Written remembrance and official Spacers logo - posting at the request of Craig T. Spratt:

I met Charlie on Memorial Day weekend, 1966. I had come along with his cousin, John Socia, on a trip to Charlie’s parents’ home in Fairfield, Connecticut. His mother was there, but his father by that time was deceased. His uncle Frank made an appearance that weekend. I saw Charlie briefly, as Kecia was probably only several months old then, and he and Mimi were preoccupied with her.

I next saw him in the fall of 1967. He was living on Hillside Street, in the Mission Hill section of Boston, near the Brigham Hospital. I believe he was teaching physics at Wentworth Institute at the time. I had come down with John Socia from the college we were attending in Maine. I came back with John a few more times, and was always interested in the lengthy and detailed discussions of a wide range of political topics, with the Vietnam war being the number one concern. Charlie clearly had thought many issues through very thoroughly, and was very interesting to talk with. This was a constant throughout his life. I never met anyone else who thought things through as much as Charlie, and to such an unusually insightful extent. He took the lead in most conversations because of the clarity and depth of his thinking and his great energy, but also always tried hard to bring out the thinking of others.

I spent a great deal of time at Charlie and Mimi’s apartment in 1968-69. Charlie was always writing or discussing the issues of the day. He was very good to whomever was around, never petty, always fair-minded. Jackie and Jessie (“the twins”) were born in 1969, and lived first in the apartment on Hillside Street. Charlie moved to Cambridge, probably in 1970-71, and sometime around then he and Mimi broke up and were divorced. I still came by to see Charlie, as I was living in Jamaica Plain, and I would take my very young daughter with me to Charlie’s apartment, also in Jamaica Plain. I visited him fairly often there, and continued visiting him when he moved to Framingham, where he lived with or downstairs from Ruth, and saw him pretty frequently during his long stint on London Street in East Boston, and then at another place in East Boston, and again when he lived at Wessagusset Street in Weymouth, by the beach, and then a few times, later, when he lived in Malden.

When he was in Weymouth or Malden, he would sometimes come to see me in Pembroke: I would pick him up, usually at the Braintree T station. Sometimes Barry would also come. I remember once the three of us read Plato’s Theatetus before we got together and then discussed it at some length when we met. Charlie came with me when I drove from Massachusetts to Newark Airport in New Jersey and back, to pick up my wife’s mother, who had flown in from Taiwan when my son William was born in April, 2011. It was like old times. He stayed over for a night after we got back from New Jersey, and borrowed a philosophy of science book from me, read it, and mailed it back to me a little later with a letter commenting on its content.

At some point in the late 1970s, Charlie returned to graduate school, and earned a doctorate degree in physics at Boston University around 1986. He worked on numerous papers over the years, and would mail me completed copies. I have many of these, and went looking for them this morning. To name just a few, there is his self-created measurement system from 1979, Unots-Unuts, which he designed to replace both the English system of feet and inches and the metric system; his “On (Mathematical) Fields” from 2006; his “Demonstration to Prompt Funding of a Book Write-up of New Physics” (2001); and his two articles that were published in professional journals: “The Relativistic Classical Increase of Energy and Angular Momentum with Rotation,” Am. J. Phys. 52 June 1984, and “Sounddrops…?,” J. Accoust. Soc. Am. 74 , December 1983. Reminiscent of his creation in the 70s of the Unots-Unuts universal measurement system, some years later, probably in the 1990s, he created a simplified restatement of the table of elements. The list goes on: his Digited Elements Energy Table (D.E.E.T.), his “The Hemipsuedosphere,” a paper about a geometrical surface half of a surface called the pseudosphere by mathematicians; his science fiction story “The Bitpit,” and so many others.

Charlie was also the founder of Spacers, a group for the promotion of space colonization. Attached is a copy of the logo Charlie designed for the organization, which I belong to. The slogan Charlie devised for Spacers is, “There is not less meaning OFF earth than on….” Sometime in the 80s, I believe, Charlie gave me a copy of Gerard O’Neill’s The High Frontier, a book on space colonization. I read about 90 pages, bogged down in it and didn’t finish. I picked it up again about two weeks ago, intending to read it in full, in Charlie’s memory, and so as to be able to introduce my little sons to the ideas in it. I’m on page 150 now, plowing through it. The engineering and science-intensive portions of the book are not crystal clear to me by any stretch, but once I’m done, I’ll have a better appreciation of space colonization. In 2000, the third edition of this book came out, with six new chapters by other experts in such things as using solar power in space. It appears O’Neill’s ideas are not incorrect or outmoded, but that the science that came out since he first wrote re-affirms his vision, a vision Charlie was enthusiastic about and that his Spacers organization was intended to foster.

Speaking of my children, I was gratified that Charlie always asked about my daughter Gretchen whenever he spoke to me. He came to her high school graduation in 1989, bringing his friend Adrienne. I was happy to be able to bring my little boys to see him a few years ago when he was in a nursing home in Weymouth. We had a reunion of sorts that day: Jessie, Ruth, Barry, and Tommy were there, too. Charlie was an important influence on me: particularly, his intellectuality and his fairness in dealing with people. I can’t say I’ve done anywhere near as well he did in those areas, but it has been a guide on the direction to strive in. I mentioned a quote from Lao Tzu in a letter I wrote that the hospice nurse read to him recently that I originally read on the wall of his study, so many years ago on Hillside Street, a quote that for me said a great deal about what Charlie was like and how he treated people: "When a man cares he is unafraid, when he is fair he leaves enough for others, when he is humble he can grow."