Astronomer, director of Oak Ridge Observatory
Mac McCrosky. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)
Astronomer Richard E. “Mac” McCrosky, director of Harvard’s Oak Ridge Observatory for nearly two decades, died May 21 in the sprawling farmhouse he loved on Old Littleton Road. He was 88 years old.
Born April 28, 1924, in Akron, Ohio, Mac was the youngest of four children—a girl and three boys born five years apart—who shared a nickname (they were all called Mac) and intense work habits, starting with early paper routes and continuing throughout their careers.
His brother Bob was working on a doctorate at MIT when 17-year-old Mac hitchhiked from Akron to Cambridge the summer before his senior year in high school. He got a job there as a lab assistant and didn’t return home until Christmas, then finished his senior year while working eight hours a night, seven days a week, building barrage balloons for B.F. Goodrich.
Mac attended Akron University for a year and a half, then in 1943 volunteered for the Army Air Force’s new Cadet Weatherman Training Program at Denison University in Ohio, where he studied math and physics, becoming close friends with fellow cadets Harlan Smith and Robert Wells. Smith and Mac served together as weather observers on Guadalcanal until their discharge from the military, then traveled to Cambridge, where MIT rejected their applications for being too late. So they strolled down Memorial Drive to Harvard College and were admitted.
They soon found summer jobs at the Harvard College Observatory studying weather patterns in New Mexico, where they would eventually build and man two camera stations, 40 miles apart, to observe and triangulate meteors, fireballs, meteorites, and occasional off-track rockets from White Sands. Mac’s small-team meteor work expanded over 50 years to Smithsonian’s Prairie Network of 16 stations in a grid extending from Central Illinois to South Dakota, Nebraska, and through Kansas and Oklahoma.
The growing McCrosky family–Mac, his wife, Jean, and eventually four children—would spend part of their summers out there through the 1960s.
Mac met Jean in Cambridge, where she worked for his boss, astronomer Harlow Shapley. He was still working toward his doctorate in astronomy when they married in 1952. They enjoyed getting out of the city on weekends, and would often come to Harvard on Sundays to visit the observatory and walk the nearby scenic roads. One winter day in 1955, they walked up Old Schoolhouse Road and saw a magnificent sunset on the hill where they would soon come to live permanently. A child of the Great Depression, Mac was always careful with money, Jean recalls, and he had somehow saved enough for a down payment on the big old farmhouse and 7.6 acres at the juncture of Old Littleton and Old Schoolhouse roads. He had no job yet but they moved in that summer, and the job soon followed.
Their lives changed again soon afterward, in 1957, with the launch of Sputnik, the first Russian satellite. Suddenly Mac was being hounded for interviews and took to sleeping on a cot in his Cambridge office to avoid the reporters eager for news about the emerging space race. Even under normal circumstances, though, astronomers work irregular hours and at one time Mac directed two Smithsonian observatories: Oak Ridge in Harvard, which had the largest optical telescope east of Texas in the United States; and the Whipple Observatory’s traditional telescopes on Mt. Hopkins, in Southern Arizona. He traveled a lot and brought his family along when the kids were out of school, or too young for school.
But as much as they all enjoyed their trips out west, which usually ended with a week camping in the Rockies, Jean yearned for a place near the ocean. Raised in Rhode Island, she could always go there, but she wanted something more rustic, where she and the children could swim and sail. They eventually found their way to a peninsula in Nova Scotia, where Jean and the kids camped while Mac was away. Then they noticed a “4 sail” sign in the grass nearby and Mac agreed they should buy a small piece of waterfront and build a more permanent camp. Based on a sketch Jean drew of a simple fish house she liked, in just nine days, Mac, Jean, and the two younger kids built a boathouse-retreat that still stands, with a few embellishments. Later, they bought a much larger house nearby and Mac loved repairing it; he worked on it for 20 years.
Back at home, Mac was seldom idle. He was a master bridge player, skilled woodworker, and small-scale farmer, growing vegetables and raising sheep until a roaming dog killed 10 lambs in one day. He taught his children how to build things, and had them re-roofing half the barn, replacing shingles, flooring, and painting. He helped them fix their bikes and encouraged building projects in the woods. He was on the Village Nursery School Board of Directors, and helped build the bike trail along Pond Road. He was a staunch Democrat and strong supporter of liberal causes. For five years, the McCroskys were a host family for the two-week Harvard-Roxbury Summer program
And all the while, he and his team continued searching for and tracking asteroids and minor planets, sometimes naming them. In 1994, NASA presented Mac the Group Achievement Award for the Asteroid Ephemeris Development Team “in recognition of the highly accurate ephemerides of asteroids Gaspra and Ida and the precision measurements upon which these ephemerides were based, enabling Project Galileo to accomplish the extraordinary encounters with the asteroids.”
In addition to his wife Jean, Mac is survived by his daughters: Susan Lander of Owens Mills, Maryland; Anne McCrosky of Lunenburg; and Gail McCrosky of Littleton; his son Steve McCrosky and his wife Jessica Gaylord of Flagstaff, Arizona, and eight grandchildren.
A memorial service is planned for Saturday, June 16, at 5:30 p.m. at Harvard’s Unitarian Church on the Common. In lieu of flowers, please consider making a donation to Loaves and Fishes.
