(Re-posted in 2014 to get it into the WordPress site.)

W. Ves Childs of Fayetteville, Arkansas, passed away Sunday, June 21, 2009 in his home, surrounded by his family. He was born September 14, 1935 in Cale, Arkansas, to Orval A. Childs and Floy (Turrentine) Childs.

Ves once wrote of his childhood: “I remember my mother washing clothes in a huge cast iron pot over a wood fire in the back yard. I remember taking a bath in a galvanized tub beside the kitchen stove. I grew up as a farm boy near Magnolia, Arkansas. I have chopped cotton, plowed cotton behind a Georges stock, and picked cotton. I have castrated pigs and calves. We raised pigs, chickens, beef cattle, and ran a Grade A dairy. I won the showmanship award at the Arkansas State Fair.”

He quit Magnolia High School after the eleventh grade and finished college, in three-and-one-half years, at Southern State College in Magnolia. He earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at the University of Arkansas, where he met Holly Hartrick; they married on June 17, 1962 in Hamburg, Arkansas. Both Southern State (now Southern Arkansas University) and the University of Arkansas’s Fulbright College cited Ves as a distinguished alumnus.

After receiving his Ph.D., Ves worked for Phillips Petroleum Company in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, for twenty-two years, receiving international recognition for his work in electrochemistry and fluorochemistry.

3M, based in St. Paul, Minnesota, purchased technology that Ves invented at Phillips, and recruited Ves and Holly to join 3M, which they did in 1984, living in Stillwater, Minnesota. He served as Division Scientist at 3M for seventeen years (he used to say “seventeen winters”), continuing to develop innovative and economical technologies and continuing to receive international recognition. Ves and Holly retired from 3M in 2001, moved back to northwest Arkansas, and built a home west of Johnson.

He was an inventor on 52 patents, spanning his career; he authored five book chapters and numerous articles; and he spoke to major symposia and conferences. He was a 50-year member of the Alpha Chi Sigma chemistry fraternity and of the American Chemical Society, and a member of Sigma Xi and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. With Holly, he established the Arthur Fry lectureship in the chemistry department at the University of Arkansas, honoring their former professor.

Along with his professional accomplishments, Ves contributed to every community of which he was a part. He was elected to two terms on the Bartlesville Board of Education, including a term as board president. In Stillwater, he served on the Public Library Board and received the Stillwater Community Service Award. He was an active part of the governance of the Bartlesville First United Methodist Church and the Stillwater First United Methodist Church, and a lively participant in the Springdale First United Methodist Church’s Sunday School program, where he was known for asking unanswerable questions, and a member of the Springdale church’s library board. He was an affiliate member of the Washington County Democratic Women. He loved and excelled at duplicate bridge.

Ves was a brilliant, funny, thoughtful, engaged, and caring husband, father, grandfather, brother, son, colleague, and friend. He loved his family, he loved science, and he loved his communities. In retirement, little brought him more pleasure than answering the science questions of his grandchildren and thinking of projects to do with them. He also enjoyed challenging “experts” – including, emphatically, himself. When possible, he loved to do both at once, as when he and his granddaughter designed and performed an experiment to test the widespread (but, they showed, wrong) notion that hot water freezes faster than cold water.

He is survived by his wife Holly H. Childs, with whom he celebrated their 47th anniversary the week prior to his death; one daughter, Lisa C. Childs (Don Hendrix) of Fayetteville, Arkansas; two sons, Michael A. Childs (Jennifer Childs) of Hillsboro, Oregon, and William G. Childs (Dena Childs) of Northampton, Massachusetts; two brothers, O. Allen Childs of Little Rock, Arkansas, and S. Bart Childs of College Station, Texas; and six grandchildren: Ella and Liam Childs of Northampton, Massachusetts; Maggie Hendrix of Fayetteville; and Tynan, Kian, and Hope Childs of Hillsboro, Oregon. He was predeceased by one brother, Mac Childs of Magnolia, Arkansas.

Memorial services will be held at 10:30 on Tuesday, June 30, 2009 at First United Methodist Church in Springdale, Arkansas.

Memorial contributions may be made to the W. Ves Childs Science Education Fund at the University of Arkansas, Development Office, 525 Old Main, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701, or to Southern Arkansas University Foundation, W. Ves Childs Fund, Development Office, P. O. Box 9174, Magnolia, Arkansas 71754-9174.

Arrangements are under the direction of Nelson-Berna Funeral Home and Crematory of Fayetteville.

(Note: I’m re-posting this in January 2014.  It has appeared a couple of places, both in a note on Facebook and in our local newspaper in Northampton, but neither of those are now accessible. As people who know me already know, my dad died three weeks later, on June 21, 2009 (Fathers’ Day!).  Other posts I’ve written about him are linked to at the end of this one.)

Friday, May 29, 2009, 7:30 am

We had a chalkboard in our dining room.

It took a while for me to realize that this was unusual. Even after going to lots of other kids’ houses, it still seemed fairly ordinary, until someone (no doubt someone chalkboard-deprived) asked me about it. Evidently not every family had dinner conversations that regularly – frequently – required charts or drawings to explain. We did, and so there was a big green chalkboard dominating one wall of the dining room on Harris Drive in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

I’ve been thinking about that chalkboard a lot the last couple of days. I’m writing this on Friday, May 29. On Wednesday morning, I was in my office at the law school, packing up for the move to the deans’ suite for my new job. Along with packing boxes of books and decorations and toys, I took the chalkboard off the wall to move downstairs.

The chalkboard made the move with the family from Oklahoma to Minnesota back in 1983, but there was no appropriate wall for it, so it lived in the basement. I took it with me to college, and then it was with me in law school, and it was on my wall through my time in practice in D.C., and it’s been on my wall of my office at the law school since I started there in 2004.

I usually use the chalkboard-in-the-dining-room concept for laughs. But as I took it off of the wall of my office, and erased it – ideas for articles, explanations of torts doctrine from office hours, my kids’ doodles, and so on – I thought, just for a bit, about how the oddity of a chalkboard in the dining room had affected me. Not that I think it is exclusively responsible for, well, anything in my life except for some chalk dust on my clothes, but it is indicative of how we were raised: to ask questions, to learn, to challenge, to always – always – think.

On Wednesday afternoon (my cell phone “recent calls” listing tells me it was at 4:32), not long after coming home from packing the office and taking the kids to their violin lessons, I got a call from my mom, telling me that my dad has pancreatic cancer.

After a moment of shock, my reaction – and I expect the rest of the family’s – was to sit down and research pancreatic cancer. I (and I bet my siblings) found the Mayo Clinic’s site, we found the site about the chemo treatment that looked promising post-surgery (we don’t know as of this writing whether surgery will be an option), we probably all giggled, and then felt a little bad for giggling, at the name of the surgery (“The Whipple Procedure” – c’mon, you giggled a little too).

Back to the phone call, though. After telling me the news and a quick overview, my mom handed the phone to my dad.

After pleasantries and such and a brief acknowledgment of the diagnosis, he turned to what he was really wanting to talk about, which was not his diagnosis or prognosis – no, he wanted to talk about a global warming skeptic’s column that had been published by the local paper in northwest Arkansas. As usual, he’s going through multiple iterations of a response to the column’s silliness, with challenges interspersed into the copied-and-pasted text of the article. We talked about how best to try to get his response out there, where the author had gone wrong in his assumptions and his thinking, and so on.

Always think, always challenge. That’s what the chalkboard was about, at least in part. (To be fair, we also used it for messages.) That’s what he’s taught his kids and grandkids, to the extent that I have a graph on my desk from my daughter and him testing the widespread (but, they showed, wrong) notion that hot water freezes faster than cold water.

And thinking and challenging is what we’ll be doing with whatever comes.

Other relevant posts:

• W. Ves. Childs (2009-06-24)
• More Light (2009-12-22)
• Father’s Day (2010-06-20)
• Science and Solstices (2012-06-21)
• Notes (2013-12-02)