The death this week of Charles Townes brought me back to my grad school days. It doesn’t take much, since my time in a basement lab at Fordham was one of the richest periods in my life. Gotta love those Jesuits—a mental challenge a minute!

Townes and Schawlow were household names at the time, and breakthroughs in lasers were important to those of us involved in spectroscopy.

The one I used in the early 1960s was a 200-cm tube filled with a mixture of helium and neon, with highly polished mirrors to sustain the laser action. Every morning we had to clean the mirrors to coax the long glass tube into action.

We lived for a while with only the He-Ne and the ruby laser—I know exactly where I was when news came in 1964 that an argon laser had come on line!

It was the people as much as the technology that marked my time at Fordham. I remember them all, keep in touch with many, and miss those who are gone.