History In the Making: A Few 20th & 21st Century Inventors and Academicians Associated with the Intellectually Fertile Cumberland Valley

Cumberland County has a long, well known, and valued history as home, whether by birth, descent, or relocation, to inventors, researchers and academicians. This tradition includes a vast assortment of the state and nations’ college and university presidents and deans such as Elmina “Mina” Mahala Kerr, Ph.D. Kerr was born in Saville Twp. (1878), in an area formerly in Cumberland County but redefined as Perry County (1820). An author/educator, she was Dean of Wheaton College, Boston. Her great-great grandfather Matthew Kerr, Jr. immigrated to Ickesburg in 1758, about 62 years prior to the change in county lines.

There is a wealth of value and legacy in figures such as Philadelphia’s Benjamin Rush, founder of Dickinson College, and such as our county’s Daniel Drawbaugh, inventor of the coin changer, an early telephone, etc., and the Craighead brothers, John and Frank Jr., (Boiling Springs/Washington D.C.) who pioneered falconry in the USA and whose research helped save the grizzly bears of Yellowstone Park. Mina Kerr, however, has the distinction of being the first woman from her area to earn a doctorate. At that time, no one could have imagined the hologram a creation of physicist Kenneth R. Dunkley.

John Ephraim Keeny (1860-1939), born in Carlisle and schooled in Boiling Springs, Keeny became president of the Louisiana Industrial Institute (now Louisiana Tech. University) in 1907. He did his undergraduate work at Shippensburg State Normal School (now Shippensburg University). Keeny is credited with improving the standards and widening the offerings of the institution over which he presided.

Six years after John E. Keeny was born, future first female graduate of Dickinson College, Zatae Longsdorph Straw, was born (1866). During the next century, Messiah University announced its first Rhodes Scholar (1998), Joy Yu-Ho Wang.

Ray Henry Crist (1900-2005) was born just south of Mechanicsburg in Shepherdstown and died in Carlisle.¹ He was a chemist who worked on the Manhattan Project for which he was Columbia University Director (1945-1946). Crist was, with fellow scientists, involved in the first efforts which led to the ability to separate uranium isotopes. Later, he developed methods to remove toxic metals from water and soil, advancing environmental science. Crist was a graduate of Messiah University (then a high school and later a college), Dickinson College (B.S. 1920), earning his Ph.D. from Columbia University (1925). Dr. Crist was 104 years old when he retired from Messiah University in 2004. Crist’s father was born in Silver Spring Township. It is no wonder that Dr. Crist, raised on a farm, titled his memoir “Listening to Nature: My Century in Science”, Seaburn Publishing, c 2005.

Other fascinating individuals include Camp Hill native M. Lionel Bender (1934-2008), a mathematician and linguist. Bender was former associate professor and acting chairman of Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, department of anthropology. He also taught at the Haile Selassie I University, Ethiopia. Linguists praise his work in developing a classification of African languages, with special focus on the Ethiopian languages of which he was considered an expert. He discovered that Ethiopia’s 2,000 years old Kunama language “contains serial verbs, a rare sentence structure in which two verbs are strung together to describe a specific action”.

Sometimes, we find great achievements by former students who have received their education in the valley, such as that of Dickinson College’s Albert A. Alley (B. S. Biology, Dickinson College, Class of 1960; M. D., Temple University Medical School). Dr. Alley founded World Blindness Outreach (WBO) in 1990 to treat preventable blindness and eyes diseases in the USA and Third World Countries. Born in about 1938, he settled in Lebanon, PA following his college and graduate studies. Among his many honors, he received Dickinson College’s 2007 Award in Professional Achievement. Messiah University’s Ernest L. Boyer Sr. (1928 OH-1995), was appointed United States Commissioner of Education in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter.

Even a cursory glance at the web sites for some of our local towns is revelatory! But many in the county hold patents, such as the late David E. “Ted” Lutz (patents pertaining to truck mechanics). Born in 1925, he was raised by his parents above the former Lutz Funeral Home of Carlisle. Lutz was a graduate of Dickinson College. His early paternal ancestor in the county was a carriage and casket maker from Lutztown/Churchtown.²

Some of our inventors may be found in lines of descent from various individuals from our fertile valley, including my own maternal cousin, Jerauld “Jery” Dunn of Wisconsin, who developed a locking mechanism to secure bars, pipes, etc. involved in, for instance, farm equipment. Jery is a grandson of the late Dickinson College graduate Rev. Ray Spotts Dum/Dunn of Landisburg/Carlisle, PA and Spokane, WA, the author’s maternal great-uncle. Jery’s father, Navy officer Robert Ray Dunn (1923-1992) of Manzanita, OR, who was also associated with great inventions. Most notably he served aboard the USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear powered submarine, which launched in 1954 and was decommissioned in 1980. Bob served largely as Chief Electrician’s Mate. He was later made Lt. Commander.

The Nautilus was a submarine of which Carlisle’s Rev. Dr. Jeffrey Gibelius (Second Presbyterian Church) recalls a family association. His father, Werner Gibelius (1935-2009) was a career employee of General Electric which created and maintained small nuclear reactors supplying energy to US nuclear submarines. As Jeff says, his father trained Navy personnel to safely operate reactors on submarines. Jeff was not permitted to know this until years after the day when, as a youngster in West Milton, NY, his school class “participated in ‘Take your child to work day’ and I saw…nothing”. Visiting his fathers’ offices, Jeff asked his father where his desk was, expecting to see it. “Over there”, came the reply along with a gesture toward an area under yet another cloth to shield the secret work from view. Much later, Jeff finally learned why a photo of the Nautilus submarine was on display in his parents’ home. Pastor Jeff and his wife, Kari, are raising their three children in Carlisle.

Our tradition of “making history” continues forward, most recognizably, perhaps, in the person of transplant Kenneth J. Dunkley (B: 1939 NYC). With a Masters in Physics from NYU, Dunkley is the holographer who invented 3-D glasses, thus enlivening movie-goers’ experiences. He relocated from NYC and Philadelphia to Camp Hill on the West Shore, becoming president of Holospace Laboratories Inc. and giving time to the Museum of Scientific Discovery in Harrisburg. Analglyph red/cyan glasses can permit 3-D viewing of the planet Mars and can be made at home in about 10 minutes according to a NASA website.³ Early interested in airplanes, and thus space, it’s perhaps no coincidence that Ken became a holographer!

Edson C. Hendricks (1945-2020 was born and raised in Lemoyne. A graduate of Cedar Cliff High School, Hendricks was a computer scientist with a B.S. from MIT in Electrical Engineering (Class of 1967). Employed by IBM, at a time when that company perceived a need to find an electronic method for file sharing, Hendricks developed CPREMOTE in 1969, the first such virtual service. That was just two years after completing his bachelor’s degree. While at IBM, Hendricks and T. C. Hartmann developed the RSCS (later known as VNET) software powering the world’s largest network prior to the internet, providing a precursor and catalyst to the world-wide web and its expanding capabilities. RSCS (Remote Spooling Communications System) went into effect in 1973. He was living in Newton Center, MA by the time his father, George Hendricks, died in Lemoyne in 1976, a retired teacher at Lemoyne Jr. High School and principle of West Shore Junior and Senior High.

Jacquelyn S. Fetrow earned her Ph.D. in biological chemistry from Penn State College of Medicine (1986).11 She was born (1960) in Camp Hill to a local West Shore school teacher and her husband, Mildred and David E. Fetrow. A computational biologist who holds various patents, Dr. Fetrow was the first to define the “omega loop” in protein structure and developed a classification system for the functional sites in protein structures.⁴ On 7 April 2017 Allentown’s “The Morning Call” newspaper described anticipation of an outdoor velodrome in Trexlertown to train future Olympic cyclists thanks to then in-coming Albright College (Reading) President, Jacquelyn S. Fetrow and others. She is the co-founder and former chief scientific officer and director of GeneFormatics Biotech Software Co.

University of Alaska-Fairbanks’ Richard “Rick” L. Thoman, Jr. is a climatologist who enjoys trips to his native roots in Pennsylvania whenever possible, trips which have included visits with his paternal aunt Linda, a graduate of Messiah College who lived in Carlisle for many years. Rick is another Cumberland County descendant through its early territory in what is now Perry County. The leading climatologist for Alaska, he was born (1961) in Lancaster County, PA (from which Cumberland County was defined in 1750). Rick descends from Henry Thoman (1757-1835) of York/Perry Counties (the former distinguished from Lancaster County in 1749). With a B.S. in Meteorology from Penn State (1982), Rick was the 2020 recipient of a NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U. S. Dept of Commerce) Distinguished Career Award in appreciation for his work for the International Arctic Research Center and Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy. Rick says that his MA in Athabascan Linguistics (University of Alaska-Fairbanks, 2003) “informs my climate work in rural Alaska”. We can be thankful to Rick for alerting the world to the significance of Typhoon Merbak (September 2022), which resulted from climate warming of the Pacific Ocean.

There is something special in the breezes wafting over the cornfields and rooftops of Cumberland County reflected in this small sampling of native, descending, and imported intellectual fruit.