I’ve decided to restart writing blog posts (Oh no! they cry) but first I wish to acknowledge those among my friends, friendly acquaintances and the rest who responded to my earlier note announcing that I am yet alive and kicking! Some very agreeable sentiments arrived in my Inbox. One of them that I found especially pleasant was from Malcolm Kenney with whom I enjoyed a long and fruitful collaboration during the later decades of the last century. Malcolm, with tongue firmly planted in cheek (I hope) suggested that the gradation of correspondents that I had used was sadly insufficient and in future my salutation list should be extended to include “bosom buddies, close friends, not-so-close friends, distant friends, dropped friends, former friends, long-lost friends, aspirational friends, business friends, chemist friends” and so on. Indeed, I thank Malcolm kindly for this suggestion which I shall ignore forthwith, although I must confess that “bosom buddies” summons more than a little titillation.

For those of you who do not know Malcolm, he has had a long and distinguished career in designing, synthesizing and characterizing metal-centered tetrapyrrolic compounds based on the phthalocyanine configuration and, as I was interested in the photophysical properties of such materials, we became natural collaborators. Fortunately, this collaboration was facilitated since Malcolm was based at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, a paltry 100 miles from Bowling Green and I fondly recall meeting him frequently for working lunches at the “Highwayman” restaurant in Milan, Ohio, roughly midway between our two laboratories.

Malcolm became known to me in one of those strange but beautiful coincidences that make life more than just the interval between birth and death; allow me to recount it to you. I was sitting at my desk in my office at U of Texas, a couple of years prior to relocating to BGSU, and I was paging through an issue of JACS, seeking a paper that had looked to be of interest in a bibliographic listing; this was how we did things before the arrival of the internet. I found the paper, and its first page, as all first pages, was on the right-hand page of the journal. However, my eye was drawn to the previous left-hand page, the last page of the contiguous paper, because there was a uv-vis spectrum of a compound thereon which showed an intense peak near 750 nm, a spectral region in which I had become particularly interested. So completely forgetting the paper that had initiated this quest, I perused the paper with the near IR spectrum; it turned out to be about some electrochemical properties of a silicon-centered naphthalocyanine compound that had been synthesized in the Kenney lab in Cleveland. The electrochemistry work had been performed, wonder of wonders, in the group of Al Bard, an eminent electrochemist, and one of my colleagues at Texas just across campus from my office. I excitedly called Al to see whether he had any of the compound remaining and he went to search through his store cupboard. He called back to report that there were a few green crystals in a vial, that I was welcome to, and I sent Pat Firey over to his lab to get the vial and the few grains she got were enough to make a solution in toluene and to perform some exploratory photophysical measurements. My next task was to call Malcolm to introduce myself and to inform him of what we were up to and to suggest a collaboration to which he generously agreed, and so began two decades of fruitful interactions  and attendant NIH funding, all because of happenstance in the juxtaposition of papers in JACS.

I leave you to ponder this concept but as I depart, I beg to inform you that I already have in mind some subjects for another post.