Richard Chandler
I was born in Ft. Pierce, FL on September 9, 1937. My parents were living in Okeechobee at the time and the closest hospital was in Ft. Pierce. At the time my father was a surveyor for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, earning $80 a month. The Corps moved him frequently over a lot of south Florida, so when they moved us to Clewiston (I was around 5 at the time), he got a job with the U.S. Sugar Corporation and we stayed there until his death in 1952. Before their marriage my mother had been a school teacher, so she got her certificate renewed during the summer of 1953 at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and we four children went with her. I spent a couple of weeks that summer at a science camp at Florida State, so that I was able to see both campuses and to choose FSU as the place I wanted to go to college.
With her certificate renewed my mother decided to take a job in Key West. It had one of the highest salary scales for teachers in Florida, and she had four children to provide for. I spent the 11th and 12th grades at Key West High School, graduating in 1955; then to FSU: B.S. in mathematics in 1959, M.S. in 1960, and Ph.D. in 1963. My thesis director started out to be Bob Plunkett, but he had family problems and left FSU before I had really gotten started so I switched to Morton Curtis. Curtis was the ablest mathematician I have ever known, with a extraordinary breadth of knowledge. He was not the easiest person to get along with, although I pretty much managed to stay on his good side.
Suzanne and I had gotten married in 1961, and since she was from Pennsylvania, we compromised (geographically) on North Carolina once the thesis was done. I took a temporary (2 year) job on the contract Special Research in Numerical Analysis which Duke had with the U.S. Army. There were four mathematicians supported by this contract: Frank Murray was the director, Walter Sewell, the associate director, and two junior persons, Robert Spira and myself. The job was similar to a post-doc position in that I was to spend half time on Army problems and half time on my own research. In retrospect this was not a good job for me at the time, since I really didn't know how to do research, and I received little guidance from the other three. Dr. Murray did give me two valuable pieces of advice: He said that all my research should be done in a bound notebook rather than on loose paper, thereby avoiding the problem of misplacing notes and having to "reinvent the wheel". He also said that I should get a job (when my two years at Duke were up) at a large state university and to try to move up the faculty ranks as quickly as possible.
In the spring of 1965 I had job offers from both NCSU and UNC but decided to take the one at State, primarily because I had been greatly impressed with John Cell when I interviewed. Cell was an applied mathematician and I was very pure so we never discussed mathematics. My recollection of him today is of a man who had a very clear vision of what he wanted for the Department and an exceedingly strong ambition to achieve it. He liked me and treated me very well: he "found" some money so as to give me a small raise in the middle of my first year; he gave me research support during my first summer; he got me promoted to Associate Professor after two years; he asked Gil Koh to mentor my research efforts.
Sometime in the fall of 1967 Cell sent a memo to the faculty saying that he had been diagnosed with a "mild case of Parkinson's disease" and was stepping down as Head. He died of a brain tumor sometime the following spring. Hubert Park became acting Head while the search for a permanent Head took place. Nick Rose was offered the job and accepted, arriving in the fall of 1968.
I find that I have only a few clear memories of "the good old days". Clarkie's (John Clarkson) doctor had told him to rest every afternoon and so he did: If you walked past his office after lunch you would usually see him sacked out on his cot, door wide open. Of the "old-timers", I was closest to Bob Winton. He and I went fishing together many times and he and his wife (a very accomplished chef) hosted wonderful dinner parties. I remember a Technician article identifying several members of the mathematics faculty (myself included) as among the 99 worst instructors at NCSU. We got abject written apologies from many persons in the administration (probably fearing 99 lawsuits).
In 1973 Nick Rose asked me to replace Nic Nahikian as graduate administrator. I remember being very surprised at the time, considering myself to be one of the junior members of the faculty. The next 12 years were my busiest at NC State. In addition to teaching a regular load of classes and administering the graduate program, I directed two Ph.D. students, kept a respectable research effort going, and published my book on Hausdorff Compactifications. The one part of the job as graduate administrator that I was unprepared for was the emotional counseling that was necessary. Graduate school is a stressful environment for many students and I heard about it from many of them.
In spite of the effort required by the position, I was very disappointed in 1985 when (then Head) Ernie Burniston asked me to step down as graduate administrator. In my fantasies I saw myself happily doing that job for the rest of my life. My disappointment lasted only a week or so. The legislature did something (like raise the out-of-state tuition) which impacted directly on the job and I found myself worrying about how I was going to deal with the problem. I then realized that John Franke was the one who had to deal with it; after that I never regretted giving it up.
Looking back, the past 37 years seem a very remarkable instant, proving the old adage: "Time flies when you're having fun." I realize there were trying periods when each instant seemed an eternity. For a while it was as if virtually every person with administrative authority over me was an anti-scholar, interested only in how much money the faculty could make for the university. I spent the afternoon walk home writing angry or sarcastic letters (in my head) to the offending department head, dean, provost, chancellor, etc. Fortunately, those times were few and far between so it has been a great time, those 37 years. One of my proudest moments came a while back, from a student evaluation for my Ma 408 class: "Before I took this course, I hated geometry. Now I can't wait to get out and teach it!"
Richard Chandler July, 2002