Whittier
Arthur Edward Axworthy Jr. was born on March 26, 1929, in Whittier, California, and grew up there. His father, Art Sr., worked for the postal service, and his mother, Lucy, kept the house. He had two sisters, Elizabeth, known as Betty, and Dorothy, known as Dot.
Photography caught him early, and he built his own homemade darkrooms to develop his pictures. He graduated from Whittier Union High School in 1946, where he was in the Science Club and the “Money Minded” Club, and went on to Whittier College, where he earned his degree.
His family went to the First Baptist Church of Whittier, where he grew up alongside friends like Dana Collins, Ken Chandler and Bruce Ballanger. In high school he was one of the Dukes, a group of friends who hung out at the Whittier YMCA. During the war years, with so many men away, he carried mail for the Whittier Post Office after school, on weekends and on vacations, as did Dana and Lloyd White. His father and uncle worked there full time.
Most summers the family stayed at a cabin in Skyforest, near Lake Arrowhead, and spent the days swimming and boating on the lake. His friends remembered him as studious, inquisitive and pleasant to be around, and Edwina Bowen, whom he dated in 1947, remembered him as shy, soft-spoken and patient.
Barbara
He met Barbara E. Lee, from Whittier, through their friend Lewis Johnson, who had ended up with two dates for a dance and talked Art into taking Barbara. On November 24, 1949, Thanksgiving Day, they were married.
USC and Dr. Benson
He earned his doctorate in research chemistry at the University of Southern California under Dr. Sidney Benson in December 1955. He became a kineticist, a chemist who studies how fast reactions happen and the steps they go through. His work with Dr. Benson on how ozone breaks down was still being cited decades later.
Ozone is unstable and can explode on its own, and he found that out the hard way: his first apparatus blew apart, and a doctor spent almost an hour picking glass out of his face. He rebuilt it behind a Plexiglas shield and became a very good glassblower along the way. Dr. Benson counted him among the top fifth of all the students he ever had. In 1955 the two of them were invited to present the work at a world conference in Chicago.
Shell Oil and Concord
In September 1956 the family moved to Northern California, where he went to work for Shell Oil. Their daughter, Linda Marie, was born in Concord in 1956, and their son, Stephen Arthur, was born there in 1963. His work at Shell on lubricants became U.S. Patent 3,293,180.
At Shell’s lab in Martinez he worked on static buildup in jet fuel and on knocking in the newer gasolines. A colleague there, Duncan Frew, remembered him as honest, likable, and very organized and methodical. Several of them bought houses at the same time, and they helped each other insulate their houses and pour their patios.
Rocketdyne and Simi Valley
In January 1964 he left Shell for a new job at Rocketdyne, and the family moved to an apartment in the San Fernando Valley. Rocketdyne was then a division of North American Aviation, which merged with Rockwell-Standard in 1967 to form North American Rockwell, renamed Rockwell International in 1973. On December 23, 1964, they moved into the house in Simi Valley.
He worked at Rocketdyne’s facility in Canoga Park and at its Santa Susana lab. Much of the work was classified or done for the government: how rocket propellant chemicals break down under heat, and how light splits interhalogen compounds. In the mid to late 1970s he worked on fossil fuels under a Department of Energy contract.
Before the Simi Valley Freeway was built, he rode in a carpool with Frank Gunderloy and Bill Moberly, and the trip from Simi to Canoga Park over the old two-lane pass road could take two hours. With Ross Wagner he worked out how to feed iodine vapor, under control, into a fast stream of oxygen to make a reliable oxygen-iodine research laser.
The later years
Art and Barbara divorced in 1977. On March 8, 1980, he married Teresa Murray.
At the end of his life he was working with chemical lasers at Rocketdyne. When Dr. Benson returned to USC in 1976 and started an alumni group for its chemists, the USC Double Bond, Art was its first president. He died on January 7, 1983, at 53, and is buried at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier.
Who he was
- A workaholic.
- He loved to bowl, and he loved a good family vacation.
- Good with anything mechanical.
- Afraid of heights.
- He never smoked and rarely drank.
- He always had ideas for new things.
- He knew a great deal about a wide range of subjects.