The Unknown Burton

I remember reading The Unknown Brahms by Robert Haven Schauffler shortly before Thanksgiving in 1979. It was in the Juilliard library, and I read it in one sitting. I remember the date and place because it was a very eventful couple of weeks (known to people who knew me then and there, but which I will not talk about here).

I realize that there are things that I would like to make known about my father, Burton Fine, that would otherwise never be known.

I'll begin with his musical adventures while in Chicago studying chemistry at IIT. As an avid chamber music player, he was well known in the Chicago musical community. At some point before 1952 he met Dieter Kober, who wanted to start a chamber orchestra. Dieter asked my father to be concertmaster, and my father agreed to play on the condition that Dieter study conducting. Some time later (maybe it was months, maybe it was years), Dieter gave my father a call to tell him that he had gone to Europe to study conducting. My father kept his part of the bargain and was the founding concertmaster of the Chicago Chamber Orchestra.

My mother, who Dieter knew from Chicago Musical College, played flute in the orchestra. Dieter thought that they would make a nice couple (they had met at Tanglewood in 1950), so he insisted on picking up each of them and driving them to rehearsals. According to my mother's sister Jeanne, they spent a lot of time in the back seat.

It was a surprise to me to learn that my father had a reading knowledge of Russian. German was the language that chemists around the world needed to understand before the beginning of the space race with the Soviet Union. Then it was Russian that chemists needed to be able to understand. I found out, during a conversation I had with my father about learning Russian in order to read writings by Catherine the Great, that one of the things my father did in the (pre)NASA lab in Cleveland was translate from Russian.

My father played a lot of chamber music when he was in Cleveland (my mother too). It was the Unitarian Church, which performed Bach Cantatas where he got his first real professional break. The story goes that Jerome Rosen, a violinist who later became a colleague in the Boston Symphony, had trouble getting up on Sunday mornings, so my father was called to take his place. The conductor was Robert Shaw. I believe that the first piece he played with Shaw was Bach Cantata 78, which happens to be the first Bach Cantata I learned (because the flute and tenor aria was the first one in the book I had of Bach Cantata arias). It is still my favorite.

I will probably add to this post in the future. Memory is like a funnel. There is only so much that can make it through the aperture at a given time.

But for why not link to the Internet Archive entry for one of his papers? Here's "Stability limits and burning velocities for some laminar and turbulent propane and hydrogen flames at reduced pressure". There's no way I can even wrap my head around the abstract:

The effect of reduced pressure on blowoff, flashback, and burning velocities of propane-oxygen-nitrogen burner flames was studied (oxygen fraction of oxidant, 0.5). The pressure exponent of burning velocity, 0.22, was nearly the same as for hydrogen-air flames; stability loops showed the same blowoff and flashback characteristics as were previously observed for hydrogen-air flames. In particular, for both systems, quenching distances determined as a function of pressure from the points of intersection of flashback and blowoff portions of stability loops were considerably higher than those obtained previously by a stopped-flow method.