Ohio, on August 31, 1905, the only child of Harry and Byrl Fox Bacher. In 1908, the family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Harry worked as a banker and Byrl as a voice teacher on the University of Michigan faculty. Bacher attended the W. S. Perry School, and later Ann Arbor High School. While there he met Professor Harrison M. Randall, the head of the physics department at the University of Michigan, who encouraged him to study physics. Bacher entered the University of Michigan, where he joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity and lived in the frat house. He became the house manager in his sophomore year, but moved back home in his junior year to concentrate on physics. At Randall's suggestion he applied to the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, which he entered in 1926 to study for his doctorate. His fees were paid by his family, but his father had a heart attack and could no longer afford them, so in 1927 Bacher moved back to Ann Arbor, where he lived at home, and attended the University of Michigan. He received a Charles A. Coffin Foundation Fellowship from General Electric. To build up the theoretical physics department at the University of Michigan, Randall recruited four distinguished young physicists to work at Ann Arbor in 1927: Otto Laporte, George Uhlenbeck, Samuel Goudsmit, and David M. Dennison. The University of Michigan was no longer a backwater in theoretical physics. Bacher immediately signed up for Goudsmit's course on atomic structure. With Goudsmit he investigated the Zeeman effect of hyperfine structure of atomic levels, which became the subject of his 1930 PhD thesis. On May 30, 1930, Bacher married Jean Dow. His mother gave them a Ford Model A and the use of the family's lakeside holiday house, where they entertained guests including Paul Ehrenfest and Enrico Fermi. In 1931, with a National Research Council Fellowship, he spent a year at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) because Ira Bowen taught there. At Caltech Bacher attended lectures by Robert Oppenheimer, but spent most of his time at the Mt. Wilson Observatory, which had a better library. Bacher decided to create a work listing the energy, coupling constant, parity and electron configurations of all the known atoms and ions, working with Goudsmit back in Ann Arbor. The result was a book, Atomic Energy States as Derived from the Analysis of Optical