Willie Ray "Karimi" Mackey; rocket scientist who loved the stars
Hyfler/Rosner
Monday, August 30, 2004
Alana Baranick
Plain Dealer Reporter
Willie Ray "Karimi" Mackey felt a kinship with the primitive
Dogon people of West Africa, who have been mapping the stars
for more than 800 years.
The 51-year-old NASA astrophysicist and African dance
instructor was fascinated that the Dogon, who revere Sirius
known as the Dog Star knew of its tiny companion star,
Sirius B, centuries before modern astronomers identified it.
Mackey was pronounced dead, apparently of a heart condition,
Aug. 6 while Sirius was making its annual daytime appearance
in the sky.
As a scientist, Mackey conducted far-ranging "fundamental
research that doesn't reveal itself until years downstream
but is critical to development," said Julian Earls, director
of the NASA Glenn Research Center.
But he didn't look like a rocket scientist.
"He had his own style," said NASA colleague Eric Overton.
"In appearance, he was so down to earth, you would be
shocked to know he even had a job. Then you find out he
worked at NASA, had a Ph.D."
Mackey grew up in St. Louis, the eldest of nine children in
what was essentially a single-parent household. Ray, as he
was known to his family, took care of his younger siblings
while his mother worked the midnight shift at the post
office. He got them ready for school in the morning and
assigned them educational projects after school.
When his sisters saw a spider in the house, "not only did
Ray kill it, he looked it up in the encyclopedia and gave a
report," said his sister Karen. "He liked Radio Shack
science kits. He outgrew those and started taking things
apart in the house. Lamps, appliances. He always found a way
to put it back together."
He watched public-television programs like "Nova" to learn
about the stars. He tried to instill his passion for the
heavens in his siblings and, later, his daughters.
"He made us go in the back yard, and we'd have to look up in
the sky," said his sister Yvonne. "He'd say, Analyze that.'
"
In the early 1970s, Mackey enrolled at Oberlin College,
where he and classmate Diaris Jackson were "roaring with
ideology, pushing for change, angry that we'd missed the
'60s, aware of the special gifts that made us leaders,"
Jackson said.
Mackey, whose African name, Karimi, means "one whose spirit
travels with the stars," went to Boston to study
astrophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He also trained in African dance and drum under Raymond
Sylla, an African cultural icon from Senegal.
After earning a doctorate from MIT in 1981, Mackey taught
math at Wilberforce University in southern Ohio. Abasi
Ojinjideka, with whom he collaborated on projects
integrating cultural arts and science, met him at a Kwanzaa
event 22 years ago.
"He was sitting on a drum, listening to music on headphones,
reading a book and watching TV at the same time," Ojinjideka
said.
Mackey started working for NASA in Brook Park in 1989 but
later returned to Wilberforce through a space agency program
that allows scientists to spend time at not-for-profit
institutions. More recently, NASA lent him to Cheyney
University in Pennsylvania.
"We worked together to provide NASA exposure and computer
technology for students who lived in a homeless shelter in
Philadelphia," said J. Otis Smith, a Cheyney professor. "He
was fun to work with. He personally inspired some of our
students to overcome their fear of science to explore those
fields more closely."
He also did his best to get his twin daughters, Nyonu and
Naima, excited about science.
"If you looked in the sky on a clear night, he could tell
you the names of the stars," Naima said.
One weekend, while visiting his daughters at Hampton
University in Virginia, Mackey woke them at 6:30 a.m., and
said, "We're going to Norfolk State University. I want you
to see the sunspots in the sky."
When they arrived, "he got out his little sunspot device
with a mirror," Naima said. "We saw these little dots that
would move across the paper. It was neat."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
abar...@plaind.com, 216-999-4828