Yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of my dear mentor, Maurice M. Dillon, known as “Matt” to all his friends and colleagues. Matt was born December 22, 1922, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the son of the future governor of New Mexico, Richard C. Dillon, and his wife, Maurine. Matt passed on November 18, 2010 at the age of 87.
Matt grew up in tiny Encino, NM before moving with his family to Santa Fe, where he lived as a kid in the Governor’s mansion before relocating to Pasadena, California to study physics at the California Institute of Technology.
As the nation entered World War II, Matt left Caltech, enlisted in the United States Army, qualified as a Ranger, and was set to deploy to Europe with the paratroops when he received orders to return to Santa Fe.
Matt told me, “I was deploying to Europe when the letter came to return home; I was concerned and confused. Even if something had happened to mom or dad, is a soldier called to stand down from deployment to go home? The orders gave no details. I didn’t know what to think.”
Of course, there was no family tragedy at home; rather, unbeknownst to Matt, he was being ordered to the Manhattan Project, where his presence had been requested by the Caltech faculty who had already encamped at Los Alamos.
After the War, Matt followed his Manhattan-Project Working Group back to Los Angeles when they took residence at UCLA, where Matt finished his undergraduate degree and started his family. He worked in the Southern-California aerospace industry at the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works and earned several patents in communications antenna design for super- and hyper-sonic aircraft.
Matt was a passionate New Mexican who was so proud of his native state. CB Radios were popular, and Matt’s moniker was the Turquoise Tiger, in reference to the New Mexico state gemstone. In the early 1980s, conversion vans were gaining in popularity, and Matt bought the best, then improved upon it with the skills of the master machinist that he was.
Every weekend, our research group at Sandia National Laboratories would pile in Matt’s van, and off we would go to some far-off, unexplored corner of New Mexico. The destination was always secret, but we knew that our chauffeur, the son of New Mexico’s most beloved Governor and certainly one of New Mexico’s proudest sons, had a treat in store. Every trip, Matt showed us anew why New Mexico is called the Enchanted State – he showed us the most amazing vistas, rivers and waterfalls, high plains and plateaus, volcanic caverns, painted rocks at sunset, and white sands at sunrise.
In the laboratory, Matt was the maestro who could make any experiment work. He was a plank holder on every significant inertial fusion experiment undertaken in the United States from the 1970s to his retirement in the early 1990s. He had encyclopedic knowledge of physics of relativistic electron beams, excited dimer laser transitions, and plasma magnetohydrodynamics. In his hands, an electron and a photon were tools to explore the microscopic world and coax Mother Nature to reveal one of her many secrets. Every minute of every day of my time at Sandia was a master class in experimental physics under Matt’s tutelage.
Matt enjoyed a long retirement during which time he returned to his rural New Mexican roots, built his dream home using several of his own innovative designs for sustainability and energy efficiency, and resumed reading and writing on New Mexican history.
I count as one of my great fortunes to have known Matt and to have been his able apprentice. I miss him dearly, and I look back fondly on the occasion of his centennial.
Michael A. X. Izatt 