“You knew Paul Corio?”
I met Mark by way of Pearl Tsang. Pearl and I were both fellow travelers through post doctoral research in the Vold lab at UCSD.I knew of Mark early on in my career by reading the paper by Rance and Byrd on spectral distortions of echo acquired chemical shift powder line shapes while in graduate school at Columbia University.
When Mark and Pearl moved to the greater Cincinnati area, it was big news for me because I grew up in northern Kentucky just across the Ohio river. Not long after they were setting up shop, I made the effort to extract myself from the usual family visiting schedule to see first hand the new labs. I had heard about the big magnets being installed at Mark's lab since I was working at Varian in the R&D department and the hallway conversations were all about it. My current projects were gradient designs for high resolution probes and susceptibility matching of probe materials. It was exciting to be able to visitscientists that were putting these efforts into practice on demanding experiments. I had a fine tour and visit and told myself that whenever I visited home I would come again. Alas, that never happened. There was however, always the ENC meeting when it was on the west coast.
At one ENC around 2009 thereabouts, I ran into Mark and Pearl. Not long before, I had left Varian and it was clearly time for us to catch up. Somehow I started to explain how I entered the NMR field and mentioned that my undergraduate advisor at the University of Kentucky was Paul Corio, and that he gave me a special projects class assignment to study the Bloch equations by reading the first chapter of Paul's book and by reading the original papers by Bloch and Hansen.
Mark had a funny look on his face as I was telling the story and I finally stopped and asked "what?". And he said, "You knew Paul Corio?, I never thought that I would ever meet anyone alive that knew Paul". This lead us into a fairly long conversation about Paul's book and how much we admired it. For me, I always knew it was a great book, and it was interesting to see that Mark recognized this as well. That did not happen very often in my experience. I think it was a very happy conversation for both of us. When it was time to move on and get lost once again on our own paths winding through Asilomar, Mark stopped and gave me his parting words: "The name of my unix computer is "corio" ".
