John A. Eddy - Childhood and Education

Childhood and Education

John Eddy was born (March 25, 1931) and raised in Pawnee City, Nebraska, a small town of 1600 people in the southeastern corner of the state. John’s brother Robert was two years his senior and his sister Lucille was two years his younger. John’s father managed a cooperative farm store where John worked until he started high school. John’s mother had attained college for one year and was a county schoolteacher until she married John’s father. The Eddy family lived in a modest but happy home but were of limited economic means and there was serious concerns that they could not afford a college education for John. As it turned out, John was the only member of the family to graduate from college. In 1948 John attended Doane College in Crete, Nebraska for one year, a distance of some 80 miles (130 km) from his home. In 1949 he was appointed by Senator Kenneth Wherry (R) of Nebraska, who also resided in Pawnee City, to the U.S. Naval Academy. At Annapolis, there were few science courses but John attended a course in celestial navigation and it was this course which gave John a love of the sky. So great was his interest in the night sky that once after Taps, John crawled out on the roof of Bancroft Hall to look for the Constellation Draco and was caught by an officer who gave him 5 hours of extra duty for not being in bed.

Upon graduation in 1953 from the United States Naval Academy he served for four years at sea as a line officer on aircraft carriers during the Korean War and later in the Persian Gulf as navigator and operations officer on a destroyer in the Atlantic Fleet. In 1957 he left active service in the Navy to continue his education. He was discharged and accepted into the graduate school at the University of Colorado’s mathematics program but switched departments, before the start of the Fall 1957 semester, upon discovering the University's little observatory and a small program in astro-geophysics that had just been started, becoming the program’s first student. Later he joined the High Altitude Observatory at the University of Colorado.