John Anderson '79 and Patricia Sells

When Alzheimer’s disease rippled through my father’s mind and eventually claimed his life, as a family we were completely devastated. We would question how this brilliant man could so thoroughly change right before our eyes, in what, at the time, seemed like everlasting months and years. Perhaps the most heartbreaking point was that interim of space when he could feel those memories leaving. There were no words at that time, nothing to say that could alleviate such a deafening roar of loss.

Robert “Duke” Sells was a gifted Physics professor, an author of several textbooks, honored as a Distinguished Teaching Professor and a definite lover of all things Physics. He was the very first Chairperson of the newly-created Physics Department and arrived in Geneseo with his family in 1963. He was known for always picking up the bill at restaurants, for scribbling intricate Physics problems on restaurant napkins as he and students or professors waited for lunch to be served and there was nothing better than a pick-up game of football with faculty against students. He had an incredible thirst for knowledge that was sweetly diverse — religion, the natural world, the stars up in the sky, the questioning black holes of the universe that begged for exploration, and the rich Genesee Valley history of notables like Mary Jemison, Boyd and Parker, and General Sullivan.

When a dear friend and former student, Dr. John Anderson (SUNY Geneseo, 1979) proposed an endowment in Dad’s name, we were thrilled. Perhaps the sweetest memories were the many former students who generously contributed to the project and took the time to write personal notes of how their lives had been enriched by one man’s life and love of Physics, kind notes with stories shared, and aspirations achieved through the next generation of teachers. That was always my father’s fundamental ambition: to lay the solid groundwork for the next generation of high school physics teachers.

-as told by Cynthia Pond ’84