Don’t mope, take action.
Accept mistakes, lessons learned.
Every day, something good.
Help others, humor.
A project. A random note from Jim Compton to himself.
Jim Compton, my sister Paula’s husband, died earlier this year after a long bout with Parkinson’s disease. Without him, the world is a dimmer, less fun, and less interesting place.
Jim was born Dinsdale Michael James Compton in London in 1930, but he was known by almost everyone as Jim Compton. When The War started, Jim, along with almost all of the other school-aged kids, was sent to the country to get them out of range of the German bombers. Jim was smart, exceptionally smart, and that led to his being accepted into a boarding school, established in the 1400s, that educated children from working-class or poor families. From there, he was accepted into Oxford, where he earned a PhD in Chemistry, and then went on to a postdoctoral position in Canada. His research spanned physical chemistry, solid-state physics, and medical technology.
According to Paula, “Jim always said that he would rather do a bit of everything than become a distinguished specialist in a single field.” He rarely spoke to his family about his scientific accomplishments, his professional footprint was significant; he filed at least 7 patents and published more than 30 papers, ranging from “Neutron capture cross-section measurements for U-238 between 0.4 and 1.4 MeV” – whatever that means – (published in The Journal of Chemical Physics with W. G. Schneider and T. C. Waddington) to developing methods to use radioactive isotopes to visualize and measure how air and blood flow through the lungs, providing a critical diagnostic tool for identifying lung diseases and blockages (I think I was on the other end of that paper when I was tested at Sequoia Hospital for asthma; thank you, Jim).
More importantly than his academic accomplishments, in my opinion, Jim had a contagious love of life that was hard not to catch when he was around. He lived in the moment. He was curious about everything, kind, and funny. Jim Compton was a remarkably nonjudgmental man. I’ll miss him, we’ll all miss him.