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Ted Geballe: Blue& Gold at Heart
By Kathryn McCarthy
Don’t let Ted Geballe’s long affiliation with our rival Stanford (where he has been on faculty since 1968) throw you off. His VIP status there does not seem to have affected his allegiance to the place where he earned is undergraduate degree in Chemistry, nor his affection for his beloved co-op Sheridan Hall, where he lived from 1937-41.
“Kids were strapped,” he remembered during a recent luncheon with three former Sheridan housemates, George Cooper (1935-40), Walter Miller (1937-41) and Jack Rosston (1939-42). “But in the co-ops we had flexibility with our 4-hour per week workshifts and we could choose our hours to fit in with courses and other parts of our lives. I liked cooking pancakes on the Saturday morning shift.” Ted’s brother Ron, who majored in physics, was two years older and also lived at Sheridan.
“Sissy,” a.k.a. Frances Koshland, whom Geballe later married, “lived across the street, but you couldn’t get past the house mother.” It wasn’t until Sissy’s brother Dan invited him to his house for the weekend that he had an opportunity to meet the future Mrs. Geballe. “Our romance began on the shallow end of the Wheeler steps, and from there we went deeper and deeper.” They were married in 1941.
Ted earned two chemistry degrees from UC Berkeley –a baccalaureate in 1941 and a doctorate in 1949–under the guidance of Nobel Prize winner
William Francis Giauque. Between degrees, he served in the U.S. Army in the South Pacific for 37 months. He spent 16 years at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey researching semi- and superconductors. He returned to the Bay Area to become a member of the Stanford Faculty where Ralph Smith, a fellow Sheridan Hall alum, was already there as professor of Electrical Engineering. Two of his best students now serve on the Cal faculty.
In 1970 Ted was awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Solid State Physics Prize of the American Physical Society for experiments that “challenged theoretical understanding and opened up the technology of high-field superconductors.”
Today, after six children, sixteen grandchildren, and one great-grandchild, the Geballes live near Stanford where Ted is Emeritus Professor of Applied Physics and of Materials Science and Engineering. In December, through a private family foundation, Ted and Frances awarded $35,000 towards completing disabled accessible improvements at Sherman Hall. Thanks to their generosity, plans are now complete and construction will begin this summer.