1950    

      After paying my own way to a B. S. degree in Chemistry at the North Dakota Agricultural College in Fargo in 1949, I went back to Washington DC to the SAE Fraternity house at 1824 19th Street NW in Washington DC. I was accepted into the graduate program in Chemistry at the George Washington University using the GI Bill.
      The first year was class work and would culminate with four three hour exams in the four fields of chemistry, Inorganic, Organic, Analytical and Physical Chemistry. I got B or better in the class work and got at least mildly concerned about the three hour exams. The one on Analytical Chemistry was particularly disturbing because I had those courses before the war and now it was seven + years later! I asked myself whether or not I thought I remembered it. So, I asked Dr. Vincent, an Analytical Chemistry Professor, to let me sit in on his next exam to see how I would do. He understood and agreed. I asked him with a smile not to let the others know if I did badly!
      I sat down to the exam and started to read through it. Fortunately, for my purposes, it consisted of a number of questions covering a variety of analytical concerns. The first time through I was amazed at how little I seemed to remember. I would estimate I did about 5% the first time through. But I shrugged my shoulders and went through it again. Oh yeh, I remember that! And I went through it a number of times and each time I would remember a little more. The Little Librarian in my brain was dredging things up that had been long buried. When it was graded I got an astounding 85% which relieved my mind enormously.
      I learned not to worry and fret over particular questions, but to move on and come back to them later. This was an important lesson for the rest of my college career.By this time I had developed a number of credos. First, I would not study a subject within the 48 hours preceding the test. Second, I would not get hung up on any question, just proceed to the next. And third, I would allow myself only half the allotted time. I would take hour exams in a half hour and three hour exams in an hour and a half. This worked well for me all the way through the Ph. D. at Harvard.

      I remember some fun times that first summer. When the Fourth of July rolled around, we went out the trapdoor in the roof and sat up there and watched the fireworks down at the Washington Monument.
      One hot summer day, someone set off a spark. Not that kind of spark but one that started a chain of actions that almost got out of hand. Water! Probably a kind of accident turned into a purposeful battle, a water fight par excellence. All over all three floors water flew. Well, it probably needed cleaning and nobody got hurt.
      We had a bar in the basement. No party in Washington could be held without alcohol. I had a roommate that was good at crashing embassy parties. A Life photographer followed him one time and an article in Life appeared! I went along with a small group one time to crash a party. I think Washington parties were used to that and accepted it if it wasn't too big a crash! However, I felt guilty and wound up rather apologetically in the kitchen. I got to talking with a man who seemed affable and possibly liked me. I told him we had crashed the party. He smiled and said it ws OK, that he was the host.
      One night after a few too many beers several of us were behind the bar and a couple was just inside the door to the kitchen. We got to throwing empty beer cans at each other. This had been going on for some time and made a bit of a racket. Irv .?. came down the stairs and poked his head in the room. Wham, someone bounced an empty beer can off his forehead, opening a gash. We rushed him down to the emergency room at the University Hospital. The young doctor cleaned him up and started to put in stitches. As they talked the young doctor became friendlier and finally said he was going to put in some extra stitches to reduce the scar.

      The barroom in the basement was painted totally black. I wanted to paint a couple small gold stripes near the ceiling on one side and a foot down on the opposite side with slant lines on the other two walls. I thought this might help us gauge when someone had had enough. We couldn't charge money directly so we sold "chits" upstairs which were then traded for drinks. We charged the nearest nickel above cost and made a mint! This would not be possible anymore. We were lucky; no one ever got in driving trouble. We had one overdrinker that was thought to drive better when drunk than when sober. We always said it was because he had more practice.
      One fraternity brother from a rich family never knew when to stop. I had told him many times he had to find some sign that told him when he had had enough. He came back to the house one night late, came up to my bedroom on the front of the second floor, sat on the edge of my bed and described what he had finally found as an indication that he'd had enough. He was excited and I was pleased. I've forgotten what it was but it seemed to work for him.
      I painted my room. It was small, probably six feet by 10-12 feet long. I painted the ceiling and the small wall at the far end bright canary yellow and the other walls a nice grey. I liked it.

      Hell week was a good time for the actives. We really never did anything that I considered physically abusive. We always did things to improve their humility. We, of course, had a fire escape. One time someone lined up the pledges outside under the fire escape. The pledges were to stand looking up with their eyes shut and their mouths open like baby birds in a nest. Then some actives on the third floor fire escape would crack eggs and try to hit the pledges in the mouth with the contents. As my wife said, "Ah, the yolk was on them!"
      We had a small building out back. The party would occupy this area also and as the evening progressed the singing would start. We sang with harmony. It was really pretty good. We had a reputation for winning the spring sings! One night when we were holding forth a neighbor next door became concerned that we were disturbing a sick friend of hers, across the alley, so she called and asked, "Are the boys disturbing you?" Her answer was, "Oh no, I enjoy it!"

      This all was in the time when people were afraid of having "the blacks" move in next door. It was said that the blacks would indulge in "block busting". They would pay an exorbitant price for the first house and then all the neigbors would move and the rest of the houses could be bought cheaply! Of course, all the whites were against this but if it was going happen anyway, they all wanted to be that first one. What a "Hobson's Choice!". It's too bad but that's the way it was. We were on the borderline. The other side of 19th street was black and the dead end street across the way was also.
      I lived there for a total of four years and never knew the name of a single neighbor, even though they were row houses with a common wall. I don't remember even ever seeing them!

      I was treasurer for a year. I don't remember the year for sure. When the end of the year came I couldn't balance the books. I was out of balance for something like $48.27. I couldn't find the problem anywhere. So I got my friend Jim Cummings to help. He went through them again and again. And finally he asked me what a certain check for was. I explained that one night one of the veterans had just gotten his $75 check. He had no cash and a date. I didn't have $75 cash in the box so I gave him what I had, $48.27 and wrote a check for the remainder. I then deposited his check. His eyes lit up and said, "That's it. By doing that you inflated your deposits by depositing the same amount twice." He laughed and said that it might be used to cleverly embezzle.

      We had a cook for a time and had her prepare an evening meal for us. She did a great job. This was the first time I came to Washington. After several weeks a discussion came up one night about margarine, This was in the era when there was intense dairy pressure against it. They got laws passed that prohibited the selling of colored margaine and it was white. But a man in Bismarck ND invented a little gel capsule of an edible yellow dye that could be put in with the white margarine in a plastic bag. One could then break the capsule in the bag and knead it tll the margarine looked like butter. It is my understanding that he made a fortune with it but lost it all when he fought against the repeal of the coloring laws. I might mention that I understood the dairy state, WIsconsin, for a time had a law requiring the margarine had to be colored, yes, purple!
      To get back to the dinner, I chimed in with some comment like, "I would never eat margarine; it would taste like lard." And then someone said, "You've been eating it for three weeks!" As I remember butter was about $1 a pound and margarine was under $0.30 a pound!

      One time I came home a little late, probably 10PM. The double door at the back of the dining room was open, rather unusual. So I went back to close it. When I was halfway through the dining room I could see a silhouette of the front part of someone's face hiding from the dark behind the archway into the piano room. I said, "Who's there?" A black man came out and mumbled, "I was lookng for someone..." I said. "Well, he's not here. you better leave." Which he did, out the back. I closed the doors and ran upstairs and sounded the alarm. Everybody came running down with all sorts of weapons, baseball bats etc., but he was long gone. I think we heard a car leave!
      One night I caught the bus home from the University and arrived at the Carrigan's Restaurant bus stop around midnight. (The Carrigans were not Irish, they were Greek, Cariganus?) I wanted a hamburger so I hurried down Connecticut Avenue a half block to Carl and Dave's hoping they had not closed yet. But as I approached I could see I was too late so I slowed down, turned around 180 degrees and started walking more slowly to the fraternity house. I got to the corner of S street and turned right for a block. A man caught up and started to walk with me. He talked to me and asked about my girlfriends and some other things and it suddenly became obvious that he was trying to "pick me up". I answered his questions with short answers, but I was beginning to boil inside. I turned left on 19th street, the house was a half block up on the left. He stayed right with me still trying to get me to converse. But I was having none of it. I kept going straight till I got to my sidewalk and then made an abrupt turn to the left into the house. He said, "Do you have to go in so early?" I don't remember answering. I was angry. Why did he pick me?
      I went in, up the stairs and told several of the guys about it, still seething. When I described what happened it suddenly occurred to me that I had unintentionally "invited" him by turning around right in front of him at Carl and Dave's and then started walking more slowly. I could then relax and smile and wipe my brow.
      Later, when I was living in the room on New Hampshire Avenue, I was walking home from the University. I had to go around one part of Dupont Circle which was a renowned hangout for gay men. I was walking pretty fast; I wanted to get home. A man fell in step with me as we turned onto New Hampshire. He said, "You have a fast pace for a small man." I don't remember answering. I turned in at my house and with a lilt in his voice, he said, "Good Night!"

      But the piece de resistance was the night I was sitting on the sofa with C.... Fl... It was dark and I was just relaxing and C.... started reaching for my crotch. I jumped up and went upstairs and told a couple friends about it. There was no doubt about his intentions. The fraternity decided he should leave the house. In those days people were intolerant of this. He was flunking anyway so he left school. He had transferred in from the University of Maryland, not too many miles away in College Park, just outside the District. I wondered if his behavior is why he transferred. And why didn't the Maryland chapter warn us. A later conversation with him indicated that he was bisexual. In those days a fraternity could not afford to be labeled. As he left for the last time he mumbled to me as he passed, "Remind me to kill you."

      If you understood the way the city was laid out, it was very easy to get around. The "streets" are all in a Cartesian grid, N-S ones are numbered and E-W ones are lettered. We were near the 18th and S Street intersection. Which of course means we were 19 blocks west and S blocks north of the Capitol building. On top of this grid is a system of circles which were connected with Avenues, usually at angles, sometimes in curves. Many of the Avenues were named after states, like Massachusetts Avenue, New Hampshire Avenue, Connecticut Avenue and, of course, the infamous Pennsylvania Avenue, from the White House to the Capitol. The Circles were named after individuals, like Scott Circle and Dupont Circle.
      For a map, see: http://www.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=dupont+circle&near=Washington,+DC&cid=0,0,8358564662930012357&ll= 38.906056,-77.041292&spn=0,.02&sa=X&oi=local&ct=image

      The E-W streets are lettered. When the first alphabet was exhausted they went to two syllable names, like Euclid, Fairmont, Girard, Harvard, Irving, Kenyon, Lamont, Monroe, Newton etc.
      The third alphabet has three syllable names, Allison, Buchanan, Crittenden, Decatur etc. At the north point of the diamond shape of the District the fourth alphabet consisted of plants, Aspen, Butternut, ?, Dahlia, Elder, Fern, Geranium etc.
      The beauty of this is that one could always know where they were. If they were getting concerned, driving roughly north on Georgia Avenue, they could turn off at the next intersection and find an intersection of two streets, like 13th and Jefferson Streets NW. Since Jefferson is a three syllable word, you are 10 blocks into the third alphabet or 13+13+10= 36 blocks north and 13 blocks W of the Capitol.

      In the second year there, I believe, one of the fraternity brothers, Lloyd Hamilton, and I moved into a room at a cooperative house on the SW corner of New Hampshire Avenue and, I think, 18th St. NW. It was a fun year, There were a lot of other nice young people, both male and female. But there was no hanky-panky that I was aware of. Lloyd eventually married a nice Alabama (?) girl and they were living in McLean VA, the last I knew.
      One weekend, probably a Sunday, they all decided to go to a stable along the Potomac and rent horses for a leisurely stroll along the river. They badgered me until I finally agreed to go along. I had a bad experience with a horse when I was about 9 and I was very reluctant. But I bit my tongue and got on the assigned nag and we ambled north along the path. When a half hour was up we turned around to go back. It was a hot summer day and no one was in a hurry to work up a sweat, even the horses. I wondered a bit why the little snip of a girl, possibly 11 years old, seemed to be in my vicinity pretty much. Then I found out why. There was a "dust pool" probably 20 feet across on the path. My horse suddenly decided that a roll in the dust would be appropriate. Butm I did not agree and when he got about 2 degrees off of vertical, I was on the ground, still holding the reins while he rolled. The little girl hopped off her horse, handing me her reins as she took mine and proceeded to beat and holler at the poor horse with her little crop. He must have weighed 1500 pounds and she about a hundred. Why didn't he just smile and turn around and boot her into the Potomac? He lost what little respect I had.

      After the first year I moved to the research phase of the degree. I was working with Dr. William Sager, who had been a student of Dr. Paul Doughty Bartlett, Irving Professor of Chemistry at Harvard. We decided to work on his problem with the mutarotation of glucose. There were two mechanisms that needed to be distinguished from each other. When one worked out the math the two mechanisms resulted in mathematical equations were almost identical. The only difference was a ternary term that would be very small. If it was present then one mechanism was most probable. It it was absent then the other became more probable. The problem was that this difference was very small and therefore required very precise measurement to be seen.
      So the first step was to adapt an existing constant temperature bath to a regimen where it could be controlled with a minute temperature range of 0.001 degree Celsius. I had to arrange a number of baffles to direct the flow from the pump to avoid any dead spots in the circa five cubic foot bath, approximately 40 gallons (calculated from memory after 50 years!). I needed to reduce the temperature below room temperature so I circulated cold water from a refrigerated bath to bring the temperature down to just below the desired temperature, around 10 deg C. as I remember (ca 50 deg F). To heat the bath I used a light bulb painted black for maximum heat production. This "heater" had to be controlled by an extraordinarily sensitive thermoregulator. I was a crude glassblower. The dimensions I give here are from memory but are essentially accurate.
      First I made six coils of glass about two inches in diameter and six inches long, using about 6 mm glass tubing. I made a support rack out of about 15 mm tubing. I connected all six coils to a central, ca 12 mm, tube on this rack and put a small piece of about 1 mm capillary on top. I then topped this with another piece of the 12 mm tubing and added a downsloping tee on the side to act as a mercury reservoir to be able to add or subtract mercury to control the temperature at which it would function. I then sharpened a heavy tungsten wire by heating it to redness and dragging it over a chunk of sodium nitrite that I had cast on a glass rod. It was incredibly sharp and stiff! I then inserted it into the top, positioning the point about halfway into the capillary.
      It was filled with mercury, then sealed off under hydrogen, progressively evacuating it, filling it with hydrogen and re-evacuating until we were quite sure that there was no air left. Then I sealed it off at the top. If there was any oxygen left it would corrode some of the mercury which would then interfere with the contact between the tungsten point and the mercury meniscus. As the temperature of the bath varied, the mercury would rise and fall in the capillary, touching the sharp tungsten point. This contact then sent a current through an electronic circuit involving a special vacuum tube. On contact the small charge on the grid would prevent a larger current which went to the light bulb which heated the bath. I showed the initial simple electronic circuit to a friend, expert in electronics. He smiled, rearranged it a little to make it simpler and more reliable, then I built it. It worked beautifully.
      The "Beckman" reservoir allowed setting the temperature at which the regulator would operate. I would put all the mercury in the main column, then place the apparatus in a bath at a certain temperature and when it was equilibrated, I would tilt the regulator to put the excess mercury into the "Beckman" reservoir. I had to determine the temperature differential between this bath temperature and the temperature we wanted the regulator to operate at.

      This is being written 55 years after the work and probably suffers from some obscurity. But an expert could probably modify my memories to make it work. And work it did and did provide the control we needed. After I finished my crude regulator, Dr. Sager took pity on me and made a somewhat larger version which was a thing of beauty. He was a very expert glassblower and I admit to admiring his expertise.

      Now we needed a "reaction vessel" for the glucose solution that would be arranged in such a way the its internal temperature could rapidly respond to the temperature of the bath. It had to maintain the same temperature control as the bath did and glass is a notoriously bad conductor of heat. I made this also, but of 10 mm glass tubing. It had three "fingers" sticking out each side of the central reservoir and sloping down so when the solution was added the air would be forced out through the top. The reservoir was then connected to another capillary where the rise and/or fall of the solution as the reaction proceeded could be measured in microns with extreme accuracy. A capillary was connected to the reservoir, pointing straight down, then bent up vertically to a probably 7 mm tube about an inch behind the reservoir. This was topped just opposite the reservoir and a little higher by a stopcock and a funnel like reservoir to add the solution to the dilatomer at the start of the run.
      He ordered a micrometer device with a small telescope to allow me to measure the rise or fall of the solution in the dilatometer in microns.

      Glucose is obtained in commerce as an equilibrium mixture of the two forms, alpha and beta. So the next step was to isolate one of the two forms. When dissolved in water it would proceed to" mutarotate" into an equilibrium mixture of the two forms. Literature told me that if I recrystallized it from glacial acetic acid (100%) the alpha form could be otained. So I did. This is not a terribly pleasant thing to do since glacial acetic acid is a rather subtle and strong vesicant (blistering agent). In other work in the chemistry department, I had learned that contact with it without proper cleanup would remove the top layer of skin from one's finger tips, exposing the quick, keeping one from using those fingers for several weeks till they "toughened" sufficiently again.

      I needed a very stable table to mount the measurement device to observe the dilatometer through the vertical glass window in the bath. I decided it should be triangular, two feet on each side. It would have three legs, made of two inch angle iron. I had to reduce the angle at the top of these legs to 60 degrees and weld them to a triangular frame made of 2 inch angle iron. The bottom of the legs were cut at an angle so the the table would rest on three sharp points. I put them together with bronze welding rod using the hand torch I used for making the first thermoregulator.
      I needed a strong flat top for the table. We decided I should go to a metal shop and get a two foot equilateral triangle of quarter inch iron plate and have it shear cut so its flatness would not be disturbed as it might be if torch cut. I went to the metal shop with a drawing of what I wanted. They cut it but it came out as an isoceles triangle about 27 inches on the two sides and about 21 inches at the base. I pointed out that it was not right and since I had the diagram there they agreed. They allowed me to go back in the shop to oversee making another. The man laid it out on a new sheet of iron and cut a rectangle that was about 24" by 21 inches, the height of the equilateral triangle. He then made a mark in the middle of the 21 inch side and was going to cut it from there to the two opposite corners. I told him that was not right and asked for the chalk. I then made a mark at the middle of the 24 inch side and told him to cut it from there to to the two opposite corners. He said that wasn't right and I told him, to cut it that way and I would guarantee to accept it. So with great reluctance he cut it as I asked. Then he measured it and found that each side was 24 inches. I left while he was till scratching his head. So much for trigonometry! I installed this on the angle iron frame, welded with splver solder!

      I now had all the ingredients, the bath, the regulator, the reaction vessel, the table, the measurement device and the alpha form of glucose. I was finally ready to start making the runs. We went to all this trouble because we were looking for a very small, almost immeasurable, variation in the rate constants.
      I finally bit the bullet, got the bath running, made the glucose solution and added it to the dilatometer, placed it in the bath and started to make mesurements. I made one run and proceeded to the calculation phase. Wow, here was another great problem, how do we calculate an exponential function to the degree of accuracy we needed.

      Dr. Sager outlined on the blackboard an idea he had for calculating an exponential by least squares. The difficulty in the least squares calculation of an exponential is that one cannot solve three equations by simultaneous equations if one of the variables is in an exponent. The usual method of doing a least squares was close to impossible by this. But he had a great idea. He suggested that one use an assumed rate constant and use the first term of a Taylor expanson of the equation to calculate the correction factor! This would be linear as the other two constants were. The three partial derivatives could then be solved for the three constants. I spent a three week Christmas vacation working out this set of complicated simultaneous equations. As I remember, it took me twenty-one pages of lined yellow paper to come to the final answer. Worse than that, It took me three times to get the same answer twice!

      The cathetometer was mounted on the table and arranged so the viewing telescope was horizontal. A knob on the right would raise the telescope as the meniscus rose in the capillary, remaining horizontal, thereby avoiding any parallax error.
      The problem with the calculation at that time was that it took many hours to do one calculation. It involved using a Friden calculator and running a lot of large and long summations. One cannot do any rounding of the numbers at any part of the calculation or one might affect the result. It takes a bit of mind bending to accept the constants as variables and the data as exact numbers with as many zeroes as needed. If you cannot accept these ideas, stay away from least squares. The final step of the calculation has a difference in the numerator divided by a difference in the denominator such as one obtains with matrices. In this first calculation I made a fairly good approximation of the rate constant so the error correction was very small. The numerator was the difference between two fifteen digit numbers that were identical for the first eleven or twelve places!

      I did a couple of these calculations in 1953 for Martin Stiles at Harvard and was able to show that he had an initial titer problem with his data.

      But the big calculation for me was the total re-calculation of the data of a student, Marian Rice, of Dr. Bartlett at Harvard just after I left. Her work was never published because of the errors that crept in by the use of the more usual and often totally erroneous method of reducing the data to its logarithmic form and then plotting it. If the error in the original data is constant, it can't be after being converted to the logarithm. The method overempahsizes the worst data.
      The slope of the straight line one obtains is the rate of the reaction. But this is just totally wrong. That method gives only two constants where three are required for all curves except a circle. It shows that when one uses the log method one is assuming a value for one constant, usually the infinity value which can be in error and can vary from one run to another.
      Marian's work was never published because the data did not fit into any coherent idea. She had investigated six chemicals, one of which was anticipated to give anomalous results. This was the effect Dr. Bartlett was looking for. It did not appear in the logarithmic calculation. More about this later.

      When I arrived at Cal Poly in 1963 I became aware of a wonderful change that was beginning to take place, computers. I took the course in Fortran IV and began to write programs. I finally got proficient enough to attack the Exponential Least Squares problem. I wrote a simple program and it did in minutes what had taken me hours on a Friden calculator. Of course, computers can be very seductive. I eventually complicated the program by including a reverse calculation and a system of rejection of data points that were very likely to be non-statisical errors like the misreading of numbers. When the back calculation allowed a calculation of the errors in individual points, I was able to reject any data point whose error was two and a half times the standard deviation of points for that run. Lo and behold, the anomalous behavior Dr. Bartlett was looking for appeared!
      I sent the data to Dr. Bartlett and received no answer. He probably never even read it. I believe he had accepted certain allegations from the man I worked for at Columbia University, Dr. Fausto Ramirez. Dr. Bartlett never asked for my side of the story but accepted the story given him by Ramirez as gospel. Actually Dr. Ramirez enjoyed other people's pain and created as much of it as he could. My problem with him is discussed elsewhere.

      My enthusiasm for this method has never intrigued anyone else. I simply cannot get them to approach it with an open mind. Even Dr. Sager, in retirement, was involved in other projects and had no interest. I find this non-willingness to listen as very unscientific. I firmly believe this method is the ONLY way to calculate exponential data. I firmly believe a lot of good work in the 20th century is flawed and lost by bad calculation. I firmly believe that all exponential data of the 20th century should be re-calculated and a lot of good work would be recovered.

      I didn't work all the time. There was time for play. The Fraternity had a formal dance every spring. I was treasurer and brought a blank check to pay for it. What a thrill, I was taking a ton of people to dinner!
      About a week before, I was straightening things up in the Chemistry Storeroom in the basement of Corcoran Hall. I was about to leave when I noticed that two bottles on the top shelf were out of alphabetical order. I decided to take a moment and put them right. There was no ladder handy but there was a large sturdy looking wooden box. So I got up on the box, exchanged the two bottles, and the wood I was standing on at the upper end of the box, gave way and I fell down inside the box. I lit on my ankle which bent over and was sprained. I got home and developed a case of the flu also!.
      I went to the George Washington University Hospital (the old one) and was there for the better part of a week. The dance was coming up and I didn't have a date. How was I to get one while in the hospital? For the first couple days I didn't care about anything. I just slept. About the third day I started becoming aware that I was not a happy camper. For one thing, the "pillow splint" they put on my ankle was beginning to hurt worse than when un-splinted. They came in to inspect the ankle and started to re-pillow splint it. Their way of doing this was to wrap a pillow around the foot and tape it into a tube. This meant the ankle was badly bent into a ballerina's "on her toe" position. Painful as hell. So I asked them if I could do part of it. They agreed. So I wrapped the pillow around my leg above the ankle and put tape around it. Then I bent the bottom end of the pillow up so my foot was in the 'rest" position and taped it around the toes area. Ah, that felt much better. I don't think they learned a damn thing.
      I gradually got better, got on crutches to leave the hospital. They had a steep set of steps at the exit and I was not familiar with crutches so I put the crutch on the ne xt step and went to step down. Misake!. I almost catapauted myself out into the stree and back into the hospital. I raised my arms and let the crutches go. They gave them back to me and this time I put the crutch tip on the second step below and stepped down to the first step, one step above the step the crutches were on! This worked fine!
      Meanwhile, back in the hospital, worrying about getting a date for the formal, I started eyeing my nurse. She was a nice looking girl and seemed like a good candidate. So I started telling her about it and finally asked her if she would like to go with me. She demurred, being a bit suspicious of the whole thing. But the idea improved with time. I told her I wouldn't be able to dance but I had a lot of fraternity brothers that could. I probably also told her that I would probably need her, being a cripple! She finally areed to go with me.
      I, of course, had no car and couldn't have driven one even if I had. That Friday in the Chemistry Department I could be seen all day, walking up and down the hall, trying to toughen up the ankle so I could at least walk with without crutches. A limp, yes. Came Saturday night I was with another couple in his car. We picked her up and went out to the National Airport Terminal. The facilities were great, airplanes taking off outside the large picture windows. I enjoyed the evening although I just sat there for most of it. Towards the end, a man presented me with the bill and I wrote a check for something like $475 on the spot. What a thrill, I had never seen, much less written, a check of that magnitude. It seemed like Hollywood stuff.
      When it came time to go home, we left, a bit more "incapacitated" than was probably necessary. As I escorted her to her front door, a series of probably eight steep stone steps, she began to bow down. Suddenly she realized she was walking up the inside of her dress. If she had suddeny tried to stand up she probably would have decreased the level of her strapless formal to a rather embarrassing level!.

      I learned a little about politics this year. Early in the year we were encouraged by the alumni to hold a Rush Party at the Willard Hotel. It is a famous one in downtown Washington at the edge of the business district, 14th and Pennsylvania Avenue, 2 blocks from the White House. They said they would help with the expenses.
      A bit later, I got the bill from the hotel. In accordance with their "promise" I prepared a bill for what was supposed to be "their" portion of it. Our "Eminent Archon" (president) and I went down to Loew's Capitol Theatre to see the President of the Alumni group, Carter Barron. It was the south side of F Street, a half block east of the Willard Theater. They saw themselves as watching over two chapters, ours at the George Washington University and one just outside the district in Maryland, the University of Maryland.
      We went in, they took our name and finally ushered us through this theatrically regal, plush environment to his opulent office. I have memories of plush velvet drapes everywhere. It was all tastefully done, sufficient to cower any visitor. We sat down on the other side of Carter's monster desk. I handed him the $70 bill. He started giving us a little lecture on the fact that the alumni had to balance the needs of both chapters and not show any favoritism. He rattled on and then the phone rang. He picked it up and had a bit of a conversation. We only got his end of course. This is not a literal rendition.
      "Yes. When will she arrive? Yes, I will meet her and get her to the Presidential Suite at the ???. Oh, and by the way, make sure we have one of her bathing suits. The last time she was here we could have gotten her into the Presidential pool at the White House but she didn't have a suit. -- Goodbye."
      We gradually tumbled to the fact that he was talking to "Hollywood" about an impending visit of Esther Williams! He hung up, turned to us and said, "What was it we were talking about? Oh yes. $70." We excused ourselves and went back home and paid it ourselves.
      There is a Carter Barron Amphitheater out in Rock Creek Park. I have no idea why.

    President Truman fired General MacArthur 11 April 1951. MacArthur was way out of line. I was reminded of the story when Lincoln went to McClellan's Headquarters to speak to him about his performance in the Civil War. McClellan was out and Lincoln waited in the Library. When McClellan came in his aide told him the the President was waiting in the Library. McClellan just went upstairs and went to bed. Lincoln fired him. These were both in the tradition that the ultimate military authority in the United States is in civilian hands!
    MacArthur made a trip around the country and participated in a number of parades. I went down to 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue to view the parade. Most of the newsreels I've seen about these parades have cheering crowds. Maybe some of them were. But not in Washington. It was positively eerie. He came down the street in the big open car but there wasn't a sound. There was a tremendous crowd all down Pennsylvania Avenue but the silence was positively deafening. I guess they felt as I did, a tremendous respect for his accomplishments but not for his attempted insubordination.
    If you see a newsreel that purports to be the Washington parade and there is cheering by the crowd, it is DUBBED IN!

      My Master's thesis was accepted in the summer of 1951 as I remember, and I was granted the degree from the George Washington University. I applied to Iowa State and to Harvard for the Ph. D. programs. I got a letter from Harvard wondering why I was applying so late. With my insufferable arrogance, not really believing I would be accepted anyway, I answered that I was not aware that time was such a factor, that I wasn't going to apply until I thought I was ready, and now I was ready.
      Good grief, I was accepted. And further I had almost no time to get there. I caught a plane from Washington to Boston on a Thursday if my memory serves. I got a cab at the airport and told him I wanted to go to where they were registering students at Harvard. He pulled up to a building, I got out and went in, up to the desk. I gave them my name and they said they had no record of me being accepted. I showed them the telegram. They smiled and said they were the Harvard Business School and I needed the Harvard Graduate School. So I got another cab.
      I checked in and was assigned a room in Perkins Hall and a roommate whose name I have unfortunately forgotten. He had a car! We went to the football game that Saturday and got seats in the endzone! I never went again. Sunday we drove around Boston and out to Wellesley, just looking around at our new "home".
      Sunday night, late, we were going to bed. My roommate went down to the communal washroom. When he came back he told me I'd better talk to a guy down there about some Chemistry exams that were in progress. I went down and there was a guy with his head under the faucet. He told me that the Chemistry Department was giving the three hour qualifying exams, that the Analytical and Inorganic Chemistry exams had been given on Saturday, and Organic and Physical were being given the next day, Monday. I just went back to get a good night's sleep. I had no books with me yet! And besides I don't believe in studying for an exam later than 48 hours before the exam is to be given.
      I went in the next day and took both exams. We had an interview with a faculty member somewhat later. I had already expressed an interest in working with Professor Paul Doughty Bartlett and I had him for the interview. He looked at the exams and smiled and said it was what he was led to believe. I asked him what that meant. And he said, rather laconically, "Disproportionate Effort". He had obviously talked to Dr. William Sager at the George Washington University, a former student of his. I had an A in the Organic exam and a C in the Physical. That meant I would have to take the Inorganic and Analytical exams and repeat the Physical Chemistry exam in January. I passed all three in January.

      There was a pretty girl there, daughter of a rich New York family that had sent her to a private Catholic College on the upper Hudson River, St. Vincent's as I remember. She was the "Class Scientist" and thought she was really learning. She was bright enough but they had short-changed her. She came to Harvard, took the four qualifiers and flunked all four. This had never happened to her before. It utterly destroyed her. I don't think she ever passed anything. I tried to tutor her in Organic Chemistry but she just couldn't seem to learn anything. She had a monumental memory block that just could not be erased. She gave me a very expensive Longine watch for Christmas as a thank you for my help. She began to go with another student named Frank and eventually married him. We used to joke about women who came there for an MRS degree. That is not what she came for, but it is what she got. I've often wondered how her life went. I prefer to think it worked out well for her.

      The Spring semester I took a course in numerical analysis. It was taught by Dr. Coolidge of the famous calculation of the hydrogen atom in the early 30's. I was way out of my depth. Everybody in there had a way better math background than I did. But I probably learned more than anybody else because I was starting so far back. I got a C which, of course, was not acceptable in graduate school. But I've never regretted taking it.
      One of the few advantages of being 83 is that you can talk about almost anyone you ever met because the likelihood is that they are all dead. Such, of course, is the case with Dr. Coolidge. The description that seems to fit him unusally well is that he was an odd duck. I had a great deal of respect for him, probably more than he had for himself. He came from a very rich family. There was the Coolidge String Quartet, well known in the 30's. They were strong backers of the Curtiss School of Music. I'm sure there was much more.
      It was said that the family thought the 1928 Franklin "motor car" was as good as a car could get. They were said to have bought three of them, that they were now (in the 1950's) driving the second one and that they had a brand new one in their garage up on blocks.
      Dr. Coolidge rode a bike to Harvard with a bicycle clip around his chain side pants leg. His notes were carried in a rolled oats box. At the first class of the course I took, he walked back and forth in front of the room and said, "I don't usually do much the first period. I let you get used to me first."
      While walking down the hall one day a friend of mine was whistling or humming a classical tune. Dr. Coolidge passed him and then stopped turned around, identified what the tune was and said that it wasn't in the clarinet part. He knew my friend played the clarinet. He played violin or viola, probably both.
      On the personal side, he had a graduate student that, under his guidance, "calculated the hydrogen atom". An enormous piece of work for the time since they only had a Friden calculator to work with. It was a groundbreaking and very important step in Chemistry. He richly deserved the honors it brought him. His family endowed a professorship at Harvard that he was to occupy as long as he wanted it. They also endowed a building.
      I think he always doubted his right to be there, that his family had bought his way into the "fraternity". I personally think that he had earned the right.
      But he had another graduate student doing another massive calculation. Toward the end of it, they discovered they had left out one of the variables. This vitiated all the work done. The student was allowed to graduate anyway but with the promise that Dr. Coolidge would never take another student.
      This is the only black mark I would give to Harvard!
      I have always wondered if these stories were true. Maybe someone will investigate them some day.

      On 25 June 1950, North Korea opened fire on South Korea. Truman set up an International force to combat it. A number of WWII veterans were recalled. I didn't know what my status was. The services run on paper and my paper was at Selfridge Field Michigan. I had never been there but I was nominally assigned there. I decided I had better find out what my status was. So I called Selfridge Field and got to the Reserve Section. I explained who I was and then asked what my status was. They asked what I was doing. I said I was in graduate school in Chemistry at Harvard. Their answer was short and sweet, "Stay there." I never heard from them again.

      The second year was the start of research. Dr. Bartlett accepted me as a student and suggested several problems. I was attracted to one that involved a study of the Wagner/Meerwein rearrangement. This reaction had been studied intensively for many years but there were a few things to do. However, it was a good vehicle for studying another of his interests. Ellie Webster had already done a thesis on the problem. But Bartlett had a preconceived notion and suggested a plan of attack. I studied the previous thesis and found that it was largely a chronicle of negative results as far as the problem was concerned. But she did have a very extensive history section.
      Bicyclic systems have a bridgehead which has a hydrogen on it. The cyclic nature of the compound interferes with reactions of this hydrogen. It had virtually zero reactivity as Bartlett had previously shown in many studies.
      But a paper in 1939 by Levy, Scaife and Wilder-Smith suggested that this hydrogen could be exchanged with deuterium rather easily. This seemed to be an unbelievable paradox to Bartlett. He believed there was a misinterpretation of their data somewhere. They seemed to have shown that the most obvious explanation, exchange with the methylene hydrogens of camphene was not possible. So Bartlett suggested replacing the methylene group with a p-anisyl group might help show what was really going on. I know this is virtually unintelligible to most of the people that might read this so I will not go into it further. A previous student, Dr. Ellie Webster, had worked on the project and literally gotten nowhere. But she had a huge amount of history to write about which rather camouflaged the essential lack of results. The problem was that the method they were using could not do what they wanted it to do.
      I will go into it to this extent. In a rearrangement there is an intermediate which can then react in one of two ways. One way is the "expected" way and the other is the rearranged way. But the rearranged way doesn't happen very often so if you have a one event way to study it, the rearranged product will be masked by the tremendous amount of the normal or expected product. I continued doing what Ellie had been doing and was getting nowhere.
      I had an appointment with Bartlett once a week on Friday morning with two others, Wendell Long and Martin Stiles. The theory was that at least one of us would have something worth talking about. But the effect was that we were constantly scrambling around with beakers and test tubes to have something to say every Friday. We really didn't have the luxury of just sitting there, in the lab with our feet up and "thinking"!

      We had a picnic out at some park. While playing touch football the ball hit my right hand on the end of my middle finger. It hurt. I took it to the Medical office at Harvard. They referred me to one of their surgeons. I walked into his office holding the finger up, out in front of me. He looked up up, smiled and said, "Ah, a baseball finger, I've got one to." So we talked about other things for a bit and left! If the surgeon can't cure himself, how could he cure me.

      Midway through the second year I was beginning to get a bit desperate. I had nothing to write about and the literature part had already been done. So I was out on a limb and it was about to be sawn off.
      Then Bartlett, unintentially, did me a great favor. He accepted an invitation to lecture for a quarter in Germany. He was a germanophile and had enormous respect for Professor Meerwein who was still alive. When he left, there was no more pressure, so I sat at the desk in my lab, turned on the record player, put my feet up and thought. I was not thinking necessarily about the project but it was there. I was waiting for the little librarian in the back of my head to work things out and send me down the right path. After about two weeks of this, Eureka, a thought popped into my head. We needed an equilibrium method rather than the one shot method we had been using. We needed an equilibrium method where the reaction would go back and forth many times and the rearranged product would gradually accumulate to where we could detect it!
      Then of course I had to figure out how to do it by an equilibrium method. I needed an acid but not an aqueous one. And it had to be fairly strong. Of the several possibilities I could think of one seemed to stand out, Formic Acid. One has to be careful with this, it is a strong vesicant, a blistering agent. So I dissolved a bit of the alcohol we were using in a little dioxane and took it down to the machine room with some Formic Acid. I decided the best bet was to take the UltraViolet (UV) spectrum and see what would happen. I put Formic Acid in the UV cell and then a drop or two of the dioxane solution of the alcohol. I ran the spectrum and a large unexpected peak appeared at 381 millimicrons wavelength. I hollered at Marian Rice who was taking an Infrared Spectrum of one of her samples to come over and look. And then I ran the paper back to the beginning and took it again. This time the peak was smaller. I realized now that I had something to write about. There was still a lot of work to do but there was light now at the end of the tunnel. I did a lot of work with this while Dr. Bartlett was in Germany.
      When he came back, he didn't understand what I was doing and made me get back to what we had been doing. I gave my oral based on what I had done while he was gone, it was approved and I was allowed to leave with the idea that I would write the thesis on my next job and get it back to him. This was rather common practice.
      Bartlett was a somewhat peculiar paradox of fame and shyness. He also was not too "swift". His good contributions came after considerable thought. His immediate, off the top of his head, suggestions could sometimes be really way out in left field. One Friday, in our little group session, he made a suggestion to one of my compatriots who was having some trouble that he might try running the reaction using dimethylzinc as a solvent. The student blanched because he knew, as the rest of us did, that dimethylzinc was so reactive that it would spontaneously burst into flame in the presence of air! We then made a resolution we would never do anything he suggested off the top of his head unless he repeated it three times.
      He seemed peculiarly non-observant. My second roommate was Arnold Manchester Hartley, from Rhode Island. He had the wry wit of a down-easter. One time when a rather unpopular student sat down at our table in the graduate school mess-hall and asked him if he minded if he smoked, Arnold turned to him and in a quiet voice said, "No, I don't care of you go up in flames!".
      Arnold and I looked somewhat alike and one time Bartlett poked his head into my lab when I was out and Arnold was sitting there and he talked to Arnold, thinking he was talking to me. Another time he stopped in and asked if I was a member of Sigma Xi. I said I had been made an Associate Member at the George Washington University. I guess that was enough for him. Everybody else in my class was made a full member, I was left as an Associate.

      There was a young couple there, Stuart and Marian Rice. They had graduated from Brooklyn Polytech and then come to Harvard. She was an Organic Chemist and he was a Physical Chemist. They graduated three years later, he became a Professor at the University of Chicago. I don't think she ever touched chemistry again.
      She did a project for Bartlett. The results were totally inconclusive and were never published. Years later after I got to Cal Poly, computers began to influence our lives. Around 1965 I had a friend that worked in the Computer Center. It was a large room full of big gray or tan boxes with things whirling around. This room full of airconditioned boxes was a computer with the monumental capacity of 128K. They were so excited when they got upgraded to 256K. I decided I wanted to get in on this. In those days they used punched cards. Woe it was if you sprayed them all over accidentally. A big program would be almost impossible to reassemble. I took Fortran 101. I was doing OK until we came to subscripted variables. Remember I was also teaching full time and I didn't have much time left over to learn this. I was almost ready to quit when I asked one of my Computer Science students if he would come into the classroom and help me with subscripted variables. I got up to the blackboard and started to describe my problem. All of a sudden, in the middle of my explanation, the big light came on and I realized what I had been doing wrong. The student hadn't said a word. As I remember, he smiled and went on his way.
      In my Master's thesis I had a Least Squares treatment of an exponential function. Dr. Sager had outlined the idea on the blackboard. I went to my apartment on New Hampshire Avenue over Christmas vacation and worked it out. As I remember it took over twenty sheets of legal size yellow lined paper to work it out. I had to go through it three times before I got the same answer twice! It was so difficult to do with a large number of data points that I only put one full calculation in my thesis with several done with only five points. It seemed to me it had great potential. One of my fellow students, Martin Stiles, was having a problem calculating his data. It just wasn't coming together using the conventional log treatment. So I went down into the basement of the Chemistry Library with a Friden calculator and calculated several of his runs. It took several hours for each calculation. I was able to show that his data was good but was complicated by a variable initial titre which was skewing his results when calculated by the log method. I should mention that the log method is statisically irresponsible. It is easy to use, but can give erroneous results.
      But now, in the 60's, I had access to a computer. I punched the method into punch cards and punched Marian's data in as well. I was able to calculate all her runs and do the secondary calculation of the Energy of Activation as well. She had used the log method and it gave scattered and non-understandable results. But when I re-calculated it, it gave the results I think Bartlett was looking for. It was beautiful. I sent the results to him and never got an answer. I don't think he understood what was going on. I think if he had understood it, he would have rushed into print.
      So Marian Rice's good work is consigned to the third row of perdition of bad calculations. It got me to wondering how many other theses were lying fallow in the Harvard library suffering from the same fate. If I ever win the lottery, I will endow some student there to recalculate all 20th century theses that involve first order calculations. I bet a lot of them would prove to be excellent work followed by bad calculations and their great work would have been lost forever.
      I know many of you will not know much about what I'm saying but I had to get it out of my system, hoping that someone sometime will understand and have the means to rescue all this good work.

      I had a 1950 Ford two door sedan. I bought it in 1952, my first car! My brother-in-law Rollie Holsen managed a Ford dealership in Moorhead MN, twin city to Fargo ND. It had belonged to one of his mechanics who needed the cash. It was a good little car and I took it back and forth, Boston to Moorhead several times and even to Seattle once. In the beginning of the third year, Fall of 1954, several of us decided to take a short trip to Canada. Stuart and Marian Rice and Barry Shapiro went with me driving went to Montreal. Then we went up to Quebec. Strictly tourists! Looky-loos. Then we went up the south side of the St. Lawrence to Trois Rivieres, Three Rivers. I remember we ate in a restaurant here. We truly felt like outlanders. Everybody spoke French and we felt they didn't really trust us. We didn't have time to take the long way around the Gaspe peninsula but cut over to Campbelltown, New Brunswick. We ate here too. I remember a vegetable we had never heard of before, Fiddleheads. From the web, "Fiddleheads are the young coiled fern leaves (about an inch in diameter) of the ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris). Nearly all ferns have fiddleheads, but those of the ostrich fern are unlike any other." And they did look like the curled head of a fiddle. Frankly I didn't think they tasted very good.
      I always liked to get out into the back country so I drove inland from here to find the road south to Moncton. While going inland we came to a covered bridge. We went down a rather steep road to the bridge where I had to make a right angle turn to go over the bridge. There were two probably 8 x 8 posts on each side of the bridge entrance. The one on the far side had been hit by some heavy object, a truck at least and was mostly broken about halfway up. My memory is that my passengers got out and walked across and then I drove the car over. It was after sundown.
      We got to the road to Moncton. We were forty miles from the nearest town or source of light and it was moonless. I pulled over to the side of the road and turned off the lights and the engine. I told them I was just resting for a couple minutes. After our eyes got dark adapted I told them to step out and take a look. I really enjoyed their wonder and amazement. The Rice's had grown up in Brooklyn and then come to Cambridge, a suburb of Boston. They had never seen the sky like this, never seen the Milky Way or 99% of the stars they could see here. There were so many stars it was hard to pick out the constellations. I grew up in North Dakota with these stars every night. We used to lie on our backs in a vacant lot and gaze at them. That was when we weren't playing "Keep 'em down" or "Prisoner's Base". It was quite a startling time for them.

      The Boston Symphony used to have real cheap tickets for their "Open Rehearsals". Charles Munch was the conductor. We got seats in the front row about six or eight seats off the center. We had a marvellous view of him. They were rehearsing Richard Strauss' "Ein Heldenleben". He was known to hate having people take pictures during a performance, even an open rehearsal. I had a good camera and very fast film. I took three 36 exposure rolls of film from my lap. The camera was very quiet and he never knew I took them. They were great. But I got my comeuppance. Barry borrowed them from me and never returned them!
      My roommate for the second and third year was Arnold M. Hartley who was working for Dr. Lingane in Analytical Chemistry. We roomed for two years. I remember walking from Mallinckrodt Laboratory to the Dining Hall one day and when we were still a block away, he said, "Oh-oh. Veal cutlets today." He hated veal cutlets. They had a suggestion box at the entrance to the food line. One day I put a note in it suggesting that they might get more comments if they put it where people left, after eating. Sure enough they moved it. They may have had some regrets later when another of my friends scraped his salad into the suggestion box.

      I remember one of the Christmases. We went out to try to find a place to eat but everything was closed. We finally wound up down in Chinatown!

      I went to Tanglewood once. I don't remember who was with me. It's a wonderful Orchestra camp run by the Boston Symphony I believe. Everything musical was going on somewhere. The setting was wonderful, out in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts.
      We went to the evening concert. They played the "Requiem" of Hector Berlioz. We were almost late. I think we got the last seats and they were way down in the first row, at the right end. To me, they were the best seats in the house for this particular number. It had a large orchestra on stage with a large choir behind it. There were four small brass choirs of about eight instruments each. One was on each end of the orchestra. Another was off to the back left of the auditorium and the fourth to the back right of the auditorium. We got the most marvellous three dimensional effect where we were. One of the brass choirs was directly in front of us. The other three were all at different distances from us. A great musical push-pull when they played. Yes, we had the best seats in the house. I pity people that hear this from a record!

      Before our time there was another couple, Charles G. Swain and his wife. When C. Gardner Swain graduated he became a Professor of Chemistry at MIT. She also graduated but never touched chemistry again. While I really believe Harvard accepted women on an equal footing, I think they did it with some reluctance when women would take up a space for three years and then throw it away.

      When some people graduated they adjusted their name to match their new status as a Ph.D. from "Hahvahd". For example, Charles G. Swain became C. Gardner Swain. Arnold referred to me as C. Everard and I called him A. Manchester. Impressive, right?
      I feel the need to digress here and relate a story from one of the Friday Bartlett seminars. There was a classic case of a student that faked all his data at the University of London and he got his Ph. D. His name was Beasley and he was a legend. Back as WWI was about to start Beasley was working for Christopher Kelk Ingold, a world famous chemist at the University of London. He apparently was disgruntled when Ingold went into the war effort somewhere and passed him to another very famous chemist, Thomas Edward Thorpe. His work could not be repeated and in the light of today's knowledge it was obvious that he faked it. In one of his first lectures in Organic Chemistry, we used Ingold's book as a text and Dr. Bartlett warned us that we were not to believe Ingold's belief that he was responsible for 90% of the work in chemistry (there was a laugh here) and that the other 10% was wrong! (big laugh here!)
      I took a lot of notes in all these classes but I don't remember ever consulting them. I think the learning came in the writing of the notes, not in reading them later.

      WHile I ws there they tried to rebuild the top of Memorial Hall, bult I believe as a remebrance of the Civil War. It was huge. It had one of thos somewhat tapered and truncated steeples, rather assive and very high.       At this seminar, before things got underway there was a discussion of two papers that had Bartlett's name on them. The first was (as I remember) Bartlett, Swain and Woodward and had two conclusions. The second was a later paper by Friedman and Bartlett that made two conclusions, that the previous two conclusions were wrong. Bartlett was sitting more or less in the middle of the table facing the blackboard with Swain immediately on his left. (There was a saying that paraphrased a common saying in Boston, "Here we are in Boston, the land of the beans and the cod, where Swain speaks only to Bartlett and Bartlett speaks only to god.") At these seminars, Swain would not acknowledge the presence of another soul, only Bartlett. I was on Swain's left and overheard Bartlett say, sotto voce, "How does it feel to be Bartlett's Beasley?"

      Bartlett invited the students to his house out in Newton for a party. I had a car now and took several students with me. I made a wrong turn on highway 128, the circumferential highway around Bosotn and had to go several miles before I could turn around and go back the right way. We were going to be a bit late and perhaps I was pushing it a little. A Massachusetts trooper flicked his lights at me. I pulled over and stopped. He parked a bit behind me, got out of his car and started to walk over to me. As he was walking and was still over twenty feet away, he said "Just because you're from Minnesota, don't think we can't pull you in."

      As a student I was carrying Minnesota plates.

      Towards the end of my graduate work I was sent out to Amherst to interview for a job. I didn't impress them. Probably my midwest non-Ivey League accent unnerved them. On the way back on highway 2, past the Army Camp at Ayer just west of Boston, I was flagged down by a trooper. It was January 18 and I still had the previous year's plates. He said I was driving an unregistered vehicle. I told him that it was registgered, that the plates were in the mail somewhere but that I had a refund check from the State of Minnesota for "Refund of Excess Motor Vehicle Fees". I even showed him the check. He took me to a kangaroo court they had and they fined me $12.50. I asked them how I was supposed to get to Boston. They ignored me while I got in the car and drove away.
      I thought that was the end of it, but one day I got a letter from Rudy King, Commissioner of Motor Vehicles for the State of Massachusetts, suspending my right to drive in Massachusetts. So I drove down to 100 Nashua Street, went in and talked to several people and finally got to a gray haired man on the fourth floor. He listened to my story and asked for the registration. He looked at it and said, " Well, the car was registered. I can restore your right to drive but I can't get your money back."

      I would not class Bartlett as brilliant, but if he had a good bit of time to mull over something he could come out with some good ideas. He was the Irving Professor of Chemistry. I would say he was a prototype of people's imagination of a university professor. He lived in Newton MA, a suburb of Boston. The community had equipment that the residents could borrow and return. One time he borrowed their little cement mixer. Sometime later they called and asked if he was through with it, they needed it back. When he checked it he found he had left the unused cement in it and it had hardened. Somehow that story didn't surprise me at all.

      As you may remember, I was an orphan, no backup finances and was broke, as I had been for many years. I needed some money so I went on an Air Force Reserve two weeks tour of duty to get the money to go to my first job.
      My tour was at Hanscom Field, Lincoln MA and as usual, I would check in with the military for a few minutes and then go work for a civilian scientist. It was an era when there was a lot of interest in getting crystalline germanium.
      I suggested that we might try the process used for making aluminum and see if we could produce germanium that way. They thought this was worth trying. To make aluminum by the Hall Process, they dissolved aluminum oxide in sodium aluminate, heated it to above 600 deg Centigrade and then eletrolyzed it. The aluminim came out at the bottom of the bath as a liquid. Oxygen was produced at the other electrode and no known electrode at the time could survive in an oxygen atmosphere at that temperature. Hall realized this and decided that he would have to use an electrode that could be generated as fast as it oxidized. He made some kind of mixture of organic materials, something like molasses and sawdust. This was then squeezed into the bath in a way that allowed it to carbonize. And of course carbon conducts a current so the oxygen would form at this electrode and burn off the electrode as carbon dioxide.
      How would I adapt this? I looked up the constants and sodium germanate melted somewhere around 800 deg C. So I set up a muffle furnace, cut a little hole in the top for the electrodes, put sodium germanate in a crucible, added some germanium dioxide, put carbon electrodes into it and applied a direct current. I had it set up on a timer to start heating at about 5 AM because it took about three hours to get up to temperature. When I got there it would already be hot.
      The idea was good but it didn't work. After a number of runs I got no germanium. Once it appeared there might be a little on the electrode.
      So, back to the books. Aha! I discovered what I thought was the problem. There was a germanium monoxide and it was volatile. Instead of taking the germanium dioxide down to germanium metal, it was taking it to the monoxide and that was going off as a gas! By this time the tour was up. The civilian was pleased with the work and I answered the question. Germanium could not be produced by a variation of the Hall process.

      During this tour, Hurricane Carol decided to visit. There I was in a Quonset hut on the base. Rain, wind, a bit of worry whether the Quonset would survive. Then it all cleared up, the Eye passed directly over us.
      I decided to take advantage of the opportunity and race into Lincoln in my '50 Ford two door car. Trees, branches, power lines were all over. There was a power line down near a park. A police car ahead of me just went over the curb and across the park to avoid it. I went right behind him. I parked in front of a place with food, but not a restaurant. There was a jog in the street to my left with a liquor store right at the corner. As I was going in the door, the front window of the liquor store exploded out into the street. This shows that the pressure drop in the eye is enormous, probably from thirty inches Hg/sq. in. to twentyfive. If you calculate the force on a wall of a building when the higher pressure is trapped inside the building you will not be surprised by this exploding window. In my opinion a large part of the hurricane damage occurs because people bottle up the building and keep the pressure inside. Every so often, one of these buildings simply explodes. I firmly believe hurricane damage could be cut in half at least by providing a way for the air to exit and return.

      I checked out with the military people and went on my way. Years later I got a chance to see my evaluations. The civilian gave me a glowing report. The Captain that reviewed the report wrote on the form "This guy can't be that good." and he reduced the evaluation. He didn't know me and probably knew very little chemistry. I found that kind of attitude prevalent in the reserves later.

      This is as good a time as any to vent my spleen about living in Boston. I was going to be offered an office in Boston for Chemical and Engineering News . Fortunately I had already resigned to take a position in California so I was relieved of the necessity of telling them the horror stories that made it so I would not go live in Boston for almost any amount of money. I have to be realistic that I would go but only for an absolutely obscene amount of money and perks!
      I have to admit that probably the major factor was the police. If they weren't mostly Irish there I would have guessed they were Sicilian mafioso. I will tell several stories that were not unusual.
      First, it was illegal to park on the street overnight. But there was no place else for most of the cars. I remember getting two tickets, as I remember in January and July. I looked upon them as my parking fees for the year.
      There was a block downtown that was marked with solid yellow curbs meaning no parking. But it was always solidly parked. Once in a while the police would just ticket everybody in the block. But there were black and white checks, for about eight feet on either side of the fire plug which said, we really mean it here!
      When I first got there to work at the National Research Corporation I rented a studio apartment in Boston near the Salt and Pepper Bridge and near the river. Admiral Byrd was said to live about a half block away. Not too long after I moved to the Harvard Street Cooperative House near Central Square in Cambridge. I changed my address with the local police departments as instucted, Quite some time later I was driving down Memorial Drive in my red and white Ford Country Sedan. To the best of my knowledge I was not speeding, the limit was 45 and I was in no hurry. I passed a cop standing on the curb. He wiggled me over with his finger. So I stopped, figuring he was he wanted a ride somewhere or something. He gave me a ticket for speeding!
      I didn't hear anything for some time and then one Friday afternoon I got a phone call at work telling me to report to the Middlesex Courthouse the next morning at nine AM. I asked why and he said that I didn't respond to a subpoena. I asked how the subpoena was served and he said it was droppped through the mail slot at 55 Brimmer Street. That was my old address that I had notified them that I had left. I shouldn't have to say that it was far from being a legal service. It is supposed to be delivered in person. I said I had plans and was there a way of postponing it and he said that if I did not promise to be there he would have to issue a warrant and send some officers out to pick me up. So I promised.
      I was there at nine AM. The judge arrived at 10:30. They emptied the drunk tank first. I think they made me wait till I was the last one, on purpose although he had promised I would go through early. I was behind a balustrade at least thirty feet from the judge. The cop however was right up there with the judge. The clerk read the charge and asked, "Guilty or not guilty?" I said, "Of what? How fast was I going? What was the speed limit there?" The cop leaned over to the judge and I caught the word summons. So I told the judge about the illegal service. There was a little more discussion and then the clerk said, "The case is filed." I turned to the bailiff next to me and asked what that meant. And he said they would file it and nothing would happen unless I was picked up again! By this time it was almost noon and I was boiing mad. I turned to the bailiff and said, "So they're admitting they were wrong!" And I stomped out.

      I was crazy about photography at that time. I always had my camera with me. It was one of probably the best cameras of the time, an Alpa. It was a Swiss Camera and had an apochromatic f 2.0 lens.

      I was using a lot of B&W film which I bought in 100 foot rolls and spooled into 30 exposure rolls. I also bought Anscochrome color film in 100 foot rolls and re-spooled it into 30 exposure rolls. The color film was processed by Ferrante-Dege in Harvard Square. I processed the B&W myself. One night I stopped by the Charles River at night, probably with a tripod and took a night picture of Boston across the Charles River from Cambridge, near MIT.

      The only tall building at the time was the John Hancock building. It is now completely dwarfed by high rise buildings.

      After a week of looking I took a couple rooms in a large brick building on 168th Steet and Riverside Drive. It was built in the 20's when lots of money let people build buildings with twenty room apartments. There wasn't much use for 20 room apartments at this time so people "subdivided" them. A little old German lady rented the whole apartment and sublet rooms! I never saw any of her other renters. I only saw her once or twice. I tried to use her phone once but it was so dirty I couldn't take it, the smell was revolting. I had two rooms. There was a fire escape outside the window with a view of the Hudson River, New Jersey and the George Washington Bridge. Under other conditions I might have enjoyed it. But New York is the most unfriendly place I have ever been. A joke from the 50's had a hippie peering at an accident victim, lying in the street, saying faintly, "Call me an ambulance!" At which point the hippie says, "OK, you're an ambulance." To me, that symbolizes my opinion of the attitude in New York. I always say it was the smallest town I have ever been in. Or rather, it was a thousand small towns, all jammed together. There was a little icecream/news paper shop a block away. The guy that ran it always wore a hat and the same brown sweater. I had the impression that he stayed there for at least twelve hours a day, then went a couple blocks to a hole in the ground, went down, got in a crackerbox and zipped across town, came out of another hole in the ground and went to his apartment. In the morning he got up and repeated the whole thing in the other direction. He probably spent most of his life on those two blocks. He lived in a two block town connected by an umbilical subway!

      One girl was getting her Ph. D. in Physical Chemistry. When she flew to a job interview it was the first time she had been on an airplane. She had never been to a Broadway play or a concert! This is a typical New Yorker? I came home to the brownstone manor late one night, perhaps midnight. The elevator was old and creaky and very slow. I lived on the fifth floor. I was about to close the door when I heard the clicking of high heels on the marble floor so I held the door so she wouldn't have to wait for its round trip to the fifth flroor. She came around the corner and stopped dead in her tracks. She looked at me and looked at me and finally said, "Oh, I've seen you before." and got in. I asked what that meant and she said. " I wouldn't have gotten on the elevator with you if I hadn't seen you before." What a way to live. It should be called New Paranoia. I had the feeling I was intruding if I asked someone for the time! I lived there for a year and a half. I didn't know anybody when I came and I didn't know anybody when I left. I was never invited anywhere by anybody. I assume they all had homes but I never saw one or met anyone's family. I had a cousin, Ansel Brasth who lived out on Long Island with his wife, Martha and three children. I visited them a couple times but it was a long way with monstrous traffic. I had parked my car in a rented space in a garage.

      A car was really a liability. There was no place for you to drive it and the streets were clogged with "professional" traffic who didn't want amateurs messing up their streets. I found the subways great! But I have to confess it was miserable year and a half for me. I would get on the subway in the evening, go down to 42nd street where they had a bunch of all night theaters, choose one, go in and watch a triple feature, get on the subway and go home. I attended a number of Broadway plays. I liked the 55th Street Playhouse with a number of great revivals, like "Guys and Dolls" and "Finian's Rainbow". I was even able to see Prokofiev's opera "Love for Three Oranges". Many times on Sunday afternoon I would go down to my car, drive north on the Westside highway, cross the George Washington Bridge to the New Jersey Turnpike and go south. They had at least six mystery programs on Mutual radio, like, "Johnny Dollar" and "Gunsmoke" with Willam Conrad. I would drive an hour and a half south, turn around and drive back, park the car and go back to my rooms. Yes, I was very unhappy, the whole time.

      I will say that I have only despised two people in my life and he was one of them. He had a graduate student working on an organic synthesis for him. He would start on Monday and spend the whole week and get less than a tenth of a gram of an intermediate chemical. Fausto would come in over the weekend and take this small amount of material and waste it all doing one thing or another with it. When the student came in he would have to start all over. After this happened several times the student was tired of it and hid the material so he would have it on Monday. Fausto came in and couldn't find it.
      On Monday morning I saw him talking rather viciously to the student about hiding the material. He actually broke the student down in tears.
      One time I was in his office and for some reason he needed to vent his plans for his career. He had a list of all the people in the department on the back of the door to his office. He described what he would have to do to advance himself. I found the whole process revolting but said nothing. I could almost see the flashing chisels and knives.
      A story I was not witness to but was told by others I considered reliable. A student of his had been working for around seven years. Fausto would not let him write it up and present it to the faculty for his Ph. D. degree. So the student said he was going to write it up and present it to the rest of the faculty to see what they thought. That night, after the student left, Fausto went into his office and took all his research notebooks and locked them up in his office. The student blew his stack, left school and never got anything for his seven year's work.
      I had serious disagreements with him about some of his procedures. When he made a new material, he would take a small amount of it and work to purify that small sample. He would then determine the analysis and the various properties of it on the highly purified sample. But when he went to the next step he would use the original crude material. I would not trust anything he published.
      One time I made a hundred grams or so of a new material that was going to be used in the next step. I recrystallized the whole batch once. I then sent a sample out for analysis. I told him that I had done that, and he snapped back, "Are you willing to pay for it if it comes back wrong?" I snapped back, "Yes!" But really one never says anything like that to a post-doctoral researcher. I was angry, as was he. The analysis came back and it was about as perfect an analysis as I ever got, fortunately. I went to his office and laid it on his desk and left without a word.
      The pity is that I was on the verge of producing the data he was looking for. I had made a precursor to the test material. The test material would have a carbonyl group next to an asymmetric carbon that would have an asymmetric hydrogen. This hydrogen would have some acidic qualities which could be studied by the loss of optical activity in a suitable reaction.
      So I rigged up a polarimeter with the precursor so that I could follow the optical activity as the preparation of the test material took place. The rotation angle went from a negative value to a small positive value and then proceeded toward zero. This meant that the optical acitivity of the desired product was being observed but that it was racemizing during the reaction. The pity is that I was probably the only person that could have separated the two concecutive reactions with my Least Squares Treatment of a first order reaction from my Master's Degree work at the George Washington Unversity.
      I was making this progress on his project but it became so difficult to work with him that halfway through the second year I was almost getting ill every morning thinking of going in to work to deal with him. I finally bit the bullet and asked him if he was planning a third year on the project and he said he was. I asked him if he could replace me easily at this point and he said it would be no trouble. So I suggested that if the next person had a year and a half he could get twice as much done than if he had only one year. He agreed so we agreed that I would not return after Christmas and I went to my sister's home in Minnesota. It was a tremenedous relief to be rid of him.
      I have always believed that Ramirez talked to Bartlett with his version of the situation. It is also probably the reason Bartlett never helped me to find the job I probably really should have had. And Bartlett never asked me for my version. I think I wrote him explaining my side but I suspect he never read it. He certainly never acted on it.

      But then again, if this had not happened, I would not have gotten on the other path that would lead me to Northwest Missouri State College where I met the probably only woman that could put up with all my foibles.

      There is an experience around this time that is clouded by a total lack of memory abut how it fits in with everything else. I don't know where I was going or why. But I remember the middle of the event. I think I had visited Bob and Helen Davis in Boulder CO. And then I headed off to the southwest. I remember going up Pike's Peak in my '57 Ford Country Sedan. I had put in a set of those lifetime plugs and they were working beautifully. I was almost at the top when the line stopped ahead of me. I must have been over 12,000 feet and there was some snow on the ground and on the road. The line started to move but the large passenger vehicle ahead of me couldn't get going. I didn't think I was going to be able to help but I thought I would try. So I eased up behind it and gently started to push. It moved and finally got going! I was shocked and didn't know the old car had it in it. But it did. I think the plugs were a good reason why.
      Later I went down to Taos and Santa Fe and then over to Flagstaff and down to Phoenix. It was 104 deg.! So I didn't even stop. I turned west, heading toward Gila Bend. When I got there it was around noon and I felt the desire to have a chocolate milkshake. So I parked opposite a drug store that looked like it might have a soda fountain. As I was about to turn off the engine I heard an announcement on the radio. I was listening to a general type program on Mutual radio on Saturday. It was somewhat slanted toward travelers. They announced that the hottest place in the United States at that time was Gila Bend Arizona, Arizona, 104 deg. So I did not turn off the engine. I left knowing anywhere I went it was going to be cooler. I headed south to Ajo and on to the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. It is undeveloped and I was seeing the real thing, not a contrived display for a tourist. I enjoyed it. As the sun was going down, I went back to Ajo and attended a drive-in movie. I sat on the hood of the car, leaning against the windshield. I remember nothing further about this trip!

      Some time later I got a most peculiar letter from Dr. Bartlett expressing, to me, some rather weird suggestions about my career, or future lack of it. I was deeply offended by his letter and never did understand why he didn't at least ask me for my side of the story. That was my last contact with him. It got to me from third party that he did mention me and said that not one person in a thousand would have solved the problem I did. While at Columbia I wrote my thesis and Bartlett began to understand what I did. He had another student finish what I had wanted to do and wrote a paper with three students names on it as well as his own. There is very little in this paper that was not from my thesis. But the die was cast. I don't know if he actively acted against my better interests but he certainly never helped me. Of course prospective employers were free to draw their own conclusions.
      As time passed, I wrote Bartlett more than one letter but he never answered any of them.

      Yes, I know. they're dead now, and can't defend themselves. But somehow, I couldn't care less. I might mention that Fausto did not last at Columbia. He went to the State University of New York at Stonybrook. And he is no longer venting his attitude on helpless graduate students. He's gone to the great reaction vessel in the sky!
      Bartlett was a rather strangely uncommunicative type with, I believe, little understanding or empathy with others. One time he poked his head in my lab and gave a message to the person sitting there, thinking it was me! It was my roommate. And one time he came in and asked if I was a member of Sigma Xi. I had always considered that a kind of Holy Grail for a chemist. I told him I had been made an Associate Member at the George Washington University. Everybody in my class was made a full member. I was left as an Associate!
      I had occasion once to meet Dr. Sager later and detected a kind of embarrassment. I always wondered if he had been "given the word" by Dr. Bartlett.

      I went to visit my sister, Helen, during my hiatus. She and Rollie were extraordinarily kind to me during this low period! During this time I drove back to LaMoure to visit uncle J.C. Since I was in no rush I approached by a rather different road than I usually did. I went around south of town and found the road from the old swimming hole at Cottowood Creek (?) and then went north trying to find the hill that had caused us so much trouble in the late twenties when we went up it with the old 1926 Buick. It was so small and cars were so much more powerful that I was not sure which one it was. Perhaps the road had been somewhat straightened in the meantime as well.

      I remember seeing the old "Galloping Goose" of the Northern Pacific Railroad in LaMoure. With all the changes in transportation it had become uneconomical to run a "real" train with engine, coal car, mail car and passenger cars. So they pressed into service the "Galloping Goose, originally built about 1927. It was a single unit that had the diesel engine in front, an express section and the last half was for passengers. It was a single car and operated on a 149 mile piece of track from Fargo, ND to Streeter. It went through LaMoure about 100 miles from Fargo. It was pressed into service about 1949 and made its last run (as painted in the picture) in 1955. The picture was painted by a North Dakotan, Larry Fisher. It appeared on a calendar of Orchard Supply Hardware and was kindly sent to me by a local friend of mine, Jim Wheeler.

      It was a number of months before I was contacted by Mr. James Gardiner of the National Research Corporation and he invited be to come interview for a job on Memorial Drive along the Charles River in Cambridge MA. I got a flight on Northwest Airlines with a change to Eastern in New York. I arrived in Boston but my baggage didn't. Here I was in my travelling khakis and no toiletries or change of clothes. I called and delayed the appointment so I could get a shave in the hotel barbershop and went to the interview in my traveling clothes. Lo and behold, I got the job and spent about a year and a half with them.
      I might mention what happened to my baggage. After the two weeks waiting period, Northwest Airlines headquarters got into the act and found it within hours. Northwest had a good baggage system, but Eastern was known for losing baggage. Once they "misplaced" Liberacci's candlesticks! It turned out that Northwest made a mistake but had documents to show that they had taken my baggage off in Chicago instead of New York. But that shouldn't have been a problem since Eastern had flights from Chicago to Boston. So they gave it to Eastern in Chicago. But some Eastern employee wanted to be of help so he gave it to American Airlines because they had an earlier flight. But nobody told me where it was and nobody told American anything either. So my baggage sat in the American Airlines baggage room for two weeks until Northwest found it. Ugh!! I was reunited with it back in Minnesota within hours!
      It was a new company with delusions of grandeur. I think they had their sights on replacing DuPont as a major chemical supplier. The company came about when Electric Bond and Share had to divest themselves of certain things to avoid an unfavorable tax situation. That left them with a bunch of uninvested cash. Columbia Gas had a bunch of raw materials. So they got together to form a company called Escambia Chemical Corporation. But they needed a research group, of course, so they gave 10% of the company to the National Research Corporation if they would develop the research group for them. I was hired for this purpose. The group had been in operation already for several years and had 45 patents and had a process patented that would allow them to make a polymer precursor at a very low price, less than half of the existing competing process. My first day there they were pouring over a new Infrared Spectrum they had just gotten, trying to figure out what it was. I was able to point out things in the spectrum that allowed them to name the chemical on the spot. I earned my first month's pay right then!

      They put me on a project to study the reaction of this process that would lead to a better understanding of the process. This was a required step in protecting their patent. I was a rudimentary glassblower. I could put things together that would do the job but didn't always look as pretty as I wished they did. I worked out a system where I could account for everything in the process and take gas samples for analysis in the Mass Spectrometer. This mechanism had been worked on for at least 70 years and I was not expected to "solve it, completely". But I did provide some information on the basis of this work which might have allowed them to reduce the cost of production. But they were not happy when I was back in my office, thinking and planning. They thought I should be pouring things back and forth between test tubes, They had no real knowledge of how chemical research works.
      So they thought I would be able to get more done if I had a helper. They got me an untrained worker that had trouble turning a stopcock without breaking it and they expected him to run this somewhat complicated and fragile glass apparatus for me. In a month, the only runs I got were the ones where I was demonstrating it to him. Every time he tried he would louse it up and the data would be worthless. Of course I was to blame in their minds. If they had spent a little more money and gotten me a competent assistant we could have gotten a lot done.
      We had a Research Director that was probably all right but didn't really understand people. He had a sign in his office that said, "The function of a good research director is to recognize a dead horse as soon as possible and take it out and shoot it!" With, I'm sure, all the good intentions in the world he would go around the lab after work and read all the research notebooks but rarely talk to the workers directly. He would occasionally ask questions that made it obvious that he was reading their notebooks when they were not there. He had the right to do this but he didn't realize the effect it had on the workers. I don't remember him talking to me in that year and a half but I'm sure he must have, on occasion.

      Once in awhile I would visit the Chem labs at Harvard. I had a friend that had been there when the top of Memorial Hall caught fire. It was originally built to honor the Harvard Civil War dead. In 1956 they were trying to restore the somewhat tapered and truncated steeple it had on top. They were trying to give it a copper roof which would turn green in time with oxidation. But apparently one of the workers that was soldering(?) the seams set the wood underneath on fire. The extremely heavy , one ton, bell in the tower fell all the way to the ground floor. The clocks collapsed into the interior. The Fire Department across the street was said to have the tallest ladder in New England but it was nowhere near tall enough and so they just had to let it burn. They soaked everything as high as they could reach to hopefully limit the damage. A friend of mine took a picture of the fire which he was able to sell to the news media.

      The triple picture shows three pictures taken between 1875 and 1900.

      They rebuilt it in 1999, with the copper, but steel underneath and without the clocks. You might like to read about it at: http://www.neslate.com/SWMemHall.html

      Towards the end of my time there, the Soviets launched Sputnik in 2007.1004. One could see it at night as it passed overhead, going from horizon to horizon in several minutes, winking at us as it tumbled. This did shake us up a bit. There was some fear associated with the Russians beating us to the punch. The stock market shook a bit and the fledgling Escambia Chemical got nervous. There had been a lot of outgo and not too much income. They had a meeting with all us chemists and were looking for a quick way to supplement their income. The upshot was that they wanted to be able to separate a saleable chemical from the dregs of the corn and soybean oil processes. These were called "foots". I was assigned to find a way of separating the unsaturated fats from it so they could be incorporated into various things like animnal feeds. This was at the beginning of the great interest in"unsaturated fats". As we left the meeting the Assistant Research Director put his arm around my shoulder and in true Knute Rockne style let me know that the future of the company was in my hands.
      These foots were a terrible looking mess of a black goo. All I could think of was to try to precipitate the saturated fats as a urea complex. But it just wasn't working because it was such a dirty mess. Then I had an idea. In chemistry, when you have a material that doesn't want to crystallize, sometimes you can induce it by adding some of the pure crystalline material. So I made some of the complex from the pure materials and then added a small amount to the mess and, Voila, it crystallized. I was able then to isolate the unsaturated material they wanted. I had saved the company. In a pig's eye. No one ever said a word to me about it.

      They were building a new research laboratory down in Connecticut. The plans were circulated among us chemists for our input. Again they had apparently hired an amateur cheap outfit that obviously knew nothing about chemistry labs. The first set of plans put the Mass Spectrometer (a large machine needing a room to itself with NO vibrations) right over the Machine Shop! They put the Nurses' station out in the lobby, next to the President's Office which conjured up the picture of a chemist holding his bloody hand while running through the lobby in front of the President's Office. Not a pretty picture.! We went through about six generations of plans and everytime they fixed something they butchered something else. I think they finally quit asking us and built what they wanted.

      I was coming home late one night after a movie, probably around 12:15. As I was approaching Central Square on Massachusetts Avenue there was a man crossing the street on crutches. The street is very wide there, at least eight lanes and probably ten. A car was coming rather slowly from the other direction and the driver did not see the slow moving man and hit him with his left front fender. I saw the man flying through the air above the height of the car. He must have been thrown at least thirty feet. The other driver pulled over to the side. I pulled over in the middle of the street and stopped to keep him from being run over again!
      The man was struggling to get up and I told him to stay there, that he had been hit by a car and we would get him an ambulance. He lay back down. A beat cop came up and paid no attention to him but asked me what I was doing parking in the middle of the street. I pointed to the man and said that he had been hit by a car and I was trying to protect him from being run over again. "That dirt spot up there is where he got hit. He was knocked right out of his shoes! Go get an ambulance." He said, "Get your car out of the middle of the street." So I parked at the side, got my camera out which had ASA400 B&W film in it and walked back to the middle of the street. The police ambulance came. Two guys tried to lift him up to a gurney, probably eighteen inches up from the street. Would you believe it, one was under his armpits, the other was under his knees. I don't think there is a worse way to pick up an accident victim. They almost got him up there and then dropped him back to the street. I, of course, took about a half dozen pictures. I gave a set of 8 x 10's to his lawyer. I never heard any more.

      I used to stop into a camera shop called Ferrante and Dege in Harvard Square after work. There were several of us that met there routinely. One of us was a short, somewhat portly man that wore a gray suit and a gray Fedora and it was easy to not even notice that he was there. He told me that he was there one day about quitting time, standing in a back corner of the shop when there was a terrible clatter at the foot of the stairs leading to the processing room in the basement. Al Dege did the processing, was rather tall, and came out of the room in a hurry to go up the rather steep stairs with a low overhang. He failed to duck in time and knocked himself cold. Tony Ferrante ran to the stairs, saw what had happened and went back to call 911. Then he went down to the bottom of the stairs to help. Only my friend was in the store above. He told me that three cops came in, a sergeant and two patrolmen. They didn't see anybody up there so they started putting things in their pockets. Then the sergeant saw my friend standing there watching, his eyes were wide open, not believing what he had just seen. He gave a high sign to the others and they quit taking things, but he didn't see them put anything back!

      They made a "wonderful" decision when they approached the time for the move. During the Depression, GE had to tighten up. They did not fire their researchers and engineers. They kept them by giving them menial jobs sweeping out the place etc. It allowed them to eat. When the Depression lessened they had their engineers still and put them back in their real jobs. But Escambia Chemical? Oh no, they fired 95% of this research group that had been painstakingly put together and was starting to gel into a good research group. I was one of the firees of course. I was going to quit anyway, just not in February. I was going to quit in the summer and try to find a teaching job. I was not impressed with "industrial" chemistry.

      I packed up my stuff and went to Helen and Rollie's home in Minnesota. I was at a very low spot in my life.
      I made a resume and sent it to a large number of places. One day in August I got a phone call from President Jones at Northwest Missouri State College in Maryville. I was of course flattered to be called by the President of the College and was offered an interview.
      I drove down, was interviewed and was hired. I was in kind of a desperate situation and had no outside help so I really had no choice. It turned out to be a good thing as you will see.
      The Chemistry Department Head was a man named Dr. Strong. He was a hangover from the 1800's. He "ruled" with an iron hand. He chose all textbooks whether he taught the course or not.
      I did not approve of his methods. His method involved getting students up to the blackboard to solve a problem. If they failed he ripped them up and down in front of the class. It had a good temporary effect but a bad longterm one. They studied like mad to avoid being embarrassed. But they wound up hating Chemistry and I'm afraid, him too.
      One time I was assigned to teach a one quarter course in non-mathematical Physical Chemistry. It was kind of a Laws I've Known and Loved. Actually non-mathematical Physical Chemistry is an oxymoron. I did the best I could.
      I'm afraid I have a rather rigid approach to the classroom. If I had an 11 o'clock class, I assumed it was my room from five after the hour till five after the next hour. One time there was a PE teacher teaching a course in football as I remember. He routinely ran five to fifteen minutes over his time. My class was waiting outside and I was there too, fuming. I finally spoke to him about it privately and asked him to have his class out by five minutes after the hour.
      He continued. Finally in total exasperation I entered the classroom at five after the hour. I spoke to him in front of his class. I told him that it was my rooom at five after the hour, that I had spoken to him privately but he did not change. So I asked him to adjourn his class and not do it again. I did not enjoy doing it but I was not afraid to. He did not do it again.
      One day Dr. Strong was helping clean out some the stockroom junk. We had the typical heavy stone sinks mounted on the ends of the lab benches. He had one of them full of water. He had some containers of sodium metal under probably toluene or kerosene to protect it from air and moisture. But some would ineveitably get in and react and build up a crust of sodium hydroxide on the outside. He had some that were so bad that he assumed there was no sodium left. He plunged it into the sink to dissolve the sodium hydroxide. A short time later, the sodium hydroxide was dissolved and the remaining sodium metal was exposed to water. A violent reaction occurred producing hydrogen gas and heat. The hydrogen exploded and loosened the sink from the lab bench. Dr. Strong was standing there with his knees slightly crouched trying to hold up this heavy stone sink full of water, probably trying to figure out what to do next. Water ran on the floor over to the wall where some supply pipes ran down through the floor to the biology lab below. The biology professor came running up the stairs ready to do battle. He rushed into the room, looked and saw Dr. Strong's predicament, paused briefly then turned around and left without a word.
      There was a Physics instructor named Dr. Cooper. He had a sideline business downtown in television repair. Intermittent electrical problems are a nightmare for any business, like car or television repair. He told me how he usually solved the problem. People didn't apppreciate being charged $50 for a 10 cent part. They usually do not appreciate the high cost of looking. So he would spend a reasonable amount of time trying to find it. Then he would give up, turn it on and throw a blanket over it. After a bit the faulty part would blow out and he would fix it. I've always admired his practical approach.
e      He was a chess afficionado. He was always trying to get me in a game. But all I really knew about chess was how the pieces moved and what "castle-ing" was. I always refused. Except for one night when I said, "OK, if you need to beat someone I'll go for one game." He set it up. He didn't expect anything out of me so he was being quite careless. Somehow I got my queen in his backfield and took several major pieces and escaped! As the carnage was taking place, he was going "Oh. Oh. Oh." with his eyebrows arched. Deprived of several major pieces I just traded him the rest and had several major pieces left after his were gone. Naturally I backed him into a corner and checkmated him. He desperately wanted to salvage his image but I never gave him a second game. I told him I was quitting while I was ahead. I knew he would never let me win again but would destroy me as quickly as possible.
      I taught a course in Physical Science. I tried to make them think. It was a survey course over many disciplines. I tried to bring them down to earth. I tried to teach them the rudiments of probability. I taught them that if a TV ad wanted to impress them they would use precise numbers and never one ending in 5 or 0. Then on a test I would give them ten True/False statements. I had told them that there was little chance that those precise numbers were really precise. A statement might be, "There are seventeen active volcanoes on the North American continent, T or F." There might be ten or maybe twenty, who knows. So there was only 1 chance in 10 that 17 would be right so the best answer for nine of the ten statements was false. They could have just marked all of them wrong and been right 90% of the time.
      Another statement was, "There are nine steps in the first flight of stairs outside this classroom." Well there may have been five or even ten. So there was probably about a 20% chance at best that nine was the right answer. Yes, it was false again.
      An interesting corollary of this occurred, I believe, at a party. I was introduced to a person who then said, "Oh, you're the one that asks how many steps there are in the stairway outside the classroom!" Missed the whole point! Frustrating.
      Another question I often asked was, "What would you have to hold at arm's length to just cover the full moon?" Then I gave them a half dozen choices ranging from a dime to a manhole cover. I rarely got the right answer. The moon is about half the size of a dime at arm's length. I even had manhole cover checked a couple times.
      One time when I was telling them how to drive in snow, there was a racket in the road immediately outside the room. The class was almost over so I told them to come outside. The driver had spun the wheels and was in a big rut. I got the driver to rock the car gently back and forth and finally they popped out and drove away.
      Speaking of snow, Missouri winters are terrible. It's far enough north to have snow but far enough south to never be very far from freezing. This means that even walking on snow can turn it to ice. It would go above freezing during the day and things would melt a little and then it would freeze at night. This created a marvelous bunch of icicles. I saw a telephone pole a couple feet from a brick building. The icicle had grown between the roof and the pole and was a solid block of ice from the roof all the way to the ground.
      The Business Manager brought his rifle in one day and was shooting the icicles off the eaves of the main building. They were so big, several hundred pounds each that they were afraid they were going to rip the eaves right off the roof.
      In the spring, it warmed up and the sap started to run in the trees and the students. They had a lot of valentine type activities. One was that when one of the girls got "pinned" (A fraternity boy would give his girl his fraternity pin, creating a kind of semi-engagement,) the rest of her sorority would serenade her at the dormitory. I happened to be on campus one night when this was happening. I watched and after they finished they walked away. I was struck by the beauty of one of the girls. There was an immediate attraction. It turned out that she was a chem major at the time and worked as a part timer in the chem stockroom, doing various chores for Dr. Strong. We talked a lot. She was a very bright girl and I was tremendously attracted to her. She was attracted to me at least in part because I had my military service behind me. She did not want to marry one of her classmates and have to be a "camp follower". We never dated while there. It probably would have ruined her reputation to be seen out with a 38 year old single college professor. Remember, this was on the edge of the Bible Belt. It had only been about 25 years since the last lynching!
      Her mother could sense the attraction and didn't want me anywhere near her. One Saturday I was working on my car, a '57 Ford Country Sedan. I was dressed in a somewhat wild Hawaiian type shirt and khaki shorts with grease on my knees. The sun was going down and the moon was at first quarter. Then Dumb Charles stepped in. Hey, why don't I go get Sauny and let her see the moon through my Questar telescope. We could go out to the airport where the visibility was great and there were some picnic benches to put the telescope on. Yeh, sure, Charlie! Dreamer again!
      I drove down to her house and knocked. Her mother answered. I explained that I wanted to take Sauny out to the airport to see the moon through my telescope. "Yeh, sure!" she said as she slammed the door. I didn't know that the airport had the reputation of being the "necking place".
      I had another experience with the airport. My Uncle J.C. was gravely ill. He had been my guardian after my mother died so he was a bit more than an uncle. I got a telegram from one of the doctors that said it would be a good time to visit if I wanted to.
      I went out to the airport and asked if there was anyone there that could fly me to LaMoure ND, explaining about my uncle. At first no one stepped up eagerly but on talking to one of the men, he said he could probably do it. It turned out that he was a Mooney salesman, a beautiful low wing four place plane that kind of had a reputation for being a mini- civilan P-51. So I went back, arranged for a couple days leave, packed a few clothes and headed out. We headed for the airport at Oakes because, as I remember, it had an asphalt runawy. It was twenty or thirty miles from LaMoure. I had called Helen who was in LaMoure and told her to pick us up at Oakes. I had told him about my flying and he let me do most of the flying to North Dakota. Straight and level of course.
      When we got to Oakes he did a low slow flyby to check the runway. It was in pretty rough shape and he didn't want to land there. So I told him there was grass strip at LaMoure the crop dusters used. So he went there, did a low pass and decided it was OK. Meanwhile Helen had decided we weren't going to land at Oakes so they came back.
      I don't remember how we got to the hospital. I went in to see Uncle JC. He was just lying there obviously not too "with it". However, he reached up and grabbed my arm near the elbow so I believe he knew I was there. We rented a motel. The next day we flew back. We were going to land at Watertown SD for fuel. He wanted me to land the airplane and I probably could have. But when we got pretty well along on the approach I told him to finish it. I've always been a careful pilot. It had been so long since I had flown. I thought I needed more airtime before doing a landing, particularly a stall or two. He only charged me $125 which I thought was a real bargain. I think it was a somewhat novel experience for him also.

      Later, I was in St. Louis for a reason I've forgotten. I was probably at an American Chemical Society meeting, trying to find a different job. In any case, on the way back I stopped to eat at a town about halfway back. There was a jewelry store next door. They had a very pretty "captured pearl" necklace. I bought it for Sauny. There was a woman who worked at the college that knew what was going on and was willing to act as a go-between. So I gave it to her to give to Sauny, which she did. Sauny kept it hidden but one day her mother found it, took it, and threw it into the furnace! Many years later I had one made but it just wasn't the same!
      Sauny went to a camp for a couple weeks one summer and she wrote letters to me, care of this woman.
      She was entered in the Miss Northwest Missouri contest and she won! The winner was to go to Kansas City Royal, a big festival in that part of the country. She was a candidate for Queen but she became a Princess instead.

      We used to meet at this woman's home. Nothing untoward happened. We talked, probably kissed, but that was it.
      After two years I was getting disillusioned about this school and felt I had to get out of there. The students that came were ill prepared. The courses were watered down and the graduates went out to teach the next crop and they were worse than the ones before. It appeared to me to be a descending spiral. I think I interviewed at the St. Louis meeting I believe, for a job with Chemical Engineering News as an Assistant Editor in Research and I agreed to start there on 1 September1960.
      Before I left I told Sauny that she was very bright, much too bright for this school. She needed to get to a better school. I told her that if she could get to Washington DC I could probably get her into the George Washington University and I could probably get her at least a part time job. When I left it was with a sad feeling that it was probably the end of things with Sauny.

      I got an apartment at 925 26th Street NW (?). The office was at the corner of 16th and M Streets as I remember. The National Geographic was right across the street. I was worthless to them for a month until I learned how to write for a magazine. I would walk to work and back. I enjoyed the job and I felt that I became a real asset to them. As a matter of fact when I resigned a year later, they expressed regret and said that they had planned to open an office in Boston and put me in it. I didn't tell them that they didn't have enough money to pay me to go back to Boston.

      Late in January, four months after I left Maryville, I got a phone call in the evening. Two words, "I'm here!" I said, "Who's this?". She said, "It's me, Sauny!" It was so unexpected I did not recognize her voice. She was at the YWCA. I found out later that she had sold her sewing machine to get the money for the trip.
      A week later she moved to the Dolly Madison Hall at the George Washington University. It turns out that some fraternity friends of mine worked in the Admissions Office. They told me they went through the pile of applications, found hers , sneaked it out of the pile and put it on top. She was accepted.
      Dr. Benjamin Van Evera had been Department Head of Chemistry when I was there several years before. Now he was Head of all External Research for the University. For some reason he had always had a special feeling for me. When I left after my Masters he took the time to write me a two page letter. I was really impressed and flattered. I still remember a line from it, "You have that research frame of mind. I let mine get killed under a load of administrative work. Do not let this happen to you!" I have always remembered that and I believe that I followed his advice.
      I went to him and said that I was looking for a part time job for Sauny and wondered if he had a need or knew of someone who did. He said that he needed a "gopher" and to ask her to come in. Which I did and which she did. She was a very good employee for him. She delivered things for him and did a lot of odd jobs for him.
      She lived on the eighth (and top) floor of Dolly Madison Hall. She was the only Anglo there. There were girls from the Netherlands and her good friend there was from Puerto Rico. She always called me by the two syllable form of Charles. She would sing in the shower at the top of her lungs in the quavering voice typical of Puerto Rico.
      Sauny had a kind of tough academic schedule and had a bit of a tough time with it. Her preparation had not been as good as it might have been and I provided too much distraction.
      We visited a number of places, like the Rock Creek Zoo and the Falls. We even went to a play in a Barn Theater out north of town. We spent a lot ot time together.
      That summer I was given an other Air Force Reserve tour of duty at an astrophysical seminar in Cloudcroft NM. The man cutting the orders nust have been smiling knowing that I was very far from being an astrophysicist.
      I flew to Denver and visited friends in Boulder. Then they took me down to Cloudcroft.
      It was a very interesting two weeks and I enjoyed many of the lectures. We even had one on the planets from Carl Sagan. He told us that he had been in the right place at the right time. He was one of six graduates in Planetary Astronomy as the Space Program was just beginning and was therefore in high demand.
      I even did a nine hole round of golf at their golf course. It was interesting to be golfing at 9500 feet. The ball would go further than one wanted to walk at that altitude.
      When it came time to return to Washington, I hitched a ride on some General's plane.
      Meanwhile, Sauny had visited her mother and lowered the boom, telling her she was going to marry me.