I was stunned the previous evening when Virginia called and told me that Rod had passed away Christmas day.  He seemed to be on the mend when I saw him at the Jungerman Hall naming ceremony, and when I phoned him later in the summer he did not mention that he was battling something more serious, health-wise.

  Rod was a very private, but a very fine person and a valued physics colleague.  He always could spare the time to answer a question from an ignorant experimentalist - even in the middle of the night!  I can recall many times, eg, in the '70s,  when late at night we would be debugging  or taking data in experiments at the Crocker Cyclotron [in Jungerman Hall] and I would walk across to Physics to look up something or get a reference.  There, I would find Rod in his office perfecting one of his amazingly-good lectures or working one of his papers into complete perfection!  He had a hard time recognizing that a paper could be sort of a progress report, and not the last word on a subject!

Rod completed his PhD work and degree in 1968 working under under Professor Hans Bethe at Cornell. There he developed his nucleon-nucleon potential models, or at least the first versions thereof, which became so widely used.

  Subsequently, Rod further developed the Reid [nucleon-nucleon]  potential which for decades was, one could argue, one of the best, if not the best, description of the N-N interaction and was invariably used in nuclear structure and reaction calculations at those energies, and compared to other models.  In his work he had carefully assembled and fit his potentials to all the known data [observables] from N-N measurements and the deuteron.  As I understood it, one-boson exchange potential model forms were used and allowed extrapolation and interpolation where data were sparse or non-existent.  At Crocker we had developed a neutron beam and were extending n-p measurements which were particularly sparse.  Thus Rod was someone we would talk to, and who took great interest in the measurements - even in the middle of the night!

  Rod's favorite thing was to throw his sleeping bag and some supplies into the back of his VW bug on a Fri eve or Sat morning and beetle up to Yosemite to hike and sleep over.  He would do both the trail hikes and the steep climbs!  Virginia told me that later they bought a station wagon that allowed them both to sleep in the back, and make tours from one end to the other, exploring places such as Death Valley.

  Rod would always greet you with a big smile, and provide lots of enthusiasm for whatever topic you brought up.  He continued to work and come to the department for many years after his retirement - in the early 90s, I recall - and was greatly missed when poor health intervened with that.  I am sure his theoretical colleagues and lunch-mates have much more to add.  I am not sure from whence came my special feelings for, and relationship with, Rod - probably those nocturnal discussions - but I, too, greatly regret the passing of this special guy.

  Sincerely, Paul