When science professor Ray Crist reached Dickinson College's mandatory retirement age of 70 back in 1970, he knew there was only one thing for him to do.
He left the school in Carlisle, Pa., and took up teaching at Messiah College in Grantham, over near Harrisburg.
Tuesday, he retired again. This time for good.
According to Patriot News reporter Ford Turner, who was there, Crist stood up before a crowd of applauding college students and waved, his big right hand "slicing the air with gusto."
He's come a long way in his 104 years. Well, sort of. Actually, he finished up his teaching career in central Pennsylvania just a few miles from where he was born March 8, 1900, the grandson of a Union Army soldier, the son of a Cumberland County farmer.
By all accounts, he acquired his work ethic -- and his curiosity about science -- as a boy, feeding his father's pigs every morning. He went on to graduate from Messiah Bible School in 1916, and in 1926 he received his doctorate in chemistry from Columbia University.
He taught at Columbia until 1941, when he joined a few other scientists -- four of them Nobel Prize winners -- on something called the Manhattan District Project. Separating isotopes of uranium for use in an atomic bomb. He was a director of the project in 1945 and counted Albert Einstein among his personal friends. (You're only as good as the company you keep.)
After World War II, Crist hooked up with a team of scientists at Union Carbide Corp. in West Virginia, until the 1960s, after his wife passed away, when he returned to teaching at old Dickinson.
He was only able to get in 10 years of teaching at Dickinson before that darned mandatory retirement thing kicked in. But Ray Crist wasn't done teaching.
Huddled in Messiah's Klein Science Center laboratory, he continued his research, his experiments, his writing of academic papers. And for 33 years, he shared what he learned with his students. A visiting professor being paid a token salary of $1 a year.
Of course, when you're that smart, you can make a dollar go further than other people can.
A couple of years ago, at age 102, Crist was named America's oldest worker by a nonprofit training group called Experience Works. A funny sort of honor for someone who never considered himself a "worker."
"I have never given a thought to working as far as its being a job," he said at the time. "I have just kept on living and wondering and trying to understand nature."
And he intends to go on doing just that. He's currently working on a paper that sets out to explain how plants absorb toxic metals, thereby cleaning the soil. It's called bioremediation, and Crist is considered to be one of the field's founding researchers.
"My mission has been to help the liberal-arts people become aware of, and responsible for, the consequences that come with technology," he told Turner.
And something like that takes time.
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