On May 3, 2000 Canada lost one of its pre-eminent spectroscopists, Professor Murray Brooker of Memorial University, Newfoundland. Murray grew up in Toronto, obtained his B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1963 and his Ontario Teacher Certificate from OISE in 1964. During that period he was to say later that his first love was sports-a love he never lost. After two years of teaching at the secondary school level he enrolled for the Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo and I had the good fortune to become his research supervisor.Those were the days of the Cary 81 Raman spectrometer with Toronto mercury arc, strip chart recorders, intensities measured by area with a planimeter, or by weight, the early days of the Attenuated Total Reflectance infrared and the MIR. Murray did outstanding work; he was a gifted experimentalist and coaxed much from the instruments and the data. The focus was on the ion-ion and the ion-solvent interactions. Murray explored nitrate-nitrite mixtures, trace nitrate levels of detection, crystalline field effects in the IR and Raman spectra of powdered alkali metal, silver and thallous salts (remember that this was before lasers), assignments of isotopically different forms of nitrate in ionic crystals, studies of hexaaquozinc(II) in anhydrous methanol, interactions and residence times (from line width studies) in aqueous alkali metal nitrite solutions, methods and advantages of MIR,-all this and more in four short years. During this time Murray's love and talent for teaching was exploited and he tutored the tutors at Waterloo. He also found time to found the rugger team, with Terry Gough as faculty advisor.After he left me he spent two years as a visiting scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he honed his understanding of transverse and longitudinal modes in crystals and isotope and photochemical effects. Some 27 papers originated from those formative years and set the stage for his later work on crystals, molten salts, complex ions, hydrogen bonding, minerals, and isotopes. George Boyd was to write me ''We were delighted with Murray Brooker during the time he was with us; I was greatly impressed by his exceptional intelligence, industry and ability. Murray accomplished a great deal as you will see from papers yet to appear in chemical and physical journals.''
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