Periodic Table Day

Today (February 7, 2022) is National Periodic Table Day.

I have enjoyed chemistry since I was a kid, and I even studied it in high school and at university. I retain an interest in it to this day.

While I ultimately became a journalist, I was quite fortunate in the 1990s to land a job in New York City where I could indulge my love of a topic that has interested me since I was a young kid in the 1960s playing with my chemistry set. From 1992 to 1996, I was a Reporter/Writer, Editor, and Researcher for an international weekly magazine on the financial and technical aspects of the chemical industry. This included agriculture chemicals, petrochemicals (aromatics and aliphatics), pharmaceuticals, flavors, fragrances, plastics, paints, coatings, oils, fats, waxes, surfactants, and more.

Yes, I'm a nerd ... and proud of it.

I am honored to have worked for one of the oldest publications in the United States. The magazine, initially titled "Oil, Paint, and Drug Reporter" and titled "Chemical Marketing Reporter" ("CMR") when I worked there, was first published in 1871. I still laugh at the title of my first position there: Oils, Fats, and Waxes Editor. It was my job to cover such products as castor oil, grease (both yellow AND white), and carnauba wax from an industrial standpoint. I was later promoted to more complex coverage areas: Flavors and Fragrances Editor, then Heavy and Agriculture Chemicals Editor, and then Market Research Editor.

I rank this job as my most favorite job since I became a journalist in 1982 partly because, as I still sometimes jokingly say, it made me appear smarter than I actually was. Also, my groundbreaking story on tung oil as a natural industrial lubricant in its infancy was cited in USDA and EPA governmental reports. My writings were also cited in a university student's doctoral thesis.

While I was working for "CMR," I sent a copy of the magazine to my former university chemistry teacher from the early 1980s with a letter to let him know that I never lost interested in this subject and that chemistry was my professional life at that time. He wrote back, thanking me. He told me that a teacher usually doesn't know how far his influence on his students will go. He also mentioned that he had never heard of tung oil.