Life Post-War:
For the ten years following World War 2, we have very few pieces of evidence for Marshall Hyman, apart from his obituary, which gives us the overall narrative. The first is a college yearbook photo from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from 1949, which lists him as a senior majoring in chemical engineering. This timeline makes a good deal of sense: after being honorably discharged in November of ’45, Marshall was way too late to continue his schooling for the ’45-46 school year. If he enrolled in the fall of 1946, with one year of college from before the war, that would make him a graduating senior in the Spring of 1949.
The second source for his activities post-war is a wedding notice in a Cincinnati newspaper from November of 1951 that lists “Marshall L. Hyman of Cleveland” as the best man. Given that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)
had a lab in Cleveland going as far back as 1940, this is probably the period mentioned in Hyman’s obituary when he was working for the predecessor of NASA. As a pilot with 50 missions under his belt, experience in the military, and a degree in chemical engineering, he was a good hire. (As an aside, NACA’s last chairman, before the organization’s transformation in to NASA, was Lt. Gen. Jimmy Doolittle. Air Force vets were in demand.) Unsurprisingly, details about Marshall’s work for NACA are not the sort of thing that casually show up on genealogical research sites. At the time, it was most likely classified.
By 1953, Hyman was working for Pfaudler, a chemical equipment manufacturing company based in Rochester, New York. (Incidentally, I spent a significant part of my childhood in Rochester, so researching this part of Marshall Hyman’s life was a trip down memory lane.) Marshall would spend the rest of his career working for Pfaudler and affiliated companies in the Rochester area. Starting in 1955, however, he is described as being “on loan” to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, which by now was already famous as one of the principle research labs of the Manhattan Project, and, relatedly, for being the first laboratory to prove that plutonium could be created out of enriched uranium. The Manhattan Project’s chief medical officer, Stafford Warren, was also a professor of Radiology at the University of Rochester, so it’s possible there was already some sort of relationship between Pfaudler and ORNL. At any rate, a brief article in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle tells us that by July of 1957, Marshall had returned to town, after 2 years spent at ORNL, during which time he “worked on nuclear fuel reprocessing and was co-inventor of several processes developed at Oak Ridge.” (Yes, I too am shocked that there was a time when you could work as a researcher at a major laboratory with just a bachelor's degree).
By the time he returned to Rochester, Marshall was married. His new wife, Vera McKinney, had gone to High School in Oak Ridge, graduating in 1953. She then went on to attend Berea College, a Christian College for two years, where she was baptized into the Church of Christ. At the end of her two years, she had returned home and took a job at ORNL as a stenographer, which is how she and Marshall met. Two things seem very curious about this marriage. By the time they married, he had fought in a world war, graduated college, worked as a researcher for both NACA and Oak Ridge, and was in his early 30s. She was just 21 and had a couple of years of college under her belt. The second thing that I find fascinating is that it was - and remained - interfaith: he was Jewish, and the Star of David on his tombstone suggests he remained so throughout his life, and she was evidently a devout Christian. I would be genuinely curious to know how their differences in age, life experience, education and religion influenced their life together, but the available records offer no clues. Nevertheless, they remained married for 46 years, until Marshall’s death, and had three kids together, so it seems that they made it work.
Vera McKinney - high school year book photo, and later in life.
Hyman’s career after that point is a relatively uneventful series of promotions: in 1966 to manager of the Machinery Sales Department at Pfaudler. Then, three years later, a lateral move to another company owned by Pfaudler’s parent company (Sybron). Marshall’s new job was Vice President of Nalge, a scientific equipment manufacturing company, which was also based in Rochester. By ’72 he was executive vice president, then President in ’76.
Today, Nalge is most famous as the manufacturer of the water bottles in the above picture, which in the US are ubiquitous at camp sites and gyms. These bottles were originally designed as scientific equipment, but
according to Nalge company lore, “president Marsh Hyman” noticed that his son, Roger, who was a boy scout, had started using these lab bottles on scouting excursions, and they had caught on with other scouts, who discovered they were useful for transporting all manner of things: water, powdered drinks, pancake mix, matches, shampoo, snacks, and camping supplies. Marshall got the bright idea of marketing the lab containers they manufactured as camping equipment, and now they’re everywhere.
All through this time, Hyman was active in the community. There are around a dozen newspaper notices of charitable donations from him and his wife (alongside many others — listing donors in the newspaper seems to have been a common thing at the time), and he spent most of his career in leadership positions at the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in East Rochester. BOCES is a decentralized organization that allowed various school districts to collaborate on specialized programs for students with career ambitions ranging from the hard sciences to trade schools. I myself knew plenty of students who would go to BOCES for part of the day back when I was in middle- and high school (although this was well after Hyman had retired, and in a different school district, so the connection is tangential).
A 1974 article quoting BOCES board member Marshall Hyman on educational policy
In the ‘80s, Nalge and its parent company, Sybron, went through a series of mergers and leveraged buyouts (under a leveraged buyout, one company borrows a substantial amount of money in order to buy another company and usually sells off parts of that company in order to pay off the debt). The newspapers suggest fears of layoffs as a result of the buyout(s), and Hyman is repeatedly quoted offering reassurances that the change in ownership would not affect the workers. It’s really hard to say whether this proved true in the absence of company data, but Nalge is still around, and their products are still manufactured in the USA, so there seems to be little reason to doubt him. One of the articles, pictured below, notes that Marshall himself was an investor in more than one of these buyouts, so he likely had become quite wealthy by this point.
Marshall continued to serve as CEO of Nalge through into the early ‘90s, when he retired and subsequently moved back to Tennessee, where two of his kids were now living. The fact that this was where he’d spent the early parts of his career may be coincidence, or it may be that they’d formed attachments to the region during summer visits to their mother’s side of the family. Either way, Marshall spent the last few years of his life back in the neighborhood of Oak Ridge, passing away in early February of 2002. His obituary requests donations to the American Diabetes Association or the American Cancer Society, so it's possible that he suffered from one or both of these diseases later in life. Alternately, they may just have been causes that were close to his heart.