Alan Whitney’s ‘enduring’ legacy spanned music and astronomy
Whitney was a musician and radio astronomer who lived in Acton for 33 years until he passed away in September at 81.
He was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in a powdered wig, ruffled shirt, and black, buckled shoes.
She, draped in a white dress covered in magic-marker musical notes, was the composer’s score.
Alan Whitney and his date, Lois Anne Logemann, attended a 1973 Halloween party in costumes inspired by their love of music. They had met four years earlier playing violin in a musical revue of “West Side Story” on stage at Kresge Auditorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Alan asked for her phone number and wrote it on his program.
The rest was history. And science.
A Wyoming native, Whitney was a radio astronomer who lived in Acton for 33 years until he passed away in September at 81. He and his wife had celebrated their 50th anniversary last June.
After Lois Anne’s parents relocated to a retirement community, the Whitneys moved from the town of Harvard into the Conantum neighborhood home where she grew up, staying there for nearly 30 years before moving to Newbury Court in 2022.
To their surprise, the couple discovered that Alan Whitney’s roots date back to 1775 Acton and to Samuel Whitney, who served as muster master of the Minute Men, town moderator, and a delegate to the First Provincial Congress, said Lois Anne. A wealthy merchant, he lived on what is now Lexington Road, in what is known today as The Wayside. He left for Maine in about 1778, she said.
A scientific breakthrough
Whitney’s sister, Carol Anderson, recalled their childhood on a small family dairy farm outside Cheyenne, where they would show heifers at the 4-H fair. But her brother was always drawn to electrical systems and woodworking.
“He was proud of being a ‘nerd’ in high school,” Carol said. “His classmates teased him, calling him Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin. I think he enjoyed that.” Whitney (Alan, not Eli) won the state science fair by building a satellite telemetry receiver from components available on the farm.
Whitney had a teacher who urged him to pursue music, but his passion for science guided him to MIT, where he earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering.
He joined MIT’s Haystack Observatory in Westford as a radio astronomer and principal research scientist in 1974, after spending several years there as a graduate student working with Professor Irwin Shapiro. Alan was “one of my best students as well as a wonderful human being,” Shapiro said.
Among Whitney’s proudest achievements was being part of the historic team that produced the first image of a black hole, for which he and his colleagues were awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2019.
Moving through the ranks of principal research scientist to associate director and interim director, Whitney was shortlisted for permanent director, but felt he was too close to retirement. Most of his career involved developing and using a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) for astronomy and geodesy. In 2011, Whitney received an MIT Excellence Award.
Contributing to the 2019 effort that provided visual evidence confirming theoretical predictions about black holes was a career high point. The image was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, which used VLBI to connect eight radio telescopes located around the globe into a single, virtual telescope the size of Earth, enabling the resolution to see an object about 55 million light-years away.
Colin Lonsdale, former director of the observatory, described his colleague as an “astute technologist” who possessed “great vision.” His legacy, Lonsdale says, “is deep, wide, and enduring.”
Relentless curiosity
Whitney possessed “incredible drive,” said his son Eric Whitney, an IT consultant. “It wasn’t enough for him to simply participate in life; he had to master it,” earning a scuba license and learning to fly planes. His relentless curiosity fueled his interests. “Who else gets a pacemaker and immediately tries to connect to it with Bluetooth to see if he can adjust the settings?”
Whitney helped Sarah, his daughter, and Eric with their school assignments, from solving complicated math problems to constructing a 2-foot-tall Eiffel Tower. “I would show up at school with projects that were clearly not made by a fifth grader,” Sarah said.
Her dad was “one of the most brilliant people I know — impeccably practical and never one to waste anything, especially energy,” said Sarah, a violinist and career coach for musicians. “He commanded the household thermostat,” and if she complained, he would fetch his “ancient 1970s blue puffer jacket, twice my size, and say, ‘Here. This should keep you warm.’”
Whitney was “a good listener who was unconditionally supportive of me and my music career,” she said. He missed very few of her concerts, no matter where they were. “He taught me what it means to really step up for the people you love,” said Sarah.
The family went on bike rides, played softball, hiked, and traveled to Wyoming to view the 2017 total solar eclipse. Whitney vowed to take his children to every national park in the country before they graduated from Acton-Carlisle High School. “And he nearly did it,” said Sarah.
‘Always there, smiling’
Her husband, Lois Anne said, loved spending time with Eric and his wife Heather’s two sons, Daniel and Harrison, who “adored him.” Daniel, 12, said his grandpa played cornhole with them and cracked jokes “out of the blue,” adding that “he was always there, smiling.”
Whitney spent hours in the home workshop set up by his father-in-law. He built wooden toys, and “was able to fix anything,” said Lois Anne. Jim Moran, his friend and colleague, said Whitney’s “specialty was cars — oil changes, brakes, head gaskets — you name it.”
He and Lois Anne continued as violinists for many years, performing in productions by the Sudbury Savoyards and Symphony Pro Musica. Lois Anne has played in the Acton Orchestra and Acton Players and is a member of the Lincoln Ringers, a handbell choir.
Recently, Lois Anne sat in her cozy apartment among piles of documents and photographs, recalling moments from her long marriage and her husband’s remarkable career. Nodding to a corner flooded with natural light, she said Whitney spent hours there in his favorite reading chair.
Smiling as she reminisced, Lois Anne said her husband’s farming background and “Western demeanor” sometimes revealed themselves. As did his sense of humor — as on the day they went shopping before their wedding, and Whitney was looking through racks of formal wear.
“Mom won’t recognize me,” he told his wife, “in a Pierre Cardin suit.”
