Dr. William Charles McHarris passed away unexpectedly on September 19, 2022, one week after his 85th birthday. He was born in Knoxville, TN, though he and his parents (Margaret Alice Zimmerman McHarris and Garrett Clifford McHarris) lived just outside the city; he earned his 4H badge for growing corn, and he was the designated member of the family for milking the goats. In high school he played the organ for the First Christian Church of Knoxville, thus starting his long career of playing any musical instrument that has a keyboard (plus others). At Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, he studied composition, choral conducting, and organ performance in the Oberlin Conservatory and played saxophone in the college band. He majored in chemistry in the college and worked summers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and finally made the difficult decision to do chemistry as a career and music as a hobby.
Just before graduation he became engaged to fellow student Rilla Spangler. They married in 1960 in West Chester, PA. After a honeymoon in the hills of West Virginia (a rattlesnake took its afternoon naps on the path to the outhouse) they began their graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley. Bill earned his Ph.D. in Nuclear Chemistry in 1965 and soon accepted a joint faculty appointment in the Departments of Chemistry and Physics & Astronomy at Michigan State University. He was rapidly promoted to Full Professor, and East Lansing turned out to be a nice place to live, work, and play, and they stayed. He published some 150 papers and approximately 300 abstracts in nuclear science.
In later years he became interested in Chaos Theory and travelled to many countries to give talks and exchange ideas with others working on this scientific frontier. He contributed a prize-winning essay, “It from Bit or Bit from It…Nature and Nonlinear Logic” to FQXi, an organization formed to “catalyze, support, and disseminate research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology”. The book he was writing on Chaos remains incomplete.
Bill and Rilla became “eclipse chasers,” exploring the world when they went wherever a solar eclipse occurred. At home, Bill collected and nurtured tropical cacti (not desert cacti) and orchids. His biggest orchid plant had 78 blooms one year. He was the family dessert chef, and chocolate decadence was his speciality.
Bill enjoyed an astounding variety of musical genres and instruments. He composed for ragtime piano, participated in ragtime festivals, and posted performances on YouTube for everyone to enjoy. He served as organist for a number of churches, and composed the music for his own wedding. He played a theremin built for him by Robert Moog, the inventor of the world’s first commercial synthesizer. (The eerie sound of a theremin is most notably displayed in horror movies.) He played the carillon and the saxophone. He sang in church choirs, the Arts Chorale of Greater Lansing, the MSU Chorale Union, and the Steiner Chorale, and he sang and danced with the Renaissance Singers. The annual Christmas greeting from the McHarris family was always a new and timely composition.
Bill’s daughter, Dr. Louise Alice McHarris, practices medicine in Portland, Oregon. She has inherited his love of music and has passed that on to her children, Susan (a student at Swarthmore College) and Benjamin (a senior in high school). All the cats he has ever loved live on in their photographs.
A memorial service will be held at Mayflower Congregational Church, 2901 W. Mount Hope Avenue, Lansing, at 3 p.m. on October 9.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Mayflower Church or to the Opera Society, College of Music, Michigan State University.
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