Autobiography

I was born on June 17, 1940 in New Haven, Connecticut. My father was a chemist on the Yale faculty, my mother a housewife. They had met ten years earlier at a departmental picnic when my mother had been a chemistry graduate student at Yale. My brother, Carl, was two years older. My father, who was born in Sweden in 1898, had come to the United States on a fellowship to obtain a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. When his thesis adviser received an appointment at Yale in 1928, my father followed, and continued up the career path as instructor, assistant professor, and associate professor. His own roots were partly in Dalarna, which was the ancestral home of his mother's family, and partly in Stockholm, which was his father's home. My Swedish grandmother was the daughter of a dairy farmer who lived near Hedemora. My Swedish grandfather worked as a clerk for the Swedish railways in the Stockholm station. His avocation was painting, which absorbed more of his psychic energy than his career. At least some of the murals in the Stockholm station are a remnant of his handiwork. Beyond this my knowledge of my Swedish heritage is not expansive. Partly this reflects my father's move to America in an age when travel was both time-consuming and expensive and therefore I lack first-hand knowledge. But it also reflects his taciturnity and also his scorn for history in all forms, even at the family level. He considered himself to be beyond all else a scientist.