January 27, 1929 – July 12, 2020
Mark Aiken Heald grew up in Princeton, NJ, son of Mark Mortimer Heald and June Kilts Kild. At age 8 with his parents, the family were eye-witnesses of the fiery end of the Hindenburg zeppelin. In the early 1930s the family acquired a one-acre island in one of the Rideau Lakes of southern Ontario, where they built a rustic summer camp – dearly beloved of the enusing family for man years.
Mark graduated from Princeton HS in 1946. Mark’s high-school years coincided with WW-II. He was very active with the local Boy Scout troop and their wartime projects. Beginning in fifth grade he took instruction on the clarinet. He taught himself the alto saxophone in order to play in classmates’ Glenn-Miller-style danceband.
He graduated from Oberlin College, Ohio, as a Physics major in 1950. He continued in the gradate school at Yale University, receiving his PhD in 1954.
In Oberlin he met Jane Dewey, who had grown up in Montana. Mark who was years ahead of Jane, so there was an active exchange of letters for two years between New Haven and Oberlin. They were married on Jane’s graduation day in 1952.
Upon completion of the PhD, Mark worked in a research program at Princeton University on controlled nuclear fusion, attempting to develop a method to extract useful civilian energy in a controlled way from the fusion of hydrogenic nuclei. Two children, Kate and John, joined the family during this time. Mark was a technological delegate to the 1958 “Atoms for Peace” conference and exhibition in Geneva, Switzerland.
In 1959 Mark accepted a teaching position at Swarthmore College in suburban Philadelphia. The college provided research sabbaticals. The first of these, 1964-65, was a wunderyear: Mark had a 9-month appointment at a British atomic energy lab. The family lived in a charming rural village of south Oxford. The two extended summers allowed the family to tour the Continent and Great Britain in a British camping van. A third child, Charles, joined the family shortly after the return home. Subsequent sabbaticals were twice back at the Princeton lab, and once at M.I.T.
Mark co-authored three books: Plasma Diagnostics with Microwaves (with C.B. Wharton, 1965), Physics of Waves (with W.C. Elmore, 1969), and Classical Electromagnetic Radiation (with J.B. Marion, 1990).
Mark retired from Swarthmore in 1992. In 1998 Mark and Jane moved into the Uplands Retirement Village in rural Pleasant Hill, Tennessee, where they found warm friendships and many small-world connections with other residents. At Uplands he has worked with the P.H. Child Enrichment Center, the town recycling program, and the community musical Ensemble.
