We have only said hello while we saw each other at the Greenmeadow events.  Our thoughts and prayers to the entire Mandell family.
Shantha & VJ Mohan

Joe loved vegetable gardening, and grew cucumbers, squashes, and tomatoes. But he often had an ongoing struggle with the increasingly large population of ever‑hungry neighborhood squirrels.

After spending time studying the squirrel's behavior,  he discovered that the squirrels learned about eating tomatoes from other squirrels and hypothesized that by removing those squirrels with “tomato knowledge” he would be able to reduce the number of tomatoes that were eaten.

In an effort to resolving the problem, he got a couple of "have-a-heart" traps and carefully began trapping and driving the squirrels to the other side of the freeway to Baylands Park. The thought being that no squirrel would be able to make it back over the freeway without being squashed!.

Each year he kept a log of the date and time of each “rehomed” squirrel. One year he logged over a 100 squirrel relocations!  

Amy and I last saw Uncle Joe in 2017 when we all celebrated Marion's Avenidas award.  But our time together then reminded us of how welcoming Joe and Marion were to Amy when she and I were dating.  They were the first members of my family (other than Mom and Dad) that Amy met, and were a great entry point.  Their kindness was very evident.  We will be thinking of Joe often. 

One time when Uncle Joe and Aunt Marion came to visit us on Long Island, my mom (Marion's older sister Syril) and Aunt Marion went to Huntington to walk and window shop especially at the store Little Switzerland which had old dolls and toys. Uncle Joe asked me to take him to Cold Spring Harbor Labs where he had worked at the time Linnea and Doug were born. There seemed to be no security--we just walked on through and Joe knew where he was going--straight to Barbara McClintock's lab. She was there and we had a nice chat with her. I was very impressed and later went and read a biography about her. This is the woman famous for the "jumping genes" in the multi-colored corn. I remember Joe asking her what she thought about the human genome project and she said, well that was one person's genome but she felt they'd end up finding out that genes were much more fluid than they expected. It was a real treat to meet her! After, we went up the hill to see the Hersheys. Alfred Hershey was another Nobel Laureate. Unfortunately, he was in constant severe pain and didn't stay in the room with us, though his wife did and she and Joe reminisced about the days long past.

One could say that growing up with Joe as my father was never dull. One of the days that I always looked forward to as a child was the 4th of July. Sure there was a local parade, a band, floats and festivities and games in the local park, but the best part was always the evening fireworks.

But I'm not talking about the big commercial firework shows that every city has, I'm talking about homemade fireworks. Since fireworks were outlawed in the city in which we lived, we would always spend the evening at the house of our long time family friends, the Lewis', in Los Altos where fireworks were still allowed.

Now "safe and sane" fireworks were fun but very predictable and somewhat dull. For several years, my father the chemist, would spend the week before the 4th making fireworks. He started with recipes from am old Dover publications reprint in paperback and worked from there.

When the sun went down it was time for the fireworks show to start! Each homemade firework would be lit one at a time, Now making fireworks is a tricky science and the homemade fireworks were anything but predictable. Some would explode immediately on the stand, some would fizzle and barely pop, and some would fire beautifully in the air in a dazzling array of colors.

Each firework was fitted with a length of underwater fuse that had been acquired at the local surplus store. This added more to the mystery and excitement as you could not see the fuse burn and never knew when the firework would start going off!

One year, during my elementary school years, he was carefully mixing the chemical powers in the backyard on the ping pong table. I came by, excited to watch the "manufacturing" process in action. He explained each chemical in turn that was used to make blue fire, and those to make red fire. I was completely captivated.

I then suggested that if he mixed the red fire powder with the blue fire powder, we could make purple fire! Joe explained that these were very dangerous and unstable oxidants and that just the process of stirring the power could be enough to cause it to ignite. But I was not deterred and begged him to make purple fire.

Against his better judgement, he finally agreed and carefully added the blue fire mixture to the red fire mixture. No sooner did he get halfway through then the whole thing burst into flame! As Dad reached to grab the fire extinguisher I was transfixed. The mixture was indeed burning with a purple flame!

In high school, everyone knew who Joe Mandell was because he was the one who used to argue with the chemistry teacher, and he was usually right! Throughout school, Dad was well known as an amazing, brilliant nerd, and he received his doctorate and worked at Cal Tech. (Linnea and Craig are huge fans of the Big Bang Theory, and love this connection!)