Hans Bethe has died

This is a rather unhappy day for me, but I will tell of my encounter with the physicist Hans Bethe:

As a grad student I had the great good luck to be Hans Bethe's lackey for a month. He was the nicest, easiest man for whom I have ever worked.
I was studying for my qualifiers and sat in his outer office at his beck and call. One day I was working on a particularly hard mechanics problem and was oblivious to the world. All of the sudden there was a cup of coffee at my elbow. I turned to watch Dr. Bethe walk back into his office with his coffee in hand.

He was preparing for a conference in Santa Fe on high energy physics. When the conference came I went to the sessions that interested me and saw little of Dr. Bethe. On the last day of the conference he insisted that I join him. He was to attend a meeting for invited physicists and I was to go in case I was needed to run an "errand". So here I was at a modern day Savoy Conference with the leading lights of the field. I sat in a chair away from the table listening like a fly on the wall. No errands were run. When the meeting was done I walked out of the room and my boss wanted to know what had happened. I confessed that I didn't understand a word of it. As he walked by Hans Bethe said with a twinkle in his eye, "That's alright, neither did I". That was the last I saw him that summer.