William E. DeedsKnoxville: A picnic and reunion for family and friends to celebrate the life of William Edward Deeds will be held at Locust Shade Farm, 3070 Deeds Road, Granville, at noon on Monday, July 3, 2017. A private graveside service will take place at Maple Grove Cemetery. He was born on Feb. 23, 1920, at the family home in Lorain, Ohio, and died on February 6, 2017, at his home in Knoxville, Tennessee. In the interceding 96-plus years, he cycled the British Isles at age 17 with his brother and sister, climbing Ben Nevis and kissing the Blarney Stone; danced with Carmen Miranda and Rita Hayworth as a graduate student (privately observing that Hayworth was the better dancer); and drove down the Pan American Highway at 57 to explore Machu Picchu and other archaeological treasures of South America with his son, Eric. He delivered the Saturday Evening Post in grade school, earning a fancy bicycle for his efforts, and worked as a tour guide in Mexico to earn money in college. He often said that haying in the summers on the family farm was the hardest work he ever did. Ed graduated from Granville High School in 1937 and Denison University in 1941. He received offers to continue his studies in mathematics, from Princeton, or physics, from CalTech. He chose the latter, he said, because Dr. Carl Anderson, who wrote the offer, had won a Nobel Prize, and the distinguished mathematician with whom he would have studied at Princeton had not. While in California, he worked from 1942-1947 for the NDRC on the Manhattan Project - tangentially, he always added, helping to build an instrument to measure the intensity of the blasts. He took art classes alongside Disney animator Ward Kimball. He spent his honeymoon in a canoe, portaging around the Great Lakes. Ed was a child of the Depression, begetting lifelong frugality. He owned a Ferrari but drove Corvairs, and observed that the only vehicle he'd ever bought with air conditioning and a radio was a tractor. He was a Scoutmaster, PTA president, pitcher for innumerable neighborhood children's softball games, tuba player in a longtime German band, and inveterate collector. As a young adult, Ed hiked the Grand Canyon unintentionally, in reverse - an avid photographer, he began taking photos at the edge, and kept moving down the trail in search of a better angle. By the time he realized how far he'd gone - early in the morning, without food or water - he decided to go all the way down and have breakfast at Bright Angel Lodge. Which would have been a fine solution, except that the tourist season had ended, and the lodge was closed. So he hiked wearily back up, doubtless taking more photos as he went. Some of the best occurrences in his life came about by accident. When he returned home to Granville in the summer of 1947 to see family after completing his war service, his former physics professor, "Doc" Smith, implored him to stay and help teach the flood of undergrads brought to Denison by the G.I. Bill. So instead of returning to CalTech, where he had earned his M.S. in physics in 1943 and had intended to earn his Ph.D., he stayed in Granville - and met the love of his life, Alice Brandt, a librarian at Denison. They were married in 1950, and he earned his Ph.D. in physics at OSU in 1951. In 1952, he and Alice moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where he taught physics at the University of Tennessee until his retirement in 1989. Professionally, he was a natural teacher and mentor, directing 24 Ph.D. dissertations and 36 M.S. theses in physics. At Thanksgiving, his home was filled with students from abroad, and once he stood in for the absent father of the bride in a marriage ceremony in Knoxville. He consulted at Redstone Arsenal from 1952-1957, and for decades at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His final project was to design an experiment, to be carried out on a space flight, to measure Newton's Constant of Gravitation at least 100 times more accurately than it is now known. A close friend called him "the most sentimental man I ever met"; he remembered the anniversary of his first date with Alice. He said the best part of being married was that there was always someone on your side. His world was shattered in April 1970, when Alice was killed in a car accident. In the 47 years that he survived her, Ed could never talk about her without tears, and asked that their ashes be comingled when he died. He believed in multiple types of immortality: Spiritual immortality, or living on in the memories of those who loved you. Genetic immortality, living on through your progeny. Molecular immortality, the realignment of your atoms into new forms. Creative immortality, surviving in the ideas or things that you created while alive. In addition to his wife, he was predeceased by his parents, Dean and Mary Frances Updike Deeds, three brothers and two sisters. He is survived by his children and their spouses, Dean and Margaret Deeds, Eric and Alexis Kurland Deeds, Amy Deeds and Scott Gowans, and Holly Deeds; four grandchildren, Brandt and Quinn Deeds, and Raithe and Alex Gowans; and numerous nieces, nephews, and cousins. Ed preferred a handshake to a contract, and respected most those who could do things for themselves. He was the fourth generation to own the farm, and its name, Locust Shade, offers an apt metaphor for the family that put down roots there. The locust is a hard wood, its resistance to rot making excellent fenceposts. Properly seasoned, it burns extremely hot. And it is tenacious, its roots reaching far and wide to send up new shoots. Ed saw himself as a steward for the next generation and placed an agricultural easement on the property, ensuring its survival against development pressures. He was proudest not of his many professional accomplishments - patents, papers, and students - but of having raised four independent children. Ed was happiest when his family gathered together, sharing small joys. If the ripple made when he left this world, dying quietly in the home he built himself, seems slight, perhaps it is that its force has already been moving outward for so many years, affecting every life that he touched, whether family, friend, or student. He outlived the rest of his generation, but his children, his grandchildren, his farm, and his legacy live on.