One day, while scrolling through a Facebook group for car enthusiasts, he had an idea. “I sent a message saying, ‘I’m an engineering major, and I’m looking to do some design work. Does anyone have any parts they would like to be designed?’” he recalls. Soon, “there were 30 people [direct messaging]me with dimensions and different projects that they needed to be completed.”

The experience he gained helped him land internships with Standard Motor Products and Psionic, an aerospace and defense company, where he “fell in love with startups” and got “really, really interested in rockets,” he says. That inspired him to create the Fordham Rocket Propulsion Lab, a club that allows students to learn more about rockets and aerospace. And with a few friends, he launched Ensemble Propulsion Systems, a passion project to “design, build, and test hybrid and liquid rocket motors.”

In his senior year, Adipietro began applying for jobs, including one at SpaceX, a spacecraft engineering company. The hiring process was intense, he says.

“Every single person from the team interviews you for 30 minutes and by the end of that, it was like the whole room is filled up with equations, but it’s all equations that I learned here at Fordham.”

He got the job as an integration and test engineer and started at SpaceX soon after graduating from Fordham College at Rose Hill in May. He believes his passion for engineering helped him stand out from other applicants.

“Say there’s one person who wants to get a job for the money, then there is one person who is thinking about the industry from the second they open their eyes in the morning. The latter will have a higher chance of getting the job,” he says, adding: “Pursue your passion.”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

Prodan published a paper in PhysRevLett that explored how a microtubule’s structure and its ability to store energy along its edges could be useful in areas like cancer research.

“My hypothesis is that through evolution, cancer-derived microtubules actually found a way to get rid of these energy storage methods,” she said.

One of her goals is to research ways to physically manipulate a cancerous microtubule into one that is noncancerous.

“Then you have another method to treat cancer,” she said.

Connecting Fields

Prodan’s work connects biology with materials science, a field that combines areas like physics and biology to better understand the properties of different materials and how they can be used. This field is useful in areas like engineering, energy conversion, and telecommunications.

“I have two areas that seem disconnected, cancer research and engineering new materials, but they are highly interconnected,” said Prodan, who came to Fordham from the New Jersey Institute of Technology this fall. “The main relationship between them is physics.”

In the course of researching microtubules, Prodan began noticing similarities between them and a new type of material, topological insulators. A topological insulator is a material whose surface behaves as an electrical conductor while its interior behaves as an electrical insulator, she said.

The possibilities of topological insulators became even more clear in 2016, when a team of scientists was awarded the Nobel Prize for its work on topological materials that “could be used in new generations of electronics and superconductors, or in future quantum computers.”

The microtubules’ ability to store energy on the outside of their structure, similar to a topological insulator, makes them a promising subject for future research, Prodan said.

Prodan said that physics has an important role to play in serving humanity, such as by assisting in drug discovery and helping run the communication technology behind programs such as Zoom.

Helping to Enhance STEM Efforts

Prodan said that she was drawn to Fordham because of the University’s expanding STEM offerings, particularly in physics.

That’s why she’s teaching an introductory physics course to undergraduates this summer. The hope is that students get excited about STEM at the beginning of their time at Fordham, before moving on to upper-level courses.

Prodan said that her lab is currently under construction but hopes that it will be ready by the summer or sooner, which would allow her to provide hands-on learning and research opportunities to undergraduate students, as well as local high school students.

“If you want people to have a better life, a healthier life, a happier life, physics and STEM in general are really important,” she said.

“In general, the discoveries that happen in physics don’t have an impact right away. It’s a long-term impact, but they’re essential.

Freelance Engineering

Adipietro, a native of Westport, Connecticut, loved working on cars growing up with family and friends, which initially made him want to pursue a career in automotive engineering. But he wasn’t sure how to get started, particularly as a college student with no experience. One day he had an idea while scrolling through a Facebook group for car enthusiasts.

“I sent a message saying, ‘I’m an engineering major, and I’m looking to do some design work. Does anyone have any parts they would like to be designed in CAD [computer aided design]?’” he said.

Adipietro said he thought no one would respond, but soon after he posted, “there were 30 people DM-ing me with dimensions and different projects that they needed to be completed.”

The experience he gained as a “freelance automotive engineer” helped him put concrete work experience on his resume, which he brought to a Fordham Career Fair. That’s where he connected with Standard Motor Products.

“They liked what I was doing with the freelance engineering, and I ended up being a mechanical engineering intern there for one summer,” he said.

Pivoting to Space

But Adipietro said that while he liked automotive engineering, he left looking for a more fast-paced industry working with leading edge technology to solve problems.

“I spoke to Professor [Martin] Sanzari, and he told me he had a similar experience. He suggested that I look into the aerospace industry,” Adipietro said. So he did, and soon sent out more than 100 applications.

“I was getting kind of burnt out from sending those applications out, so I ended up just starting to send cold emails—which is a pretty humbling experience—but it’s definitely a good way to reach out to people directly,” he said.

He heard back from one recipient, Psionic, an aerospace and defense company, which sent him a test project on a Friday: Design, model, 3D print, and ship a component part to their office by Monday that they needed for a meeting with the U.S. special forces.

With a lot of hustling, he managed to complete the challenge and get it all done and shipped. That helped land him a job there for about a year, where he said he “fell in love with startups” and got “really, really interested in rockets.”

Launching His Career and Others

This newfound interest inspired Adipietro to create the Fordham Rocket Propulsion Lab, a club that allows students to learn more about rockets and aerospace. He also leveraged his work at Psionic to land his next internship—a mechanical engineering position at Astra, an aerospace company. And he got some advice along the way from Bernadette Haig, a 2018 Fordham College at Rose Hill graduate who is a mechanical engineer there.

“She was incredibly helpful in terms of figuring out what that [career] timeline looks like and realizing that, even if there’s not an aerospace program at Fordham, there’s definitely a route to get to aerospace, and there’s definitely a route to get to other industries,” he said.

After his internship at Astra, Adipietro was certain that aerospace is where he wanted to work. In fact, right after it, he and a few of his friends launched Ensemble Propulsion Systems, a passion project where they “design, build, and test hybrid and liquid rocket motors.” And he also began applying to jobs for after college, including one at SpaceX, a spacecraft engineering company.

At SpaceX, the intense hiring process includes multiple rounds of interviews and, if the candidate advances, culminates with a presentation to a team of engineers followed by individual rounds of questioning from each of them.

“Every single person from the team interviews you for 30 minutes and by the end of that, it was like the whole room is filled up with equations, but it’s all equations that I learned here at Fordham,” he said.

Adipietro said his internship experiences, paired with the technical and communications skills he learned at Fordham provided him with a solid foundation.

“Going to Fordham was so helpful, and I cannot stress it enough,” he said. He cited an example of when, as part of an interview process, he had to submit a piece of writing describing the project he was working on.

“When we were in the interview, after [the interviewer] read it, he said, ‘Oh, you’re great at writing, and you really don’t see that,’” Adipietro said. “Having a very well-rounded education is definitely helpful for going out there in the industry.”

He also encouraged other students to find what they’re passionate about because that will help them be successful.

“Say there’s one person who wants to get a job for the money, then there is one person who is thinking about the industry from the second they open their eyes in the morning. The latter will have a higher chance of getting the job and being successful in industry,” he said, adding. “Pursue your passion.”

On July 30, the answer came from space: a call for human unity during a time of bitter conflicts, articulated by someone who is—quite literally—above it all.

“We watch the news up here every night, and we’re aware of what is going on in the world,” said Ricky Arnold, a NASA flight engineer aboard the International Space Station, speaking via live webcast. He cited the crew’s cooperative efforts as an example of what can happen when people from diverse nations work together.

Haig and her fellow interns watched from NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

“It was really exciting,” said Haig, who is getting ready for the fall quarter at Stanford, where she will pursue a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics.

The experience, part of a NASA educational program, fueled her enthusiasm for becoming an aerospace engineer and, hopefully, an astronaut herself one day. It also provided a thrilling coda to an undergraduate career that was heavy on science and grant-funded scientific research but also on classic humanistic aspects of Jesuit education.

Science Studies Inflected with Jesuit Values

Haig graduated summa cum laude from Fordham in May with a double major: engineering physics, with a concentration in mechanical engineering, and classical civilization. At NASA in Cleveland, she spent the summer in the ARETEP (Aeronautics Research and Engineering Team) program, studying the movement of urban air masses with an eye toward safety standards for new aerial vehicles that could one day be zipping around city skies.

Aviation is a longtime interest. In high school, she volunteered at an aviation museum near her Long Island home and enjoyed working with the museum’s elderly docents—an experience that led her to volunteer at Fordham as an aide to a former missionary—Richard Hoar, S.J.—living in the Murray-Weigel Hall retirement residence on the Rose Hill campus. “He actually has a master’s degree in physics, so it was a great fit,” Haig said.

A student in the honors program, she loved the program’s classics-related courses and kept signing up for more of them—Roman art, Latin, Greek. “Before I knew it, I had a major,” she said. For her senior thesis, she melded her two majors by examining how the Romans, known as great engineers, might have managed to fill the Colosseum with water for mock naval battles, as some have suggested they did.

There’s little evidence this happened. However, “the drains underneath the Colosseum are a lot larger than they would need to be just for rain water and waste water,” Haig said.

She also pursued varied scientific research projects. During the summer between sophomore and junior years, a Fordham Undergraduate Research Grant made it possible for her to work with physics professor Stephen Holler, Ph.D., on developing a new optical-fiber probe for use in analyzing tumors. For her second undergraduate research project, she worked at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago between junior and senior year and diagnosed a malfunction in the accelerator’s monitoring components.

She traveled to present her research at academic conclaves on the West Coast, thanks to travel grants provided by the University, and recently was awarded the Fordham College Alumni Association’s Undergraduate Research Symposium grant.

Haig suspects that her research helped her attain the NASA internship, a long-sought prize.

“I’ve been applying for the NASA program for a while, for at least a couple of summers, and I guess this summer I finally had enough research experience,” she said.

She found the internship to be a cornucopia for the scientifically curious. In addition to getting intensive introductions to aerodynamics and computational fluid dynamics, Haig has found scientists and engineers readily responsive to her email queries.

“I’ve found everybody to be so helpful and so willing to talk about their projects,” she said. “There are people working on missions that are going to Mars, stuff that’s going into deep space eventually. People say, ‘Yeah, come on over.’ I’ve been able to make so many connections.”

Aiming a Question at the Heavens

When she was chosen to record a question for the space station’s astronauts, she moved away from the technical and leaned toward the liberal arts, asking a question with a philosophical bent: “In today’s world, what is the most compelling reason to engage in human spaceflight?”

In his answer, Ricky Arnold, the NASA flight engineer, cited the scientific research conducted in space, as well as the crew’s perspective—“a higher plane of agreement”—on all the strife occurring far below.

“We have two Russians, three Americans, and a German right now,” he said, bobbing up and down in the zero gravity and casually moving his hands away from the microphone floating in front of him. “We have found something we all believe in, and the operations both here and on the ground are seamless because we all believe in the same thing. …

“There’s a really powerful message to all humans about what we as a species … are capable of when we put aside differences and focus on higher objectives as a species.”

Watch NASA astronaut Ricky Arnold’s webcast below. Bernadette Haig poses her question at the 5:22 mark. 

The resource is an artificial pond for raising fish, and it’s the inaugural project of Fordham’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB), founded three years ago. A team of students returned last month from the project site, where locals were abuzz with the possibilities for a better life that the fish farm represented.

“Some of the community members were [saying], ‘We’re just excited,’” said chapter co-president and Fordham College at Rose Hill senior Grace Bolan. “It really comes down to opportunity. Hopefully, it leads to economic development in the region.”

She and three other Fordham students—engineering physics majors all—went to Uganda from March 17 to March 28. Accompanied by a professional engineer who’s a chapter mentor, they oversaw the implementation of designs for the pond that they’d drawn up in the past year.

Designing the pond was just one facet of the project. Students also consulted with a student team from the Gabelli School of Business about funding it; presented the project to potential donors and to the national organization of Engineers Without Borders; and coordinated via telephone and e-mail with those in Uganda who would be doing the digging and building.

Along the way, they’ve learned a lot about applying their academic lessons outside the classroom, said physics professor Stephen Holler, PhD, a mentor for the Fordham EWB chapter.

“They’ve done a phenomenal amount of work in a very short time,” he said.

Fish Farming for Economic Development

The project originated in efforts by a Ugandan nongovernmental organization, the Serere Local Fish Farming Initiative, to promote fish farming for economic development in impoverished areas of eastern Uganda. The group submitted its proposed projects to Engineers Without Borders so that EWB chapters could apply to take them on.

The Fordham chapter picked up the project because it seemed relatively feasible—compared with, say, building a bridge or a dam—and because the community’s description of its needs and goals was appealing, members said.

A team of five students visited the region in the winter of 2014 to assess a few dozen fish farming sites and choose one that seemed the most viable. For the first project, they settled on Omorio Village, where a group of 20 families wanted to build a pond that would generate income to provide for their widows and orphans. The chapter also agreed to see four more pond projects through to completion in the years ahead.

The first trip and a portion of the return trip were funded by John Reddy, FCRH ’76, and his wife, Christa Reddy, in consultation with their daughter, Kathryn Reddy, a 2014 Fordham graduate who studied physics.

In addition to helping the Ugandan families, the Reddys saw a chance to expand opportunities in the engineering physics program and advance the Fordham mission of educating men and women for others, John Reddy said.

“What it came down to was, we believed that this was a great opportunity for the University and for the families that would be benefited by this,” he said.

The return trip was funded by multiple alumni donors–including the Reddys–in response to a challenge gift from George McCartney, FCRH ’68, and his wife, Mary Jane McCartney, TMC ’69, who learned about the project at a meeting of the Fordham University Science Council, an alumni group.

“They hit a home run with us at that meeting, because they described the project that they did in Uganda and we were fired up to help them make it a reality,” Mary Jane McCartney said.

Their presentation to the Engineers Without Borders national organization—which needed to approve the project—was similarly impressive, said Holler, who said he listened to the presentation via telephone. “They had answers for practically everything that was asked of them,” he said.

The donors’ money paid for tools and for materials like piping, bricks, and stone. It also paid for laborers’ wages and food, and for hiring someone to drive, translate, and provide security. Grants obtained through EWB paid for the students’ flights and for materials used in digging and excavating the pond.

A Cross-Cultural Collaboration

The workers in Uganda started excavating the pond in January, said Fordham College at Rose Hill senior John Murray, the project lead who spearheaded the design work with input from other chapter members and the chapter’s professional mentors.

The pond will serve as a model for others in the district who want to build one. The community members had experience with this kind of project; the Fordham team showed them some enhancements, like techniques for fully draining the pond between harvest cycles, Murray said. The pond is stocked with tilapia because they’re relatively easy to take care of, compared to catfish, which would be the other option, he said.

The students found it was enriching to interact with the Ugandans and learn about their culture and way of living. They said the Ugandans marveled at various aspects of American life, like the sunscreen the students were donning—“‘We thought you were putting it on for energy,’” said one of them, according to Bolan.

Said Murray: “It’s just fascinating to come face-to-face with a completely different culture with different ideas of what it means to just live day to day.”

Bolan said she was impressed with how readily the Fordham community rallied to make the trip happen—from the administrators who went out of their way to help to the donors who funded the trip.

“We’re so thankful to our donors,” Bolan said. “This experience is absolutely the most important thing I’ve done at Fordham.”

Bill Breisky recalls his grandfather Victor Hess, who discovered cosmic radiation 100 years ago and spent more than a quarter-century teaching physics and conducting research at Fordham.

Victor Francis Hess and I inhabited different worlds. He was born in the green heart of Austria and schooled in physics and mathematics in its Renaissance capital, Graz. I was born in the smoky city of Pittsburgh and schooled in the very unscientific world of journalism.

And yet, we shared common ground. Both of us loved searching for truth and unraveling mysteries (we shared a passion for Eric Ambler spy novels), and of course we loved Grandma Hess and her incomparable dumplings and strudels. She had married Victor two years after her first husband, Artur Breisky, a retired major in the Austro-Hungarian army, died during the First World War.

I first set eyes on my Austrian grandparents in Innsbruck in mid-1932, in the heart of the Great Depression. The Hesses had offered to share their apartment there after my father lost his job in Pittsburgh and suffered a nervous breakdown. I was almost 4 years old at the time, and my brother Arthur was an infant. His howling became an issue for grandma—or “Ma-ma,” as she was called. She demanded peace and quiet so that her husband the professor, my step-grandfather, could concentrate on his papers and have an afternoon nap.

It was a tumultuous year for both families, with young Nazis, the Heimwehr, and Bolsheviks clashing in the streets “right outside our window,” my mother reported in a letter home. But there were many good times, one of them a visit to the new cosmic radiation observatory Victor Hess had established one year earlier on Mount Hafelekar, outside of Innsbruck. My mother wrote in the Hafelekar guest book: “The top of the morning, and the top of the world!” She signed it, “Laura Breisky and Billy, Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S.A.”

Two years later, back in Pittsburgh, Laura Baer Breisky died of breast cancer.

We were still in Pittsburgh in 1936 when we received a telegram from Innsbruck informing us that Victor Hess was, belatedly, to be awarded a Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of cosmic radiation during the daring experiments he had conducted while aloft in a balloon more than two decades earlier. To celebrate, the Hesses sent my brother and me garments that were a source of amusement at the Pittsburgh school I attended—lederhosen.

By 1938, we had moved to Baltimore, and Hitler had moved into Austria. Fascist-dominated Europe was already in the midst of a great intellectual and cultural migration to America—Einstein, Pauli, Fermi, Stravinsky, Chagall—but the Anschluss hastened the process, and Austrians became the second largest national group in that migration. One writer called these emigrants “Hitler’s gift to America.”

Victor Hess, thanks to the Nazis—who dominated the faculty at the University of Graz—was made virtually penniless when he fled with my grandmother to Switzerland, having been forced to leave behind the Swedish crowns that had come with his Nobel award. The Nazis had declared grandma to be Jewish (she had converted to Catholicism but was irreligious) and grandpa to be “too cosmopolitan” (he had served as a science representative in Austria’s democratic government). But news of his plight spread rapidly, and he soon received the offer of a full professorship from Fordham University.

The Hesses spent Christmas with us in Baltimore that year, and I began a bond with my grandfather—one that lasted until his death, 26 Christmases later.

In 1943, I contracted double pneumonia, was hospitalized for eight weeks (penicillin had not yet been discovered), and recuperated with the Hesses for the summer at their apartment on William Street, in the Fleetwood section of Mount Vernon, New York. I had received the last rites of the Anglican church while in the hospital, and that prompted grandpa to tell me of his deep religious faith, and of the vow he had made after larynx-cancer surgery had left him with a voice that never rose above a hoarse whisper. He said he had vowed that if he were spared, he would attend Mass faithfully for the remainder of his life. He kept that vow.

“A scientist, more than other scholars,” he wrote during his first decade in America, “spends his time observing nature. It is his task to help unravel the mysteries of nature. He comes to marvel at these mysteries. Hence it is not hard for a scientist to admire the greatness of the Creator of nature. From this it is only a step to adore God.”

He took me to Mass on several Sundays after that. And to a movie, preferably one featuring Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney, on afternoons when he drove grandma to one of her bridge games. Grandpa and I cheered for the Yankees at Yankee Stadium, and we marveled at Pancho Segura’s two-handed swing in the Davis Cup tennis tournament. I learned that Victor Hess had been an avid tennis player as a young man.

I never saw my grandfather in tennis shorts, however. His day-to-day uniform was a three-piece Witty Brothers suit—or at least shirt, suspenders, trousers, and a vest. He required a vest with pockets ample enough to hold his gold pocket watch and chain, a packet of Chiclets chewing gum, a pen, and a small notebook, where a meticulous record of his expenses was recorded in a daily diary.

Victor Hess’ intellectual home in America was, of course, at Fordham—his laboratory, office, and lecture hall. One corner of his spacious office seemed reserved for instrumentation, to monitor the weather and measure breath samples with his good friend and colleague William McNiff, Ph.D. He and Professor McNiff developed a method of measuring small amounts of radium in the human body.

When I visited grandpa at Fordham as a boy, we would share lunch on a campus bench or at a Fordham Road restaurant that served an excellent fillet of sole for 40 cents. Those lunches often were followed by an afternoon of taking measurements—at times on a Harlem River pier where we tossed bits of raw sodium into the river and laughed at their explosive sizzle. He took me to the Empire State Building, where he and a colleague had taken measurements of radioactive fallout after Hiroshima. (He was appalled at the idea of nuclear testing after the war.) And a couple of times, I accompanied him to the 190th Street subway station beneath Fort Tryon, where he had obtained permission from the city to measure radiation in a granite wall some 400 feet below the surface.

I sat in on what I believe was his final lecture on the Rose Hill campus. He told his students that he had loved every class he had taught at Fordham.

Last year, I located one of his prize doctoral students from that time, Joseph Braddock, Ph.D., GSAS ’59. Braddock and two other physicists who studied under Hess while earning their doctorates left Fordham in 1959 to create the defense and technology contracting firm of Braddock, Dunn and McDonald, which went on to play a major role in the development of American anti-missile technology.

“My strongest memory of him is as a great lecturer—and a great listener,” Braddock said. “Often Bernie Dunn, Doctor Hess, and I sat down and had lunch, in the office or in the lab, and talked, frequently about opera. The unofficial Victor Hess was very warm.”

Grandma Hess died of cancer in 1955, at home, where she had been nursed lovingly by Elizabeth Hoencke, a German refugee. Before she passed away, grandma gave one final instruction to Victor: “Marry Elizabeth.”

Several months later, Victor did as he had been told. Elizabeth called her bridegroom “mein Schatz.” She accompanied him to Rome, when he was inducted into the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and to the White House to attend a dinner for Nobel laureates hosted by Jack and Jackie Kennedy.

Late in 1964, Victor was confined to a hospital bed in his living room. A week before Christmas, Elizabeth called our home in Connecticut to tell me, through her tears, that Parkinson’s and pneumonia had finally prevailed, and that her Victor had died.

Grandpa’s funeral, in Mount Vernon, was very small. I recall that a few Fordham Jesuits were there, along with Elizabeth’s family, but not many others. He seemed virtually forgotten, and that pained me. Grandpa Hess was buried in White Plains and gone from our lives, except in my memory.

Or so I thought.

In the fall of 2007, I underwent a procedure called proton-beam stereotactic radiosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. A neurosurgeon targeted my cerebellum with high-energy protons that halted the growth of a benign tumor. Afterward, I asked the medical physicist who had worked alongside the neurosurgeon whether she had ever heard of a physicist named Victor Hess.

“Of course,” she replied, stunning with me with the news (it was news to me) that an observatory called H.E.S.S., or High Energy Stereoscopic System, had been established in Namibia to search the skies for the origin of cosmic rays. Another physicist at the hospital told me that the development of the particle accelerators that had made my radiosurgery possible was stimulated in large part by my grandfather’s balloon-flight discoveries.

In 2009, Grandpa Hess came alive for me yet again when my wife, my brother, and I visited the University of Vienna. I sat at grandpa’s old roll-top desk and examined the instrumentation he had devised for his historic 1912 balloon flights. And we met Professor Peter Schuster, who had been instrumental in establishing the Victor Franz Hess Society—in order, as he put it, “to bring him home to Austria, from which the Nazi regime had banished him, and to be once again the figurehead of Austrian physics we have been missing for too long.”

To my son John and my teenage grandson Ethan McPherson, Victor Francis Hess was a family legend and the subject of a gray photograph that hangs in my study—a stout, young mustachioed man in a three-piece suit, standing in the basket of a hot-air balloon. It seemed high time that they got to know Grandpa Hess better, so in the last week of May 2011, we paid our respects to the Rose Hill campus.

Our first stop was Freeman Hall. The Hess lab was gone, but there were countless reminders of him in the office of physics Professor Martin Sanzari, Ph.D., head of Fordham’s new engineering physics program. Sanzari had organized Victor Francis Hess Day earlier this year. We chuckled at a photo of an exuberant student wearing a T-shirt proclaiming, “Victor Hess Day is the Bess Day!” And we paused reflectively in Freeman’s lecture hall—so unchanged that I imagined I could find the seat I occupied on the last day that Victor Hess formally addressed his students.

The Arthur Avenue restaurant where we had lunch was recommended by none other than Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, who had warmly welcomed us into his office in late morning. Father McShane saw to it that John, Ethan, and I were outfitted with maroon Fordham caps before ushering us to the Administration Building’s Hall of Honor, where a Victor Hess plaque shares wall space with none other than Bronx-born baseball legend Frankie (“The Fordham Flash”) Frisch. Father McShane’s parting words to Ethan: “I’ll see you in four years.”

It was in the archives of Fordham’s William D. Walsh Family Library that the spirit of Victor Hess seemed most alive. In its stacks were copies of some of his letters to old colleagues who had made their way out of Nazi-occupied Europe to the United States—Swiss biologist Eugster on 54th Street in Manhattan, Austrian Nobel laureate Loewi on 93rd, Austrian ex-Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg in St. Louis, among others.

We found a 1950 paper written by Hess the motoring adventurer on “The Capacity of a Highway.” (A maximum number of vehicles can travel safely and efficiently on a highway, he calculated, if they maintain a speed of 15 miles per hour.) And an astonishing discovery—the tattered address book he had kept atop his desk in Fleetwood containing the addresses of physicist Georg von Hevesy, his old balloonist companion; of Fordham colleagues McNiff, Weber, and Kovach; and, to be sure, those of prize students Braddock, Dunn, and McDonald.

Grandpa Hess would be surprised to learn that records of his work occupy 34 cubic feet in Fordham’s archives. He also would be surprised to find more women than men walking the Rose Hill campus. And I’m guessing that he would be pleasantly surprised that solar panels and a wind turbine are planned for the roof of Freeman Hall—while, as my son John the architect observed, the green and leafy Gothic-style campus appears virtually changeless, despite all its well-concealed modernization. A place of faith and reason, and beauty.

Ethan, who’s in ninth grade (my age in the middle of my Fordham-visiting years) googled Victor Francis Hess when he got home and promptly advised us, “He died on December 17. That’s my birthday!” Should I have been surprised? Grandpa Hess lives on.

Next August, Victor Hess will be remembered throughout the world as the scientific explorer who, 100 years earlier, made a series of historic flights—in what essentially was a flying basket—to demonstrate the existence of cosmic radiation. He will be remembered for his enduring love of nature, for his exploration of nature, and for his love of the Creator of nature.

He will also be remembered, by me, as the person who signed his letters, “Your loving Grandpa.”

—Bill Breisky is a former associate editor of The Saturday Evening Post. From 1978 to 1995, he was the editor of the Cape Cod Times.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=gLWjmeLo31U%26hl%3Den_US%26fs%3D1%26rel%3D0%26border%3D1