Today I was combing a chapter for any permissions requirements. This is when I include a snappy quote and need to get approval (pay money?) from the publisher or sometimes the author. One engaging account of a dramatic episode in 1950s history, the 1955 lighting of a small Idahoan town Arco by a small boiling-water reactor experiment, is written by Ray Haroldsen, an engineer then at Argonne Laboratory.
This book was originally on an Argonne website page. It has now disappeared but when looking for it online, I chanced upon Haroldsen’s obituary. Eerily, he died just a fortnight ago. He was aged 95 and sounds like a very likeable man indeed.
Sometimes when writing history, the past collides with the present.