Remembering Linus Pauling

Hi, I'm Nick Haltman. I edit the Terra Research Magazine here at Oregon State University. The question comes up for us once in a while about who inspired us, who our role models were in the work that we do. For me it was another magazine editor, a fellow that I worked with as a college student many years ago. For a scientist, you might think, well of course it's another scientist. Ken Hedberg is an emeritus professor of chemistry here at Oregon State, and for him it was Linus Pauling. Dr. Pauling met Ken in 1945 at Caltech, where Ken was a graduate student, and in 1956, when Ken had a job offer here at Oregon State, Linus Pauling played an influential role in Ken's decision to come back to his alma mater, where he has been ever since then. Let's listen to Ken tell the story. Between the time I got my degree, well after that, I got my degree in 48, and in 52 I had applied for fellowships, and I got one that took me off to Norway. And in Norway, I met my wife. We were married a year later and came back to Caltech, where I continued there for a year or two. Close to the end of the second year, our son was born, and there was so smoggy in California that she, as a Norwegian woman, growing up in absolutely crystal-clean air, she said, we can't stay here. And then I was stopped in the hall by a professor, a colleague, who said, Ken, he says, do you know that I've got a letter from a former associate of mine who is professor at Oregon State, and they have an opening there. Would you be interested in applying for that? And so I said, well yeah, I better think about that, because I was thinking of my wife on my back about the smog there. And so the upshot of all this was that we made a trip to Oregon and visited the department here. And I was a little disappointed. I knew everyone in the department at that time. Well, I'm sorry, I meant to say that I knew most of the staff. They were still working here. There were a few new ones. And I went around and talked to them and went back to Caltech, and then I was offered a job here. And my wife was pretty happy about it, being offered the job, but I decided that at that stage I wouldn't be able to do any research here. And so I wrote a letter to Professor Gilbert, for whom this hall was named, declining the job. And a few days later I got a telephone call from E.C. Gilbert, and he says, we're very sorry that you declined our offer. He said, would you be interested in reconsidering? We offered you a little more money. And by this time my wife was renting hell at home, and I thought, well, yes, maybe I better reconsider. So the bottom line there was, I did reconsider. And in the process of doing that, I went up to see, by arrangement, to see Linus Pauling. And we sat on his veranda, and I talked about my concerns of coming to Oregon State. And of course, as everybody knows, he was an Oregon State alumnus. And after we had chatted there for some time, he said, well, my principal concern was that what they wanted me to do at that time was going to occupy so much time, I didn't see how I could possibly build this complicated apparatus that I intended to build, the one that's still down there in the laboratory that we're using. And so I expressed my reservations to Pauling, and he said, oh, well, he says, 15, 20 contact hours a week, that's nothing, because when I was there, I had 40 hours contact a week. That's the term that he was appointed to teach undergraduate home ec students elementary chemistry, in the course of which he met his future wife, Ava Hillam. After Ken came to OSU, he and Linus Pauling remained good friends, and they met during Pauling's occasional trips back to Corvallis. Ken was instrumental in the transfer of the Pauling papers to OSU in 1986.