DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker says about Dr. Joseph William Kennedy, Jr. — and friend, this one is something else. Nacogdoches, Texas.
May 30, 1916. A boy is born, and nobody in town could've known what that boy was going to go off and touch. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Joseph William Kennedy, Jr. moved through Nacogdoches High School like a man on a mission. Graduated in 1932. Valedictorian.
Then he walked over to Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College and, by 1935, had earned a B.A. in Chemistry with the highest grade point average of any student up to that time. Any student.
Up to that time. The bar existed. He cleared it by a country mile.
From there, Kennedy went to the University of Kansas — M.A. in Chemistry, 1937. Then out to the University of California at Berkeley, where in 1939 he received his Ph.D. and joined the faculty as a chemistry instructor. Now.
Here is where the story shifts weight. At U.C. Berkeley, Kennedy and three colleagues — Arthur Wahl, Glenn Seaborg, and Edwin McMillan — discovered the element plutonium.
Discovered it. And if that weren't enough, they developed a method of separating it from other fuel material in a nuclear reactor. Kennedy also designed and built detection instruments — Geiger and proportional counters, ionization chambers, linear amplifiers — tools that became essential to radiochemistry in the early 1940s.
The man wasn't just workin' science. He was building the instruments science needed to work with. Then came March 1943.
Dr. Kennedy began work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Laboratory. He developed and tested the atomic bomb.
Let that sit for a moment. A boy from Nacogdoches, Texas — valedictorian of his high school class — is now at the center of the most consequential scientific undertaking in human history. In 1946, President Harry Truman awarded Dr.
Kennedy the Medal of Merit. The highest military award available to a civilian. The President of the United States put that honor in this man's hands.
After Los Alamos, Dr. Kennedy was named chairman of the Chemistry Department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he pioneered hot labs — places where tracer atoms were studied.
He kept pushing the edge of what was known. Dr. Joseph William Kennedy, Jr. died on May 5, 1957, in Laude, Missouri.
But Nacogdoches didn't forget him. At the urging of Dr. Kennedy's family, the board of regents at Stephen F.
Austin State University renamed the science auditorium the Joseph W. Kennedy Auditorium on January 23, 1971. The boy who once walked those halls with the highest GPA the school had ever seen — his name is on the building now.
Turns out some legacies don't need much embellishment. The facts do just fine on their own.
What the marker says
Dr. Joseph William Kennedy, Jr. was born in Nacogdoches on May 30, 1916 and graduated from Nacogdoches High School in 1932 as valedictorian. Kennedy attended Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College and, in 1935, received his B.A. degree in Chemistry with the highest grade point average of any student up to that time. Kennedy graduated from the University of Kansas in 1937 with an M.A. in Chemistry. In 1939, Kennedy received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and joined the faculty as a chemistry instructor. While at U.C. Berkeley, Kennedy and colleagues Arthur Wahl, Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan discovered the element plutonium and developed a method of separating it from other fuel material in a nuclear reactor. Kennedy also designed and built detection instruments, Geiger and proportional counters, ionization chambers and linear amplifiers that were essential to radiochemistry in the early 1940s. Dr. Kennedy began work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Laboratory in March 1943 where he developed and tested the atomic bomb. President Harry Truman awarded Dr. Kennedy the Medal of Merit in 1946, the highest military award for a civilian. After his assignment at Los Alamos, Dr. Kennedy was named chairman of the Chemistry Department at Washington University in St. Louis and pioneered hot labs where tracer atoms were studied. Dr. Kennedy died in May 5, 1957 in Laude, Missouri. At the urging of Dr. Kennedy's family, the board of regents renamed the science auditorium at Stephen F. Austin State University the Joseph W. Kennedy Auditorium on January 23, 1971. (2012)