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.