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.