Glen Lambertson

January 14, 1926 - August 30, 2020

Glen Lambertson’s life was an odyssey through the 20th century and into the 21st. He was born near the small coal mining town of Paonia, Colorado, in a farmhouse that had no electricity and only one water faucet. From a young age he was raised by a single mother, during the height of the Great Depression, doing his homework by the light of a kerosene lantern.

A good student, Glen was the first in his family to go to college, enrolling at the University of Colorado at the age of 16. After two years his education was put on hold; he was drafted into the Army in 1944. In World War II he served in the Tenth Mountain Division, the legendary mountain troops. He fought in the Tenth’s campaign to push German forces out of the Apennines in northern Italy in 1945, and was severely wounded in the battle to take Mount Belvedere. In an army hospital, his life was saved by a wonder drug that was just then coming into mainstream use; it was an antibiotic called “penicillin.” He received the Purple Heart and was presented with the Bronze Star by General Hayes himself, the commander of the division.

Thanks to the G.I. Bill, Glen was able to complete his degree in engineering physics, and went on to do graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley. At U.C. Berkeley he got involved in particle accelerator science, initially as an operator of the 184inch cyclotron, occasionally with the lab director Ernest O. Lawrence reaching over his shoulder “to turn up the knob.” This would be the start of a distinguished 50year career as an accelerator physicist. In the 1950’s, he modeled magnets to help design Berkeley’s “Bevatron,” a machine that could accelerate protons to energies of a billion electron volts. It was the beginning of the era of “Big Science” and the golden age of high-energy physics. The scientists who used the accelerator were modern-day alchemists, creating matter from energy as if by magic, proving Einstein right and eventually producing exotic anti-particles like the anti-proton. Glen was a codiscoverer of the anti-neutron. The accelerator would later produce high-atomic number “transuranic” elements that had never before been present on Earth. Glen’s career would take him to Brookhaven, New York, CERN in Geneva, and Fermilab in Illinois. The “Lambertson Magnet” is still used in modern particle accelerators.

On a blind date in Berkeley, he met Betty Jean Smith, a graduate student at UC. They would marry in 1950, and settle in Oakland. Their marriage would last 67 years until our beloved Grandma Jean’s death in 2017.

Glen was a responsible husband, father, and grandfather; he had a zest for life and adventure and a keen sense of humor. He was an avid skier until he was 82. He enjoyed gardening and home improvement projects. For many years he did all of his own automobile repairs, often on Citroëns, which he had become enamored with while living in Switzerland. After his retirement, he and Jean enjoyed traveling to many foreign lands including Japan, New Zealand, France, Germany, the former Yugoslavia, Romania, Italy, England, Turkey, Peru, and Chile. Glen was preceded in death by his siblings Wayne Lambertson, George Lambertson, and Mary Draper. He is survived by children Tali Pinkham and her husband Daniel Pinkham, Roy Lambertson and his wife Leah Lambertson, and Dean Lambertson and his wife Mary Gaines, grandchildren Hannah Pinkham, Claire Pinkham, Andrew Pinkham, Clayton Lambertson, Elena Lambertson, Kelly Lambertson, and Trevor Lambertson.

Though his personality faded away some in recent years, we will always miss Grandpa Glen’s good nature and bad puns, his relentless curiosity and insight, and his gentle kindness.