KENNETH:
Before we leave this thing about the interest our parents had in education, and the help they gave us, mostly moral, but very, very important, I would like, as one of the younger boys, to tell some of these people here something: We have, over the years, operated very much as a family, even though we don’t write, and even though it takes the family letter months and years to get around. When it came time for me to go to college, these older brothers over here helped me a great deal, as did my sister, also.
JOHN:
And, please permit me to say that it did not end with Kenneth.
HOWARD:
Talking about going off to college, after Luther, Arthur, and Ralph had gone, I went to get my underclothes, undershirts, and shirts—and I didn’t have anything left. By George, they had taken off and cleaned out the whole shebang. The next fall, I got me a corner over there, and began a week or two ahead of time to put things aside; I did this in self-defense.
BLANCHE:
Now as I mentioned before, neither Momma nor Papa thought it was as important for me to go to college as it was for the boys to go. Those were the lean, hard years of the Great Depression, and Papa felt that I should stay out of school and teach—I believe they were both hoping that I would find a nice boy from our kind of folks, get married, and settle down to a life like theirs had been.
I did teach for one year at Churchland, at the end of which time, I wanted more than ever to go on to college and learn all I could. When Momma and Papa realized how much I wanted an education, they finally agreed to let me go on to the women’s college of the State University at Greensboro.
You older brothers, more resourceful than I was, volunteered financial help, and Momma made me expertly tailored clothes. She had a new sewing machine from a mail order house; she could look at a picture anywhere and make something just like it.
But, to back up a bit, those years you older boys were in college were proud years. At State College, Luther played basketball, worked, and paid his way and had money extra when he graduated. Arthur, at the University of North Carolina, was making grades as good as the city boys and won the Julian S. Carr Fellowship. Ralph, who had grown robust and strong—for he was the sickly one when we were children—won honors at State. And Howard, as he had always been, was a favorite at Carolina and was making his own way selling pennants and felt pillows, especially at the football games. In other words, all of you before me did right well for yourselves, and this gave me the needed boost to accomplish the things I wanted to accomplish—despite the handicap of being a girl.
Oh, Blanche, do I know how that felt! I, as the youngest and only girl in a family full of boys, wanted to be a scientist starting in third grade—I just KNEW it. But in the earlier part of the twentieth century, girls weren’t supposed to do that. I, like Blanche, did it anyway, albeit belatedly.
ARTHUR:
You know, Blanche, I have a couple of letters from you to me when you were over in the Women’s College. They’re appropriate at this point, I believe, because they convey some of the feelings you had about college life and the cost of it.
Dear Brother,
One of the prettiest afternoons I have ever seen, one which enhances the beauty of what I think of always as a beautiful campus. I have been sitting here by my window enjoying the tapestry carpet of yellow green blending into one of darker shade. Over the carpet, tall, majestic trees look down upon a lot of wandering girls who somehow look a little out of harmony with the rest of the silent, immobile, grandeur of the scene. Yes, I love it, perhaps more than I would otherwise, because it reminds me of the scene I see when I sit at home on the porch at night and watch the shadows and moonlit spaces of our own bit of creation.
Many things can be gorgeous but what we find most beautiful is somehow almost invariably through the eyes of a past of loves, disappointments, heartaches, reveries, happy days, lonely days, friendships, dreams. In its entirety, beautiful things we don’t know what to call—happy? sad? or what?—but only know its memory is sweetly beautiful.
So much for my raving. Now for something else. In the first place I failed to set down the dates of the last check you sent me, the $10 one, so please if you have the checkbook handy, let me know the date. I had it cashed on the way home from the P.O. and forgot to look to see what the date was. In the second place, I want about $15.00 more, whenever it is convenient to send it. You see, it’s annual time and picture time just now. Sure, I am planning to send you one.
Hope you are getting along all right. Write when you can and don’t forget me.
Love, Blanche
And then there’s this other one in which you talk about your plans for after college.
Dear Brother,
Had I told you I had signed my contract for Salisbury? Paulette Hubbard is going to teach there too. She came home with me one time. Perhaps you remember her? I suppose we will room together and so the only part I dreaded about next year is settled.
Of course, not knowing what living expenses will be, I can’t say how much money I shall be able to save— quite a little I hope. As soon as I find out what my room and board will be, I will make out a budget to live by next year, i.e., I will say:
? for room
? for board
? for clothes
? for incidentals
? for payments
Then I shall live by it, save by it, and, when I get each check, send you your allotted part. I will be so glad to be able to pay it back, and it is quite relieving to know I have once before set a standard for payment and met it. And you can depend on it: I will do as much as I say. I realize that to do it, I will have to go rather slow in some respects, but I willfully came back to school and I will take the consequences and be as considerate as possible of other folks who are concerned.
I have thought many times of something you said sometime during the holidays: “When a fellow works his way through school and succeeds, he gets himself in a hell of a fix”—a statement I thought pathetically true, not only in its original application but in a broader sense as well: What is life except a struggle to obtain what is unattainable? What is the ideal for which we work, and scheme, and long for, but a beautiful soap bubble, delicately tinted with rainbow hues, lovely in the diaphanous reflections, but, at the slightest touch of genuine reality, evaporating into nothingness, leaving only a mocking distasteful smell upon the hand of the fool who grasped it?
Aubrey and Blanche newly married.
But why so pessimistic? Perhaps after all, it is worthwhile. Yet, it seems, the things we look forward to, always bring disappointment. But why my moralizing? Nothing, except in a month I graduate from college, with a good record, and a high recommendation for teaching next year. That’s all.
Love, Blanche
BLANCHE:
Fair enough, Arthur. I fear my ups and downs have been exposed, but they were to continue for right many years. As long as we’re into my saga, perhaps you’ll tolerate just a bit more of my current recall of that time.
After college and two grueling years of teaching in Salisbury, I was home again. Teaching now came natually; I was active in church work, and Papa and Momma were openly proud of me. Momma said I could talk and do things, and Papa heard people say I was a good teacher. Furthermore, I had finally settled down to dating the one boy both parents had been openly encouraging me to marry. As Papa put it, “the Charlie Zimmermans are our kind of folks.”
JOHN:
So you wound up fulfilling the role they had in mind for you all along.
BLANCHE:
Moving in that direction, but not all the way. I had something different and, I think, more than Momma ever had. I had developed a quest for learning and a yen to teach what I learned. I’d found a way to pursue both with some satisfaction. Momma, on the other hand, was far more limited in scope. Aside from all the homekeeping, she had very little. She was active in some church work, the Women’s Missionary Society, the Women’s Christian Temperance Un
ion, and Sunday School teaching; she participated in spelling bees; but outside the home and church activities, that was about all.
CHAPTER 11
Harken to Good Advice
JOHN:
You know, after you all had left, I couldn’t wait to get off the farm and get away to college. But once I got there I didn’t know what to do. I just played around, discovering those vices our parents forbade: booze and partying—got caught one night a bit in the cups, playing my trumpet on the roof of our dorm. I almost flunked out that first year.
Then you, brother Kenneth, came to the rescue: you talked up a course in mycology taught by Professor John Couch. Couch had turned you on to the fungal world, and you thought that might work for me. You were right. I began to see purpose in college.
Then, about the same time, I auditioned for the University Symphony Orchestra and played under the direction of another inspiring mentor, Thor Johnson.
KENNETH:
Johnson later became conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony, didn’t he?
So that’s how John came to be a better trumpeter than I. Although, while in high school, I got to be first trumpeter in the Plattsburgh Symphony, our local conductor was not of Thor Johnson’s caliber.
A few years later, the fates brought John and me together at the University of Chicago: He was a newly appointed assistant professor, fresh from the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; he’d worked on the effects of radioactive fallout from the atomic bomb. I was his first-year graduate student, transferred from Syracuse University.
We took up playing trumpet duets together in his lab late at night—an early bonding experience—until the janitor complained. We then switched instruments to quieter recorders.
JOHN:
Yes, and Thor Johnson got me so interested in music that if one Professor John Couch hadn’t gotten me even more interested in botany, I would have chosen trumpeting for a career. Although I guess I realized at the time that it would be a lot tougher to end up a second rate trumpeter than a second rate scientist.
KENNETH:
Well, you needn’t have worried much about the latter.
John Couch, now there’s a man whose enthusiasm for studying fungi was so infectious it was almost impossible not to catch it, if you had any bend towards science at all.
ARTHUR:
And that’s exactly what did happen; first you succumbed, Kenneth, then John. I think I have a letter here from John—he’s one who has escaped this exposure-by-letter business so far. This was written when he was finishing up with Professor Couch, a Masters thesis I believe, at Chapel Hill. He starts out with a bleak explanation about his dire financial straits:
Dear Arthur;
Things are going not so good with me, the weather adding its share of murky existence, et al. (He writes in some detail about his debts and asks would I consider signing for a loan to a poor struggling mycologist, etc. Then he goes on:)
The way things look now I’m going to have to stay in school until I get a chance at a really good job, else I’d play hang for getting them (meaning the debts) all paid off in the two years they cover.
Mother seemed to think it was terribly foolish to stay in school any longer when I owe as much as I do, and am able at the present to do nothing about it, save ask for extensions. She’s right, I suppose. On the other hand I think it would be more foolish to get out and teach school for the $70 per month the teachers of North Carolina draw. Either way it is a mess—one that I’m not prepared to make any dogmatic statements whatever about.
Are you coming up home anytime this summer? If so, would such a visit of yours coincide with a possible visit of Kenneth’s? I haven’t heard from him for months on end—I have written him—and I don’t know anything about his comings and goings, if any.
The thing I wanted to say though is this: I’m just the least bit tied down here trying to get a thesis, oral, and written exams off during the next month and a half, so as to get my degree in August; I have not much time to spend away from Chapel Hill. But when any of the far-flung members of the clan get around, I want to see ’em!
In the meantime, let’s back to work, letting our colossal egos guide us by the misleading expectation that we will solve the sexual mystery of Achlya bisexualis, and establish another great biological fact, which will take its place along with those of Mendel, Darwin, et al. I’m thinking ‘pooey,’ so you may as well say it!
Your brother, John
KENNETH:
Well now John, your work on the sex life of that water mold, first with Couch and later at Harvard with “Cap” Weston, did go far enough to make the textbooks, so it has taken its place among the facts of Darwin et al.
JOHN:
As a mere bush in the forest—it’s of major interest only to other Achlyas, I fear, and they’ve known all along how to do it. Anyhow, ‘twas great fun.
Let’s see, you must have been at Harvard at the time I wrote that letter, too busy studying with Cap yourself to bother to write to me—working on those wee-creepy-crawly things, the slime molds. They too made the textbooks.
You know, I had no prospect of a decent job by the time I finished at Chapel Hill, it being during the Depression, so I applied for graduate school and a teaching fellowship at Harvard. I asked three professors for recommendations, and one of them, Professor of Embryology, Henry van Peters Wilson (better known behind his back as “Froggy”), said, “Hmpf, don’t know why you ask me; I can’t think of a thing good to say about you.”
Later on, when I heard I’d been accepted by Harvard, I went back to the professors and thanked each for troubling to write on my behalf. When I got to Froggy, he answered back, “You mean to say Harvard accepted you?! And awarded you a teaching fellowship? Well I’ll be goddamned!” Whereupon he turned around and walked out—never said another word.
Years later, just recently in fact, while chairman of the Graduate Committee of the Department of Biology at Harvard, I mentioned this to the Graduate Student Secretary. She was curious enough about what Froggy Wilson said about me that she looked it up in the files: she reported that his was the best recommendation of the lot!
KENNETH:
Well I’ll be darned. I remember Froggy Wilson all right— cantankerous old soul; you had to practically tiptoe around his laboratory—but I hadn’t heard that story before.
Let’s get back to Cap Weston for a moment; now there was an act who could follow John Couch as few men could. Cap was a different sort from Couch—pretty much left a fellow on his own instead of breathing down his neck, but a very great teacher nonetheless.
JOHN:
Yeah, he could be cool. He surprised the hell out of me the first time I burst in on him, all enthusiastic about something I’d seen through my microscope, expecting him to beat me back to it as Couch always did. Instead he said, “Well, son, that’s nice. You just go back and work some more on it, then tell me all about it later.”
Then I’ll never forget the day I came at him sputtering about something—I forget just what—and he said, “Son, must you be so damn red-headed?” Being a redhead himself, I suppose he understood the syndrome.
There are lots of Cap stories, but let me tell just one. It illustrates, I think, the fabulous combination he was, and still is, at the age of seventy-five, of venerability and downright earthiness—always in either capacity combined with exuberance. He would throw parties at his house, I mean bashes, and invite all the graduate students. The beer would flow, and nobody, not even the heartiest among us, could outdrink ol’ Cappy.
On one such occasion, a fellow grad student who was in his cups, you know, raised his glass and proclaimed loudly, “Cap Weston, to everybody else you may be a full professor at Harvard, but to me you’re just a goddamned tank!” Well, the next day, after the guy—his name was Davey—had sobered up and come to his senses, we asked him if he remembered at all what he’d said the night before. Of course he couldn’t, and when told and reminded that he was up for his qu
alifying exam the next week—with Cap on the committee—he was visibly shaken.
He went trembling to Cap’s office to apologize, and ol’ Cap just sat there with a big smile on his face and said, “Why, son, that’s the nicest compliment’s been paid to me in a long time. I’m glad to know you think I’m good for something!”
KENNETH:
The Cap story I like best is about his service to a fruit packing outfit that hired him as consultant to figure out why the oranges they were packing had such a high incidence of rotting due to fungal contaminants. He examined their sorting and packing procedures and discovered that the source of trouble was the sharp end of a nail sticking up and puncturing each orange as it tumbled down the sorting trough. This of course supplied each fruit with a portal of entry to all sorts of bacteria and fungi that can make a living off good ripe oranges.
Cap got a hammer and pounded out the nail. He charged the company a fee of $25.50. When asked to explain the odd figure he replied, “Fifty cents for hammering and $25 for knowing just where to do it.”
John is the only professor I’ve encountered who had that kind of waggish sense of humor. Now I see where he got it: Cap reinforced a sense of whimsy that Frank Raper expressed before he became so ill just before Red’s birth.
ARTHUR:
We’ve been having some letters back and forth from college and all here. I have a couple from our parents around that time. They never had a chance to get to college, or high school, for that matter. In fact the only formal education they did get didn’t seem to teach them as much about how to write sentences as our schools taught us in our early grades.
Julia profiled with her six Moravian sisters.
An American Harvest Page 10