Harry Lustig, professor emeritus at City College of New York (CCNY) and former treasurer and acting executive secretary of the American Physical Society (APS), died of prostate cancer on 17 March 2011 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Born in Vienna, Austria, on 23 September 1925, Harry sailed with his family to the US from Naples in November 1939 to flee Nazi persecution. He entered Boys High School in Brooklyn, New York, as a freshman with no knowledge of English and graduated two and a half years later with highest honors. Shortly after entering CCNY, he was drafted on his 18th birthday to serve in the US Army; he returned to Europe on the same ship on which his family had traveled from Italy, now commandeered for use as a troop transport.
In 1946, following his discharge, Harry reentered CCNY, where he majored in physics. He earned a doctorate in theoretical nuclear physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1953. Compelled by his wish “to repay the debt that I owed to the College and the City” of New York, he joined the faculty of his alma mater; he spent the next 33 years as a member of the physics department and served in positions of increasing responsibility.
One of Harry’s major achievements was building an outstanding physics department at CCNY. Shortly after he was elected chair in 1964, he obtained a $1 million grant from NSF to establish a center of excellence in physics. With additional resources provided by the college, he recruited outstanding faculty by following his oft-stated principle to hire people who were better than he was. Harry felt that one of his greatest accomplishments was the recruitment of Robert Marshak as college president. By the mid 1970s, CCNY was ranked in the top 20 of the nation’s roughly 160 PhD-granting physics departments.
From 1970 to 1972, Harry took a leave of absence to serve as senior officer in the department of science and technology at UNESCO in Paris, where he revived the dormant program in solar energy, an issue that engaged his attention and focus for the remainder of his life. He returned to CCNY as dean of science and was instrumental in the creation of the Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education, the Institute of Oceanography, and the Benjamin Levich Institute for Physico-Chemical Hydrodynamics. He assumed the position of provost and vice president for academic affairs in 1983.
After his retirement in 1986, Harry embarked on a second career as treasurer of APS. During the move of APS headquarters from New York to Maryland in 1993, he held two of the three APS operating officer positions—treasurer and (acting) executive secretary—for nearly a year. He was instrumental in the planning, programming, and funding of the APS 1999 Centennial Celebration and wrote a comprehensive article, “100 years of the American Physical Society,” for the American Journal of Physics. Harry established the first successful capital campaign. During his 10-year tenure, the net worth of the society increased ninefold, he put the journals on a sound financial footing, and he greatly expanded APS’s educational, minority-outreach, and international programs. Harry’s heroic tenacity and strong commitment to freedom of publication were central to the successful defense of a protracted suit brought by Gordon and Breach against APS and the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in the US, Germany, Switzerland, and France. The court transcripts attest to Harry’s wry sense of humor and sharp linguistic skills; during the proceedings Harry often corrected the opposing lawyers’ grammar and helped clarify their arguments.
After Harry and his wife Rosalind Wells retired to Santa Fe in 1996, he continued to be actively involved in the issues of the day. He codeveloped a series of public symposia at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York to coincide with the Broadway opening of the play Copenhagen in 2000. Characteristic of Harry’s exceptional dedication, his last published work began as a book review and grew into a 27-page article, “The life and times of Werner Heisenberg,” published in Perspectives in Physics. For the APS Forum on the History of Physics, he spearheaded a fundraising effort to support the newly established joint APS–AIP Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics.
Throughout his life, Harry was active in defending and promoting free speech, reasoned discussion, and civil liberties. When the Marxist Discussion Club needed a faculty adviser so that it could operate legally as a student organization on campus in the 1950s, Harry volunteered despite his opposition to Communism and to “scientific” Marxism. He spoke to more than 100 community groups and on radio and television in favor of a nuclear test ban, and during the Vietnam War he helped organize and became chair of the Universities Committee on the Problems of War and Peace, an organization that developed into a center of opposition to the war.
Harry was equally serious about excellent wine, mushroom hunting, great music (most particularly opera), and objets d’art. He was a bon vivant, a feinschmecker, a connoisseur in all matters of fine living. Even during his final illness, Harry continued his devotion to food, waking at any hour of the day or night and saying in his sly voice: “Don’t you think it’s time we did something about dinner?”
Harry lived a long, rich, and meaningful life. He will be missed by many for his strong commitment to justice and reason, his involvement in the world around him, his energy and creativity, his wit, and his deep and abiding friendship.
