Chemistry Dept. regains a trace of its history

by Daniel J. Fitzgibbons, Chronicle staff

Chemistry Department head Paul Lahti examines a photo given to the department by former campus employee Michael DeCheke, who found the picture and other departmental memorabilia in a trash pile during building renovations several years ago. (Stan Sherer photo)

ome of the Chemistry Department's lost heritage came home recently as a former campus employee returned a cache of old photographs he found in a trash heap a few years back.

     Michael DeCheke, who worked in the Microanalysis Lab from 1984 to 1995, presented the collection of 10 framed and unframed pictures to Chemistry Department head Paul Lahti on Nov. 20.

     DeCheke said he discovered the trove in a trash bin during renovations of Goessmann Laboratory in 1996. Apparently the Chemistry Department put little value on the discarded photos, documents and other papers, he said, because DeCheke was given permission to carry away the memorabilia.

     A chemist by training, DeCheke was intrigued by the glimpse into the past the papers offered. He was particularly taken with an old volume written by Charles A. "Dutchy" Goessmann, the fabled founder of the Chemistry Department. Trained at Germany's University of Göttingen, which led chemistry studies in the 19th century, Goessmann was one of the "Big Four" faculty hired at Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1869.

     Captured by Goessmann's "fascinating writing," DeCheke's delighted in the direct link back to Goessmann's teacher, Friedrich Wöhler, who was, in turn, a student of Sweden's Jöns Jakob Berzelius, regarded as one of the father's of modern chemistry.

     DeCheke held onto the collection until this past fall, when he was clearing out his Easthampton home in preparation for a move to the Philadelphia area and a job as a criminalist with that city's police department.

     The fragile photographs posed a problem, said DeCheke. "The pictures were old and had very old newspapers inside the frames."

     Rather than risking the photos to the vagaries of moving, DeCheke decided to return the images to the Chemistry Department.

     "Most are recognizable to me," said senior lecturer David L. Adams, who serves as the department's unofficial historian. "They are portraits of old German chemists."

     Two of the photographs, however, piqued Adams' interest. "One is a fairly nice portrait of Goessmann and the other shows Dutchy with a group of younger men, who may be his students. "The challenge," said Adams, "is to identify the location and people in the photo."
Adams said two of the men may be MAC faculty members Joseph B. Lindsey and Charles Wellington, who also studied at Göttingen, but that more research is needed to make a positive ID.

     DeCheke's find "is relatively significant to the history of the department," said Adams, who noted that the materials will eventually be turned over to the University's Archives.