Bodie Douglas: Still Making Waves
At this spring’s commencement, many Arts and Sciences professors could be found draping hoods over the heads of their newly minted PhDs.
But it is likely that only one of them was hooding an advisee nearly 50 years after his first.
Though Bodie Douglas, professor emeritus in the Department of Chemistry, retired in 1989, he remains an active member of the department’s graduate faculty. So when Carol Fortney, a PhD student whose research was in inorganic chemistry—Douglas’s field—was in need of an advisor, Douglas stepped up.
His long career in chemistry began when he was a teenager and was interrupted only by his service in the U.S. Navy during World War II.
“As a kid, I was interested in science, biology—any critter I came across,” he says. As he got older, he had a chemistry lab in his New Orleans home.
Douglas enrolled at Tulane University at only 15 years of age. He was one course shy of graduation when he enlisted in Midshipmen’s School at Columbia University. Still, he was allowed to graduate, in absentia, with his class at Tulane the same month he was commissioned.
During the war, Douglas was a lookout officer on the battleship USS South Dakota. “I had the best view on the ship,” he says. He was in Tokyo Bay for the signing of the peace in September 1945.
After he came home from the war, he married his sweetheart, Gladys Backstrom. They had their first child in New Orleans, and he completed his master’s degree in chemistry at Tulane in 1947. Then he moved to the University of Illinois, where he received his PhD in 1949.
He got a teaching position at the Pennsylvania State College (now University), and came to Pitt in 1952. He enjoyed teaching immensely and still can be found in his Chevron office enthusiastically showing a visitor the varied forms of crystalline molecules on his computer screen.
In 1985, he had a heart attack and had to have a quadruple bypass. Then, last year, he had chest pains and had a stent put in. But he still swims four times a week. “It’s very important to me to make my heart work hard,” he says.
An inveterate traveler, Douglas has visited 64 countries. Even now, at 82, he continues to travel. He’s in Serbia this summer to give talks and visit friends. The main message he has learned from his travels : “Once you get to know them, all people are very much alike.”