Chapter 15: The Army
I got a student deferment from military service as soon as I came to the U.S. in 1950. The Korean War lingered, so the draft was still in effect by the time I got my Ph.D. in 1954. No more deferments. A few months later I was drafted and sent to Georgia for basic training. I wasn’t too concerned about my future because in those days the Army recognized the value of technology (which is how World War II was won), and the likes of me were spared being sent to drive a truck or something similar. Instead, we were “requisitioned” by military labs.
It was clear to me that the real reason I was drafted was to improve my English. Having been in this country for only five years, my command of the language needed attention. I could manage quite well in classroom and laboratory, but in the real world I spoke in a halting and unsure manner. This was to be remedied — and remedied fast — during basic training (e.g., I found out that “mother” is only half a word). My vocabulary increased in a precipitous way and, in short order, I could face the world. Camp Gordon (or better, Camp Gawd’n), Georgia, was my Berlitz school. I was now ready for ‘finishing school’ at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C.
Barbara and me.
I had to make a detour before landing in a research lab at Walter Reed. I was first sent to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. My MOS (Military Occupational Specialty, which defines who you are, as far as the Army is concerned) was that of a “Sanitary Engineer” (translation: latrine inspector). I was told to report to a certain colonel. When I came to his office, I was met with a string of vituperation. It turned out that the colonel was in charge of the class whose graduates merited the Latrine Inspector MOS. And here I was, with that singular distinction awarded to me without having taken his course! The colonel and I were both shocked, shocked! After he recovered from his near apoplexy, he allowed that since I had a Ph.D. in microbiology, perhaps I should be in a lab. As the result of this amazing insight, I was shipped off to see another colonel. This one was the model of politeness and showed concern for my well-being. He quizzed me at some length about my background, and gave me a written test with questions that included describing the biosynthetic pathway of tryptophan. He said he knew some of my professors at Penn and seemed to have a good sense of my field. After this pleasant conversation, he turned to me with a grin and said: “Good, you seem to know your stuff. But you won’t need any of this here. You’re going to work with fecal samples for two years!”
But fate intervened. The next day I got my orders for Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, just north of Washington DC. Getting there was a bit of an adventure. This was Christmas time of 1954 and I was to report six days later. Providentially, Barbara
Being signed in.
was visiting her folks in Northeastern Oklahoma, so I thought I’d take a detour. We had a great time, but the night before I was to fly out of Tulsa, a big snow storm hit the region. Undaunted, my father-in-law loaded his pick-up truck with bags of sand to weight it down, and off we went on the 40-mile trip to the Tulsa airport. Of course, we were greatly delayed, but so were the flights. As a green soldier, I became more and more apprehensive, but all seemed well when the flight took off, apparently with enough time for me to report in. Wouldn’t you know it, there was a big thunderstorm over the DC area and the flight was diverted to Richmond, Virginia. We were then bussed to D.C., me in a bit of a panic about being AWOL for a few hours. When I finally made it to the post, late, the sergeant in charge yawned and checked me in without comment.
A proper G.I.
The next day I reported for duty and all went well from then on. The first thing I was told was to get “whites,” funny uniforms for those of us who worked in labs. To distinguish the officers, the army had them wear full length lab coats. As our uniform had to be white, as is suitable for the lab, enlisted men were issued cooks’ and bakers’ uniforms. They were white all right but had a strange cut off at the end of the sleeves. I guess that was so the cooks and bakers wouldn’t dip their sleeves in the soup they were cooking or the dough they were kneading.
I was assigned to Barracks 73 (or, as we called it, Stalag 73), the home to some 30 GIs, including a couple of dozen Ph.D. malcontents. We bonded immediately. I suppose that many things went into that; being yanked away from normal life, needing to adjust to new situations, coping with the uncertainties — in the early weeks — of what would happen to us, and having to create a new world all of our own. Barracks 73 was a unique place, one that would seem almost incomprehensible to outsiders. We created deep friendships, close camaraderie, life-long ties. My memories of the time there are of one of the best years of my life. I felt part of a community of kindred spirits.
Allen Campbell and Me.
Life in the barracks consisted of a series of inventive adaptations to Army life. The contrast between it and “normal” life was enhanced by the fact that most of us spent our daytime hours in a lab, where we were treated nearly as civilians. To deny our soldierly reality, we decide to adopt new names, all of which had to start with a C. A guy by the name of Greenberg took on “Christian,” I became “Clarence,” and so on. We were forbidden to use our real names, only our “C-names.” We were in some other world.
My new home.
Here are a couple of exploits of members of the C-club.
Reveille at Night
One of us had once to serve as CQ (‘charge of quarters,’ a night duty at the company headquarters building). He noticed the phonograph used for bugle calls. To fight boredom, he decided to find out what all the bugle calls sounded like, so he put the 33 1/3 record on the turntable. He couldn’t hear the calls very well, as they were being “streamed” out of doors, and it was wintertime, with the windows closed. So, he upped the volume as much as possible. The whole neighborhood, including many retired officers living nearby, were regaled with this concert in the middle of the night. I don’t think the sergeant was happy.
GI clean
To prepare the toilet bowls and sinks for the weekly barracks inspection, one of the guys appropriated nitric acid from the lab and poured it onto the porcelain, which saved us from having to use the scrubbing brush. The degree of cleanliness was spectacular, and we readily passed that part of the inspection. The fact that the pipes mysteriously corroded with some frequency was none of our business.
Military Dentistry
On weekends when not on duty, I used to hop on a train to Philadelphia, where Barbara was going to Social Work school. To save money and get a GI fare, I traveled in uniform (not my white cook’s coat). Having gotten back to Union Station in Washington late one Sunday, I wanted to share a cab and looked around for personnel with the Walter Reed insignia on their collars. I saw an officer who, when asked, said he was OK with cab sharing. On the way, I found out that he was a dentist with a Ph.D. in anatomy, so we had quite a bit to talk about. We were left off near his digs and continued our conversation in almost complete darkness. Not a soul in sight. After we said goodbye, as I started to turn to go to my barracks, he remembered his recent officers’ training, so he abruptly stepped back, straighten himself out, and saluted me!
I was extraordinarily lucky in my assignment to a lab at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research that was working on rickettsiae, the bacterial agents of various kinds of typhus. In the old days, calling them “bacteria” would have been jumping the gun, because at that time it wasn’t clear if they were indeed bacteria or maybe something like a virus. My boss, a civilian named Joe Smadel, was an eminent rickettsiologist and a very fine scientist. His goal was to resolve the uncertainty about the Rickettsiae once and for all, and he wanted me to solve the problem. No nonsense here — as I found out shortly. A week or so after I had started in the lab, he was walking into the men’s room when he saw me, and holding the door half open said: “Well, chum, what have you been doing?” And he didn’t mean “hello!”
Getting my papers from a slightly drunk superior officer.
My assignment seemed straightforward enough: I was to Iook through the microscope at human cells growing in a culture that had been infected with rickettsiae and follow individual rickettsiae until they either divided into two (bacteria-like) or did something else. It took me a while to recognize which were the rickettsiae and then follow an individual meandering inside a host cell. I knew that the process would be slow, and that I had to do this for many hours. No problem with meals, as a sergeant, no less, brought them to my bench side. I took pictures through the microscope every minute, or until, happy days, I saw a couple of my beasties split into two. Problem solved. Rickettsiae were indeed bacteria! I went on to do some other work that confirmed that they had chemical and structural properties that were typical of bacteria, such as possessing a cell wall, etc. This was pretty good work and it resulted in three articles that were published in major journals, two of them with me as the senior author. Not bad for an army private. But the best part was that the atmosphere in the lab was the opposite of that at Penn, the science being incisive and innovative. Above all, I was treated with respect despite my lowly rank. I regained much of what I had lost in self-esteem and felt ready to tackle the world. Four days after I was discharged, Barbara and I were on a ship to Copenhagen.
Chapter 16: Denmark
My two years in Copenhagen were most likely the happiest of my life. My wife Barbara and I were there from 1956 to 1958, while on a postdoctoral fellowship in Ole Maaløe’s laboratory. We had decided on this sojourn in Europe for several reasons. In the decades after World War II, young Americans where drawn to labs in Europe, partly because some of them were birthplaces of Molecular Biology, partly for the excitement of being abroad.
View of Copenhagen (Wikipedia).
I had four specific reasons for wanting to do a postdoc in Copenhagen: 1. Barbara had fallen in love with her professor of Scandinavian Civilization (and with Scandinavian Socialism) at the University of Kansas, where we both had been students. 2. I once found my Army barracks-mate Allan Campbell (see chapter 15) sprawled out on the bunk, reading a paper by someone in Copenhagen, and saying: “Everything that has been done has now to be done over.” (Turned out he wasn’t right, for the only time that I am aware of. He became a famous scientist). 3. I was accepted by the lab where this work was done. 4. I was awarded a fellowship to go there by the American Cancer Society.
The Little Mermaid (in Copenhagen).
Barbara and I had the time of our lives, enjoying the delightfully serene and friendly city of Copenhagen. We OD’d on Danish pastries, learned to appreciate modern Danish furniture, had our share of Danish beer, and got to relish that most Danish form of bliss, ‘hygge.’ We tried to learn Danish and, toward the end of our two-year stay, managed to engage in a csimple conversation. The language is difficult, and its sounds were largely unfamiliar to our ears. Our efforts to speak Danish, however, revealed an unexpected Danish attitude. Unlike most other countries, where attempts to learn the language are usually met with praise, here we encountered somewhat negative reactions. One reason is that Danish is spoken well only by Danes, so that anybody who speaks it with an accent is likely to not be understood, or, at least, be viewed with suspicion (on occasion, I was even asked if I was Swedish!). We tried to get a bit further behind this attitude and, eventually, when we got chummier with our acquaintances, we were told that Danes were self-conscious about so much of their culture being imported. That was something they could accept, but the language was uniquely theirs, so would we please keep a distance.
The lab of my mentor, Ole Maaløe, was at the State Serum Institute. That was before he became a professor of microbiology at University of Copenhagen. The lab’s factotum, the indispensable Jens Ole Rostock, found us a lovely apartment in a near suburb called Frederiksberg. We soon bought two big old black bicycles at the police auction (Barbara’s for 3 US $, mine for $2) and were ready to go, to liver som Danskere (live like Danes). During the first year, a challenging winter, I rode the bike to work every day, pedaling across Tivoli Gardens. Enough bravado. In the second winter, I took the trolley. Our hyggelig apartment soon had the 3 B’s required for hygge, Billeder, Bøger, Blomster (pictures, books, flowers).
Ole Maaløe.
The lab was quite small, with just two postdocs, the Dane Niels Ole Kjeldgaard and me. I was tempted to change my name because everybody else’s was Ole (Ole, Jens Ole, Niels Ole. How about Elio Ole?)
We had Ole’s nearly undivided attention. He would occasionally participate in an experiment, elegantly removing the ever-present cigar from his mouth, and carefully placing it down while gracefully reaching for a pipette. The work went well practically from the beginning. We followed the routine of starting a culture of bacteria (Salmonella in this case) in the evening and using it as an inoculum for a fresh culture as soon as we got in the next morning. We spent the rest of the morning analyzing the data from the day before and, after lunch, were ready for a new experiment.
Niels Ole Kjeldgaard.
We were producing a lot of data which would probably have overwhelmed us had not Ole displayed a magnificent ability to digest them and to place them within a useful framework. Thanks to him, we felt that we knew what we were doing, both with regard to planning the next experiments and to relate the results to the wider world. Ole, being one of the members of the original "Phage group,” was eminently qualified to recognize the implications of our results.
Lunch at the Serum Institute was at the Laegernes Frokostue (the doctors’ lunchroom), where I usual had an ost smørrebrød med spejlaeg paa (open faced cheese sandwich topped by a fried egg). The place was generally fairly quiet, as everybody was intent on eating. One day, the silence was interrupted by a visiting Englishman, who uttered: “Surely, if you could get your nutrition from a pill, you would prefer that to eating.” So astounded were the people in attendance that they dropped their knives and forks and looked on in disbelief.
Overall, friendliness and camaraderie pervaded the atmosphere. But one day the Queen of Denmark came to visit the Institute. Because one of the group was an avowed leftist, he was told to please take a day’s vacation on that occasion.
In our apartment.
I managed to get some good work done on regulation of bacterial growth. My otherwise modest fellowship went a long way in that postwar economy, and we did a lot of traveling to various countries in Europe as well as to Israel.
A small vignette. How do you buy condoms in Copenhagen? I don’t know about now, but in my days there, you did not go to a drugstore or the likes. You went instead to a special store with a neon sign saying: “PREVENTION.” Inside I found two doors, one for each gender. On entering the correct one, I found a man behind a counter, impeccably clad in a white lab coat. When I told him that I wanted some condoms, he acted like a man at a deli counter being asked for a sandwich. Which kind did I want? He opened the top of the counter and exposed samples of perhaps two dozen kinds of prophylactics: thin, thick, opaque, transparent, colored, perfumed, ornamented, plain, etc. After making a choice, he invited me to tour the establishment. In the back was a room where a row of women seated by tables were testing condoms, one by one. They did this by slipping them over a wood piece in the shape of a robust penis from the end of which came a jet of compressed air. This was done to the accomplishment of soft music, as the women were not allowed to talk. Germs, you know. I was then taken to a room where the items were rolled up, powdered, and finally packaged. Before I left, I got a booklet describing the history of prophylactics and was told that I could order what I wanted using a subscription plan.
We brought back wonderful memories of events and the feelings they evoked. But, as I have already hinted, not everything Danish was familiar to us. When we said something that we thought called for a smile or change in expression, we often saw no difference in facial muscles. Was affect missing? Surely not. I remember talking about it with a Danish friend with whom I had a wonderful relationship. I mentioned affect, showing emotions, sharing feelings. His response: “Du er en ballademager!” (“You are a troublemaker”). I guess I got used to this in time, but I thought that something was different, despite innumerable demonstrations of caring friendship. Intimacy certainly is possible with a Dane, but don’t expect too many outward expressions of emotions. This illustrated the cultural differences between the Danes and us. Even though this was a superficial matter, it emphasized our disparities and it may have contributed to our not choosing to stay there, something we had discussed.
One more memory of why I love the Danes. I was talking to one about the Swedes, not the Danes’ favorite people. He explained that they were known to be bossy, dominant, heavy handed, etc. But then he stopped and said: “But there is one thing we are very grateful to them for!” “What is it?” I asked. He answered: “They saved OUR Jews!” He was referring to the fact that the day before the Jews in German-occupied Copenhagen were to be rounded up and deported by the Nazis, the Danes hastily organized a rescue operation and ferried them to Sweden in every kind of fishing boat available. Most Danish Jews survived WWII in Sweden. “OUR Jews,” indeed!
Again, the Danes are without question among the kindest of people. They care for one another in so many ways — theirs is said to be the country with the highest level of happiness. It is not possible to live in Denmark for any length of time without admiring the ability of its people to care for one another. We came from a country where a prevailing attitude was that people ought to be rugged individuals and be largely responsible for their own fate. What we saw in Denmark was a developed sense that everyone’s well-being was everyone’s concern. If someone is not successful in life, the question is not whether they are to blame for it, but rather, how they can be helped. The Danes are special people and theirs a special country. Det er et yndigt land! (“There is a lovely country,” from the Danish anthem.)
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