50-Year ACS Member (2007): Lewis Lincoln

Lewis Lincoln, who among his peers has always been called “Abe”, worked his way from lab assistant to chemist at Kodak while going nights, working toward his chemistry degree from the University of Rochester.

Abe was born on a farm in Naples, NY, the oldest of eight children. After the death of his mother when he was 15, the family moved to Rochester, where he graduated from Jefferson High School in 1944. He then joined the Air Force and was part of the Troop Carrier Command in Germany for 29 months.

In 1947 Abe was employed at Kodak in the Synthetic Chemistry area as a lab assistant and began to attend the University of Rochester nights. Eventually he transferred to the Sensitizing Dye Lab in the Kodak Research Labs as a lab assistant and later as technician. He joined the ACS in 1957 and soon achieved the rank of Chemist. He received his B.S. in Chemistry from the U of R in 1966. Abe worked on various projects synthesizing sensitizing dyes and related organic compounds under the direction of Leslie Brooker and Donald Heseltine until 1976, when he became a major scale-up chemist in the lab until his retirement in 1986.

For the last 20 years since retirement from Kodak, Abe has made a second career of selling real estate, having become a broker. He is just now in the process of retiring from that. He and his wife Mary live on a beautiful, large wooded lot in northern part of Irondequoit, the rear part of which goes down the slope toward the Lake Ontario shore level. The care of that consumes much of his extra time.

Mary and Abe had five children, all of whom had college educations; the two oldest boys having careers at Xerox and Kodak. A daughter lives in Pennsylvania. Well after the first three they had boy and girl twins. Altogether they have eight grandchildren, most of whom live in the area.