It appears well founded to say that Willi Richter was an outstanding person in many respects. Everyone who saw him for the Ðrst time must have been impressed by his stature, which would have qualiÐed him as a heavyweight sports champion. Everyone who got to know him professionally realized quickly that he or she was talking to a Ðrst class chemist who, in his special Ðeld of organic and biomolecular mass spectrometry, knew just about everything and everyone. And those who had the opportunity to sit at his table during co †ee or dinner discovered a highly educated cosmopolitan, who had travelled all over the world with open eyes and was able to entertain his company most amiably with intelligence, a good sense of humour and an inexhaustible supply of anecdotes.
Willi grew up in the small town of Wels, situated in rural Austria. After elementary and secondary schools he enlisted as a chemistry student at the University of Vienna. As was true for many Austrian students soon after the war, he was short of money, so that he had to earn part of his living during vacation time. Because he could arrange to live in Innsbruck less expensively than in Vienna, he moved there for his graduate education. He chose organic chemistry under the direction of Hermann Bretschneider and completed his thesis in synthetic heterocyclic chemistryÈat this juncture still far from mass spectrometry.
At the end of his studies Willi married Ute Wennrich, a young German pharmacy student, whom he had met in Innsbruck where she had spent a year on leave from Tu bingen.
Together with his wife, Willi then embarked for Cambridge, MA, to spend 2