Remembering William McCallion – mathematics professor played pivotal role in bringing the stars to McMaster

The six words at the end of professor William J. McCallion’s obituary in the Globe and Mail perfectly summed up his legacy at McMaster.

“Let darkness come…stars are overhead.”

Not only was McCallion the driving force behind the university’s history-making planetarium – he delivered a record number of celestial tours.

In 1943, McCallion – who’d just graduated from McMaster with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics – became both a sessional lecturer with the university’s naval training program and a member of the Hamilton chapter of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.

Six years later, the chapter’s 50 members committed to bringing a planetarium to Hamilton, similar to the one that had just opened at the Buffalo Museum of Science. McCallion successfully lobbied the university to be the planetarium’s home. Future McMaster President Harry Thode, who was then serving as Principal of Hamilton College, saw the planetarium as “a definite asset to the University and an aid in teaching astronomy.”

On Nov. 5, 1949, the Hamilton chapter presented McMaster with a Spitz planetarium projector. The sold-out event in Convocation Hall was the latest in a series of fundraisers to cover the projector’s $1,150 price tag – tickets to the event sold for 50 cents each and raised $125.

The projector’s inventor – former newspaper reporter and science educator Armand Spitz – was the evening’s guest speaker.  McMaster became the first in Canada to use his state-of-the-art projector. A few months later, McMaster’s planetarium again made history, becoming the first in Ontario to offer public tours of the stars.

The projector had a home but no dome. Student enrolment was soaring so space was at a premium on campus – converting a classroom into a permanent planetarium wasn’t an option. So McCallion enlisted the help of Evelyn Theodore Clarke, McMaster’s Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds, to build a makeshift planetarium. They designed a system to hang an army surplus parachute umbrella style from the ceiling in a Hamilton Hall classroom.

The price was right – only $20 – but it took three and half hours to move chairs in and out of the dome for a one-hour show. There was one other problem – the classroom wasn’t “light-tight” so shows could only happen at night. “This, of course, was a great handicap to teaching since it was not easy to assemble students in the evenings for classes,” McCallion and Truman Norton wrote in the RASC Hamilton Chapter’s August 1959 newsletter.

The parachute was retired in 1952 and replaced with another McCallion creation. Up to 60 people could sit inside his portable dome of corrugated cardboard covering a wooden frame. Converting a daytime classroom into a nighttime planetarium was now quicker and easier.

The planetarium finally had a permanent home when the Physical Sciences Building opened on Oct. 15, 1954. McCallion and Clarke once again joined forces to design the dome in a custom-built, light-tight room. Shows could now run day and night for university, secondary and elementary school students, along with community and church groups.

But audiences initially had nowhere to sit – the planetarium’s budget ran out before 60 theatre-style seats could be bought and installed. So yet another fundraiser was launched with friends of the planetarium buying the $25 chairs complete with commemorative bronze plaques.

Not only did McCallion design three domes and help raise money – during the planetarium’s first decade, he delivered upwards of 2,500 presentations to nearly 150,000 people as the director of public viewing. He even took the projector on the road at least two dozen times. In 1959, he enlisted the help of Reverend Norman Green and William Sled from the RASC’s Hamilton chapter to keep up with the public demand for shows.

Looking back on the planetarium’s first decade, McCallion and Norton said it had delivered on its promise to be both a “valuable teaching aid for astronomy classes” and “a very excellent public relations instrument to make the University better known to the community.” They hoped the success of the planetarium at McMaster would encourage more planetaria to open across Canada for “studying the stars without depending upon the stars.”

McCallion would go on to serve as Director of Educational Services and Dean of the School of Adult Education, retiring in 1978 and continuing as a mathematics professor until his second retirement in 1987.  Five years later, the planetarium was named in his honour.

McCallion – who’d bravely met the challenges of living with Parkinson’s disease for 29 years – passed away on April 18, 1998 in his 80^th year at the McMaster University Medical Centre.

The W.J. McCallion Planetarium today hosts more than 300 public and private shows annually, created and delivered by graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty in the Department of Physics & Astronomy. McMaster also brings celestial tours to the community with a portable planetarium.