DeTar was born in 1920 in Kansas City, Missouri and grew up in Elgin, Illinois.
[2] After working for a short time with the Dupont Company, he became a lecturer at Cornell University, followed by an eight-year stint at the University of South Carolina (where he helped form their first Ph.D. degree program in chemistry).
[3] In 1961 he joined the chemistry department at Florida State University, where he remained until retiring in 1988.
His most cited papers were focused on reaction mechanisms [4][5] and the properties of conformationally flexible molecules.
Carleton was a professor of physics at the University of Utah,[13] and published at least one article together with his father.