Roy E. Norris, Jr.

(August 29, 1935 – December 3, 2019)

Roy Edwin Norris, Jr. was President of MITSFS, ca. 1957, and in the 1956 yearbook photo he was the only Black member shown.

When he was five years old, his mother moved with him from Goldsboro, a small North Carolina city, to Brooklyn. In New York he learned under his own direction, reading in a library while his mother taught piano. When she enrolled him in school again at the age of 11, they sent him to second grade with 7-year-old classmates; humiliated by this, he proved his worth and was promoted to the sixth grade with his agemates by the end of the year. He passed the entrance exam for Stuyvesant High School, and teachers there urged him to apply to MIT, where he majored in physics. In addition to his stfnal activities there, he fenced and was the captain of the Épée Squad.

After his graduation in 1957, he was recruited to track Russian spy satellites for the US government and wrote code to map and track objects in space, later joining the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Harvard as a senior programmer. Although it appears MITSFS was his only fanac per se, he was a fan of science fiction and an avid reader of sci-fi magazines throughout his life. His personal collection included magazines dating back as far as 1948.

Photo, MITSFS annual banquet, 1959 (misidentifies him as Philip, but his signature is on the back)

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Person

1935—2019

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