♂Alfred Tredway Peaslee

Alfred Tredway Peaslee (25 June 1930 – 18 June 1995) was a physicist from Dubuque, Iowa, who graduated from Harvard magna cum laude, took his doctorate there, and worked for some forty years at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico, retiring in 1991. He was the husband of Barbara Blanchard (1928–2008), the elder sister of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006).

Early life and education

Alfred Tredway Peaslee Jr. was born at Dubuque on 25 June 1930, the son of Alfred T. Peaslee and Marie L. Burch, and grew up there. He prepared for college at Phillips Exeter Academy^W and went on to Harvard. In April 1949 his parents left Dubuque, and by 1952 they were living in the Española Valley of New Mexico.

He graduated from Harvard in June 1952, magna cum laude with highest honors, as a physics major. The Española Valley column of the Santa Fe New Mexican, which had “something to brag about,” called him a “brilliant Valley youth.” His parents traveled east for the ceremony, and there his mother watched her uncle, the 91-year-old Frederick H. Dalling, march in the same graduation procession, “the oldest member able to take part.” By then he already had a summer job at Los Alamos. That autumn he went back to Harvard to work toward his doctorate, and after an A.M. he took the Ph.D. in 1955, with a thesis on the decay of nuclear isomers^W, “Electrodynamic modes of isomeric decay.”

Los Alamos and marriage

After Harvard he joined the staff of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, and by 1959 he was working in its Theoretical Physics Division. Barbara Blanchard, who had come to the laboratory in 1953, worked in the same division, and her parents announced the couple’s engagement in September 1959. They were married at three in the afternoon on Tuesday 29 December 1959, in the living room of her parents’ new house on Grand Estates Drive at Estes Park, Colorado, with Dr. Marcus Grether of the Community Church of the Rockies officiating. Her sister Nancy Jane was matron of honor and his sister’s husband was best man. The night before, his parents had given a dinner for the wedding party and relatives at the Scandia restaurant in Estes Park.

After a wedding trip to the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, the couple made their home at Los Alamos, where he stayed on as a staff member of the theoretical physics division. They had three sons.

Later life and death

He remained at the laboratory, by then Los Alamos National Laboratory, until he retired in 1991. The next year he and Barbara moved down to Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, and he died there on Sunday 18 June 1995, a week before his sixty-fifth birthday. He was cremated, and a memorial service was held at French Mortuary in Albuquerque, with gifts in his name asked for the Friends of the Rio Grande Nature Center. He left his wife, his three sons and seven grandchildren; Barbara died in 2008.

Notes

His name

His middle name is written out as Tredway on his own application for a Social Security number, filed in November 1961, which also names his parents, Alfred T. Peaslee and Marie L. Burch; in Harvard’s library catalogue of his 1955 thesis; and in the three newspaper reports of his wedding (the Estes Park Trail, the Santa Fe New Mexican and the Rio Grande Sun). The engagement notices and his death notices give only “Alfred T. Peaslee Jr.” Tredway was a well-known name in Dubuque, where Alfred Tredway’s hardware firm, A. Tredway & Sons, was in business, but no record seen ties that family to his.

Years at Los Alamos

Both death notices of 1995 credit him with 43 years as a physicist at Los Alamos before his retirement in 1991. His first work there on record is the summer job of 1952, which would make the span 39 years to 1991; the records do not explain the difference.

Papers

A paper by Bickel and Alfred T. Peaslee in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in May 1948 is probably his work as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, but the index record of it does not say where its authors were. A 1989 paper in the journal Knowledge Acquisition by Meyer, Mniszewski and Alfred T. Peaslee may also be his; only its index record has been seen.