a physician like his father, he would have been the fourth physician in a row along the Lipscomb male line. The source for this subsection, except as noted, is Lipscomb's autobiographical sketch. Education Lipscomb's high-school chemistry teacher, Frederick Jones, gave Lipscomb his college books on organic, analytical, and general chemistry, and asked only that Lipscomb take the examinations. During the class lectures, Lipscomb in the back of the classroom did research that he thought was original (but he later found was not): the preparation of hydrogen from sodium formate (or sodium oxalate) and sodium hydroxide. He took care to include gas analyses and to search for probable side reactions. Lipscomb later had a high-school physics course and took first prize in the state contest on that subject. He also became very interested in special relativity. In college at the University of Kentucky Lipscomb had a music scholarship. He pursued independent study there, reading Dushman' s Elements of Quantum Mechanics, the University of Pittsburgh Physics Staff's An Outline of Atomic Physics, and Pauling's The Nature of the Chemical Bond and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals. Prof. Robert H. Baker suggested that Lipscomb research the direct preparation of derivatives of alcohols from dilute aqueous solution without first separating the alcohol and water, which led to Lipscomb's first publication. For graduate school Lipscomb chose Caltech, which offered him a teaching assistantship in Physics at $20/month. He turned down more money from Northwestern University, which offered a research assistantship at $150/month. Columbia University rejected Lipscomb's application in a letter written by Nobel prizewinner Prof. Harold Urey. At Caltech Lipscomb intended to study theoretical quantum mechanics with Prof. W. V. Houston in the Physics Department, but after one semester switched to the Chemistry Department under the influence of Prof. Linus Pauling. World War II work divided Lipscomb's time in graduate school beyond his other thesis work, as he partly analyzed smoke particle size, but mostly worked with nitroglycerin–nitrocellulose propellants, which involved handling vials of pure nitroglycerin on many occasions. Brief audio clips by Lipscomb about his war work may be found from the External Links section at the bottom of this page, past the References. The source for this subsection, except as noted, is Lipscomb's autobiographical sketch. Later years The Colonel is how Lipscomb's students referred to him, directly addressing him as Colonel. "His first doctoral student, Murray Vernon King, pinned the label on