ics. After only three years he graduated first in his class in 1929. Upon the urging of one of his professors, C. P. Boner, Gene applied to Harvard University, where he studied for a doctorate in physics under E. C. Kemble.

Gene's graduate student career was not routine. With the Great Depression settling upon the United States, his father found himself unable to provide financial support for his son's graduate study. Kemble and other professors helped Gene find part-time employment in a Raytheon laboratory in Cambridge—the first of his two experiences with industrial physics.

In 1931 Harvard awarded Gene a Parker Traveling Fellowship with which he studied in Europe for a year and a half. During the summer of 1931 he worked at Raytheon. At this time his father became ill and died. Gene then left for Europe in the fall. Although he later said that he probably was not mature enough to take full advantage of the European study opportunity, Gene spent some time in Munich with Sommerfeld's group, in Zurich with Pauli's institution, and in Rome with Fermi's group. In 1933 he went to Leipzig for a few months, just as the Nazis were seizing power. I have been particularly moved by a copy of a 1933 letter Gene wrote to Professor Kemble in which he described his observations of Nazi anti-Semitic violence in the streets. Over the nearly thirty years I knew Gene Feenberg, fifteen of them as a faculty colleague, I never saw this quiet, peaceful, and reasonable man angry. He was the epitome of thoughtful, tranquil, and balanced wisdom. Yet we all know, from the unfolding of history, how thoroughly justified was the indignation Gene expressed over Nazi violence and persecution when he wrote to Edward Kemble from Leipzig on April 4, 1933, “I walked the crowded streets Saturday boiling with anger; violent emotions visible on my face, I suppose, for passers whispered to be calm.” An American fel-