By Jeff Hunter ’96

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In the early 1950s, Utah State University was still known as Utah State Agricultural College, and what would come to be known as the Taggart Student Center was simply called the Student Union Building.

When the much-anticipated grand opening of the new SUB officially happened in May 1953, USAC students were greeted by a large painting of a man wearing a beige lab coat over a white shirt and dark tie. At the time, there were professors and administrators still on campus who were familiar with the man in the portrait.

Eugene Gardner had graduated from Utah State 18 years earlier as both the valedictorian and the senior class president. But by 1950, one of the brightest minds ever to come out of the university was gone. 

A renowned nuclear physicist who played a significant role in the United States’ development of atomic weapons during World War II, Gardner ended up with berylliosis — a condition that he developed due to inhalation of toxic dust while working with the metal beryllium in the early ’40s — which led to his death at the age of 37.

Three years later, Gardner was memorialized in a brief tribute in Utah State’s yearbook. Known as The Buzzer, the piece was likely written by editor Darrell Deem and included a black-and-white version of the portrait from the SUB, albeit with Gardner’s hands and microscope cropped out at the bottom of the painting. 

A portrait of a serious, sensitive young scientist was hung in Utah State’s new student union building this year as a symbol to us — indeed to all Americans — of the highest courage which human beings display. This brilliant nuclear physicist, only thirty-seven at his death in 1950 was Dr. Eugene Gardner, a native of Logan, whose important work in atomic research resulted inadvertently in his death. Dr. Gardner was educated at Utah State. Many remember him as senior class president and valedictorian, class of 1935. Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and the University of California were the scenes of his research. He and a colleague are credited with discovery of the meson rated among the most fundamental advances in twentieth century physics. It is for us, his successors, to pay him and all men like him tribute by following his example and devoting our talents to the service of our fellowmen. He gave his last full measure in the interest of mankind and in doing so, made his own name immortal.

‘Genius’ Gets to Work

MaryJane Gardner Neville wasn’t born until 1952 — two years after her Uncle Eugene passed away in California.

The daughter of Eugene’s older brother, Eldon Gardner, Neville grew up in Logan, graduated from Utah State University and lived much of her early life in the same house on 100 South where her father and uncle were raised. 

“But I never heard my father talk about him growing up,” Neville says of Eugene. “Of course, I am the youngest of six children, so I think the older kids got a lot more than I did. … But because I didn’t know anything about (Eugene), I think that’s why I started writing these stories because it very fascinating to me to find out more about him.”

In 2018, Neville compiled a brief biographical sketch of Eugene Gardner that included many of the memories Eldon had of his brother, who was nearly four years younger than him. 

A longtime Utah State professor who passed away in 1989, in the last few years of his life, Eldon wrote a personal history to pass along to his posterity. And using her father’s notes — as well as some memories from others who knew him — Neville was able to share some insight into Eugene’s life that wasn’t found in the newspaper and magazine stories that focused on his scientific career. 

“My dad was amazing; I’m very impressed with him,” Neville says of Eldon Gardner, who served as the first dean of USU’s College of Science. “But he always said his brother was a genius, and he was much smarter than he was. He always stood up for [Eugene] and had great admiration for him.”

Born to John and Cynthia Gardner on March 22, 1913, Eugene was the second of the couple’s five children — twin sisters, Lucille and Marian, were born when he was 4, while brother William died shortly after birth. Unfortunately, another tragedy soon followed, and Eugene had to grow up extremely quickly. In October 1920 when Eugene was just 7 years old, John Gardner was attempting to fix a hot plate when he was electrocuted and died in the kitchen at the age of 40. 

To help provide for her family, Cynthia returned to work as a teacher at Woodruff Elementary School, while Eugene worked a variety of jobs as he got older, including that of paperboy, gardener, and store clerk. The start of the Great Depression in 1929 made life even more difficult for the Gardner family, but Eugene excelled at Logan High School, and he was involved in student government, the theater program, and also served as the editor of the school newspaper and yearbook.

“Eugene knew where he was going,” Eldon Gardner recalled. “He excelled in mathematics and physical science. In school, he was given extra assignments in all of these courses to keep him busy and interested. … He was an outstanding student, and besides his ability and interest in scientific fields he had much ability in speech and English. 

“His school friends nicknamed him ‘Genius,’ not in derision but out of respect. … In school (Eugene) didn’t seem to study much. In enforced study periods he became

restless. He read rapidly, retaining what he had read after the first reading and was soon bored. He found other things to do that were not always in keeping with the lesson or the rules of the school room. Yet scholastically, he was at the top.”

Despite the grievous manner that his father died, Eugene Gardner developed a strong interest in electricity and building and operating mechanical devices. His upstairs bedroom soon became off-limits to all visitors, and according to Eldon, “Was filled with copper wire, springs, bolts, used transformers, and other ‘valuable’ construction items that had been carried or dragged home from the Logan City dump, a half mile west of our home.”

“He built a telephone system and a radio, and he worked out experiments in a college physics laboratory manual all alone in his own bedroom. Mother despaired of any organization or prospects for cleaning up the room. It was left entirely to Eugene, and he appreciated the total responsibility for the appearance of his room.”

Eugene’s sister Lucille shared similar memories of Eugene’s unique living space. 

“Eugene was always playing around with electricity and doing experiments. He scared us to death!” she said. “He had the doorknob to his room wired so no one could get into it and bother his things. He left and entered his room by his bedroom window walking on the second-story roof and somehow dropping to the ground.”

And once he graduated from high school, Eugene Gardner hit the ground running at the university level.

“As soon as high school was out in May 1931, Eugene was on the (USAC) campus getting acquainted in the physics department,” Eldon noted. “He took a full load of summer quarter classes.”

Serving His Country

Eldon and Eugene Gardner ended up on campus together in 1931, after Eldon had served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in California. Eldon was a sophomore the year Eugene started school at Utah State Agricultural College, and the young Gardners were both interested in physics, partially due to the influence of their uncle, Williard Gardner, who was an esteemed professor and soil physicist.

By the time Eugene was a sophomore, he was already serving as a teaching assistant in the physics laboratory and was helping to teach some of the classes he hadn’t even taken yet. 

Maevonne Rees Moench, a cousin in-law, remembers encountering Eugene for the first time in a physics class in 1934: “He was so sharp; the professor turned the class over to him to teach. He carried a pocketful of class cards in his pocket. He was friendly, charming, and so good looking that any girl would have singled him out as the prince charming of the crowd. Yet, he showed no vanity. He was elected President of his class, but learning was his whole ambition. He was good as he was bright.”

During his senior year, Eugene was nominated for a Rhodes Scholarship, but according to Eldon, who graduated from USAC in 1934 and went on to attend graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, “He did not impress the committee in his oral response to questions about goals and objectives. At this time, Eugene had not yet become involved in research. He appreciated good teachers and was making every effort to be a good teacher in his TA assignment. Yet, the committee members thought he showed ‘no ambition by merely wanting to teach.”

That evaluation of Eugene Gardner would prove to be far off the mark over the next decade and a half. But then, he was also involved with numerous other pursuits beyond physics while attending Utah State. In addition to being named valedictorian, Gardner successfully ran for senior class president and continued to act in student theater productions. 

“Eugene was not a recluse scholar,” Eldon pointed out. “He was around the entire campus, and many faculty members and students were warmed and cheered by Eugene’s happy smile and warm friendly greeting. He was involved in school activities and was around the entire campus on various errands and goodwill projects.”

Eugene Gardner also managed to find the time to fall in love with Dorothy Johnson, who grew up primarily in Richmond before attending USAC to study English. Dorothy was named the Class of 1936 valedictorian, and the couple was married shortly afterwards on June 25, 1936.

At the time of their wedding, Gardner was teaching physics and mathematics at USAC, but in August 1937, he and Dorothy followed in Eldon’s footsteps and moved to Berkeley to both start graduate school. Dorothy completed her master’s in English in 1939, the same year Eldon was awarded his Ph.D., and Eugene decided that he missed teaching and Cache Valley.

“Because we were short of money, he returned to Logan during the academic year 1939-40 to teach at the AC again,” Dorothy said. “Gene was very good with people. He would have made a wonderful teacher. He knew how to draw people forward, to draw things out of them, without making them feel dumb.”

But after two years of teaching at Utah State, Eugene decided to return to his pursuit of a Ph.D. at Cal. Once back in Berkeley, he focused his research on the study of cosmic rays under the mentorship of Ernest Lawrence, the founder of the Radiation Laboratory (now the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and the 1939 Nobel Prize honoree in physics for inventing the particle separator known as the cyclotron.

Knowing that Germany was working on developing an atomic weapon at the outset of World War II, the U.S. government was already working towards a similar goal when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. What would become known as the Manhattan Project quickly pressed Lawerence and other nuclear physicists into service in the race to produce the world’s first atomic bomb.

“The U.S. government immediately interrupted Eugene’s studies and drafted the whole science lab and all the scientists (a high-level research team), including Eugene, to do research on radioactive material,” Eldon said. 

After spending the first couple of months of the war in Berkeley working on the process of uranium isotope separation, Eugene Gardner was sent to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in east Tennessee. Dorothy wasn’t even sure where he was or what he was doing for a few months, but she was eventually allowed to relocate to Oak Ridge, where Eugene spent a total of two years before being reassigned to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. During his time in Tennessee, Gardner did manage to complete work on his Ph.D. in 1943, but because his dissertation, which was entitled “An Investigation of Arc Discharges,” contained classified data, it was never published. 

The Gardners’ stay in New Mexico was rather short — with Eugene also spending time at the testing grounds in Wendover as he worked on the development of an implosion method and a detonation fuse for a plutonium weapon — and the couple returned to Berkeley in the fall of 1945, shortly after the United States orchestrated an end to World War II by dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

However, the Manhattan Project endured through August 1947, and Gardner continued his scientific research at the Radiation Laboratory, not knowing that he had already sealed his fate during the early days of the war.

Achievements and Tragedy

A year after the Manhattan Project end, Eugene Gardner made scientific history.

Working alongside celebrated Brazilian physicist César Giulio Lattes, Gardner used Ernest Lawrence’s larger synchrocyclotron at Berkeley to record the first photographs ever taken of artificially produced pions. 

Then referred to as pi-mesons, pions are a type of unstable subatomic particles known collectively as mesons that play a vital role in holding atomic nuclei together. Using the massive, 184-inch particle accelerator at the Radiation Laboratory, Gardner and Lattes proved that pions could be created in a controlled laboratory setting rather than having to wait for naturally occurring, highly unpredictable cosmic rays to strike photographic plates at high altitudes.

“The work of Gardner and Lattes opened the newest new age since the discovery of fission. It might roughly be compared to the discovery of America,” the University of California, Berkeley heralded at the time. 

Gardner and Lattes published their finding in the journal Science in March 1948, leading to the duo being recognized throughout the nuclear science community. 

An article in Time magazine heralded: “Many laboratories all over the world are greatly indebted to our American colleagues of Berkeley, California, for the very generous way in which, promptly and without conditions, they have exposed photographic plates to the particles provided by their machines. Gardner mastered the photographic technique and oversaw its adaptation to the cyclotron. The study of mesons might lead in the direction of a vastly better source of atomic energy than the fission of uranium.”

But according to Dorothy, about the same time of his greatest scientific achievement, Eugene was also dealing with the symptoms of a worsening illness that had yet to be diagnosed.

“They consisted mostly of unusual tiredness and shortness of breath,” she said. “He had always required great amounts of rest, and so the tiredness did not surprise us too much at first. But things did not improve, and eventually he was hospitalized for diagnostic tests (which proved inconclusive), and he was ordered away on a “rest cure” (which proved unhelpful). Finally, he was re-hospitalized for treatment of symptoms (since no real underlying cause had been identified).”

It would later be determined that Gardner had inhaled toxic dust while drilling a hole in an electrode made of beryllium oxide at Oak Ridge in 1942. At the time, the potential health danger of beryllium wasn’t known, so proper safety precautions weren’t taken by scientists like Gardner, who continued to work with beryllium well after the end of the war. He eventually developed the condition known as berylliosis, which severely affected the function of his lungs. 

By the time Eugene and Dorothy’s only child, a daughter named Claire, was born on July 4, 1948, Gardner was in and out of a hospital in nearby Vallejo. And eventually, doctors restricted all contact with Claire, and he was only allowed to see her through a window. 

But while his heart was broken and his lungs were failing, Gardner’s mental capacity was still strong. Even while in an oxygen tent dealing with tuberculosis and a painful case of shingles, he continued his research by studying meson photographs with a microscope right up until the day after Thanksgiving — Nov. 26, 1950 — when he passed away at the age of 37. 

“Eugene’s death was a severe loss to the scientific world,” Eldon declared. 

The rest of the world agreed, and stories eulogizing Eugene Gardner were printed in many large-circulation national publications, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, as well as numerous scientific journals. 

The short article in Time was headlined, “Science: War Hero” and included these final two sentences honoring Gardner: “During his final hours under an oxygen tent, knowing that death would no longer be denied, he worked with pencil and notebook, painfully gleaning his brain while he still had time for last bits of knowledge to pass along to the living. Last week at Vallejo, his work all but done, Dr. Gardner laid down his notebook and died.”

For the Love of Science

Seventy-three years after the opening of the Student Union Building, the exact whereabouts of the portrait of Eugene Gardner is unknown. Painted by a man with the same first name, the Eugene Montgomery painting was taken down at the Student Union Building at some point and ended up in the hands of Eldon Gardner. 

“I don’t know how my father got it, but the portrait hung on the wall in his office for as long as I can remember,” MaryJane Neville says. 

In addition to serving as the dean of Utah State’s College of Science, Eldon Gardner taught zoology and was dean of the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Utah. He was also a human genetics scientist who became one of the most esteemed cancer researchers in the country. The Eldon J. Gardner Teacher of the Year Award is given out annually to a USU professor in his honor. 

But right up until his death in 1989, it’s clear how highly Eldon revered his late sibling, Eugene.

“Rather than competing with or feeling jealous of his younger brother who overshadowed him — academically and in social popularity — Eldon was one of his greatest supporters and advocates,” Neville proclaims. “When Eldon received scientific awards and accolades my sisters, Pat and Alice, remember him saying, ‘Eugene was the smart one! I had to work really hard, but it came easy for Eugene. He was a genius. He was also well balanced, excelling in other areas besides physics. He was socially adept, great in drama and theatrics, and had a photographic memory.

“He had great admiration and respect for his brother.”

As did his alma mater, who honored Eugene Gardner with a plaque that hung on a wall in Old Main until renovations to the historic building in the early ’70s. Still housed in USU’s archives, the plaque reads: 

“In memory of Eugene Hill Gardner; President and Valedictorian; Class of 1935. Wartime atomic physicist and co-discover of the meson by laboratory methods who gave his life for the advancement of science and the defense of his country. His mind was one of America’s natural resources.”

Dorothy, who was married to Gardner for 14 years prior to his death, remarried about six years after his passing. Her second husband, Wilson Powell, was also a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and taught at Cal Berkeley after the war. Powell died in 1974, and Dorothy remained in northern California before passing away in 2004 at the age of 87. She is buried at the same cemetery in El Cerrito as both of her husbands.

The Gardners’ daughter, Claire, is now 78 years old and still lives in the Bay Area, but she was too young at the time of his death to have memories of her father. Neville says her family has interacted with Claire through the years and has shared as much information about Eugene and his family with her as possible. 

But as time marches on, fewer people are familiar with Eugene Gardner and his contributions to the U.S. war effort in the 1940s. Neville, who completed a bachelor’s degree in elementary education at Utah State in 1974, wants to keep Gardner’s memory alive. But at the same time, she realizes that the idea of someone helping to introduce atomic weapons to the world isn’t popular with everyone, “Even if his generation all believed they were doing the right thing; something that had to be done to stop the war.” 

“He wasn’t interested in making a bomb; that wasn’t his intention,” Neville says of her Uncle Eugene. “He was just so excited about physics — that was really his love — and all of the bomb stuff was not his making. He was forced into it, and he did what he had to do.

“He just loved physics, and it was more than a job — it was also his hobby,” she adds. “He loved to figure out problems, and it was challenging. But he had the mind for it. It was something that he loved to do, and he died doing it.”