When Laurie Good told her boss, James McGrath, that her mother had suffered a stroke out in California, he immediately gave Good one of his frequent-flyer tickets to get to her mother's side.

"Generous" is one of the adjectives that crop up often when people discuss Jim McGrath, University Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Tech, one of the premier scientists worldwide in polymer science and engineering, major author, and academic leader in polymeric materials, which include rubber, plastics, textiles, and adhesives.

"He's a giving person with respect to trying to help a lot of colleagues," says colleague Garth Wilkes. "He's not just a power player for himself, but he's a power player for the school. He would take the shirt off his back if he thought you needed it."

McGrath also is known as someone whose work and leadership have provided a strong research base in the development of materials for electronics and aerospace. He is credited with helping to move polymer composites into transportation and infrastructure uses.

Things have moved quickly over the past three years for McGrath, head of the National Science Foundation's Science and Technology Center for High Performance Polymeric Adhesives and Composites at Virginia Tech and holder of the Ethyl Chair in chemistry. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineers in 1994 (one of the few polymer scientists to receive that honor), received the 1996 Herman Mark Award for outstanding research and leadership in polymer science from the American Chemical Society's Division of Polymer Chemistry, was named a Virginia Outstanding Scientist of the Year in March 1997, and was named to the Society of Plastics Engineers Plastics Hall of Fame in June for "developments with far-ranging benefits for society." All of this for a man who began his academic career with little intention of going to graduate school, much less of becoming a professor.

Born in the Adirondacks of upstate New York near Saratoga, McGrath grew up on a 400-acre dairy farm. "I milked a lot of cows," he says. He attended a one-room school for six years; one hour was devoted to each grade. "If you didn't fall asleep, you kept learning new things," he says.

In 1946, at 12, McGrath started taking trombone; the instrument became one of the great loves of his life. After high school, McGrath went on to Siena College in Albany, where he majored in chemistry and joined ROTC. He also swept the floor in the chemistry department and worked in the chemistry stock room to cover his expenses.

He earned additional money playing in his own jazz-dance band called "The Keynotes." "We had a very large repertoire," he says, "I got so I could even call a couple of sets of square dances."

After a stint in the service, McGrath got a job at Rayonier working in cellulose fibers and films. "I learned a lot about polymers for the first time because polymers are a big part of textiles and wrapping films such as cellophane," he says.

After Rayonier, he went to Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. in Ohio in 1959 and earned a master's degree from the University of Akron in 1964. Along the way, he realized he could get a Ph.D. too and completed his doctorate in 1967. That year, after a brief post-doctoral fellowship, he joined Union Carbide Corp. in New Jersey, doing research for eight years on a variety of different thermoplastic materials. By 1975, he had spent nearly two decades developing new polymers and processing techniques.

But McGrath had been thinking about an academic career. In 1975, he was offered a job at Virginia Tech at about half his industry salary. He accepted, but, with a family (he has six children), decided to take a year's leave of absence from Union Carbide to come to Blacksburg. "They didn't want me to go, and I didn't want to burn any bridges," he says.

Still, says Tom Ward, Adhesive and Sealant Council Professor of Chemistry, leaving a good industrial job to take a chance on a university, without tenure and with a family, took courage. McGrath never recrossed that bridge he had refused to burn.

Bringing to Virginia Tech his unique perspective on the educational needs of future generations of plastics professionals, McGrath first taught freshman and sophomore chemistry and organic chemistry. He started the polymer program with Ward and, later, Garth Wilkes, with whom he shares an interest in music.

"We became friends in 1970 when he was a young assistant professor at Princeton and playing in a rock-and-roll band," McGrath says. "In 1977, I convinced him to join us as a full professor of engineering, a major step toward putting Virginia on the map in polymer chemistry."

"He twisted my arm," says Wilkes, the Fred W. Bull Professor of Chemical Engineering. Wilkes too has never regretted coming to Tech.

Together, Wilkes and McGrath started the Polymer Materials and Interfaces Laboratory (PMIL), which has grown to include 21 faculty. The NSF center that McGrath established in 1989 and still heads addresses the critical scientific issues of processability and durability of known and newly discovered polymeric materials. The center focuses its research on new polymeric adhesive and composite materials, establishing the fundamental mechanisms that govern performance. These materials relate to the performance of items produced and used by virtually every sector of society, from aviation andautomobiles to bridges and aerospace structures.

McGrath's most recent research is directed toward the synthesis and characterization of high-performance polymers and structural adhesives, new polymer matrix composites (polymers plus reinforcing fibers such as glass or graphite) for possible use in aerospace (such as the proposed high-speed civil transport), new high-temperature-resistant polymer insulators for computer development, and fire-resistant polymers.

"We generate the basic knowledge," McGrath says. The center develops information that industry can use in producing such things as aircraft, naval vessels, subways, and oil platforms; but McGrath does not always know when products are developed using his findings.

The center also is monitoring a bridge over Tom's Creek near Blacksburg that uses an experimental, composite box I-beam. The research will assist in advancing a method for predicting the performance -- including the durability -- of composites in infrastructures.

McGrath's research has had support from numerous industrial groups, including Boeing and IBM, the U.S. Department of Commerce, McDonnell Douglas/ARPA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.

McGrath is the co-author or editor of six books on block copolymers, polymerization technology, organosiloxane copolymers, and polyimides. He initiated the first experimental, nationally offered short courses in polymer chemistry (Wilkes estimates they teach 300-400 people a year on campus and at various industrial locations throughout the world) and provides extra-university education for polymer scientists at major corporations and courses for undergraduate teachers in macromolecular chemistry and engineering. In addition to fostering the work of more than 100 graduate and postgraduate students, he has administrated millions of dollars worth of research grants from government and industry.

At present, McGrath is seeking major NSF funding for a Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) on Advanced Polymeric Materials for Transportation, Infrastructure, and Microelectronics Packaging that would have some similarities to, but also significant differences from, the first center. His funding for that center ends in two years.

If the faculty from chemistry, civil and electrical engineering, and physics get the $3-million award, the new five- to 10-year program will start in October 1998 and will build on the work of the present center. It will involve materials for airplanes, cars, ships, bridges, oil drilling rigs, and road repair, materials that will resist earthquakes, and computer components that cover the semi-conductor and allow for rapid computer design and utilization in, for example, microcellular phones.

The center would also include a major educational effort for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as continuing-education students. The faculty would work with Clark University of Atlanta, Hampton University, and Norfolk State to recruit under-represented minority students, McGrath says.

McGrath, Wilkes says, is excellent at raising funding so that his research projects sometimes support as many as 30 researchers.

McGrath, in fact, is so busy that he must meet colleagues in airports between flights. Donald Baird, professor and eminent scholar of chemical engineering, jokes with McGrath that maybe they should get a booth and have their polymer brochures on display at the National Airport in D.C. as many protest groups do.

But they are not all work and no play. Baird and McGrath share an interest in sports and used to play basketball together. "When we could jump and do all that stuff," Baird says. "We weren't bad for plastics guys."

McGrath has several interests besides the work that earns him so many awards. He loves jazz and classical music, a good chardonnay, and a good joke among friends, those same friends say. With Wilkes and some other colleagues, he still plays music -- but usually only once a year at the PMIL Halloween party, in a band called "Poly and the Mers." McGrath plays trombone, Wilkes lead guitar. They practice a few times for about a month before the event and "sound pretty good," McGrath says.

McGrath is, Ward says, a very people-oriented person. In his office are numerous gifts from grateful former students, who now reside all over the United States, in Japan, Korea, India, and Europe, including a loom with his name woven on it given to him by a student from Turkey.

McGrath has a tremendous circle of both professional and personal friends and colleagues around the globe, according to Tim Pickering, deputy director of the NSF center. "If you put a pin in a map everywhere he has a friend, you'd have an extensive collection of pins."

Sally Harris is public information coordinator for the College of Arts and Sciences.