Close to 50 years ago now. I went with Tom Wilson up to Delphos, OH for the annual “August Orgy”. Amazing to meet Leslie and see thru the 6-inch comet seeker and the 12-inch Clark. Got to spend some direct face time with Carolyn Hurless, Tom Cragg, Ernst Meyer, Tom Wilson, Charles Scovil, Clint Ford, David Levy was there and was still active in AAVSO then and others I am forgetting today. A crowd of us slept on Carolyn and Don’s living room floor. As I remember Carolyn had just received the nice custom Maksutov-Cassegrain that was built for her.
One of the best astronomy meetings I ever attended, mixing astronomy with classical harpsichord music. What more could one ask for. Links to AAVSO pages below. No sure who wrote them as they are not signed.
I joined the AAVSO in 1968, so I was certainly observing when Leslie Peltier was alive. Although I was inspired by Starlight Nights, I unfortunately never met its author. I was, however, able to meet some other luminaries of the AAVSO at various meetings in the 1970s: Charles Scovil, Carolyn Hurless, Clint Ford, Margaret Mayall, John Bortle, Dorrit Hoffleit, Joseph Ashbrook, Helen Sawyer Hogg, and Marvin Baldwin, among others. I especially recall the 1973 and 1974 fall meetings, which saw the transition of the directorship from Mayall to Janet Mattei. I was unaware of much that was going on behind the scenes in the AAVSO at that time, so that the history by Williams and Saladyga was something of a revelation when I read it. – H. A. Smith
Reading the histories I see Morgan Cilley was at USNO were I spent most of my career–finished at the U.S. Naval Research Lab. I met Martha Stahr Carpenter at University of Virginia back in around 1980 when I was looking to get a objective spectrum of a star I was interested in from the UVA 10-inch objective prism survey. Of course, Janet Mattei but I didn’t meet her at UVA but at my one and only AAVSO meeting I attended. Janet I talked with several times at night when we were observing dwarf novae to alert her to outbursts starting so she could check/confirm then forward alerts to HEAO-2 and IUE projects. Many other names familiar in those short bios.
I was lucky enough to meet him in 1979. My dad was from Lima, Ohio and so we used to make the drive from Florida to Lima some summers to visit with all our relatives there. My grandmom knew someone who knew Leslie Peltier and was able to set up a visit for us. We drove to Delphos and met him at his house. He was still growing strawberries. I’ve never tasted such a fantastic strawberry in my life. We didn’t have a camera with us and I didn’t have a copy of his book to ask him to sign. I had read the copy in our local library in Titusville, Florida. I asked him to sign a sheet of paper for me and then taped that to the inside of the copy of Startlight Nights I later purchased.
In person, he was a kind and soft spoken man. It was a great privilege to meet one of my heroes. One interesting anecdote is that it settled the question for me of how to pronounce his last name. The last syllable is pronounced like a tear when you are crying and not in the French way of tee-ay.
We the lucky few…! I have some slides I took I’ll have to scan them to digital some day. Nice description of how to pronounce “Peltier”!
I have one slide that shows the original wood tube of the comet seeker tucked in a corner of the small observing room off the 12-inch dome. Of Leslie had retubed it for the Merry-go-round. I had my copy of “Starlight…” with me and got him to sign it. Now stored in a library quality acid free envelope.
Right next to “Startlight…” is my Comet Clyde Tombaugh signed “The Search for Planet-X”, Tony Simon (1965). This book I bought in grade school, back then grades 1 - 6, in the “Scholastic” books system you could buy. It too is in a library quality acid free envelope. Clyde came to USNO-Washington DC to give a lecture and I got him to sign it back in the 1990s.