• Eleanor O'Connell, a Junior High teacher of Latin and Algebra at Allison Junior High School in Wichita , KS , befriended Manuel during a difficult period of his life in the 1951-1952 school year. Manuel, a 9 th student, had little time for studies, working before and after school each day at Warner's Grocery Store in downtown Wichita . Ms. O'Connell recognized some potential in Manuel, despite his poor academic performance. Despite her wise counsel, Manuel dropped out of school after the 9 th grade and remained out of school for the next two years.

 
  • Cecil Gray, a science teacher at North High School in Wichita , befriended Manuel when he returned to school in 1954-55 as an older 10 th grader. The high school registrar insisted that Manuel must repeat a science class that he had taken three years earlier in the 9 th grade. After she denied Mr. Gray's request to move a chair into his biology class for Manuel, Mr. Gray wisely resolved the stand-off by making Manuel his teaching assistant. Manuel dropped out of high school again the next year, but that time he had been admitted to college.
 
  • Jim Pauley, a Chemistry Professor at Pittsburg State College, combined math with chemistry and physics to stimulate Manuel's latent interest in these subjects in his lectures on General and Physical Chemistry. In 1959 Pauley encouraged Manuel to pursue an advanced degree in Chemistry, despite a record of uneven academic performance and an admission that his few good marks reflected an unusual ability to “cram” material the night before an exam and an equally remarkable ability to promptly forgot it all the next day.
 
  • Paul K. Kuroda, University of Arkansas Professor of Nuclear Chemistry, reached out to Manuel in 1960 when Manuel was disillusioned with the graduate program in chemistry at that institution. Manuel had decided to pursue a graduate degree in mathematics elsewhere when Kuroda called him into his office. Then Kuroda showed Manuel the two new papers by John Reynolds at Berkeley on the discovery of decay products from extinct 129 I in meteorites and an unexplained anomaly in the abundance pattern of the other eight xenon isotopes. Manuel accepted Kuroda's offer to join his research group and to make the xenon isotope anomaly puzzle part of his graduate research problem. In 1962, Manuel went to Berkeley , CA to learn the operation of the high sensitive mass spectrometer that Reynolds developed to analyze meteorites. Two years later, Manuel returned to Berkeley to work with John Reynolds as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow.
 
  • John H. Reynolds, UC-Berkeley Professor of Physics, allowed Manuel to visit for three months in early 1962 and work with a gifted graduate student, Craig Merrihue, in Reynolds' new laboratory for ultra-high vacuum, high sensitivity mass spectrometry. After returning to Fayetteville to set up a similar instrument for his PhD research, Manuel came back as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow with a sample of the Fayetteville meteorite to analyze on the superior instrumentation available in Reynolds' laboratory. That analysis revealed the first clear evidence that neon atoms in the Fayetteville meteorite had been sorted by mass.