JACKIE BUCK HAD TO GET BACK ON HER FEET QUICKLY. THERE HAD been a little bit of money saved up, but not much. None of Buck’s patents were producing any income of note, although the MIT patent office would keep her up to speed on its progress nonetheless.
The dean of one of the local graduate schools, a friend of the family, wanted to help out when he learned of Buck’s death. He let Jackie study social services on a part-time basis—it was the first time the school had ever let anyone study part-time.
Spreading her study over a few years, she eventually got her degree and started working for the child guidance movement, then for Massachusetts General Hospital before applying for a job in the guidance department at MIT. She spent thirty years working in the same buildings where her late husband had performed his experiments.
Jackie started to call her neighbors in Wilmington her angels. When the babysitter couldn’t make it or she got held up at work on short notice, it was Nancy Bodenstein, Jeanne Collins, and Shirley Harding—the same three women who had gone with her to see Fidel Castro speak—who would lend a hand.
Jeanne Collins had seven children of her own, but would quite often make space for the Bucks. As Jackie remembers, “Jeanne, who cooked every day for nine, thought nothing of adding another four to her table, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Likewise, Nancy Bodenstein would insist on sharing their evening meal. Nancy would apologize, saying that it was a ‘pretty simple meal.’ I told her that it tasted like ambrosia. After a long day and commute, it was such a help not to have to prepare a meal, in addition to the nightly baths, putting-to-bed ritual, laundry, and preparing generally for the next morning.”
With Jackie working at MIT, many of Buck’s old friends stayed in close touch with the family. When the family outgrew the house in Wilmington, they rented a bigger place at beneficial rates from Harold “Doc” Edgerton, the MIT professor who pioneered the strobe light and worked on subsea cameras with Jacques Cousteau.
Carolyn, Douglas, and David only knew their father through other people’s stories. Every day after school they would wander the corridors of MIT, waiting for their mother to finish work. Douglas in particular liked to look for his dad’s old equipment.
“I remember once when he was leading around the president of MIT, James Killian [Eisenhower’s former science adviser], and they were looking for a cryotron probe that Doug was sure was there in a closet somewhere,” Jackie says. “Everyone was so fond of the children, because they were so fond of Dudley. Killian could see that Doug was earnest in trying to find his dad’s things.”
Jerome Wiesner, the dean of science and a trusted adviser to President John F. Kennedy, also knew the Buck kids by name and would always say hello.
If Jackie was struggling to find her children, she usually tracked them down in Doc Edgerton’s lab. When Edgerton wasn’t building equipment for Jacques Cousteau, he would let them play around with his cameras. Doug, Carolyn, and David would take turns photographing drops of milk falling with Edgerton’s rapid-fire, freeze-frame cameras. They would line up shots for his famous experiments photographing bullets passing through apples, bananas, and playing cards.
Doug was only two years old when his father suddenly died. Growing up, he was always hearing remarks from his father’s former colleagues about the legacy he had left behind. Yet he had little idea of the specifics.
In 1975 Doug Buck decided to start gathering together more information about his father’s life with the aid of another former MIT professor, Bernie Widrow. The Internet was starting to change the world, and the roll call of pioneers from the 1950s and 1960s did not include Dudley Buck.
Doug wanted to change that. Piece by piece, he procured Dudley’s lab books and notes from MIT. With Bernie Widrow’s help, Doug tracked down other people who had known his father. He sifted through boxes of files in his mother’s attic, finding his father’s diaries and correspondence. He also found a large collection of travel receipts recording journeys all over America—including frequent trips to Washington, DC. It was there too that Doug found the cryptic military papers that later transpired to be orders for two covert missions conducted in the Eastern bloc for an unofficial wing of the CIA.
Not long after Doug began his research, Killian approached him at an MIT function. He punched Doug on the shoulder and said: “Your father invented everything.”