Dr. Wood beamed, taking this for an invitation, and said to me, “You saw the enormous fireplace in the living-room there, with the old Dutch oven at the back. Well, when my granddaughter was about a year and a half, I stood a small bronze dog in front of this black cave and placed on its head a button of German cannon powder, of which I’d brought home a bagful from the war. It looks like a heavy button, you know, a thick black disk with a hole in the middle. With the baby in my lap I touched a match to it. It flared up with a vicious, bright-yellow flame, which burned for about five seconds.
“ ‘That’s the fuzzy-wuzzy,’ I said to the baby.
“I repeated this experiment every day for a week, always saying ‘fuzzy-wuzzy’ when the powder burned. Then I said ‘fuzzy-wuzzy’ or ‘Do you remember fuzzy-wuzzy?’ to the baby every day for a month or so until her mother took her away. I hopefully expected that her mother would say ‘fuzzy-wuzzy’ to her in the intervals of their absence. The reactions of baby Elizabeth, however, were different from those of Margaret who had always politely lisped ‘yes’ to my question. At every family reunion, the baby was as bored as these uncooperative adults of my family, and whenever I said, ‘Do you remember fuzzy-wuzzy?’ she always answered, ‘No!’ Sometimes she laughed slyly. So we hadn’t the remotest idea whether she remembered anything or not.
“The revelation came when she was nearly five years old.
I hadn’t uttered the hated words for a long time when one day at lunch she looked at me and whispered, ‘Fuzzy-wuzzy.’ “I said, ‘What?’
“This time she repeated, louder, ‘Fuzzy-wuzzy!’
“I turned to her mother and said, ‘What’s she talking about?’
“Her mother said, ‘I don’t know.’
“The little witch hesitated for a moment and then said in disgusted triumph, ‘You do know too! You put the dog in the fireplace and put fire on its head.’”
Little Elizabeth was evidently a chip off the old block, and wasn’t taking grandpa’s experiments lying down. The one they tell of her which I like best concerns the memory experiment with the hayride. While she was a tiny tot, she and a playmate named Nancy were taken for a ride on top of a load of hay. Then Dr. Wood began with his “do-you-remember’s”. She refused to be the guinea pig. She never answered anything but “no” or nothing, and it was he who gave up. When the haymaking began across the road on the following year, her mother asked her point-blank one day, “Do you remember riding on the haycart last summer?”
She glanced reproachfully at her grandfather, gave her mother a look of betrayed and outraged indignation, and replied,
“No! And I don’t remember Nancy either!”
I agree with Mrs. Wood and the relatively conservative members of the family that it’s difficult to prove anything with the boomerang story, since Margaret herself can be mistaken — can have later overheard or seen something which described or duplicated the original event. But I think the hayride story proves a lot of amusing things that didactic child psychologists are prone to ignore or soft-pedal.
As for Dr. Wood’s basic theory, which he continues to defend — well, maybe you’ve got something, Professor, even though you’ve stepped out of your own field into Watson’s.
Dr. Wood believes he’s found a vindication of his theory that memory of events can be “fixed” by associative events even in the case of infants too young to be reminded of them in words. In his recent autobiographical As I Remember Him, the late Hans Zinsser wrote:
The minds of little children are like rolls of cinema film on which long series of uncoordinated impressions gathered by the senses are caught. Usually most of these fade in later years. It is only here and there, in the earlier years, that an experience impresses itself with sufficient coloring to remain as a memory for life. My earliest reminiscence goes back to when I must have been between one and two years old. It was like a vaguely remembered dream, until I found later in speaking of it that it was based on fact. I remembered clouds in a blue sky against which the spars of a ship were swinging to and fro, and at the same time I heard a little tune sung with German words. Later I learned that I was taken abroad as a baby and that my father often sat on the deck of the old Moselle and sang me to sleep in his lap with the little song. As a boy I would often — especially before going to sleep at night — hear him singing again, see the swinging spars against clouds scudding across the blue sky[15].
Dr. Wood believes the memory of the sky and moving spars had been repeatedly called up by the frequent repetition of the song through later years, and that it was this accidental associative prodding of the auditory memory that had fixed the visual impression. He proposes an experiment in associative memory fixation which he hopes some enterprising parents interested in child psychology will try out on babies too young to know the use of words. It involves the three senses of sight, smell, and hearing. He would like to have it tried on babies not more than one year old, and believes that “earliest memory” could probably be pushed back to an astonishing degree. As is well known, odors and tunes are powerful stimulants in suddenly recalling events or situations long passed.
A spectacular arrangement of colored lights on a wheel revolving against a black background or in a dark room, or some such device, would be suddenly exposed to the view of the baby, and at the same time a simple but distinctive tune would be ground out on a toy music box, while the air would simultaneously be perfumed by a spray from an atomizer, preferably an odor unlikely to be encountered again.
Then at frequent intervals the baby would be subjected to the combination of two “reminders”, the tune of the music box and the spray of the atomizer, which would recall and fix, as Wood believes, the more entertaining event of the gorgeous revolving wheel of bright colors.
“A much simpler way of trying the same thing”, he added, “would be to sing a little tune and let the baby smell a perfumed handkerchief, while the wheel turned”.
I said, “Why don’t you try it yourself — with the revolving wheel? You love tinkering and gadgets”.
He promptly replied, “Get me the babies, and I will”.
Chapter Twenty One.
Wood in the Bosom of His Family — or How the Woods Take Care of Their Prodigy
In the early twenties, John Rathbone Oliver inscribed on the guest book at East Hampton a tribute in verse to the Wood tribe. It — the verse, not the tribe — is graciously Victorian, abounding in polite conceits.
15
As I Remember Him: The Biography of R. S., by Hans Zinsser. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.