Peter Max Flower Stickers

The opportunity to leave this comment over at Roy's place reminded me of, you guessed it, Peter Max flower stickers.

It seems in the late 60s, novelties like random stickers were relatively new. This was before those damn Have A Nice Day puke-yellow idiot smiles. It was actually a rebellious act of creative abandon for my father to take a package of the things and put them all over the mass spectrometer he operated at Chevron Research. Maybe they were Flower Power stickers. Whatever.

Dad wore a white shirt and bowtie when first he took over the mass spectrometer. He became its steward and keeper because he was the only guy in the lab with both a doctorate in chemistry and Navy training in electronics. The mass spectrometer (pictures to follow if I remember, CBA right now) was a hugely expensive hunk of technology that took minuscule samples (in his case, typically samples of gunk extracted from deep below ground somewhere) and destructively tested them to see what they were made of. They were blasted in just such a way as to bust apart in the centrifuge into their constituent elements, and then a detector would indicate how far they were flung. The elements were determined by how far they were flung, distance being a function of elemental mass, and their relative quantities in the sample by how much was flung, and in this way a mass spectrum could be derived. This told them what elements and how much of them were to be found in the sample, be it of raw crude, or refinery waste, or for all I know a competitor's herbicide. (Chevron owned Ortho in those days.)

Eventually he quit wearing ties, but he never lost his place as the mass spectrometer man, not until he retired. To this day he is remembered as an expert in the field of mass spectrometry, particularly in the oil business, worldwide. As a matter of fact, I just found this. Kinda cool. A legacy of his nights in the late 1960s when, as a lonely divorced bachelor, he'd get permission to go in and play with the company computer. Taught himself FORTRAN. I remember those cards flipping through the machine well.

This wasn't going to be about my father. I'll be writing more about him again, and long before I want to, but there it is. It was just going to be about flower stickers, and how the lab management wasn't too keen on them getting stuck to their five hundred thousand dollar machine.