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F.K. Edmondson (Indiana U.)
My attendance at AAS meetings began with the 46th meeting in September 1931 at the brand new Perkins Observatory. This was the first semester of my junior year at Indiana University. Professor Wilbur Cogshall, my astronomy professor, took me to the meeting, and paid my expenses for dormitory accommodations and meals. Hence, my attendance at AAS meetings covers a span of nearly 68 years.
There have been so many "memorable" meetings that it is hard to pick just one. However, the 99th meeting in December 1957 at Butler University in Indianapolis, a joint meeting with the AAAS, is memorable because I was in a wheel chair and using crutches, following an injury to my right knee cap.
I was a member of the AAAS Committee to select the "best paper" presented at the meeting to receive the Newcomb Cleveland Prize, and Martin Schwarzschild's first report of results from Project Stratoscope was on the program. I showed up at the Committee meeting in my wheel chair, and nominated Martin's paper for the "best paper" award. The Committee asked a lot of questions and then approved the paper by a unanimous vote. The wheel chair and crutches obviously played a role in convincing the Committee that I had strong feelings about the merits of Martin's paper.
Allan Sandage was the Warner Prize Lecturer, and reported on the current status of his revision of the cosmic distance scale. Hubble's 1936 distances needed to be increased by a factor of five to ten.
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