Howard White died of Alzheimer’s disease Jan. 7, 2010.
Howie was born in Batavia, N.Y., in 1920, the son of a DuPont Corp. executive, and prepared at Choate. At Princeton he won numerals in wrestling and was a member of Charter Club. He majored in chemistry, was admitted to Sigma Xi, and graduated with honors.
From graduation until retirement, Howie’s career revolved around chemistry. Initially he was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. Administrative tangles and a bad knee kept him in both the Army and the Navy pools during the closing years of the war. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from Princeton in 1947. Armed with this degree, he was variously a research chemist at the Textile Research Institute, Princeton, the Stanford Research Institute, and the National Bureau of Standards. He also was for a time special assistant for research to the assistant secretary of the Navy.
Howie enjoyed sports of all kinds. He loved golf at Sankaty Head Golf Club in Nantucket and swimming from the island’s beaches.
He married Elizabeth (“Betty”) Wangler in 1949. They had two sons, Matthew and Michael. The three of them, along with Betty’s daughter, Sally, constituted Howard’s family. To them, the class sends its sympathy.