Shortly after completing his education from UT Austin, Joe von Rosenberg Jr. completed post-doctoral studies and joined our Department as a professor, back in 1965. Although Joe’s personal interests ranged from collecting stamps and pocketknives to cooking and shooting rifles, his true passion was chemistry, and was able to share it with students for over 27 years! Honoring his legacy and representing the many students inspired by him, this newsletter highlights the support from Dr. Dale C. Buchanan, class of 1978, and his wife Cathy. In partnership with his professor’s son, Joe von Rosenberg III, they funded one of the most important endowed scholarships in chemistry. The Buchanans also actively support a lecture series in Chemistry.
Dale now lives in Charlotte, works for the Presbyterian Hospital, and along with Cathy has two sons, Alex and Will.
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Joseph L. von Rosenberg Jr. was the eldest of four children, he was born on August 22, 1932, in Lockhart, Texas, and he was raised in Austin, Texas, where he graduated from Austin High School in 1950.
After receiving his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of Texas, he served as an officer in the U.S. Navy, where he was stationed at Coronado Island, California, and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from 1954 until 1957. Following his honorable discharge, he moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and married Flo Stuart, with whom he had three children during their 33-year marriage. He returned to Austin in 1959, earning his Ph.D. degree and completing post-doctoral work at the University of Texas before joining the faculty at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina, where he raised his family and was a professor of organic chemistry for 27 years.
In 1992, he retired from the U.S. Naval Reserves as a Lieutenant Commander. Upon retiring from Clemson in 1992 – having been asked for 27 years, “If Texas is so great, why don’t you go back there?” – he did just that: first, to Austin, then (after determining that Austin had become “too liberal”) to San Antonio. During his final illness, he moved to Georgia to be near his two daughters.
His interests were wide-ranging and he pursued them all with intensity and passion. These interests included, at various times during his life, collecting stamps and pocketknives; hand-loading rifle cartridges; classical music; photography; military history; and travel. He had a strong appreciation for the art of cooking. Although right-handed, he was a left-handed shooter who was a wonderful shot with either a rifle or a shotgun. He read for several hours every day of his life; there was hardly a subject about which he was not conversant. He loved Mexican food and margaritas, barbeque and draft beer, bird hunting in South Texas, and saltwater fishing in the Laguna Madre. He especially loved to take family members or friends with him on long, meandering drives through the Blue Ridge Mountains or the Texas Hill Country and he liked to stop and read all of the historical markers.
He is survived by his three children: Joseph von Rosenberg III and his wife Sharon, of Houston, Texas; Karen Holtzer and her husband Matt, of Alpharetta, Georgia; and Karla Edwards and her husband Ron, of Marietta, Georgia. He also is survived by his siblings: Ann Moses and her husband Bob, of Austin, Texas; Arthur von Rosenberg and his wife Frances, of Spring Branch, Texas; and Robert von Rosenberg and his wife Sue, of San Marcos, Texas. Finally, he is survived by ten grandchildren, who lovingly knew him as “Pa Pa.”
In 1993 Dr. A. Kholodenko published paper entitled Analytical Calculation of the Scattering Function for Polymers of Arbitrary Flexibility Using the Dirac Propagator (Macromolecules 26 (1993) 4179), which had become so popular that it found its place in wikipedia .
