November 5, 1930 – March 14, 2024
John W. Lyons, a renowned scientist who led civilian and military technology organizations for the federal government in the 1990s and was widely considered one of the world’s foremost experts on the chemistry of fire, died March 14, 2024, in Frederick, MD, after a brief illness. He was 93.
A chemist by training, Lyons was an eloquent advocate for government’s role in basic and applied research in partnership with the private sector, what he once described as “curiosity-driven research or a search for understanding” to “push the frontiers of knowledge.” He balanced his scientific rationalism with a deeply personal faith and commitment to civic engagement in various forms, devoting decades of leadership and support to his church and local communities.
Lyons was the ninth director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (formerly the National Bureau of Standards) and led NIST through a dramatic transformation of its mission from a strict focus on standards and measures to a broader role supporting industrial manufacturing productivity during a time when the U.S. faced stiff economic competition from Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. In 1993, after twenty years at NIST, he became the director of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory where he was the civilian leader responsible for consolidating and reorganizing the U.S. Army’s sprawling scientific research and technology development functions after the Cold War and 1991 Gulf War as part of the recommendations of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission. He retired from the ARL in 1998.
John Winship Lyons was born on November 5, 1930, and grew up in Reading, MA. He was the third of four children of Margaret (Tolman) Lyons and Louis M. Lyons, a noted newspaperman at The Boston Globe who later became curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and a widely known radio and TV news host at WGBH in Boston. (Lyons is named for one of his father’s Globe editors, John Winship.) Lyons graduated from Harvard College with a degree in chemistry in 1952.
After graduation, Lyons was drafted into the U.S. Army in early 1953. Later that year he married his high school sweetheart, the former Grace Catherine Hanley. Together they raised four children and remained married for more than seventy years until his death.
Lyons was honorably discharged from the Army in 1955, returned to Reading, MA, and joined the Monsanto Company as a bench chemist. He relocated his young family to St. Louis, MO, in 1957 to continue his Monsanto career. During his sixteen years in St. Louis, he earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in physical chemistry from Washington University. He was part of a Monsanto team that developed the first effective fire retardants for children’s sleep wear at a time when death and property damage due to fire in the United States outpaced all other advanced nations. Lyons published a well-regarded monograph in 1970 based on the work, “The Chemistry and Uses of Fire Retardants,” one of the first treatises on the subject.
While living in the St. Louis suburb of Webster Groves in the mid-1960s, Lyons participated in a “block partnership” through his church. The partnerships were designed to leverage the suburban groups’ perceived political activism and organizing strategies to help urban public housing groups pressure public officials to improve conditions at the notorious Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in downtown St. Louis. Lyons chaired a partnership in collaboration with a group of residents at Pruitt-Igoe for several years. Although the partnership succeeded in helping the small group of residents relocate outside of Pruitt-Igoe, the giant complex ultimately failed and was demolished by the U.S. government in the mid-1970s. Lyons wrote an unpublished manuscript about his experiences with the block partnership, Bidwood #19, The Story of a Block Partnership in Pruitt-Igoe, St. Louis, MO.
Lyons’ work and writings on fire retardants led to his participation on an evaluation panel for the National Bureau of Standards’ fire safety standards program. In 1973 he joined NBS to lead the newly created Center for Fire Research. The Bureau’s standards for the fire resistance of fabrics and building materials directly reduced deaths and property damage from fire in the United States in the years that followed.
Several years later, as part of a reorganization of NBS, Lyons led the planning for the agency’s newly created National Engineering Laboratory. He became the lab’s first director in 1977.
Lyons and his family moved in 1973 from St. Louis to a 200-year-old farmhouse near rural Mt. Airy, MD. For more than fifty years there Lyons enjoyed the respite from his demanding professional responsibilities by raising farm animals as pets and riding horses; tending a vegetable garden (green beans and summer sweet corn were annual favorites); tinkering with cars and tractors; baking bread, Yorkshire pudding and flapjacks on special occasions; completing multiple crossword puzzles each day; and welcoming children – and later grandchildren and a great-grandchild, along with extended family, business associates, and friends from around the world – to its pastoral setting.
Lyons was active in the lay leadership of his parish, the nearly 200-year-old St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church in Libertytown, MD. He was the incorporator of the parish for 25 years and helped lead the church community during the reconstruction of the main sanctuary after a devasting fire in 2004. Before that he was Parish Council president, and served as a lector for Sunday Mass for decades.
In retirement Lyons served for many years as a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University. He held a dozen patents; authored four books, including Fire, published by Scientific American Books in 1985; wrote more than 60 technical and scientific papers; and delivered dozens of lectures on a range of scientific and technology research and national laboratory management subjects. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1985, was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Washington Academy of Science, and was a member of the American Chemical Society and Sigma Xi.
Lyons is survived by his wife, Grace C. Lyons, of Mt. Airy, MD; daughters Margaret Emily Lyons (Donald Keyser) of Fairfax Station, VA, and Mary Ann Lyons of Mt. Airy; sons John Hanley Lyons (Kathleen Lyons) of Olney, MD, and Louis Martin Lyons, II, (Christina Lyons) of Germantown, MD; nine grandchildren: Margaret Jessee Lyons (Patrick Hills) of Silver Spring, MD; Brianna Casey Lyons (Elske Tielens) of Atlanta, GA; Samantha Grace Lyons Keyser of Carmel, IN; Kaylene Moya Lyons of Urbana, MD; Franklyn Grace Lyons of Warsaw, Poland; Annee Lyons (Jack Thiemel) of London, England; Dunchadhn Hanley Lyons (Torie Lyons) of Durham, NC; John Winship Lyons, II, (Carolyn Stephens) of Los Angeles; and Josephine Lorraine Lyons of Germantown, MD; and one great-grandchild, Louisa Cora Catherine Lyons of Silver Spring, MD. He was predeceased by a daughter, Elizabeth Catherine Lyons, age five weeks, on January 15, 1956.
A funeral service is scheduled for 11 a.m., Thursday, April 4, 2024, at St. Peter The Apostle Catholic Church, 9190 Church St., Libertytown (Union Bridge), MD 21791. Interment in the church’s cemetery will take place immediately after the service, followed by a luncheon at the church’s Sullivan Hall.
