Category: Silver Years

During my professional life I had significant collegial relationships with two biochemists of Asian ancestry: Lafayette Noda and Tsoo E. King. In personality they could not have been more different.

Lafayette was the Chairman of the Biochemistry Department at Dartmouth Med during the time I was a postdoctoral fellow with Lucile. He had taken an interest in me and urged me to continue my career in Hanover as an Instructor in his department. Tsoo was a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Oregon State University and had lied to me about a faculty position there as an Assistant Professor. During my two years with him – an interval that seemed twice as long as my two years in New Hampshire – I was acutely aware that I was really, once more, a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. King as my supervisor.

Dr. Noda had a very interesting background. He was Nisei, a second-generation son who had been interred, along with his parents, relatives and other US-Japanese citizens, in camps in California, Wyoming and Colorado. The federal government believed such drastic action was necessary during the Second World War. At some point, he became a Quaker, and lived out his entire life in that peaceful calling. I have never met anyone so dedicated to peace and harmony as were Lafayette and his wife, Mayme. During the time we were living in Hanover, many people were involved in peaceful demonstrations regarding the Vietnam War. Lafayette and Mayme were often part of those quietly standing on the corner of the Hanover Commons on a weekend.

Their apologies about the skunk in their barn and the stench of our stuff that had been left there on our move to Hanover were truly profuse and deeply meant. Their hospitality was readily available to anyone in need. He and Mayme often invited us and faculty to his old New England house for gatherings and for meals. The Nodas are the only people I knew who, routinely, bought gallons of soy sauce and 25-pound sacks of rice. I recall one remarkable dinner when the guests were given the usual chopstick for their utensils. Everything went well until dessert was offered: cubes of red or green Jell-O! Lafayette did have a sense of humor; he relented when his guests observed that his own kids were now using spoons.

Lafayette died in February 2013, at the age of 96. I saw him on an occasional trip to the Federation meetings we attended. I wish I had known him better, personally.

Tsoo E. King was among the least trusting and most prevaricating scientists I’ve ever met. His deceit was more than just lying to me about my position in his department at OSU. Within a few days in Corvallis, I learned from the department chair that I was not really a faculty member in the Chemistry department, but merely a postdoc in the Science Research Institute. Although I did offer sections of the biochemistry class regarding lipids, my primary position was to undertake the laboratory work assigned to me by Dr. King. Our “team” consisted of a research associate, Bob Howard, and a graduate student, Jack Kittman. At least, with Tsoo, I did get three research papers published as first author in Biochemica Acta and the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

As his team, we were constantly cautioned not to discuss with anyone else anything occurring in the lab, whether the topic was the research, itself, or any other departmental event we might have heard about. His secretary, Clistie Stoddard, was the only person, other than King, himself, who had the key to the cabinet holding “fine chemicals,” which were expensive but vital to our work.

I was surprised when I learned that “Clistie” was actually “Clistie.” Tsoo had a very heavy Chinese accent, so I had assumed he was, once again, merely mispronouncing “Christy.” I often wondered how he had managed to find somewhat whose name he could actually handle.

Because of his accent, one of my jobs was to translate what he had said in the lectures he gave. I had a high interaction with graduate students taking classes with him. I also found it necessary to “de-Tsoo” all of his scientific writings by editing them into recognizable English while still leaving the essence of his Chinese orientation.

Working closely with Bob, King’s research associate, was one of the limited pleasurable events in my daily lab work. His only distraction involved Bell’s palsy, which gave him a ticking cheek. Jack Kittman, a graduate student, was the third member of our laboratory gathering. The only unexpected event in our lives was the day when Jack’s wife, who was also a graduate student and research assistant in our lab, entered long enough to say she had just taken cyanide. Her suicide was the only one I have ever known about directly. It devastated Jack and had an effect on all of us. Cyanide is the major inhibitor for the enzyme cytochrome oxidase and was used, routinely, in our research. In fact, the paper I published in Biochemica Acta bears the title: “The Effect of Cyanide on the Keilin-Hartree Preparation and Purified Cytochrome Oxidase.” Basic research and real life do have intersections, even unexpected ones.

There’s a difference between a “Where were you when …?” question and one that asks: “Do you remember when …?” A person can be asked: “Do you remember when the Challenger exploded?” or “Do you remember when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon?” The inquiry may be about a disaster or a great event in history, but they differ from the one which asks, “Where were you when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center?” Or the one about our first modern-day crisis: “Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated? In these “where-were-you-when” questions, there is a double focus: one on the crisis, itself, and a second on your own bodily reaction to the event; how the event impacted your own life more directly than you would have thought could be the case.

Where was I when JFK was killed?

I was working in the lab at Oregon State in Corvallis, a town a thousand miles from Dallas. Background music was playing on the small radio on a shelf in the lab. The news crackled forth and the lives of millions who heard the announcement at the same moment were dramatically changed. Was this another Orson Wells fantasy? Halloween had passed several weeks ago; thoughts now involved Thanksgiving, occurring within in a few days. Today was Friday, November 22, 1963, it was about 10:30 a.m. on the Pacific coast.

Other faculty, staff, and students wandering by were called into the lab to listen. To hear the impossible. To reject it and then, with extreme reluctance, to accept the possible truth of it. We whispered to one another. There were few tears; they came later. No one could stay and listen further. We each had to go home to loved ones.

I closed off what I was doing and, leaving the lab, got on my bike to pedal the half mile to my house. Had Karen heard the news? There were no others along the streets. No cars, no bikes, no pedestrians. Yet I wanted to shout to someone, anyone, “Have you heard?” But there were none to hear. When the two of us met, all we could do was hold on to one another as deeply as possible.

For the next week, we listened and watched events as they appeared on the recently established television networks of the country. Within 90 minutes, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in Dallas. Within 48 hours the accused assassin was, himself, shot in the Dallas Police Station. We began to hear about the “grassy knoll conspiracy” as we watched John-John salute his father’s casket and Jacqueline lead the Nation in its mourning of her murdered husband.

I do not recall the death of any other incumbent President. There was no other benchmark upon which to pin my observations and feelings. FDR had died in office, but, in 1945, I was only ten years old, probably in the fourth or fifth grade. That was so long ago, even in 1963, when the towers of Camelot came crumbling down.

I had admired JFK for many reasons. He and Jackie were a young couple, one whose family-life seemed as ideal as those who had, according to other legends, lived in that other magical kingdom of knights, where Arthur reigned, and Merlin advised. It was only later that the John-Jackie legend became tarnished by real-life peccadillos. In that terrible November, I thought more about how he had prevented a nuclear war than about his botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs. He had been the first, and until 2020, the only, Catholic elected President. His widespread intelligence was favorably compared with Jefferson’s. Then again, our third President’s life has undergone revisions by modern historians, as have those of all the others!

In that November, we watched the riderless horse and worried greatly about the future of our nation. We firmly believed no matter what had happened that this nation would survive. Little did anyone recognize what dramatic events would occur in the coming decades to impact on such thoughts.

At the time, I did not realize how the events happening in Washington, D.C. would affect my own life and career development. “Where was I when?” led directly, over time, to “where am I now?”

JFK was the first Catholic President. Without the changes of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960’s one might wonder if a Catholic could ever have been elected to this office. Three decades earlier Alf Landon showed the difficulty to be encountered. There were, of course, many changes initiated within the Church during this era.

Although the major changes resulting from Vatican II were not really implemented until after its final session had been completed in December 1965, early liturgical changes were hinted at in the years before the closing event. One major expected change was in the language of the liturgy, itself. The Mass which had used Latin for almost two-thousand years might be translated into English and other vernacular tongues people actually spoke and understood.

The Pastor of the local Catholic parish in Corvallis was a musicologist, who had recently composed an English language Mass in anticipation of the possible liturgical change. The quartet from St. Mary’s Church had piled into our micro-bus for a brief journey to Portland where they were to perform this new liturgy for representatives from the Diocese of Portland. Karen had been an active member of the group; I was merely the driver. They may have been practicing their hymns as we drove along the new Interstate highway heading north from Corvallis.

In my rearview mirror I suddenly noticed a cloud of gray smoke pouring from the exhaust pipe of our micro-bus and I quickly pulled over to the side of the highway. We all got out to see what was happening to my relatively new vehicle. What better way to find the origin of the smoke than to open the door to the engine compartment in the rear of the wagon. That was the wrong move. With exposure to more oxygen, bright flames burst forth to engulf the entire motor. We all scurried away before the small explosion occurred. All four tires burst from the heat and the vehicle settled onto the pavement where it slowly burned down to its metal framework.

This was long before the invention of cellphones, but many truckers did have two-way radios for routine communication along the highways they traveled. Fortunately, one of the passing truckers had called the local voluntary fire department. The volunteers arrived very quickly and put out the blaze. Arrangements were made to tow the remains of my micro-bus back to Corvallis. We pleasantly learned that many of the volunteers were also members of a local Knights of Columbus chapter. They kindly took us to their meeting hall to await the arrival of transportation for the choir back to St. Mary’s.

The adventure had mixed results. The next day when I went to see my insurance agent, he inquired if the event had happened on the Interstate at a particular time. My response corresponded with his recollection of his own trip the previous day along that route. Without the need for any further investigation, he was able to declare that there had been a complete loss of my wagon and I could expect a full reimbursement for the accident.

Officials in the transportation office of the University were less understanding of the situation. When I went to get a new parking sticker for the replacement vehicle, I was told I should have peeled off the old sticker and brought it to them before they could issue a replacement. I finally convinced them that the micro-bus had been completely destroyed and it would have been impossible for me to scrape off any of the old sticker to return to them.

Fortunately, our Pastor had another copy of his composition in his Parish office, so he did not suffer an irreplaceable loss. The insurance covered the cost of a used, blue Chevy station-wagon that lasted for many years and was later sold to a friend living in Washington, D.C., even if it did develop a hole in the floorboard that allowed water to be splashed onto the floor under the passenger seat.

I did discover that there probably had been a rough edge to the metal pipe leading from the gas line into the plastic tube of the combustion chamber of my destroyed micro-bus. When the ragged metal cut through the tubing, gasoline was squirted onto the hot motor. That was certainly as direct a means for burning up a vehicle as any other method. It was also very dramatic.

Although my professional life in Corvallis, Oregon was the pits, living there was really quite pleasant, once a resident accepted the daily, light rainfall. The summers were dry, too dry, actually; drought was not uncommon at that time of the year. If possible, escape across the Coastals to the Pacific, or over the Cascades to the east, made existence much more pleasant. Corvallis’ heart of the valley location in the snow shadow of Mary’s Peak allowed only a minimal white cover during the winter months. There, was, however, a significant snowfall during our second winter. Deb was able to build an impressive snowman in our Highland Way backyard.

The only major environmental event during our stay in Oregon was the Good Friday Earthquake which devastated Anchorage, Alaska on the morning of March 27, 1964. I thought I had felt the duplex, where we were living at the time, shake slightly while I was eating breakfast at our kitchen table. It was not until I was on my way to my lab in the Science Research Institute that I saw the markings on the seismograph in the hallway display-case near the Geology office. I had noticed its scribbles each morning when I passed it, but, that day, the rapid wiggles were off the edges of the chart. Later, I learned that this was the recording for a 9.2 temblor, a magnitude making the Alaska quake to be the largest ever measured for the North American continent! I never felt any of the Californian quakes, which must have occurred while we were living in Oregon, but THIS one could not be ignored.

There were, also, minor family movements exhibited during our two years in Corvallis. Ken finally learned to crawl and walk. It took him awhile to move about on his knees, and later, on two feet. At a very early age, he had learned how to carry something in one hand, while using the other one to help bump his way across the floor on his padded butt. He had minimal need to walk on two legs when the butt-bump method provided all he required for daily movement around the house. Moreover, for his second Christmas, he received two horses: a brown spring-driven one for bouncing and a white one for sitting on while pushing. That was the Christmas when Debbie learned to cook, albeit on a large, cardboard stove. She specialized in pancakes and paper products.

Karen did go with Deb and Ken, on a very long train-ride, to visit her sister Tami and family in Los Angeles. They went to Knot’s Berry Farm, if not to Disney World. Our other trips were several to Seattle to visit Bob and Audry Ritchie, who were our friends from Hanover. Bob was now head of the Math department at the University of Washington. He claimed that from his office, each day, he photographed Mount Hood, which was visible more often than not. As a result of our visits, I believed Seattle might be the only large city where I could enjoy living. Never did, but I have liked every trip I’ve ever made there. Houston, Texas is certainly NOT Seattle!

Our social life in Corvallis was minimal. There may have been an occasional party with faculty from the Biochemistry department. No one ever arrived on time. There was one evening when we gave a party and received a telephone inquiry thirty minutes after it had been scheduled to begin. The caller wondered if they had the date correct. They had driven by our house on Jefferson and saw no one as they passed by. They, and others, arrived a short while later.

The usual way to gain new friends is through your own kids. Deb began attending kindergarten in Corvallis and became friends with a young Cy Field, whose great-grandfather had laid the first telephone cable under the Atlantic Ocean. Karen and Becky Field became somewhat close, if I recall, but there were no others she or I met on a recurring basis.

My professional life as a research biochemist held minimal pleasure; but there was an entertaining alternative. I completed my work on “Basic Biochemistry: A Programmed Textbook” for Basic Press. I had begun my efforts at Dartmouth, where the concept of a “programmed text” was being introduced. One of our friends in the Psychology department was preparing one for his own discipline and had introduced me to a representative from Basic Press. Strangely, I also recall that our friend was a Skinnerian, who actually raised his own son in a Skinner Box!

With regard to the concept of a programmed textbook, I might mention that, instead of reading a classic text composed of paragraphs, the student encounters a series of interrelated questions and statements, with fill-in-the-blank positions completing sentences within a specified block of text. The individual blocks are designed to follow predetermined, but alternative, pathways, dependent upon how the user fills-in-the-blank. The result is a “programmed text.” The method would, later, find application in computerized learning, in which jumping from one block to another is made much easier through the associated electronic presentations.

I sent off the finished manuscript to Basic Books, who gave me a thousand-dollar prepayment. The book was never published. The biochemical structures for carbohydrates, amino acids and steroids were judged to be too costly to print in the recurring forms the method required. It was difficult enough to reproduce them on a typewriter, or by hand with pen-and-ink drawings.

When I began the effort at Dartmouth, I had engaged an undergraduate student to help in the development of the statements I would need. He read each written question and, if he could not fill-in-the-blank correctly, I would write additional intermediate questions until he could complete the final statement correctly. This was the most important feature for this method of “programmed instruction.” The student could proceed at his own pace along the branches needed or omit those which were not needed.

Somewhere in my closet is a copy of the manuscript I completed more than sixty years ago, when I attempted to be a computer before computerization actually occurred! The experience led, in great part, to the development of my own teaching style. This may be the reason why, in later years when answering questions posed by my own kids, they were offered, at the outset, either the short or the long version. For the long answer, I would formulate intermediate questions they had to answer until they, themselves, reached the final solution to the question raised. Most of the time they wanted the short answer, the one we all routinely seek as we pursue the odds and ends in our own lives.

At the time of Kennedy’s assassination, I did not realize how those events occurring in Washington, D.C. would affect my own life and career development. All I knew was that, within weeks of our arrival four months earlier, I could not remain at OSU. It was because of my distasteful work in Dr. King’s lab that I determined I must seek my future elsewhere. Over the following months, close faculty friends knew I was searching for a dramatic change in my academic life.

Shortly afterwards, a likely escape route was provided by Dr. Donald MacDonald, a young faculty member in the department. He had a friend, Dr. Bob Backus, who was an administrator with the National Institutes of Health, a federal agency known for its support of biomedical research through its grant-awarding functions. I met with Dr. Backus on one of his visits to the University and applied for a position in the NIH-supported “Grants Associates Program.”

This federal program was a new endeavor in which the agency would retrain active scientists to become scientist-administrators. The process was thought to be easier than making current administrators into scientists. These scientist-administrators would have an overview of the Nation’s expansion in biomedical research. My application had been favorably reviewed and approved. I was invited to Bethesda, Maryland, for a series of interviews for the GA Program and was accepted into the next available class. However, I needed to wait for the forthcoming federal budget cycle, beginning in July 1965.

Throughout my life, I had been very interested in teaching and believed that this was my most significant talent. I had enjoyed my interaction with students in segments of the biochemistry courses offered at both Dartmouth Med and Oregon State. The students, themselves, seemed to believe I was able to provide useful information about lipids, even though I, myself, felt this was not a significant part of the curriculum for biochemistry.

Although I enjoyed, more or less, working in the lab, I also felt my physical skills were only average and that I was not destined to be a lab-bench investigator forever. My preference would be to offer an entire biochemistry course at the undergraduate level, in some small college, if not a major university, where faculty membership is determined by what you publish rather than by what you teach. I never reached my goal.

Although an academic life as a faculty member had been in my plans for many years, I began to think, with other members of the biochemistry faculty at OSU encouraging me, that an alternative career in administration might fit my profile equally well. On the other hand, I was concerned how Dr. Wright and Dr. Smith would view such a change. They had mentored me to be an investigator, not an administrator. Working in a government agency might be only slightly preferable to a job in industry!

Nevertheless, my emotional life at OSU changed dramatically during the autumn of 1964, a year after Kennedy’s death, when I learned I would be leaving my “imprisonment” by Tsoo E. King. I looked forward with great anticipation to departing the oriental kingdom of which I had been a minor player and undertaking a more significant role in what had once been JFK’s Camelot. A lowly knight would be a vast improvement for the serf I had been. Although Camelot’s towers had vanished in the mists, I continued to hope new ones would be raised. If not Camelot, perhaps the Great Society would have a place for me. Washington, D.C. could become my new “heart of the valley.” Later, I learned Potomac Fever can be a welcomed remedy to Willamette Chills.

Christopher Paul was born in Corvallis, Oregon, on May 30, 1965, only five days after my own thirtieth birthday. Two weeks later the family began a new life which led us in a very different direction.

A month or so earlier, in mid-April, I made my first flight to Washington, D.C. to house-hunt before moving on to the annual biochemistry meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The plane was a Boeing 727, the series which had made its maiden flight only two years earlier, in 1963. It was a strange, exciting experience to ride inside a javelin thrown into the sky. Technology said it should stay there, hurtling across the continent, but common sense said otherwise. Everyone knew, from the days of the Wright brothers, onward, that airplanes had propellers that moved the air rapidly over the wings to provide “lift” to the underside of them. They did not have jet engines mounted there instead. Somehow it worked.

I made my first landing in Washington, D.C., an event repeated often over the next five years. Each time there was the wonderment of seeing the Capital laid out beneath me. The Mall, the White House, the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial were extremely exciting to view from a seat traveling several hundred feet above them. An early, evening arrival was even better, with the lights shining on each of the buildings erected to give a sense of solidarity to all who beheld them. I had a very early infection resulting in Potomac Fever that lasted for decades.

I was fortunate to find a perfect house only a few blocks from the campus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. It was of modest Georgian style with old bricks, dormer windows and white trim. Of course, there was a cherry tree in the front yard. We could have it as a very inexpensive, semi-furnished rental for a year, while its owner, who was an officer with the United States Public Health Service (USPHS), was on an out-of-town assignment. The NIH was part of the USPHS, which, itself, was a division within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (DHEW). Welcome to the federal alphabet soup!

In mid-June, only a few weeks after Kip (the shortened version of Christopher Paul) was born, Karen and the three kids, Debbie, Ken, and Kip, had their own 727 adventures flying from Corvallis to Cleveland by way of Chicago. This was Karen’s first flight. It was, she maintains, adventurous enough for her. The plane was late arriving in Chicago. Ground assistants helped her with the three young kids, ages six years, two years and three weeks, race from one terminal to another. She has maintained that the businessmen on the flight to Cleveland readily made room for them. A telephone call from an airline agent alerted Karen’s father of the delay, since he was to have met them at the Cleveland airport for the drive to Sandusky where she would await my arrival.

The plan was for me to drive our recently purchased Chevy wagon to Ohio, meet the family, visit relatives, and drive on to Bethesda. The loading of our furniture onto a cross-country moving van would be supervised by our former, semi-willing landlords, the Messengers. Somehow it all worked out. Driving from Oregon to Ohio in a Chevy van was more comfortable than driving a VW van to the Pacific Northwest, as we had done only two years earlier. My escape from the secret kingdom of Tsoo E. King, to the Johnsonian administration made up for any hardships of the lonely drive.

A new world lay ahead of me. The days of academic studies and research would now become a time for learning about science administration. Now I would be supervising the giving of federal grants instead of trying to get them. It seemed as if this direction in my life, as well as in my geography, would be more fun, and maybe more exciting in a positive way.