Cal Meyers, Southern Illinois University’s only Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and one of the country’s great organic chemists, passed away peacefully in Carbondale on Friday, March 16, 2012.  Born and raised in Utica, New York, he earned his B.A. in Chemistry as a LaVerne Noyes Scholar at Cornell University in 1948 and he received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois in 1951.  He was a post-doctoral scholar at Princeton University and then worked for seven years at Union Carbide.  He taught at the University of Bologna and U.C.L.A. before coming to Southern Illinois University in 1964.  For almost half a century Cal spent virtually every day at his extraordinarily successful and prolific SIU lab, where he authored hundreds of articles and received many patents.  He presented invited papers in most states as well as in Italy, Japan, Hungary, the Czech Republic, England, France, Switzerland, Poland, China, Serbia, Sweden, Norway, Canada and elsewhere.  He refereed manuscripts for a dozen academic chemistry publications, regularly reviewed grant applications for the National Science Foundation and others, and was invited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to submit proposals for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on at least three occasions. 

Although an encounter with Cal was never complete without an update on his progress in “closing the ring,” he also was involved in community life in a host of other ways during his almost fifty years in Carbondale.  An active musician until the last few years, he played professional quality jazz trumpet when he had his own dance band in college and when he played with jazz bands in Southern Illinois.   He rigged up a sound system that brought classical stations from all over the Midwest into the house he lived in on Hewitt in Carbondale for four decades.  He served on a wide range of Chemistry Department and University committees, including the Judicial Review Board and its Grievance Panels , the Honorary Degree and Distinguished Service Committee, the Faculty Senate (each several times), and a dozen more.

An outspoken defender of civil rights, Cal was involved in many of the battles fought at SIU and throughout Illinois over racial and religious discrimination and free speech over the past fifty years, and he was among the founders of the Southern Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, to which he dedicated a great deal of his energy.  Following in his father’s footsteps, he was never afraid to speak the truth to power – even to his employer.  Although some petty-minded officials (and the go-along-to-get-along group at SIU) did hold that against him, what he risked by this conduct was more than made up for by the deep respect and admiration that others developed for him as a result of his strength and courage.  He loved the beauty of the Southern Illinois countryside, especially in his final years, and he was proud to describe the progress that this part of his State had made in matters of civil liberties during his time here.  Cal never forgot where he came from, though, and in memory of his parents Cal endowed an annual Yiddishkeit celebration in his hometown of Utica.

In 2000 Cal established the Meyers Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Organic and Medicinal Chemistry, and his endowment of the Institute, which Cal directed until his death, will enable it to do significant truly interdisciplinary scientific work for generations to come.