photo credit: Babbie Whipple

George Field was raised and educated in New England - Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Edgewood, Rhode Island was home when he was a kid, with baseball in the summer and public school in the winter. His mother, Pauline Woodworth Field, had graduated from Radcliffe in 1916 with a major in classics, but it was she who egged him on to get better grades in geometry, not so much his dad, Winthrop Brooks Field, who had majored in math at Harvard and graduated in 1915.

New Hampshire entered via a farm and a friend. Stearns Morse, his father's best friend, inherited a farm and invited him to farm with him. He and George's mother did so until 1927, when they decided to move to Massachusetts and then to Rhode Island to assure a good education for George’s older sister, Sarah. But while growing up, George, Sarah, and their brother John Field enjoyed summer vacations on a farm in New Hampshire, profoundly affecting George’s attitudes toward all growing things from the soil to songbirds.

Pauline had a lifelong interest in reading and in public libraries, serving on the board of the William H. Hall Free Library in Edgewood. As a result, all three kids grew up with books. In particular, George found several books on astronomy, including Eddington’s The Expanding Universe and Jeans’ the Universe Around Us. Turned on, he became an astronomer, telling his high school newspaper that he aspired to be a theoretical astrophysicist. Although a whiz at sandlot baseball and touch football, George never joined a team, preferring to play with the neighborhood kids. This was a mistake in retrospect, because playing with a team is fun, and builds self confidence.

MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a natural for a science addict in New England, and George started out in chemical engineering, thinking to make a good living. Within a few months he changed to physics with a strong minor in math, and was happy he did so the rest of his life. Today, 50 years later, he still recalls the thrill when his professor in Analysis, Mr. Coddington, stepped to the board and began writing proofs starting in the upper left corner. MIT had just finished with the development of radar for World War II, and the sky was the limit for physics, particularly the new science of particle physics. But when George graduated in 1951 and worked for a year in Washington to avoid being drafted in the Korean War, it was in astronomy that he applied to graduate school in Princeton. Lyman Spitzer, Jr. , his thesis adviser, was in the vanguard of theorists studying the interstellar medium in our galaxy, a tenuous gas embroiled in a magnetic field. George has worked on various problems in astronomical gas dynamics, but recently has returned to this specialty he learned from Spitzer.

Spitzer’s wife introduced George to Sylvia Farrior Smith, then a teacher in the Princeton school system. After they married in 1956, their first child, Christopher Lyman Field, was born in Boston while George was serving as Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and working with Ed Purcell. Natasha Field, now Collins, was born in Princeton, where George had returned to teach. Both kids are wonderful serious students of life. George remarried in 1981 to Susan Alice Gebhart, an adventurous spirit who grew up in Baltimore, to whom he had been introduced by Babbie Whipple, wife of the Director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Among many other talents Susan is a free-lance writer. She had two children by a previous marriage, Cristina Mia, and Stefanie Louise. Together, George and Susan are setting out on a new adventure following his retirement from teaching — but not research.

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