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 qualifying 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.
Here is a letter to me from Mother. As you know, she wrote with an even hand and with few errors in spelling, but she never did learn to punctuate the way you’re supposed to—this letter is typical, I believe:
Julia, the youngest of seven sisters, had formal schooling only through the fourth grade level.
Welcome N. C.
Nov 22-1927
Dear Arthur,
I’ll, try and take time to write once again it seems like there is something doing most of the time. The Olivet Auxiliary entertained the Friedberg and Enterprise Ladies Aid Society Sat. afternoon we had a real good time everybody seemed to enjoy it nobody was in a hurry to go home.
Last night we pounded Mr. Goforth (Pounding here means welcoming a new minister with a pound each of cooking essentials such as butter, flour, sugar, and so forth) and tomorrow I must fix for the Thanksgiving sale we will have at the school house. I’m to bake chicken pies and make some coleslaw They are going to serve barbecue too. Yes, I promised to make some pumpkin pies to send to the county home Miss Margaret Perryman takes dinner down there each year under the auspices of the Epworth L. I thought about sending you a box but I did not know where you might be at this time.
Mr. Bivens carried a crowd of boys, John included, to Durham last Saturday to see Duke vs. Carolina game John spent the night and Sunday at the Hill I think he enjoyed it fine
Blanche will come home tomorrow and stay until Sunday. Ralph Howard and Kenneth will come Thursday night
There have been quite a few deaths around but none right in our neighborhood Mr. Charlie Snyder, Mr Cisero Doty and Mr. Sam Snyder were all buried week before last. Cousin Low Watkins is dead and will be buried tomorrow . . .
Had a right nice crop of sweet potatoes got Mr. Roger Berrier to make bins and finish up the basement. Shredded the corn 2 weeks ago, did not have quite a hundred bu. in all. Have not dug the harvest potatoes yet.
Have not heard from W. C. (Cletus) since you were home last summer. Papa is not very well has a bad cough and is short of breath.
With love
Mother J.C.R.
Before getting on some more, let me read by way of contrast a letter I have here from our father. As you’ll see, even though he’d gone through seventh grade—three more years than our mother—he had even less understanding of grammar and lacked her mastery of spelling. This letter was written to me some two years after the one from Mother. Martha and I had just gotten married and were honeymooning in a tent, a cloth house, as Father puts it, in the mountains.
Welcome N. C.
July 24, 1929
Dear Son,
We received your letter last week was glad to here frome you for we were gitting uneasy about you and Martha I hope you are Still injoying your cloth house I guess you remember what you said about the cloth house at Arcadia You said it would Fall down Will your house fall down
John went with the Enterprise Band to Raleigh Tuesday and came back last night Stayed with Luther Tuesday night Grady Zimmerman had his trile yesterday he gat 5 yer in the State Prisen.
(I remember Grady as a big bully when we were kids. Dad’s referring here to his conviction for embezzlement from a small bank where he worked after he was grown. Then he goes on about the boy he had as a hired hand at that time.)
About the boy $25 per month would be in line . . . if he is all right the first part if he will stay until John comes back which will be about 1 month . . . When you go to school and you must be on time and go regular or fail, that is the way it apear to me.
The Tobac is looking fairly well but cannot tell yet we will begin priming next week Eli and Fred Tesh has primed last week The cantalopes will be ripe in about 10 days they are looking fairly well my watermelon vines is looking good
R. H (Ralph), has not got a school yet.
The timber acrose the branch sawed out 43,000(board feet) and the pines at the School house sawed out about the same, We are trying to make hay and it rained first after Dinner, Son see it in bad luck, We are looking for you and Martha to be by in a few weeks and stay some time for we know when you git back to Atlanta you will stay for a long time. We are all well as common. Hope you are both well
Your Father
BLANCHE:
When Papa said he was “well as common” that was not very well. Momma, in the earlier letter you read, expressed the state of his health more accurately I think.