meta-roj

a doctorate in chemistry 1926
a director with the manhattan project in 1945
selected as the oldest worker in 2002.
and the subject of a pbs documentary on centenarians… [with a video clip in several formats available]
but mostly a teacher

has retired from teaching at 104 years young, but has not retired from life.

Ray Crist

As with all people, you go into the past and whatever you might have done, any sum of it might be expressed in the minds and lives of other people, just as what they have done was part of your own personal expression.

Ray Crist

When you have a mission, you go after it, and I am still going after it.

an article on ray crist’s retirement from messiah college in pennsylvania follows.

Retiring prof, 104, tried to inspire youths
Professor continues century of curiosity

Wednesday, April 14, 2004
BY FORD TURNER
Of The Patriot-News

One hundred four years old, Ray Crist stood up yesterday morning before a crowd of applauding college students and waved, the big right hand of the one-time farm boy slicing the air with gusto.

It was farewell. Crist was retiring from Messiah College as probably the oldest working professor in the nation.

He joined the Messiah faculty at age 70, after a career in science. He taught for 34 years for the token pay of $1 a year.

As the students applauded yesterday, they appeared to appreciate what made him do it.

Pure curiosity about the world — and a desire to cultivate that curiosity in others.

“My mission has been to help the liberal-arts people become aware of, and responsible for, the consequences that come with technology,” Crist said shortly after the Honors & Awards Convocation in Messiah’s Brubaker Auditorium.

He jabbed a finger as he made his point. His shoulders still looked square in his pinstriped blue blazer, and his brown eyes still looked sharp.

Two years ago, when he was 102, Crist was named America’s oldest worker by Experience Works, a nonprofit training and employment service.

Students said Crist’s presence on campus has been an inspiration.

“I never had him,” sophomore Kinsey Rice said. “But last year when I had classes in his building, I would walk by and see him in his office. … He would be in there, hunched over at the desk, working. It was kind of like motivation.”

Mizpah Rodenberg, a junior biology major, said students have chatted about his “amazing” longevity on the job.

Sophomore Sean Cochran said he saw Crist working in a lab in the evenings.

“I had no idea he was 104 years old,” Cochran said.

Crist was born in central Pennsylvania, within a few miles of what would become Messiah College. His grandfather had been a Union soldier in the Civil War, and his father was an auctioneer who had a farm.

As a boy, Crist fed the hogs every morning, including Sundays. They fattened quickly on a mixture that included milk and corn. “You could see how those hogs would grow. They put on pounds and pounds,” he said.

Curiosity became the trait that shaped his career. It took him to the loftiest heights of science.

In 1926, he received a doctorate in chemistry from Columbia University. In 1945, he was a director with the Manhattan Project, the research and experimentation effort that led to the development of the atomic bomb. In 1960, Crist was director of a team of scientists at Union Carbide Corp.

It was after his wife died in 1961 that he began to develop “a growing concern about how technology and science were beginning to dominate the earth,” said his son, Henry Crist, who is a pathologist at Carlisle Regional Medical Center.

Ray Crist taught at Dickinson College for 10 years. When he reached that college’s mandatory retirement age, he sought the job at Messiah College in Grantham.

Not for the money. For his $1-a-year pay, he wanted to impress upon young minds the importance of using technology wisely, he said.

His research has included examinations of the effects of automobile exhaust on deer and of toxic metals on trout.

Now that he is retiring, he does not plan to stop that research, he said.

Crist, who lives in Carlisle, has published more than 50 academic papers and is working on another. The basic premise is how “plants, through their roots, will pick up toxic metals and thereby clean the soil,” he said.

Curiosity-driven work. The sort of thing that keeps him going.

“When you have a mission, you go after it,” Crist said. “And I am still going after it.”