Frank Sherwood Rowland always seemed destined to do something inscience. Born June 28, 1927, in Delaware, Ohio, the son of a mathprofessor, Sidney A. Rowland, and his wife, Latin teacher Margaret (Drake), Rowland said in an interview with Joan Oleck that math always came easy for him.

In 1948 he received his bachelor of arts degree from Ohio Wesleyan University; after three years--the summers of which he spent playing semiprofessional baseball--he obtained his master's from the University of Chicago. His Ph.D. came a year later, in 1952.That same year he married the former Joan E. Lundberg; the couple would eventually have a son and daughter.

In 1952 he got his first academic job, aninstructorship in chemistry at Princeton University, where he would remain four years. In 1956 Rowland moved his family west to theUniversity of Kansas, where he was a professor for eight years, and then farther west still, to Irvine, California...