Former UMaine astronomer reminisces about unpacking the mysterious universe

George Ayers was a practical man. He enjoyed walking almost everywhere he went, spending quiet time in nature with his family, and finding a good deal.

But his greatest passion was to make easy to understand what seemed mystical and inexplicable. He devoted his life to teaching astronomy to his many students at the University of Maine, to his children, grandchildren through a backyard telescope, and to strangers who read his “What’s Up” column in the Portland Pages Press Herald. .

Ayers died at his home in Gorham on May 10. He was 96 years old.

In an interview at the family home Sunday, Ayers’ wife and children said that while he was a lifelong teacher, he was not one to lecture. He preferred to engage his students with practical lessons. His children remember him placing marbles, tennis balls and basketballs in the backyard to demonstrate the different sizes of the planets. He often took students to the roof of Bailey Hall on the USM campus in Gorham, where he set up telescopes so they could see distant galaxies for themselves.

Born on December 22, 1927, in Camden, Ayers was the middle of five children and grew up working in his family’s fish market.

In a letter to his grandchildren, Ayers wrote about the green bicycle he rode as a teenager. When the weather warmed each spring, he rode down Camden’s main street blowing the black horn attached to his handlebars to “proclaim the joys of spring in abundance and have a bicycle.”

He had a gift for spotting beauty wherever he went, his family said, and he never missed a chance to indulge in it.

After serving in the Army for two years during the post-World War II cleanup in Europe, he was waiting to board a ship home from Italy when a band in port began playing a popular song of the era, “Deep Purple.” He stood and listened long enough to almost miss the boat, he told his wife, Ruth Ayers.

During the weekly trip home, he felt claustrophobic in the ship’s sleeping quarters, she said, so at night he would go up on deck and fall asleep watching the stars, the only pinholes of light in the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.

‘QUIET AND EASY’

Ayers met his wife in a biology lab at the University of Maine in Orono. They were lab partners in the fall semester, but she said it wasn’t until after Christmas that he got up the courage to ask her out. Once united, they were inseparable.

They later took German together, and their children – Pam, Mark and John – remember occasionally speaking it at the dinner table when they wanted to talk privately.

They were known to friends as “R and G” and were married on June 22, 1952, at the Schoolhouse Methodist Church in Gorham. The license plate on their blue Toyota reads “R&G22”.

They exuded a quiet comfort and enjoyed many shared hobbies, their children said. They enjoyed going to their family cabin in Newfield, where they would canoe, skip rocks and spend time in nature.

“Being together was smooth and easy,” Ruth Ayers said.

After graduating from UMaine, the couple moved into a small shack in George Ayers’ parents’ backyard, and he began a career as a teacher. He taught high school science and served as principal at Dennysville, Albion and Unity high schools before moving to Ohio to earn a master’s degree from Ohio State University.

Although he was there to study physics, he enrolled in an astronomy class on a loop and was immediately intrigued, his wife said. He earned his master’s degree in physics, but when he returned to Maine, he taught astronomy for decades and eventually founded an astronomy program at the University of Southern Maine.

In his spare time, he wrote a monthly astronomy column published in newspapers across the state. He prepared the Portland Press Herald’s sky charts until 2021, when he chose to retire at age 93.

Growing up, his children remember constantly bumping into their father’s students and hearing them say he was their favorite teacher.

As a father, they said, he was kind and gentle. When they were in high school and college, he would wait with the light on, no matter how late, until they were home in bed.

“He was always concerned that we were safe,” said Mark Ayers, the couple’s oldest son.

Usually, in order to stick to a regular bedtime, Ayers would occasionally ignore them and wake the family to go outside and look through the telescope. Whether in search of a comet or Venus or a meteor shower, they all spent countless hours in the backyard, heads bowed to the sky.

WAITING FOR MAY

Ayers was health conscious and rarely drank alcohol. His granddaughter Kelly Caiazzo remembers him feeding his cats egg yolks, preferring the whites for their lower cholesterol content.

Although he never smoked cigarettes, he packed nearly a hundred packs into an old tweed suitcase stored in the attic. He got each card free with a coupon, his family said. He didn’t mind resisting a cigarette, but he couldn’t resist much.

Ayers had a dry sense of humor and a quick wit. When he was hospitalized with pneumonia years ago, he joked that he probably shouldn’t buy green bananas because he might not be around to see them ripen.

When he was released, his daughter bought him a bunch of green bananas. He posed for a photo with them, smiling.

Even as Ayers became a more accomplished astronomer and gained a deeper and deeper understanding of the cosmos, his family said his appreciation for the world’s beauty never waned.

When he was diagnosed with stomach cancer earlier this spring, he told his children he wanted to live to see May, his favorite month.

He loved the way the world turned green, the way flowers burst from the ground. Although he could not spend much time outside in his final days, the family brought bouquets to his bedside.

The night he died, the aurora borealis lit up the skies over Maine. And like many times before, his family went outside and looked at the sky. They realized, thanks to Ayers, that the green waves dancing above them were an emission of energy from the sun interacting with the earth’s gaseous atmosphere.

But they enjoyed them all the same. They were still magic.

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