He came to Penn State in 1918, “just in time to see the old Engineering Building burn down,” he said. His faculty rank was “lower than the offal of a shark”—an assistant instructor with a salary of $900 a year—but he stayed on the faculty for forty-two years; taught thousands of undergraduates the rudiments of physics; published six textbooks, one a worldwide bestseller; and earned Penn State’s first Ph.D. degree, an honor that came to him sixty years ago, in June 1926.
At the Graduate School commencement this spring Dr. Marsh W. White ’20g, ’26g, professor emeritus of physics, was honored with a “refreshed degree,” as Dean of the Graduate School Charles L. Hosler ’47, ’48g, ’51g called it.
“We figured that after sixty years a Ph.D. gets a little stale, so we thought we’d refresh it for him,” Dean Hosler said. “After all, we had stolen his diploma a long time ago, and it’s been hanging in Kern ever since the building was built.”
Dr. White quipped, “That’s because they could find a better place to hang it than in my bathroom.”
Although 90 and officially retired since 1961, he regularly stops in at his office in Osmond Laboratory, sometimes to talk with a student but more commonly to “putter around,” as he says, with the two fraternities that are dear to his heart—Delta Chi (social) and Sigma Pi Sigma (physics honor society). Dr. White has visited more than 500 campuses to personally charter new chapters of the two groups and has been active with the Penn State Delta Chi chapter since 1920 when it was a local fraternity (Delta Pi). He was instrumental in obtaining the Delta Chi charter for it in 1929, is still a chapter adviser (“due to my longevity,” he laughs) and is secretary-treasurer of its alumni association.
“I’m always pestering alumni for money,” he says, waving his hand at three four-drawer filing cabinets devoted solely to Delta Chi. “Raised $60,000 in two years, we’ve had income from it for scholarships and now it’s worth $150,000.”
In 1981, when the Penn State Delta Chi chapter was named most outstanding in the United States, Dr. White won the National Interfraternity Conference silver medal “for a lifetime of service to youth.” Chapter president Chuck Umphred ’82 said at the time, “Only three men have ever won the silver medal. Dr. White’s name rings a bell with every Delta Chi in the country.”
He also was given an honorary membership in Sigma Pi Sigma in 1971 for being a past national president and the founder and executive secretary (1928-68) of the Penn State chapter. And he was equally well known for being a founder and national president of the American Association of Physics Teachers, an organization, he says, “interested in the academic problems of teachers in a discipline dominated by research and publications.”
Born on April 22, 1896, in Claremont, North Carolina, Marsh was the third of five children of parents who had just high school educations, but who encouraged their children to go to college at a time when not many people did. “My father ran a country store, then moved us to High Point where he manufactured wood materials for the furniture industry. One of my sisters became a big executive with Southern Mirror Company—a respectable businesswoman and the president’s right hand.”
Marsh went to Park, a 500-student liberal arts college in Missouri, because “you could work your way through. I was business manager of the weekly student newspaper and drove a one-horse garbage wagon.” At Park (which gave him an honorary doctorate in 1958) he “fell under the influence” of two people who would determine his future—a physics professor who later won the Oersted Medal and Stella Steele who would become his wife for sixty-eight years.
Stella had grown up on a farm near Turkio, Missouri, and like both her parents, was determined to become a schoolteacher. “She was definitely the smarter of the two of us—she was the brains of our family,” Marsh said.
“After I saw Stella for the first time, I told her I was struck by lightning like St. Paul at Damascus. I then managed to get invited to eat in her dormitory. But to get to the right table with the right girl took some time. They only invited boys to dine with them twice a year.”
Stella graduated in 1916 and taught school for a year in West Virginia, waiting for Marsh to graduate (in physics) in 1917. “I went to Philadelphia to work for a munitions factory and thought I’d be called up by the military draft,” he said, “but I never was. Stella and I were married that September.”
His arrival in State College came about through a Park College graduate, John “Cicero” Smith, then working in Penn State’s chemistry department. Smith suggested that White apply for an opening in the physics department headed by Dr. William Ham. A young faculty member, David Duncan, was sent to Philadelphia to interview Marsh, although, as the story goes, G.G. “Swampy” Pond, then Penn State dean of chemistry and physics, told Dave, “I’m not sure we should hire this man. Here in his letter he says, ‘data is’ and he ought to know better than to use a singular verb with the word data.”
Marsh was hired despite the blunder at a salary of $100 a month for nine months. “And Stella and I managed to save half of that first year. We lived in the 500 block of West College Avenue in one of those red brick houses that President Sparks had encouraged people to build to relieve the postwar student housing shortage. We had no family yet—we were both busy studying.”
In 1920 both earned master’s degrees, he in physics, she in history, at a time when the few advanced-degree students were under the jurisdiction of a graduate study committee. President John M. Thomas, who shocked everyone by saying Penn Sate should become a university more than thirty years before it did (and lost his job for expressing that opinion), created the Graduate School and appointed as dean Dr. Frank D. Kern, then head of the botany department. That was in 1922, the year Stella White gave birth to twin sons, Kenneth and Laurence. Three years later a third son, Malcolm, came along, and the following year, 1926, their father received Penn State’s first doctoral degree.
“I was the only one to get a Ph.D. at that graduation,” Marsh said. “It was on Old Main Lawn, and since we were between presidents at the time, Judge H. Walton Mitchell ’90, president of the Board of Trustees, gave me my diploma.”
His doctoral research, done under the aegis of Dr. Ham, dealt with the energy of high velocity electrons. “I set out to prove that Einstein was wrong,” Marsh said. “As it turned out he was right, but by then I’d gotten a thesis out of it.”
“In later years,” he went on, “my children would tell their friends that their father was a doctor, but not a real doctor.”
All three sons graduated from Penn State; Kenneth ’44, now professor of French at the University of Kansas; Larry ’48, who has worked thirty years in Penn State’s chemistry department; and Malcolm ’49, professor of marketing at University of California at Sacramento. “I also have eight grandchildren and four ‘greats,’” Marsh said, “and all the kids call me ‘The Professor.’”
He says his career was entirely teaching, mainly courses for freshmen and sophomores who were not majoring in physics. “I loved it. I didn’t want to do anything else and I did very little research in physics proper. I did write a lot [six textbooks with physics professor Robert L. Weber ’38g and Kenneth V. Manning, including College Physics (later renamed University Physics) that was used around the world for decades]. I also developed apparatus and new methods of lab work—I was in charge of the undergraduate labs and rode herd on the graduate teaching assistants.”
When Marsh came to Penn State, he shared an office (“actually a cubbyhole on a stair landing”) with physics professor Madison Garver. “Gravy,” as he was called, was noted for keeping Old Main’s clock on time by adjusting it to his own pocket watch, which he set according to the Navy’s daily time signal from Arlington, Virginia.
In those days the chemistry and physics departments shared Walker Laboratory (now site of Davey Lab), which had been designed not by an architect but by Penn State’s first physics professor, I.T. “Lordy” Osmond. This explained its multiple levels and strangely shaped cubicles. In 1938 ground was broken next door for a new $1 million building (now Osmond Lab), whose principal architect was physicist Wheeler P. Davey ’11g. “Wheeler made my bailiwick the labs,” Marsh said. “I designed them for sixteen people, to keep classes small, and we built up a lab equipment collection that was the envy of other colleges.”
Penn State’s physics faculty, too, was the envy of other colleges, and Marsh White was only one of the reasons. Now widowed (Stella died last November), he has begun to walk with a cane, but this has not dampened his enthusiasm to work for his pet organizations or to speak out on behalf of teachers.
“I have a great deal of respect for the Ph.D. degree,” he says. “Penn State has to put emphasis on research to find its place in the sun. But it owes a great deal of its prestige to the quality of its alumni who were undergraduates here. Penn State ought to be famous for the quality of its teachers and for the quality of its students as well as for the quality of its research.”
