WALTER J. Blaedel didn’t want a memorial service, but he wanted to be remembered. His paid obituary in October said he wished that “family, friends, students and co-workers remember me occasionally, for having shared work, ideals, love, joy and sadness, success and failure.”
Blaedel, who died Oct. 8 at 91, was a brilliant chemistry professor who lived in Madison for 60 years and knew plenty about success and failure. After a bitter dispute with the University of Wisconsin department of chemistry that began in the 1970s and ended with his forced retirement in the early ’80s, Blaedel refused to go quietly.