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Ice & Ironing Boards. Like Caltech. DuBridge also emerged out of an unlikely background. Born in Terre Haute. Ind., the son of a Y.M.C.A. physical-education instructor, he grew up in a succession of cities from Mount Vernon. Iowa to San Jose, Calif, to Sault Sainte Marie, Mich. Though Lee fished in Lake Superior and watched the ships pass through the locks, he was better known as that studious young fellow in knickers who was so often with a book. At one time, he tried to be a reporter ("but I was too scared to go up and ask the right people the right questions"), later set his hand to selling ironing-board covers and potholders ("but I hated to go out each morning. Some days I made no sales at all. Some days I wouldn't get inside a house"). As a matter of fact, young Lee really scarcely knew what he wanted to be.
But then in his sophomore year at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa he took Professor Orrin H. Smith's physics course. Under Smith, particles became a whirl of whizzing elephants and bouncing basketballs, and science a series of problems involving such exotic matters as Joshua's stopping the earth's rotation to make the sun stand still. ("Given the coefficient of friction between the green grass and the soldiers' britches, how long would it take Joshua to slow down the earth without sliding the soldiers off the battlefield?") DuBridge found himself "enthralled by physics. And I even learned what I had never known before—that it was possible to take graduate work in physics and actually earn money by being a scientist. From that time on, college became an exciting adventure."
Not so adventurous was his romance with the future Mrs. DuBridge, amiable Doris May Koht of Reinbeck, Iowa. The first time she saw him, he was waiting on table. "He wore nose glasses," she recalls, "and looked more like a professor than he does now." After a series of unromantic dates (they spent one hunting frogs) and a number of awkward starts, Lee finally proposed. But it was another four years before the marriage actually took place.
No Great Shakes. Lee graduated third in his class, out of 120. He went on to graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, eventually turned out a doctoral thesis called Variations in the Photoelectric Sensitivity of Platinum ("I'm afraid it didn't shake science at all"). Later at Caltech, he kept on with his arduous experiments ("I learned to hate liquid air," says Mrs. DuBridge), and at his post as assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, he started collaborating on a book ("It took the evenings of four years," says Mrs. DuBridge). The book, written with Physicist Arthur L. Hughes, turned out to be, at the time, the definitive work on photoelectricity. Lee DuBridge had made a dent on science at last.