David J. Eicher - Early Life

Early Life

Eicher was born in Oxford, Ohio on August 7, 1961. He was born into a scientific family, the son of John Harold Eicher (1921– ), a professor of organic chemistry at Miami University in Oxford, who as a young man was a Manhattan Project scientist, and housewife Susan Ann (née Arne) Eicher (1923–1983). His sister Nancy Eicher (1959– ) is a journalist and bookseller. His great uncle was Ethan Nathan Allen (1904–1993), a professional baseball player and baseball coach at Yale University whose players included George H. W. Bush. His great-great grandfather Darius Wetzel (1839–1903) fought with the 74th Ohio Infantry in the Civil War, which influenced Eicher more than a century later.

Eicher grew up in a suburb of the small town of Oxford, with relatively dark skies overhead. He attended William Holmes McGuffey Laboratory School (a school for offspring of Miami University employees) and Talawanda High School, where he was involved in band activities, playing snare drum in marching band, drum set in “stage band,” and tympani in orchestra. He was also actively interested in American history, having taken many trips around the United States, and in science, leaning toward a career as a doctor.

This changed in early 1976 when he attended a “star party” in Oxford and Eicher looked at Saturn through a telescope. He was immediately attracted to astronomy and set off exploring the sky with binoculars, joining the local astronomy club, and beginning to write for their publication when another contributor quit. Eicher had significant enthusiasm for writing about star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies — objects in deep space beyond the solar system — and by June 1977 commenced publishing Deep Sky Monthly, a journal for similar observers. Although the publication began with a tiny circulation and was produced with his father’s office mimeograph machine, Deep Sky Monthly caught on and soon had a circulation of several hundred among astronomy enthusiasts. By the time Eicher started attending Miami University in Oxford, focusing on physics, he continued producing the magazine, which had gone to a commercial printer with slick paper and offset photo printing, reaching a circulation of 1,000.

Eicher became well known in the astronomy hobby, and was well connected, looking to various professional astronomers as mentors for career advice, Carl Sagan, Bart Bok, and Clyde Tombaugh among them. In the fall of 1982 Eicher left his schooling after three years of college when Richard Berry, then editor of Astronomy, offered him a position as assistant editor and a continuance of Eicher’s magazine, now retitled Deep Sky and to be published quarterly. In September 1982 Eicher moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Astronomy was based, and began his career in journalism and popularizing his favorite topic, astronomy.