“I remember the most important thing was that he had money, he wanted to give it to us, and he didn’t care how we used it,” recalls Doreen Studebakker, a longtime steward of the Public Observatory, which was located for decades in the area of Monterey California, near Big Sur, before being dismantled in 2014. “During an era when scientific inquiry was mostly not happening where defense was not involved, individual rich eccentrics became the backers of a lot of what might be called ‘unproductive’ research - where no conclusions were marketable or otherwise exploitable, but served just as a general deposit into the bank of human knowledge. Usually these folks were there with blank checks, but there was always some tertiary goal of sending their legacy to space, or otherwise bolstering a bruised ego.”
Mrs. Studebakker is almost impossibly articulate in her speech, well into her 70s. She occasionally closes her eyes while recalling a memory, almost as if to internally examine an image of the person or scene she is describing. She seems to close them more frequently when talking about the Public Observatory’s mysterious benefactor. [9:53 AM] “Our crew received a letter one day, delivered by courier, from a bag handcuffed to his wrist no less, to the office we had been using for the plans for the observatory. It was starting to seem like a pipe dream - an important funder had just backed out despite the combined expertise of two architects, one engineer, one member of the region’s government who was volunteering his time. In addition to myself, there was another astronomer, both of us interested not just in research but in sharing the knowledge and wonder of the field, perhaps in the form of presentations for school field trips or family nights. It was a good crew, all of us scientists in our own way, interested in the method, the inquiry, the revision.
“So when the courier produced this letter, we almost didn’t have the time to register our shock. I picked up the envelope quickly. ‘To The Public Observatory, LLC’ and our address, which was not in fact public at that time. On the back: ‘From the offices of Geoffrey Eric Michaels III - Hong Kong/Köln/Big Sur’. Inside the envelope, a large check, half the size of a piece of notebook paper, with the amount line blank, but otherwise endorsed and filled properly. Memo line: ‘In support of The Public Observatory’. Also inside the envelope was a single embossed card, which had two phone numbers on it - one an 800 number labeled “collect”, where the other was unlabeled and definitely to a location outside of the country, though none of us recognized the country code. I have to recall a kind of shimmer of nervous laughter going round the room - this was by far the most interesting single development in 16 months of work on this project. Our politician stood up, going for the phone… [9:53 AM] Working toward a result or sometimes abandoning it. The process of opening a non university-backed observatory - truly independent, at least of institutions - had suffered its ups and downs, but for the first time it was starting to seem like abandonment of the idea was a real possibility. [9:53 AM] “So when the courier produced this letter, we almost didn’t have the time to register our shock. I picked up the envelope quickly. ‘To The Public Observatory, LLC’ and our address, which was not in fact public at that time. On the back: ‘From the offices of Geoffrey Eric Michaels III - Hong Kong/Köln/Big Sur’. Inside the envelope, a large check, half the size of a piece of notebook paper, with the amount line blank, but otherwise endorsed and filled properly. Memo line: ‘In support of The Public Observatory’. Also inside the envelope was a single embossed card, which had two phone numbers on it - one an 800 number labeled “collect”, where the other was unlabeled and definitely to a location outside of the country, though none of us recognized the country code. I have to recall a kind of shimmer of nervous laughter going round the room - this was by far the most interesting single development in 16 months of work on this project. Our politician stood up, going for the phone…