But I also knew Rod other than as a neighbor. Rod was my E&M teacher in 1970, when I took my first upper division Physics class. At the time, I didn't know that he had just started teaching at Davis a year or two before: he was just "Dr. Reid" then, and I assumed he had been at Davis forever. As with most young students (I was 19 years old), I assumed that a professor with such knowledge and authority must have been there forever.

He was a bit of an anomaly then, because 110A had a lot of engineering students in those days, and he was asking us to to do problem sets which a lot of the students thought were too difficult. I remember spending most of a week with Ken Issacs, who was a friend and Physics major (while I was not), trying to solve a current loop problem with a moving conductor in a magnetic field. We put the that effort in just because Dr. Reid seemed to think that we should be able to come up with a solution. To this day, I don't think that an analytic solution is possible, but the challenge was worth the effort!

I hope that touching the minds of his students and challenging them to excel was enough for Rod to feel fulfilled. He certainly had an effect on me, and on many of his students.

Perry