Editor's Note: We asked Professor Harold Hart to write an article describing the chemistry department as it was when he came here in 1946. Here is his response. Due to its length, we shall publish it in two parts. Stay tuned for the next issue of the Department of Chemistry Newsletter for Alumni and Friends!
[From Pages 4-11 in "Department of Chemistry Newsletter for Alumni and Friends," August 1992]
I came to the chemistry department at Michigan State (then college, MSC) in the fall of 1946. Let me tell you what it was like then, but first I should warn you that this is a personal account, biased by and selective from my own experiences, and not checked for accuracy with regard to dates or completeness. It is unfortunate that we have already missed the opportunity to obtain similar accounts from other members of the department at that time (Max Rogers, for example, would surely have had amusing tales to tell) but perhaps we should now seek memoirs from those who are still with us (C.N. "Mac" McCarty, Dick Byerrum, Fred Dutton, John Speck and others) before it is too late. In combination, such accounts might present an accurate history, if that is ever possible.
* * *
The way I was hired might interest you, because it was so different from the way we do it now. The experimental work for my Ph.D. thesis was begun in January 1946 (at Penn State, where I had spent the war years on classified research projects that could not be used for a thesis), was completed in June, and the first draft of a thesis was finished by the end of the summer. So I felt that I could apply for teaching jobs to start that fall, and did. I registered at the ACS employment clearing house for the fall meeting in Chicago and was interviewed there by Professor L. L. Quill, (called Larry or L2Q) then head of the chemistry department. I refused his offer of a temporary position (I already had two other offers of permanent positions elsewhere—enrollments were about to burgeon and qualified candidates were scarce) and, after Larry made a phone call to his Dean, the offer was changed to a permanent one—i.e., with the opportunity for tenure, and I accepted. The rank was instructor—I think I was the last person to be hired into the department at that rank—the salary was $3,400 for a 12-month appointment. At that time, one taught for three quarters out of four. There was no extra pay for summer teaching.
Why did I select Michigan State over the other two offers? Mainly for a reason that had nothing to do with chemistry. It was immediately after the war and housing was extremely scarce, especially apartments. I was married, had a young daughter, and had no money for a down payment on a house (indeed, in order to devote full time to thesis research—I had been at Penn State since the fall of 1941 and was anxious to get out—I refused financial support that involved time commitments during those last eight months, used up our savings and was even somewhat in debt). John Hannah, then President, foresaw this shortage and the need for faculty housing, and had the Cherry Lane brick apartments under construction. These buildings were financed cleverly (signs proclaimed "constructed at no cost to the taxpayers of Michigan") and were amortized over 11 years, so they have been earning money for the university ever since 1957. We were assigned to Apt. 204 in 804 Cherry Lane, but it was not yet completed so I lived in a room on Grove Street in East Lansing until Thanksgiving when my family (who had been staying with my wife's parents in Chicago) could join me. Later, when our family grew, we moved down the hall to Apt. 208 and eventually to our present home in Okemos.
Although my reason for coming to Michigan State was non-chemical, I have never regretted the choice on chemical or any other grounds.
Harold Hart at the beginning of his career at Michigan State.
In 1946 I was 24 years old. I had never taught a class before, not even a laboratory class; had never been a teaching assistant, only a research fellow. I had never presented a seminar, since virtually all classes at Penn State were suspended during the war. I had no postdoctoral experience. Almost all of my graduate courses, the few that there were, were either in physical chemistry or physics but I was considered an organic chemist because I had passed the 8-hour organic prelim exam (and only the 4-hour prelims in the physical, inorganic and analytical areas). To be sure, I had read quite a bit of organic chemistry on my own (the two volumes of Gilman, Hammett's physical organic, Branch and Calvin's very different book on the same subject, Sidgewick's organic nitrogen chemistry, and others). I had only one short publication from my masters' thesis, a JACS communication.
I was hired on the spot by the department chairman without meeting with or being interviewed by the organic faculty (more about whom, later). I have always suspected that I was hired by mistake; Larry Quill had Irish ancestry, and I suspect that Hart sounded like a good Irish Catholic name. Little did he suspect, until too late, that he had hired the department's first Jew (the next was not to be hired for over two decades. Before World War II, neither the chemical industry nor academia hired Jews, with a few rare exceptions. I strongly suspect that this issue was a major factor in not making an offer to H. C. Brown at the time that he wanted to leave Wayne State and was interested in Michigan State. The future Nobelist went to Purdue—our loss and their gain. The same issue raised its ugly head in the early 1960's when we had a chance to bring in J. J. Katz, then at Argonne, as department chairman.)
Compare my being hired with the process that we follow today, when we obtain a large number of candidate files, most of whom have several years of postdoctoral experience and numerous publications. We select perhaps 6-8 of them to spend two days being thoroughly interviewed, we hear them present two seminars, and the entire faculty is in on the selection process. We have come a long way indeed! (Incidentally, I was not the only faculty member hired by the early non-process that I have described).
* * *
Let me say something about Larry Quill. He took his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, was on the Ohio State faculty for some years, and then spent one or two years as Head of Chemistry at the University of Kentucky before coming to Michigan State. His missions here were two-fold—to get the department accredited by the ACS Committee on Professional Training and to hire faculty who would initiate research programs. The Head before Larry was A. J. Clark (A.B. degree only) who had allegedly said that only the chemical industry could afford to do research, and that universities should stick to teaching. As a consequence, there was very little research activity when Quill arrived on the scene; what there was, I will describe later. Clark, incidentally, had a second job; he was president of the East Lansing State Bank (now Bank One, at the corner of Abbott and Grand River), and spent much of his time there.
Larry Quill succeeded in both missions. A major reason the department had previously been denied accreditation by the ACS was the presence of too many faculty without the Ph.D. degree. [I am told by Professor McCarty (Ph.D. from Illinois) that when he joined the department in 1935 there were only 3 faculty members with a Ph.D., Huston, Ewing and Hoppert.] By attrition and by hiring young Ph.D.'s Quill was able to shift the balance, and the department was accredited within a few years (perhaps 1948). Simultaneous signs of general improvement in the quality throughout the campus were the name change, from MSC to MSU, and admission to the Big Ten. A sky-rocketing enrollment required new faculty positions, and these could be filled with ever higher standards. And in chemistry, the new faculty wanted to do research as well as teach. As you can well imagine, however, the changeover from a predominantly teaching faculty (old guard) to a research/teaching faculty (young turks) could not be accomplished without considerable travail, and for perhaps ten years the department was split and not very congenial—more about that later. But the direction of change toward a more modern department was inevitable, and Larry Quill deserves credit for starting the department along that road. Unfortunately, Larry's scientific growth did not parallel that of the department, perhaps because of having too many administrative details to handle, and he eventually was replaced.
* * *
Back to the fall of 1946. What was the department like then? The faculty consisted of five divisions, biochemistry being present in addition to the usual analytical, inorganic, organic and physical. There was also a group that mainly taught general chemistry. I may not remember all the names, but here the "old guard" are: analytical (Elmer E. Leininger), organic (R. C. Huston, Ralph Guile, Gordon Goerner, Bruce Hartsuch), physical (Dwight Tarbell Ewing, Louis Bateman) and biochemistry (C. D. Ball, Carl Hoppert). In addition, Charles Norman McCarty (known to all as 'Mac') taught general chemistry and some inorganic, Bill Lewis and Cecil Langham (who later went to Chem Abstracts in Columbus) also taught general chemistry, and O'Neal Mason was in charge of general chemistry, but he left the college within a year or so.
In addition, there were several 'young turks'—I was not the first. They were John C. Speck, Jr. (Ph.D. in organic chemistry with Ralph Bost at the University of North Carolina, but part of the biochemistry group), Frederick R. Duke (Ph.D. from Illinois with G. Frederick Smith, and considered an analytical chemist though really a physical chemist with diverse interests, one of which was solution kinetics) and Max T. Rogers [Ph.D. from Cal Tech with Linus Pauling, and with five years of experience at UCLA; Max had been denied tenure at UCLA though I think he deserved it and he certainly is in good company—other well-known chemists now active, who were denied tenure at UCLA, include Julius Rebek, Jr. (now at MIT) and John Gladyz (now at the University of Utah)].
Some weeks after I wrote the previous two paragraphs from memory, I went to the main library and looked up university catalogs from that era. The above list is quite complete, though I omitted one assistant professor (E. C. Tabor) and a number of instructors, all without the Ph.D. and most of whom were either on leave or left within a year or so.
So altogether there were about sixteen chemistry faculty when I joined the department. Soon afterward new staff was added as enrollment climbed from about 11,000 to over 40,000. In analytical chemistry, Fred Duke left (about 1948, for Iowa State and later, Texas A. & M. and then Iowa) and was replaced by K. G. Stone (Ph.D. with Furman at Princeton). Later, Andy Timnick (Iowa) joined. Regrettably, all three of these analytical chemists are no longer alive. Carl Brubaker (MIT) and Harry Eick (Iowa) joined the inorganic group. Bob Herbst (Ph.D. with Treat B. Johnson at Yale and a faculty member at NYU) was brought in to head the organic group and replace Huston, who retired and in succession Bob Schuetz (Ph.D. with Baker at Northwestern), Bill Reusch (Ph.D. with Stork at Columbia and postdoc with Derek Barton) and Mike Karabatsos (Ph.D. and postdoc with Paul D. Bartlett at Harvard) were added, as Goerner left for a job at the State Health Laboratories and Hartsuch died. Max Rogers became head of the physical group when D. T. Ewing retired and Jim Dye (Ph.D. with Spedding at Iowa State), and Dick Schwendeman (Ph.D. with Brockway at Michigan) were added. A little later, both Ewing and Batemen died. In biochemistry, Dick Byerrum (Ph.D. with Rose at Illinois), Hans Lillevik (Minnesota) and Keith McCall (Wisconsin) joined in a very short time as that group was expanded and Ball and Hoppert retired; Keith, however, only stayed for a few years before leaving to head up the blood chemistry group at the State Health Labs, and Jim Fairley came on board. Eventually all joined the newly formed Biochemistry Department. Fred Dutton was brought in early on (about 1947 or '48) to head up the general chemistry program after Mason left, and some years later Bob Hammer joined that group and eventually succeeded Fred.
There were a number of other people who joined the faculty for a few years and then left. These include John J. Pitha, Jim Hall and Ralph Birdwhistell in inorganic chemistry. My oldest daughter liked the sound of John's name and called one of her dolls 'Pitha'; if I recall, John went to G.E. Victor Gilpin, Jim Sternberg and Boris Musulin were, for a time, members of the physical chemistry group. And William T. Lippincott joined the organic and general chemistry groups but later moved to the University of Arizona and for a number of years became the Editor of the Journal of Chemical Education.
Well, that is the rough catalog of faculty changes through the mid-1950's. I will leave it to others to carry on from there. More interesting is what the place was like in those days.
* * *
It is hard for me to realize now that Kedzie Chemical Laboratory was only 18 years old in 1946 when I joined the department. The building seemed ancient, though the cornerstone reads 1928. Perhaps it was the Gothic entrance, which was at once beautiful and archaic. Perhaps it was the old-fashioned wooden desks in the lecture hall and recitation rooms (we used to have faculty meetings in one of those rooms, with Professor Quill up in front standing on a dais, and the rest of us sitting at those tiny desks; Quill was the great white father, and we were the little children, or so it felt to me). Perhaps it was the teaching labs, with wooden tops instead of stone or composition. Perhaps it was the sink in the office/lab that I shared with Max Rogers. That sink was iron, rusted, and only about 8 x 15" and a shallow 4" in depth. Or it could have been the hood, which was made of masonite and had no window of any kind to raise or lower, so that it was always open. Or was it those huge, ancient style windows that were opened by loosening a catch and pushing out, so that the two halves folded toward one another; our office was on the first floor and in spring, Max and I enjoyed watching the young coeds walk by that window, which faced toward the front of Kedzie. The lab bench, which ran along the east wall, was really only a table with four legs. There were no drawers beneath it for storing equipment (which I suppose didn't matter much, because there wasn't much equipment to store).
Or could it have been that to someone who is 24, 18 years seems old for a building. In any event, it was in Kedzie that I spent the first 18 years of my academic career. We didn't move to our present building until 1964. It is now 28 years old, yet it still strikes me as being the 'new' chemistry building.
* * *
My teaching load in the fall of 1946 was 21 contact hours. Most of these were laboratory supervision (some on Saturdays; to accommodate the growing numbers of students in the limited space, Saturday classes were necessary), a few were recitation sections, all in general chemistry under Mac's supervision. I also attended all of Mac's lectures, and took roll for him; there was a seating chart, students were not rebellious and actually sat in their assigned seats, and attendance made up a small part of the grade. I learned a great deal about showmanship and maintaining class interest from Mac.
I well remember standing at the door to my first laboratory class, checking off the students' names against the class list as they entered, my heart beating wildly and my knees knocking. I was petrified, never having faced a class before. But the terror soon passed, and I came to enjoy teaching very much.
By spring term the teaching load had dropped to 15 contact hours, but I was not entrusted to lecture until the following year, after learning the ropes from Mac.
There was insufficient space in Kedzie for the students. Quonset huts (roughly on the present site of the Breslin Center and its parking lot) were converted to freshman chemistry laboratories and later, even to undergraduate organic labs, as one by one teaching labs in Kedzie were gradually converted to research labs. I also taught qualitative inorganic analysis in a lab that had been converted from a chicken coop standing where Giltner Hall (veterinary medicine) now is, and have an old photo to prove it. And I recall lecturing in the old Physics Building, a strange structure that had been added to so many times that it had 27 different levels just on the first floor. It was torn down to make room for the present university library (which in those days was in the building that now houses the university museum).
The teaching load being what it was, I obviously didn't have a great deal of time for research. Nevertheless, I did want to get started. I built a rack and, doing the glassblowing myself, constructed apparatus similar to what I had used for my Ph.D. thesis to study the kinetics of reactions that evolve a gas, by measuring the increase in pressure with time, in a constant volume system. For my Ph.D. thesis I had studied the alkylation of phenol with t-butyl chloride which, I had found, proceeds spontaneously without a Friedel-Crafts catalyst, to give p-t-butylphenol and hydrogen chloride (autocatalytic in the latter). I planned to study the alkylation of p-methylphenol, to see if the t-butyl group would go into the ortho position, to create a hindered phenol. In a conversation with Fred Duke, he asked whether o-t-butylphenol was known, or could be made; that is, would the t-butyl group stay in the ortho position, or would it rearrange spontaneously to the para position if that position were unoccupied by a methyl or other group. A literature search showed that o-t-butylphenol was not known and my first paper from Michigan State described its synthesis (the para position was blocked with a bromine, then, after alkylation, the latter was removed under alkaline reducing conditions, thus avoiding rearrangement). Later we made 2,6-di-t-butylphenol by a similar method. Nowadays, both compounds are commercial chemicals, but prepared by less expensive methods.
Well, I don't intend to describe any more of our research here. How we moved from one research area to another over 45 years will be saved for another essay. But I did want to indicate that without equipment or instrumentation the projects had to be simple, and I think that even with them, simplicity is not such a bad principle to follow.
John Topless and Harold Hart at Warner-Lambert Lectureship Reception.
During the fall of 1946 I also completed the final draft of my Ph.D. thesis. I went back to Penn State over the Christmas break to take my Ph.D. orals, and the degree was granted in February, 1947. I returned to Penn State again in the summer of 1947 to get some research done. My family stayed in East Lansing. In fact, to get a career started it was necessary (I thought) to work every night and weekend, or to take research jaunts such as the one to Penn State that summer, or a few summers later, to the Standard Oil of Indiana labs in Whiting, Indiana, setting aside the needs of my family. One of life's regrets. I would not make the same choices today.
What else can I say about research those days? Start up funds and government research grants were unheard of. The only instruments around were a single-beam Beckmann DU UV-visible spectrometer and a Perkin Elmer single-beam infrared spectrometer, the kind with the large rotary drum to which the recording paper was affixed. Both instruments belonged to Professor Ewing, and he was not about to let an upstart organic chemist (or anyone else) use them. I did surreptitiously obtain a key and sneak in during the middle of the night to obtain spectra, but always with considerable fear in my heart that I would be out on my ass if I ever got caught. Fortunately I wasn't, and I doubt that Ewing every saw the papers in which the spectra were published.
* * *
It wasn't just the lack of equipment, it was everything. You couldn't have designed a better system for thwarting research than was in operation at Michigan State at the time. I will explain.
There was a Graduate School with a Graduate Dean (at the time, it was R. C. Huston from chemistry) and a Graduate Council. This superstructure set various requirements for the Master's and Doctor's degrees. One of these was to require a minimum of 96 course credits for the Ph.D. degree (45 for the M.S. degree)! This requirement was supposed to ensure high academic standards in all departments by requiring graduate students to take loads of courses, and to maintain a B average. This notion of how to insure quality, misguided if ever there was one, could only have been conceived by a largely incompetent faculty that lacked self confidence and hence was unsure of itself. Imagine this. If a student took four 3-credit courses each term, 3 terms a year, it would take nearly 3 years just to complete the course requirement. There were also complex rules for course distribution; a certain number had to be in at least two minor areas within chemistry and a minor area outside of chemistry. This insured that students would have a smattering of ignorance and no intensive knowledge of their own field. Imagine the poor graduate student who tried to complete these requirements, at the same time being a graduate teaching assistant (with perhaps 12 contact hours per week—not uncommon), and in addition having to take sets of qualifying and preliminary exams in all four areas of chemistry, and so on. It is no wonder that research was given short shrift, and that only a few faculty tried, in 1946, to carry on a research program. And graduate students had to be heroes or survivors to make it through the system.
Another rule was that one had to be a member of the Graduate Faculty to direct the research of graduate students. The reason given for this requirement was that it would ensure that only qualified faculty would direct research. In actuality, however, it was an effective way for senior faculty to maintain power, and to see to it that no young upstarts would change the system. To become a member of the Graduate Faculty, one had to be nominated by the department head and be elected by the Graduate Faculty (or the Graduate Council, I've forgotten which). You had to have a Ph.D. degree, have the rank of Assistant Professor or above (remember?—I was hired as an instructor), and have some publications (in a sense a Catch 22 requirement, since one couldn't have any graduate students).
So it became the order of the day for the young turks in chemistry to somehow change this idiotic system. It took time, and a willingness to put one's job on the line for the cause. My way around the graduate faculty requirement was to get Larry Quill to be the official mentor for my students, sign all the forms, etc., while I supervised their research. My first two M. S. students (John Bordeaux and Ed Haglund) and my first two Ph.D. students (Frank Cassis and Bill Spliethoff) worked under this system. After two years I was promoted to assistant professor, and a little later elected to the graduate faculty.
The course requirement was a tougher nut to crack. My first student to get a Ph.D. with fewer than 96 course credits (and I think he was the first in the department) was Herbert S. Eleuterio, who got his Ph.D. in 1953 with 72 course credits. (Herb, after a postdoc with Mel Newman at Ohio State, went on to a distinguished career at DuPont). So you see, it took 7 years to break the barrier—well really about 5 years, because Herb's program was approved several years before he finished. Once the log jam was broken we were able to move further, and eventually get through a rule which set no official Ph.D. course requirement for the graduate school as a whole, and allowed programs to be devised to suit the individual needs of each particular student.
As is often the case, the pendulum swings too far, and in my opinion this may be true for course requirements. Nowadays we may be turning out students who are too narrowly trained (educated?), a complaint often heard from the chemical industry.
* * *
So who among the old guard had what might be called a viable research program in 1946? There were really only three groups. In organic chemistry, it was R. C. Huston, who had two research areas: the rearrangements that occur during the reaction of Grignard reagents with epoxides, and some AlCl3 - catalyzed Friedel-Crafts reactions. It was neither exciting nor highly innovative, but it was something. Ralph Guile, who had taken his Ph.D. degree with Huston and was beholden to him for his job, did quite a bit of the actual supervision, since Huston was busy being a Dean. Gordon Goerner also, as I recall, worked mainly on the Dean's chemistry, though he may also have had some independent projects. But it really was a lot like the old German (European?) system, where there was one professor and everyone worked on his chemistry.
It was similar in physical chemistry, where D. T. Ewing was the professor and Batemen, who took his Ph.D. with Ewing, was his satellite. Ewing, I was told, held some of the basic patents on chrome plating. His research interests were in electrochemistry. It was said that the Ford Motor Company gave Ewing a new Lincoln every 2nd or 3rd year to reward the research and consulting that he did. True or not, he did drive a Lincoln. He had a quiet sense of humor, and one of the stories told of him was that he enjoyed cruising in the Lincoln, startling his passengers by surreptitiously pressing the buttons for the windows to go up and down; automatic windows were very new then.
And in biochemistry there was Carl Hoppert, who did research on dental caries. There was a rat lab in the attic of Kedzie, to maintain his experimental animals. Through breeding, Carl had developed some strains of rats that lost all their teeth to dental caries on reaching maturity, and other strains that never developed a cavity. Harrison Hunt (Zoology Department) collaborated with Hoppert (or vice versa). C. D. Ball may also have done some research, I'm not sure. He was a kind and genial gentleman, a former coach of the Michigan State tennis team.
* * *
Ralph Chase Huston seemed, to me, a very strange person. He was rather large and exceedingly gruff; the only words (if you could call them that) that I recall his saying outside the classroom were hrumph or ggrumph, by way of a greeting. I suspect he was shy.
As I mentioned above, I had taken almost no graduate courses in organic chemistry at Penn State, so about the second term at Michigan State, when my teaching load dropped from 21 to 15 contact hours and I had the time, I decided to sit in on a course that Huston was teaching, advertised as "the correlation of physical properties with organic structure." He had written a slim volume on this subject that had just been published in 1947 by the newborn Michigan State press (I still have an autographed copy). The course dealt mainly with empirical correlations of the boiling points, molecular volumes, surface tensions and, parachors (for you youngsters, there's something archaic to look up) of alkanes and alkenes in terms of such concepts as intramolecular dispersion, coordination, contact areas and relative energies. The topic was dull, as were the lectures, and I soon learned that questions were not greatly appreciated.
The next term, I sat in, briefly, on a course Huston gave based on Louis Hammett's "Physical Organic Chemistry" monograph. But I was soon called in to Quill's office because Huston had complained that I was spying on him. Naturally, I stopped going.
* * *
After the first summer (1947), I offered to teach regularly every summer quarter. The teaching load was somewhat lighter during summer, and with the spring quarter off from teaching, I could get six successive months with a fair amount of time for research. The offer to teach summers was always accepted because there was no extra pay and most of the faculty took summer vacations (our first summer vacation—indeed, our first vacation ever— came in 1955, when we spent 3 weeks in New Hampshire and Maine at the end of a sabbatical year at Harvard; we had been married 13 years. In retirement we are making up for that deficiency, but it is too late for the time when our children were young—another regret). This arrangement went on for several years, until all faculty were switched to a 10-month salary base, with extra pay (at a lower rate) for summer teaching. Everyone then wanted to teach in the summer, or at least for half of it, for extra pay.
* * *
One summer, I think 1948 when I was still an instructor, I taught qualitative inorganic analysis. There was a young lady in the class whom I shall call Carol (not her real name) who had difficulty with chemistry and, as she explained, needed to pass the course in order to be admitted to the ceramics department at Alfred University in upstate New York. (Alfred University has an excellent fine arts department, especially in ceramics; one of MSU's most illustrious potters in the art department, Louis Raynor, received his training there.) I arranged to tutor her several times a week, of course without any fee—I considered it part of the job. It turned out that Carol's father was the coach of a major sport at MSU, and the day before the final exam he stopped by to thank me for helping Carol. When he finished shaking my hand I found a $50 bill in it; I tried to return it but he protested that I was a young instructor, could use the money, and left. This was not an acceptable way to earn extra pay, so I gave Larry Quill the money to return. The next day, I'm pleased to say, Carol passed the final on her own steam and got a C in the course. Later, she gave me some record albums (78's in those days) as a gift, knowing I enjoyed music. I don't blame her father, who was simply acting as a concerned and loving parent.
One day I was a bit late for our tutoring session and, while waiting,
Carol made a pen and ink sketch of the apparatus on my rack, with me standing in front of
it in a white shirt with sleeves rolled up, a typical pose. I still have the sketch, but
you might not recognize me because I had a full head of almost black, curly hair.
Carol was admitted to Alfred, obtained a BFA and I believe an MFA and became an art professor, after which we lost contact. Amusing that in later years I developed an interest in ceramics and have become an amateur potter.
* * *
Bruce Hartsuch was a short man with a slight build, narrow, rounded shoulders and a concave chest. He had just a little hair. A cigarette usually dripped from the corner of his mouth and he could speak without taking it out. He had a gravelly voice and a hacking cough. Bruce wore round, thick glasses with wire frames, and peered from them with owl eyes. His glasses were so thick that he couldn't see anything at a distance unless it was a pretty young coed walking down the hall or, at a party, a woman with a decolleté gown. To read, he held the page within an inch of his glasses. He had a broad grin, and was a charmer.
Bruce's wife Margaret was considerably larger and more robust than he, with a hearty laugh and cheerful disposition that matched his. They were a wonderful couple. We often heard the story of their honeymoon (many years earlier), a canoe trip up the Red Cedar River from East Lansing to Ann Arbor (with many portages).
Bruce loved to teach. He did not have a Ph.D. and did no research, though he participated in graduate organic seminars, where he would sit nervously folding and tearing sheets of paper into smaller and smaller squares. His hands shook if he didn't keep them busy.
Bruce wrote some laboratory texts (soft cover) which were published and used locally. I think one was in inorganic qualitative analysis, and another in textile chemistry. He developed and taught a lecture and laboratory course in textile chemistry to girls from the College of Home Economics (now Human Ecology). He supervised the laboratory sections himself, and would stop at each bench, peer over the young lady's right shoulder at the bench top and ask 'how is it going?', at the same time gently patting her fanny with his left hand. It was sexual harassment, but Bruce didn't know it and meant no harm.
Bruce liked to drink. It was said that the only chemical he ever checked out of the stockroom was absolute alcohol—for research. He stored it in an Erlenmeyer flask in his desk drawer. At parties, he drank a lot and handled it well.
Bruce died first and Margaret within a few months thereafter. They lived for each other.
* * *
Social life during the Quill era was rather lively. The usual form was a party with drinks and snacks, then a buffet dinner eaten at three or four card tables, with lively conversation, followed by a number of rounds of bridge, then prizes. The McCartys were the main driving force behind these parties, especially Alice McCarty, who was kind, witty, vivacious and outgoing, with a ready, hearty laugh. I rarely drive down Michigan Avenue toward Frandor, even today, without glancing at the dark red, brick house on the north side, where the McCartys used to live, thinking of those days. (to be continued)
Harold Hart, Mike Karabatsos, and Mercouri Kanatzidis at Brubaker
Symposium.
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