I never had a serious accident, but once I had a narrow escape — nearly lost my right hand and perhaps part of my arm. No matter how big and powerful machinery becomes, one of the most dangerous things in any shop remains the power-driven buzz saw. I had a heavy board on the buzz saw once, when it suddenly jumped out of my hand, but in the jumping pulled me forward so that my wrist almost went down on the saw. The workmen told me that I had got hold of a piece of “springy” wood. After it passes the saw, it clamps together on the saw, then jumps and pulls you forward.
Wood had by that time begun playing with and experimenting with all the big machinery including the hydraulic presses. He apparently refrained from inflicting on his mother any confidences concerning his experiments and narrow escapes. He played there only after school and Saturdays, since she was meanwhile sending him to Mrs. Walker’s select “fitting school,” and later to that of another unfortunate lady, Miss Weston, a spinster. Rob’s outstanding memory of Mrs. Walker’s was when two of the older boys locked her in the water closet, which opened off the main schoolroom. When she’d been released from durance indeed vile, she pinned it down on two brothers, past masters of mischief, and said before the whole schooclass="underline"
“Malcolm and Isaac, pick up your books and go straight home and never return to this school!”
The boys strapped up their books, but one of them turned on his way out and called back:
“Mrs. Walker, here goes three hundred and fifty dollars straight out through this door.” They were of course back again in two or three days.
Mrs. Walker’s reports of young Robert, in the meantime, were completely discouraging, though not so scandalous. She said he was inattentive, almost dull, and that his mind seemed almost always to be “wandering somewhere else.”
Where else it “wandered,” when it wasn’t absorbed at the Sturtevant plant or in exploding bombshells, Dr. Wood tells in his own words. The account goes back now somewhat in time sequence, but helps fill out the picture.
We had practically no science at school, though they had something they called botany at Mrs. Walker’s when I was about eight or nine years old. I hated it and did very badly in it — as in everything else. It consisted of something they called analyzing flowers. A flower was laid on your desk and you were supposed to find its name by looking it up in the botany book, in which the various parts of every flower, calyx, corolla, stamen, pistil, et cetera, had been classified in tables. You would find the top of a vertical column and then follow it down to the proper horizontal column, where you would find a reference to another page of tables, in which the process was repeated. You would eventually come out with the name of the flower in the end, if you knew how and had made no mistakes. It interested me about as much as crossword puzzles do at the present time. I did become interested at the age of nine or ten, however, playing what I suppose now would be called plant physiology, planting an acorn or a bean, and after it had got well started on its way to the surface, turning it upside down to see what would happen, putting pollen from a pear tree on the pistil of an apple blossom, and other strange experiments in cross fertilization. I learned to cut twigs from the trees in winter, and put them in jars of water in the sunshine and watch the buds swell and the leaves come out; watered plants with red ink to see if the white blossoms would turn pink; planted seeds in a flowerpot, covered with a plate of glass and placed in the sun, and was charmed to note that when I lifted the glass and sniffed, it smelled exactly like Sturtevant’s greenhouse next door. My father gave me a very fine microscope and Carpenter’s large volume on microscopy. This started me on excursions in which specimens were brought home from brooks and pools, in glass jars, to be examined under the microscope. Microscopy was a “science” in those days, the science of anything small. Even today, there is a Royal Microscopical Society in England, of which I am an honorary member. I mounted slides and had a large exchange list with other enthusiasts, having correspondents in practically every state. At one time I was mailing living aquatic specimens in small bottles of water in exchange for mounted preparations.
My father believed in teaching me the value of money by making me “earn” my spending cash from earliest childhood[2].
We had about an acre of ground behind our house at Jamaica Plain which was utilized as a vegetable garden. Finding out that the local butcher sold small sprigs of mint to his customers, for fifteen cents, I had my father arrange with him to get his supply from me. We had a small mint bed in the garden for our own use, but by transplanting and spreading it out I succeeded in producing a most luxuriant bed about ten feet square. Every morning before breakfast I used to run down the hill to the butcher shop by the railroad station with a magnificent bunch of fragrant cuttings, for which he paid me five cents. From this he could easily make fifteen or twenty bunches of the size which he sold for three times the money. The tasks which I most disliked were picking potato bugs from the vines and digging up dandelions in the lawn which surrounded the house. But from these sources I derived most of my income. My earliest expenditures were chiefly for rubber bands to make slingshots, and mineral specimens purchased at the natural history store in Boston, for my collection of minerals. Later on my purchases included chemicals and materials for making fireworks. My father gave me a geological hammer, armed with which I scoured the quarries in the vicinity of Boston for minerals and fossils. These, together with the specimens that I bought from time to time, eventually made quite a sizable collection.
The expedition which caused me the greatest excitement was a trip which I made to Braintree on my bicycle to the world- famous quarry where the giant trilobites, Paradoxides harlani, are found. It’s curious how you remember the scientific names of ace specimens in your collection. I had read somewhere a fantastic story about these trilobites, that they were not found anywhere else in the world, and that some scientific romancer had propounded the theory that they might have been brought to the earth on a meteorite. I secured such a heavy bagful of them that it was only with great difficulty that I could mount to the seat of my high-wheeled bicycle.
One day I ran into a young man who had an amethyst crystal which he said he had found in a quarry. It contained two cavities filled with liquid, clear as water, in each of which a small air bubble moved to and fro when you turned the crystal sideways. I had heard of quartz crystals containing moving bubbles but had never seen one, and this was an amethyst with bubbles! Was there another in the whole world, I wondered. He wanted five dollars for it, and I wanted it more than I had ever wanted anything in my life. I teased and teased my father to let me get it, not in my mother’s hearing, however, but he thought the price was a little high, and he was a little doubtful, I think, about the air bubbles moving around in a liquid in the crystal. The young man lived in Boston, and my father said, “You tell him to bring the crystal out here and let me see it.” So one evening the young man appeared with his crystal. He would not, however, come down in his price, and my father after demurring for some time finally handed out a five-dollar bill and I pocketed the crystal. “Don’t tell your mother how much we paid for it,” he said. I still have the amethyst and the moving bubbles are still there.
2
In his notes there kept occurring a story about how when he was 13 years old, his father had taken him in to Boston and bought him for $100 or more, a high-wheeled, man-sized Columbia bicycle. He kept putting it in, and I kept leaving it out. His final plea for its inclusion didn’t impress me. Here’s what he wrote.
“The only excuse for the Columbia bicycle was to illustrate a trait which I inherited from my father, whose reaction in matters of expenditures resulted from a mixture of New England thrift and Hawaiian lavishness. I was conditioned in my youth against extravagance in spending pennies, but have formed no fixation against spending dollars, whether I possess them at the moment or not. Gertrude says I always take a day coach for short trips alone, but engage a drawing-room on The Chief when we go to California. ”
He hasn’t been generally too insistent about what goes in or what comes out, but he was plaintive about the bicycle. It was as if I had taken it away from him. I began finally to understand that this bicycle was very important to him—but couldn’t understand why, since his economic explanations had left me cold, when it belatedly dawned on me that the reason is because he’s still riding it—and will to the day of his death. If after his death he approaches the Pearly Gates, it will be on that bicycle. And he will expect and be given the special welcome he deserves.
“Here comes somebody on a high horse—or high wheel—instead of a kindly but dumb and perhaps foot-weary nobody. ”
This begins to illuminate the combination of always well-bred arrogance, not always so well-bred egocentric impudence and impishness, combined strangely with sweetness and light, which makes this man unique.