Tribute to John Holmes
In keeping with a time-honoured tradition, I have been asked to produce an article about John Leonard Holmes on the occasion of his retirement from his position as North American Editor of Organic Mass Spectrometry. I have found this to be difficult task. There is no shortage of praise to sing, but I have difficulty thinking about John as retired. The word 'retired' has overtones of inactivity, an attribute which I do not associate with him at all. To me, his retirement as editor is not the end of an era. In fact, I realize that I am looking forward to a period where he will have some more time to spend with us in the lab.
John's contributions to this journal will be more appropriately described elsewhere in this issue by persons better qualified to do so than I am. I will therefore attempt to provide you with a mixture of fact and folklore about the man, his career, and the people who have worked with him at his home base, the Mass Spectrometry Centre at the University of Ottawa.
John received his chemical education at University College London, obtaining a doctorate in physical chemistry under the direction of Allan Maccoll, the Founder Editor-in-Chief of this journal. He then spent three post-doctoral years in Ottawa at the National Research Council of Canada, followed by two years as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. In 1962, he accepted a position at the University of Ottawa, where he has remained ever since.
John's involvement in ion chemistry started in 1964, when the Chemistry Department at the University of Ottawa received its first mass spectrom-