Master of ceremonies was new Plum Island Director Doc Shahan— smartly dressed in a sharp two-button black suit, crisp white shirt, diagonally striped thin tie, and a handkerchief ironed into a square that peeked out of his breast pocket. Sitting in front of him, in the roped-off seating areas up front, were the VIPs: Plum Island's founding father, Dr. William A. Hagan; the island's former commanding officer, Army Colonel Donald Mace; top military brass from Fort Detrick, Maryland; and finally a slew of European research scientists. Among them was the director of West Germany's new State Research Laboratory at Tubingen, Erich Traub.
After the Pledge of Allegiance and a robust singing of the national anthem, Dr. Hagan rose to give his remarks. To most of the audience, he was known as the distinguished dean of Cornell University's veterinary school. But to a select few, he was an architect of America's biological warfare program, and the patriarch of anthrax as a weapon of war. Hagan spoke to the crowd about the lab's importance, and listeners nodded and smiled approvingly. But then he upbraided the local audience, who had initially opposed the lab and were only now beginning to accept it. Reopening old wounds, Hagan said, "Those of you who fear that germs will leak and harm your families are good but misled folk." Hagan exited the podium to tepid applause.
At first, "the neighborhood wasn't in our favor," says Diana Fish, then the tender twenty-year-old wife of scientist Dr. Ralph Fish. "They didn't want to accept us — we were ignored completely." Scientists and their families got together each week to socialize and play canasta and gin rummy. Sometimes villagers would cross the street or turn and walk in another direction when they saw Colonel Mace or Doc Shahan approaching Main Street. "We were about as welcome as a moth in the garment district," Sha-han later remembered. "These men had wonderful, wonderful minds," says Diana Fish. "They carried the banner of the United States through Mexico and were rewarded with Plum Island — and the public there was not hardly ready for it."
Dedication day, however, seemed to mark a turning point in relations. One Mrs. Hallock, from one of the area's oldest and most respected families, wrote Doc Shahan that the ceremonies and public tours were
so right — so helpful in allaying and banishing latent fears at first held by the community (I being one of those fearful!)…. The fact that you want to think of us as friends and neighbors means a great deal….We have pride in your work within — not outside of — our community.
Doc Shahan thanked the VIP scientists for attending, careful not to name Colonel Mace and the Fort Detrick scientists. "We cannot say too much for the excellent cooperation the USDA has been given by the representatives of the Department of Defense," Doc penned in his first draft, praising Mace's vision for Plum Island; but such kudos remained on the cutting room floor, and the Army germ warfare men sitting in the audience understood (and accepted) the snub. After all, their involvement had to remain top secret.
Dr. B. T. Simms spoke next, ordering Plum Island headlong into a brave new world. "We know we are facing days and weeks and years of hard work, but it will be work that we love," he exulted. "We can expect many disappointments, but we can expect them to be overshadowed by achievements."
President Eisenhower's secretary of agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, then delivered his captivating keynote address. The former Idaho potato farmer had visited Long Island earlier that year and spoke to local farmers at Riverhead, the farming village at the head of the North and South forks, listening first to their concerns on crop supports and then their worries over Plum Island. The dapper, bespectacled Benson mounted the podium, crowned with the Department of Agriculture seal and framed by a long dais adorned in red, white, and blue bunting. With a cool breeze sweeping through the outdoor ceremony, the Mormon farmer roused the thousand-strong audience with impassioned, almost religious oratory.
Doc Shahan, sitting to the right of the podium in the first seat, beamed at the secretary and out at the crowd, applauded Benson's powerful speech as the band played a majestic fanfare. The amiable director was overjoyed that his island laboratory had arrived.
After the ceremony, Doc and his deputy, Dr. Jerry Callis, led Secretary and Mrs. Benson on a private tour down the lab corridors, pointing out laboratory rooms and animal rooms along the way. Benson gazed curiously down a chute in an animal room that led to the incinerator. Observing the tangle of decontamination machinery and pipes down the hallway that filtered the air, he exclaimed out loud, to no one in particular, "Germs just don't have a chance!" On that intoxicating day, in the hands of such capable men, it certainly seemed that way. Outside, the doctors led the secretary to the lab's cornerstone, which he dedicated retroactively. It read simply, "A.D. 1956."
The breeze had picked up, pushed by the fast-approaching Hurricane Flossy. Benson bid them farewell, tipped his white derby to the crowd, and caught the ferry back to the mainland. The other guests were also quickly shuttled off the island, and Doc Shahan moved the inaugural scientific conference to Greenport High School. Flossy wasn't the first — and wouldn't be the last — storm to batter Plum Island, which lay squarely in the path of the East Coast hurricane corridor.
Doc Shahan's Plum Island team consisted of a core of three scientists. Doc's most promising star, thirty-four-year-old biochemist Dr. Howard L. Bachrach, had been the first to isolate the polio virus, working under the Nobel laureate Dr. Wendell M. Stanley. Obtaining Bachrach for Plum Island was so imperative, Shahan wooed him east with unheard-of perquisites: the opportunity to bring in his own biochemistry-biophysics team, and the chance to design his own research wing in the new island facility. The fifty-two-year-old Nebraskan Shahan, a cowboy boot-wearing lab director, was a hard man to turn down; a reporter described him as
"tweedy in dress, handsome in a wide-open Western way….Doc Shahan
likes people and people like him." Bachrach bit, but realized soon afterward that he got a little less than he had bargained for. "This space is, of course, much less than I have recommended as a minimum," he later lamented. "And it would help if [more] space becomes available in the basement." It never did. Shahan also drafted chief scientist Dr. Jacob Traum, who retired at the age of seventy-four from the University of California (also Bachrach's alma mater). Traum lent his reputation and immense knowledge to the fledging facility as a world-renowned expert on tuberculosis and brucellosis. But the franchise player on Doc's team was the slim, blond assistant director. At the tender age of twenty-seven, Dr. Jerry Callis was the youngest member of the Plum Island scientific staff. Callis graduated with honors from Purdue University and landed a USDA position studying animal germs overseas, where he was being groomed for the opening of the new laboratory.