Diana used to joke that she “always was a bride and never a bridesmaid” and that, for her, “wedding bells were like an alarm clock.” She did stress that neither line was original and that both ignored the engagements that, for one reason or another, did not result in marriage.
One such engagement was not only a tale of unknown potential in terms of “what-if” scenarios, but also the reason for her first trip to California.
In September of 1943, Diana was to go on a blind date. At the last moment, Bill Baum, a friend of said date, called to tell her the date had to leave town and asked if she would mind his taking her out instead.
They seemed to hit it off well enough that Baum, who was at the University of Rochester doing work in the physics department, took her to see the laboratories where he and colleagues were in the final stages of experiments. Diana recounted that Baum became faint and, as he began regaining consciousness on a gurney, made some self-deprecatory crack about how he was probably the worst possible date she could have been with.
She insisted that his tour of the physics facilities was fascinating and one thing led to another so that, by October, they were engaged to be married. He had to return to Pasadena (what, today, is the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) so she took her first trip (by train) to the “Golden State.”
The stark differences between Rochester and Pasadena and her impressions of California are the subject of her letter to her parents shortly before her 21st birthday.
Bill and Diana went their separate ways and lost touch with one another for about three decades. A year or two before she and i met (1972? 1973?), Diana was performing in Washington, DC, when some friends came backstage to congratulate her after the concert. They introduced her to a visiting guest, a Dr. William E. Brunk causing Diana to ask what kind of doctor he was.
When he replied that he was an astrophysicist she asked if he knew Bill Baum which, in turn, brought about one of those “small world” remarks since Drs. Baum and Brunk worked down the hall from each other at Flagstaff.
Soon after this chance conversation, Diana and Tom had dinner with Baum when Baum spoke at a NASA symposium in Washington, DC. That was the last time they ever saw each other.
Around 1999 Diana googled Baum and found he’d moved from Flagstaff, years earlier, and was a physics professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Diana was going to phone Baum but had a cold that took a while to shake so the next time she remembered to google him, 
, the first hit was an obit.
Diana sent a sympathy card to his widow, Ester, which moved her to start an e-mail exchange that continued until Diana’s death. A few months into their discourse, Ester asks Diana to speculate about whether or not Bill was shy. Although Diana did not mention it in her reply, she did muse aloud for nearly a minute about how no way existed to know if, had they married, Bill might have become an amateur musician or Diana an amateur astrophysicist (in addition to the biochemistry study she took on in 1952?).
The lesson Diana’s life teaches is the value of adaptability and, in her case, insatiable curiosity. In her final decades, she was into everything: physics, marine biology, constitutional law, while still interested in machine knitting and even music as well as good food. This diversity of interests is reflected in some of the stray items in her desk drawer. (1997 Golden Ear Award and fascination for technology)
At PARC and Stanford, she more than held her own with Paul Ehrlich, Arno Penzias, Mark Weiser, George Schultz, Doug Hofstadter, Robert Bork and others.
May 2017