Joseph F. Dillon

Joseph F. Dillon, who explored the optical properties of magnetic materials and who in later life excited many with his enthusiasm for contemporary Japanese prints, died of pneumonia on 5 December 2021 at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Born in Flushing, New York on 25 May 1924, Joe Dillon was the elder son of Joseph F. and Ann E. (née McElroy) Dillon. At 10 years of age he lost his younger brother Paul in a drowning accident. Joe graduated from Townsend Harris High School in Manhattan and then studied at the University of Virginia, receiving a BA in physics. He spent 18 months at sea in the US Navy Reserve as communications officer, later executive officer, of the USS LST 834 as it sailed from Pittsburgh to North China, taking part en route in the invasion of Okinawa and the occupation of Japan.

After the war he married Eleanor Lee Valentine (known as Lee or “Suzi”) of Charlottesville, Virginia, and returned to graduate school at the University of Virginia, where he received a PhD in physics in 1949. For two and a half years he did research in biophysics at the animal virus research laboratory (now the Pirbright Institute) in Pirbright, Surrey, England, as an employee of the US Department of Agriculture.

Returning to this country, Dillon spent 40 years at Bell Laboratories (now Nokia Bell Laboratories) in Murray Hill, New Jersey. There he did fundamental and applied research on magnetism and the properties of magnetic materials. After his discovery in 1956 that some magnetic crystals were transparent, and that one could actually see the distribution of magnetism inside the crystals, the principal thrust of his research lay in exploring the optical properties of magnetic materials and using those properties as a research tool and in device applications. He published roughly 100 research papers and was awarded some 20 US patents. He was active for many years as an officer or organizing committee member of the annual US Conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials, as well as of the triennial International Magnetism Conference.

In 1966 Joe received a Guggenheim Fellowship and used it to spend a sabbatical year with his wife and two teenaged sons at the University of Tokyo’s Institute for Solid State Physics in central Tokyo. There he collaborated on work to study the IR properties of newly grown magnetic crystals and lectured widely. Kindled during the occupation, his interest in Japan deepened, and he resolved thereafter to visit Japan every three or four years. After one of these trips, in 1982, Lee and Joe set up as private art dealers specializing in contemporary Japanese prints. From that time on, trips to Japan were to attend to things scientific, to nourish the small print business, and to nurture their many friendships.

Joe and Lee lived most of their years together in a striking redwood-and-glass house, fairly radical in its time, pitched on the eastern slope of Mount Kemble in Morris Township, New Jersey. After his retirement from Bell Labs in 1992, Joe joined the Department of Applied Physics at Yale University as professor adjunct; after a few years he and Lee moved to Guilford, Connecticut, not far from Yale and several doors down the street from his son Drew and family. Only a few months after the move to Guilford, Lee suffered a serious stroke resulting in partial paralysis. Sentient but in pain, she was confined to a nursing home for five years before she died.

Since their early days in New Jersey, Joe and Lee had nurtured a close friendship with once-near neighbors Doris and Bill Childs, exchanging visits over the years and traveling together to France and various Caribbean islands. Their children knew each other from infancy. Bill died in 1992, and Lee in 2002. At the end of December 2003, Doris and Joe were married in her home in Brewster, on Cape Cod, in the presence of all their children and grandchildren. They went to Poʻipū Beach at the southern tip of Kauaʻi for a honeymoon, and returned for about six weeks each subsequent winter. On Cape Cod, Joe was an active volunteer at the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. He worked hard to master the ancient craft of fabric marbling, and he took up kayaking.

Not long before Doris died in 2014, she and Joe had moved from Cape Cod to Fox Hill, an independent living community in Westwood, Massachusetts, not far from Drew and from Doris’s children Bob and Kate. Joe delighted in his close bonds with the Childs children: Bob and his wife Hilary and their sons Liam and Chris in Arlington, Massachusetts, Lisa and her husband Scott in Portland, Maine, and their children Brita and Carey, and Kate and her husband Stuart in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He stayed in touch, too, with Max and Sam, the children of Doris’s eldest daughter Dana, who predeceased her mother in 2003.

Neither vain nor ostentatious, Joe kept body and mind fit throughout his life, investments to which in large measure he attributed his longevity. He sustained decades-long enthusiasms for swimming, photography, and astronomy. He welcomed the new with unflagging curiosity and he eagerly kept himself informed both about people dear to him and about the world at large.

Joe saw no contradiction between scientific rigor and aesthetic delight. His range was broad and his disposition playful. Uproarious chocolate or candied-ginger tastings he organized for family and friends, for example, typically involved spreadsheets and numerical scores. Likewise he numbered his eggs—from “1" in the mid-60s to something well into five figures, by the time he moved to Connecticut. When asked why he did this, he would always reply, “So I’ll know which one I ate.”

Likewise too, when the subject came up, he would express his age as a decimal fraction. Thus he died at 97.53.

Joe’s inquisitiveness was infectious, and to children of all ages he made for a consummate companion in charmed exploration of the world. At the same time, his was a wisdom of perspective—excess and blind habit didn’t much appeal to him. He didn’t insist on a second sliver of pie after dinner, or a touch of single malt whisky, for example, but he was not the sort to refuse either one. The last book he read was David Hockett Fisher’s Albion’s Seed.

Joe’s exuberant years in Westwood were punctuated by travel to archaeological sites in Spain, France, Britain, and Ireland. Back at Fox Hill, he gave illustrated talks detailing his adventures, mounted an exhibition of his marbled scarves, helped edit the in-house literary magazine, and took lavish advantage of a range of cultural and intellectual activities. His community of friends and admirers swelled, and his days were brightened, in particular, by his loving friendship with Jean Stanbury, also resident at Fox Hill and now also bereaved.

Joe leaves behind his elder son Jay, a rare-book dealer who lives with his wife Kathleen O’Brien overlooking the beach in Monmouth Beach, New Jersey, and his younger son Drew, a teacher who lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with his wife Debbie. Joe is further survived by three adored and adoring grandchildren—Laura Rose Dillon, John Andrew Dillon, and Alyssa Lee Dillon—and by Laura and her husband Jamie Wilson’s newborn daughter, Iris Clare Dillon. Joe lives on in each of them.

Those moved to commemorate Joe Dillon’s life and passions are invited to make contributions in his name to the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History .