1977 Christmas Magic Courtesy of the Saxon Inn

Right before Thanksgiving Day of 1977, my wife and I decided to take our 5 children with us to the area in Western Pennsylvania where we were born and raised for Christmas. At Thanksgiving dinner, my wife announced our intention to spend the holidays with relatives on both sides of the family back home. Our 3 older boys were elated while our 9 month old baby boy and our dog didn't care. Our 5 year old daughter, however was devastated. She was convinced that Santa Claus would not know where to find her if she were not right there in her own house in Ohio on Christmas Eve. That would mean no gifts for her! Now our daughter's mind was a hard one to change. So instead of just telling her that she would have to trust her mother and father to do things in a way that would make things happen so that everyone would have a wonderfully beautiful Christmas, I decided on a deception that would result in her conviction that Santa was sure to find her on Christmas Eve. The ground work for the deception had already been laid by my claim in the past that Santa had always took a break at our house to have a beer with me when his reindeer were flying him around delivering gifts to the children of the world. All we had to do was ask Santa if he knew where we were going to be on Christmas Eve and he would be sure to prove that he knew because after all, he was my good old buddy. Unfortunately, our daughter discovered that the supposed letters between us and Santa demonstrating his intimate knowledge of our family's planned Christmas activities were fake. My wife rescued her from the grasp of hysteria and with the help of our 3 older boys convinced her that so long as we all remembered the true meaning of Christmas and acted accordingly, everyone would indeed have a wonderfully beautiful Christmas. Thankfully, our daughter bought into that notion and was relieved and contented. I, however, was miserable. Before the Santa letters debacle, as far as our daughter was concerned, I knew everything and could do anything. Now not only were the Santa letters a fake, but, I too was a fake. Her faith in me seemed to be not only gone, but irretrievable. Every cloud has a silver lining and in fact between the time of the catastrophe and when we set off for Pennsylvania, our daughter engaged in Christmas oriented activities in a more mature manner than she had previously. By the time we all climbed into our Volkswagen bus for the trip to Pennsylvania, all were in good spirits but for me. Following my fathers lead on long motor trips when I was a child, I would tell stories about the geography and the history of the places we drove through. On this particular trip, I told stories many of which I told to myself in order to ease my troubled mind as well as to entertain and educate my family. It was easy to do on the trips we would take back and forth between Ohio and Pennsylvania because Western Pennsylvania in general and Pittsburgh in particular are rich in geography and history. It is not important that the stories told on the trip were or were not the actual ones reported in the book. What is important is that a little yelling and threatening here and a little storytelling there kept things on a relatively even keel until we arrived at my parent's house. Even so, upon our arrival I wasted little time before walking over to the nearby Saxon Inn. Who could blame me for craving a few beers after driving four hours in inclement weather, two of which were in darkness, in a Volkswagen bus packed with my wife, 5 children, a dog and boxes containing Christmas gifts? How could I have known that only on that evening would Christmas magic have awaited me that would make my life with my daughter right again?

I was born in Brackenridge, PA in 1937. I married my high school sweetheart and helped her raise five children. We proudly count four granddaughters and two grandsons. I received a B.S. in Physics from Penn State in 1959 and a Ph. D. in Astronomy from Wisconsin-Madison in 1962. I started my independent research career at Caltech in 1962 and over a 46 year period served on the faculties of several universities including California-Berkeley, Ohio State, Arizona, University of Wales-Cardiff, and Michigan State. My major areas of research were the dynamics of the interstellar medium and the dynamical evolution of gaseous nebulae, both those associated with the deaths of common stars and the births of not-so-common very massive stars