Dr. Otto Loewi & Me--Woods Hole, 1955

Woods Hole Memories

Between my freshman and sophomore year in high school (summer of 1956) , I had the opportunity to spend the summer with my uncle, Dr. Morris Rockstein, and his family at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

I stayed in a small apartment with my uncle, Morris, his wife, Elaine, and my two cousins, Sue and Mady. The building we lived in was owned by the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL). Upstairs around the corner was the renowed biologist, Julian Huxley [five years later I met Julian's brother, the author, Aldous Huxley , when he gave a lecture at Monterey Peninsula College in Monterey, California].

One of my uncle's early mentors was the Nobel Laureate, Otto Loewi, who this summer lived nearby. Loewi, a Jew, had been born in Frankfurt, Germany, but was teaching and doing research at the University of Graz in Austria when the Nazi's invaded, arrested him, and seized his assets. He was fortunate to get to the U.S. in 1940 and was teaching at NYU when my uncle met him. He and his wife were warm and welcoming people who could find time for a curious teenager who was fascinated by this brilliant couple.

One day, my uncle introduced me to a very distinguished looking gentleman whose name was
Winterton C. Curtis. It turned out that Mr. Curtis had been one of the scientists called to Dayton, Tennessee, by Clarence Darrow to be one of the expert witnesses for the defense at the Scopes "Monkey Trial," but the judge would not permit their testimony. Mr. Curtis had written an account of the trial which was included in the book D-Day at Dayton. He gave me an autographed off-print of his story, which, unfortunately, has disappeared over the intervening years.

I only met Sir Vincent Wigglesworth, the eminent British entomologist, once at Woods Hole that summer. We ate most of our meals in a large cafeteria-style chow hall that served the laboratory community. One day at breakfast Sir Vincent joined us at the table. On his tray was a stack of three pancakes with three pats of butter. My attention was drawn immediately to his eating as I was unfamiliar with Europeans' tendency to always keep their fork in one hand and their knife in the other, rather than cutting with the right and then taking up the fork with the right. Very soon, however, I became more fascinated by the precision with which he would cut off a precise piece of pancake and then a precise portion of butter from the pat and butter the cut piece. Each time the pat lasted exactly for one pancake. At the end of this prodigious feat, I was tempted to applaud his consummate skill, self-discipline, and precision! I had been hypnotized--I could not not watch him eat his pancakes! Later in life, I purchased Sir Vincent's Principles of Insect Physiology and was once again drawn in.

There was an evening lecture series at the MBL during the summer. One of the lectures I really enjoyed was by George Gamow, the physicist and author of 1,2,3 Infinity. Gamow picked a small topic, "The Origin and Evolution of the Universe." I was a bit "shocked" by his first slide, the Origin of the Milky Way (click the link to see the slide). This was my first exposure to cosmology, but it was presented in a very interesting and entertaining way just like his 1,2,3 Infinity, a mathematical sojourn into physics.

Another interesting (and influential for me) lecture was presented by George Wald, the discoverer of Vitamin A and later to be Nobel Laureate, who spoke on the "Origin & Evolution of Life." I learned about the Urey-Miller experiments to recreate the conditions of the primordial soup that lead to the chemical evolution of life. It was heady stuff for a soon-to-be high school sophomore who would be starting biology the coming fall.

On July 25, 1956, the Italian ocean liner the SS Andrea Doria was struck by the Swedish-America Line's SS Stockholm off Nantucket and sank. For much of the rest of that summer various bits and pieces of the items carried on the Andrea Doria washed up on the shores of Cape Cod.

Cape Cod, Woods Hole, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the whole gestalt were a wonderful eye opener for young boy from a sleepy town on the Delaware River in South Jersey in the 1950's!

More another day

Kennedy Toppers

My freshman year in college at Rutgers I lived in a dormitory that had a broad spectrum of students, many unlike people I had ever met before. Among these were two chubby young guys who seemed inseparable and who always wore suits and ties. No sooner did they get there than they enrolled in the Young Conservatives. (I don't know if there was a Young Log Cabin Republicans Club there)

When Kennedy, at an earlier Democratic National Convention, had broken with tradition and campaigned actively for the Vice-Presidential nomination, I was working in my uncle's lab at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, as a lab factotum and bottle washer. I listened to the convention on the radio in rapt attention whenever I could.

So when Kennedy was running for the presidency in a later election, I was inspired to join his supporters and, informed by the Conservative gold dust twins' example, I looked for a Young Democrats Club on campus.

I look back fondly to those days, especially raising money for the campaign by selling Kennedy Toppers, the straw boaters such as pictured above, which were a vibrant symbol of this youthful campaign.

Years later I worked actively in the campaigns of Vance Hartke and Birch Bayh, both for the Senate from Indiana as well as the early campaign of Frank McCloskey for Mayor of Bloomington, Indiana, before he ran successfully to become a member of the US House.

Later, I worked in the US Government for 30 years and was prevented from working for my candidates actively by the Hatch Act. The Bush Administration has perniciously rendered the Hatch Act meaningless by so politicizing the bureaucracy that the Hatch Act should be scrapped immediately!

John

Between my high school freshman and sophomore year, I was spending the summer at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, working as an assistant to my uncle Morris who was doing research to determne if the terminal pigment spots (so-called "eyespots") on the tips of the arms/rays of the common Atlantic starfish, Asterias forbesi, were, indeed, photosensitive.

In addition to various chores around my uncle's main lab which included a large tank with running seawater, I also had to do an extensive search of various biological and chemical abstracts for information adenosinetriphosphotase (ATP) another research interest for physiologist uncle. Finally I regularly did counts on the starfish in a second lab with running seawater whih was in a darkroom. Half the starfish in the tank had had the "eyespots" removed. A light was shone into one end of the tank and counts of the starfish in the lighted half of the tank were made hourly to see if there were any difference in the attraction to the light by the starfish with eyespots and those without.

I first became aware of John F. Kennedy in 1956 when he ran for the Vice Presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention and almost succeeded in wresting the nomination from Estes Kefauver who, ultimately, was selected as Adlai E. Stevenson's running mate. Kennedy's speech caught the attention of many young people who rallied to his cause when he later ran for the presidency.