Colleagues, former students and
other friends gathered Aug. 30 to memorialize the man known to all as
“Charlie,” whose passion for enriching lives with science spilled off campus
and into hundreds of elementary school classrooms throughout the country.
Prof. Charles
Scaife died of cancer on Aug. 24 at his Schenectady
home. Over the past decade, he reached an estimated 40,000 children through the
science workshops he did with his wife, Priscilla.
Scaife, 65, joined the chemistry
department in 1972 and retired in 2001. The professor had a reputation for a
keen interest in the welfare of his students; he frequently hosted them in his
home for dinners, joined them on hiking trips and at least once gave them a
lesson in making ice cream. Regardless of the weather, he walked briskly to and
from campus – often with his wife – from his home nearly a mile away on Ardsley
Road.
In 1986, while visiting classrooms
to talk about an experiment he designed for a space shuttle mission, Scaife
solidified his conviction that children take to science when they can do it
with their own hands and experience a sense of surprise. “The kids realize
they are going to have fun,” he once said. “But they don't always
know they will accidentally learn something along the way.”
So in 1994, Scaife used a
sabbatical to become what one newspaper called “a latter-day Merlin”
with “Johnny Appleseed wanderings.” With his wife, a social worker,
he hit the road in the family minivan, doing demonstrations in youngsters'
science classes by day, holding evening science workshops for parents and
children, and sleeping wherever they could get a free bed.
Starting in the Northeast, they
later expanded their travels to include the entire country, using additional
sabbaticals as well as vacation time. After he retired, the Scaifes had done a
number of workshops and were planning more.
In one favorite experiment,
someone would hold up a Ziploc bag filled with water, and Prof. Scaife would
push a pencil into it from the youngster's side. But no one would get wet, the
polymer providing an instant seal.
In another, students would pass a
magnet over a fortified breakfast cereal to discover that it did indeed contain
iron. “I can't believe I eat that for breakfast,” one adult commented.
Scaife would always appear in his trademark white lab coat, adorned with colorful scientific diagrams and nomenclature.
The Scaifes' school visits had a
dual purpose — to permit children and their parents to experience close up the
sense of surprise that is science's essential excitement and to encourage
teachers, some of whom have little knowledge of science, to be more adventurous
in the classroom.
In the schools they visited, the
Scaifes trained a team of volunteers to take over where they left off. Through
school visits, teacher workshops, and a web site (http://www.kids.union.edu), they built a corps of
volunteers across the country dedicated to improved science teaching.
The couple's exploits also caught
the eye of the national media, inspiring a front-page story in The Wall
Street Journal, as well as subsequent stories in USA Today, the Christian
Science Monitor, and Education Week.
In 1999, Scaife received the Community
Service Award from the Hudson Mohawk Consortium of Colleges and Universities.
He accepted the award by acknowledging all the students “who wear their
enthusiasm right out in front.”
Scaife, who specialized in
inorganic chemistry, taught a range of courses in inorganic chemistry and
designed laboratory experiments for chemistry majors at Union.
He published a number of papers in chemistry journals. He was a member of the
American Chemical Society, a Danforth Associate, and a member of Sigma Xi, an honorary
dedicated to scientific research.
Charles Scaife
received a B.A. degree in chemistry from Cornell
University in 1959 and a Ph.D.
there in inorganic chemistry in 1965. He was a commissioned officer in the Navy
from 1959 to 1961 and a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the
University of York, England, in 1967. He taught at Middlebury
College before joining Union
in 1972.
Scaife was distinguished in his
younger years for having collected the most milkweed pods in his native Williamsport,
Pa.; the material was used in the
manufacture of military flotation devices. An Eagle Scout, he also helped build
the 56-mile Loyalsock Trail near his family farm in Pennsylvania.
Scaife and his family vacationed there often.
Surviving, in addition to
Priscilla, are two daughters, Rebecca Sanders of Lyndon, Vt., (and her husband,
James), and Jennifer Craig of Lakeville, Conn., (and her husband, Ken); a
sister, Betty Scorese of Pennsylvania; and seven grandchildren. He was
predeceased by his sister, Laura.
Memorial contributions may be made
to family and youth ministry programs at Our Savior's Lutheran
Church, 63
Mountain View Ave., Colonie, N.Y.,
12205; to Community Hospice of
Schenectady, 1411 Union St., Schenectady,
N.Y. 12308;
or to City Mission of Schenectady, 425 Hamilton St.,
Schenectady, N.Y. 12305.