having a child” – and
I wanted them – “Hide it.
Don’t let anybody know that you have a child.
You’ll be kicked out at Caltech like this.”
That’s what I followed—I followed Beatrice’s
advice.
I hid my pregnancies.
I lived close by, so I could go back and forth.
There was no health insurance.
When you go into the hospital and give birth,
it was a private luxury at Caltech.
I got out of the hospital in one day, because
I couldn’t afford the private luxury.
We didn’t have health insurance either.
Later, I go to visit Beatrice when she was
in Washington and so on, and her tough life
continued.
She finally decided to split up with her husband.
They went through a very friendly divorce,
and she kept the daughter and he kept the
son.
It’s only then when she split up and she
was a single mother, she got the position
at Yale.
She became a full professor at Yale, and I
was so pleased, because my PhD advisor was
there, Pierre Demarque.
I’m sure he was helpful.
He was always supportive of me, too.
She got this position and then she dated a
colleague of mine, Richard Larson, and it
was discovered that she had cancer and she
died shortly afterward.
She was barely 40 years old.
She worked herself to death.
Now they have an asteroid named after her.
They have awards in the American Astronomical
Society named after her.
But it’s too late.
She had a hell of a life, but she inspired
me.
“Hide the fact if you want a child.
Go ahead, but hide it.”
I have a lot of bitter experiences here, too.
But because I wanted to support my husband,
I swallowed it all.
I swallowed a lot.
I could’ve gotten a job somewhere else,
but I told my husband we would see each other
once a month.
How do you carry out a marriage seeing each
other once a month?
He very much wanted a wife who would accompany
him to meetings, who would accompany him on
vacations, who would accompany him at everything
in his life.
Who would be home, who would cook for him.
He didn’t want to cook.
He had so many—he wanted a chic wife, he
wanted so many things and I figured I couldn’t
do that if I wouldn’t be close by.
So I swallowed LA, I swallowed the smog, I
swallowed everything I didn’t like about
here.
But the smog has gone away.
It’s much better.
It has improved.
I basically stayed here to help him with his
dreams.
It was a good marriage, but I had to pay a
lot.
I’m still paying in many ways.
But I swallow it, that’s life.
Kelly: On balance, you were a winner.
Sackmann Christy: Yes.
It’s, it’s tough.
Stanford is different.
I came from Canada, I was educated in Canada.
We had a very small faculty, but two fulltime
professors among the small faculty, and both
of them inspired me a great deal.
Without these women, I probably wouldn’t
have had the guts to do it.
But they had a very fulfilled life and they
did many things that men don’t do.
They inspired me, and we need that for our
young students here—for women students.
What I did is when I ended up here is I had
preferentially women students.
Caltech women students, I had them come to
my house and see what the life of a working
professional is like.
I picked the Chinese ones, preferentially.
I wanted my children to learn Chinese, because
I figured there’s a lot on the other side
of the ocean from LA.
I wanted to get to know things that are not
translated.
My children had to learn Chinese.
I used Chinese students to speak in Chinese,
Mandarin, to my children and to play with
them and to see what I was doing.
I would have a student come – actually she
was out of China and she was working here
in a house.
She asked me if she could clean my house,
and I was in the front.
It was Easter and I was hiding Easter eggs.
I looked at her and I said, “Uh-oh, this
is not a cleaning lady, this is a highly intellectual
woman who’s desperate.”
I said, “I’ll clean the house if you speak
in Chinese to my children.
If you go swimming with them in the Caltech
pool and play with them in Chinese only.
I want my children to learn Chinese and I
don’t know anything myself.”
That’s how I got Chinese people involved
in bringing up my children.
I lived next door and I understand some of
these women are very important scientists
now, but they saw what the life of a struggling
wife who’s a scientist is like, you know.
I tried to pass that on.
Kelly: Would you encourage young women to
go into science today?
Sackmann Christy: I love science.
I would do it again.
I would do theoretical physics again.
Yes, but you have to know what you’re facing
and somehow survive it.
I did survive, and I had a very good marriage,
and I would marry him again.
I told my husband when he died, “Don’t
fret too much, whatever comes.
I’m coming.”
Yes, one of my daughters is an engineer, Stanford-trained
engineer and she does unusual stuff.
The other one is in medicine and she does
unusual stuff.
I was very interested in medicine due to the
cancer background and my husband’s eye problems.
You know, personal reasons.
I said, “You do it, you make new inventions.”
She’s very good at it, and she’s very
kind also.
