Rod at Georgia State University

Brenda and Rod had received the great blessing of the opportunity to live in Wales from September 1966 to December 1967 while Rod did a Post-Doc at the University College of North Wales in Bangor. Brenda had the experience of being registered as a nurse in England and Wales and worked at the Caernarvonshire and Anglesey General Hospital in Bangor.

While Rod had applied for several university faculty positions in the U.S. before leaving and had gotten some offers, his plans were not pinned down. During 1967 he got communication from Dr. Joseph Hadley of Georgia State College, soliciting an application for a Physics faculty position. We still don't know exactly how Joe got my name, but he persisted, and we talked about the possibility of setting up a microwave spectroscopy laboratory at Georgia State College. He felt strongly about the department being active in research, and a molecular spectroscopy lab was not such a major capital investment as to put it past the reasonable capability of a small department.

The more we thought and prayed about it, the more reasonable it seemed to come back to the Atlanta area where we would at least be close to one side of the family. So we made the decision to accept the offer and made the trip back from Wales to Atlanta in December of 1967.

So in January of 1968 Rod began his position as Assistant Professor of Physics at Georgia State College. The College had about nine thousand students at that time, and occupied mainly two buildings, Sparks Hall and Kell Hall. Rod was assigned an office on the 5th floor of Kell Hall, which housed the entire Department of Physics. His office was 514B, and he was in the area of the two classrooms and two laboratory rooms where he would do most of his teaching over the next several years. He remained in that office until he moved to a new office in the Science Annex, 4th Floor, in the early 90's. He was assigned laboratory space on the western side of that floor,

When Rod joined the Faculty, the Physics Department consisted of six faculty members, Dr. Joseph H. Hadley as Chair, Dr. Robert H. Hankla, Dr. Martin Meder, Dr. Gus Petit, Dr. James Purcell, and Dr. Brant Jenkins.

We weren't big on photography in those early days, so the first picture I have that contains the original faculty members at my time of arrival was made in May of 1979, over ten years later. Those outlined faculty are, L-R: Gus Petit, Rod, Jim Purcell, Martin Meder, Bob Hankla, and Joe Hadley. Brant Jenkins had taken a position at Valdosta State before this photo was taken.

Rod developed the microwave spectroscopy laboratory during those first few years, but the earliest photograph of the spectrometer that could be found was in 1978