Interview with Helen Parsons

Helen Parsons #80 Transcript

SL: Well Miss Parsons, before we get into your career, it would be interesting to know about you and your lineage.

HP: Yes, I shall go a little farther back to the Gleasons. Our families derived the scholarly trait, I think, from the Gleason family. Old Grandpa Gleason was a missionary to the Mohegan Indians and he figured large in our family chronicles. He was the grandfather of my mother, my mother's mother's father, and the whole family seemed to have been rather scholarly. His sister was a member of the 00:01:00Scribners staff and you see her referred to in books like Laredo Task's autobiography. I have found that he delighted when he went to Scribner's to talk with Miss Gleason. So the Gleasons figured quite largely. My mother was born at Grandfather Gleason's mission. And when I was at Yale I thought it interesting to go and look up Grandpa Gleason so I went over to the region there in Connecticut where the old mission was suppose to be and I found something on the map that said Mohegan and I told the conductor of this little conveyance, I told 00:02:00him I wanted to stop there. "Oh," he said, "there isn't anything there but an old church." Fine. So I got off and found the old church and lo and behold above the pulpit was a large, an enlarged picture of my Great Grandfather Gleason. There it was. So I scouted around and found the home of an old Indian woman of the Mohegan Tribe who had been a child in my Grandfather Gleason's church. So she pulled open a drawer and handed me out pictures of many of my relatives, my mother as a baby, she was a twin, and so it was very interesting. So then later I went up to New York and found standing the old wooden church that my 00:03:00Grandfather had built for another tribe of Indians. So I traced them around. My Grandfather is down in the annals of the Congress for having applied for his church there in Mohegan. He applied for $600 dollars a year. That was his salary, but he had to go before Congress to get his salary, so he had $600 dollars to build his churches, to run his affairs, to support his family. Of course the dollar did not mean the same at that time but it was interesting.

SL: When was this?

HP: I don't know. I had various paintings of the old--I have photographs and paintings and--well, this Grandfather Gleason wrote a very interesting autobiography that has been filed with the, I believe the Massachusetts or 00:04:00Connecticut historic society because he was quite scholarly and this tells all about it but I don't remember.

SL: Would you guess it was around the 1840s, 1850s?

HP: I suppose so. I could verify that. I could look up the record.

My father's family was a pioneer family in Indiana. They were scholarly after a fashion. They believed in education and my father's mother lived with us and she could tell about the old days very entertainingly and she was a friend of a good many scholarly people there. I can't remember who they were but she told us tales about this and the other person that's down in the history of the pioneer 00:05:00people. So we had traditions of scholarliness and owning books and magazines and papers. My father took some books and magazines in his car when he went in those old sod houses. He would bring things to loan to people that hadn't any printed word and that was a scholarly thing. I remember one old fellow saying to him, had to chuckle to myself as a child, this old fellow said to him, "Doctor, I'm interested in those stories in those magazines you bring but there's one author 00:06:00that never seems to come to the point and his name is Tobe Concluded.

So I went with my father and there were very--he was fond of horses, he was a good driver. He loved driving his team. We had two horses they hitched to this little country conveyance and we forded rivers, we went around the great fires, the prairie fires. I remember some of those. I was never afraid of anything I trusted my father, and we went around these great prairie fires, we forded rivers where there weren't any fords. It was really very interesting. We went to 00:07:00the second ward school there at Arkansas City, and my Aunt Dick who brought us a good deal of the tradition of that scholarliness, she was the principal of this 2nd ward school and so that was her last year in the school when I was five years old, so I was allowed to enter the first grade. We didn't have things like nursery school or anything like that. We went right into the first grade and so I entered and all through that ward school I was so tiny that I had to carry a little stool to the school to put my feet on because there wasn't --of course every room was graded, with big seats and medium size seats and smaller seats, but the small ones were never small enough so I carried my little stool to put 00:08:00my feet on. Then it was this Aunt Dick that married Professor Miller who was the head of the chemistry and pharmacy department in the old API, Alabama Polytechnic Institute, and they offered to have me come there, and there I was one of fourteen coeds in a military school. It was very hot in June when we took our examinations. But I remember that the young gentlemen were not allowed to take off their padded coats buttoned clear up under their chins so they were just expiring, but with young ladies present they weren't allowed. There was a 00:09:00room provided down the hall. Any young gentleman that would like to take his coat off may go down the hall and take his coat off down there but not in this room where young ladies are present. So it was that kind of quite a Southern atmosphere.

HP: And as I told you I didn't graduate because there was a fiery confederate history and I would have been the butt of all kinds of notice and jokes, so I didn't graduate there.

SL: You decided not to?

HP: I decided not to, yes, so--the degree didn't mean much to me. So I didn't graduate from there, but then I came back to--I think it was then that I taught the country school after I came back from Alabama. It was not very far from home 00:10:00and I got the magnificent salary of $27.50 a month. I held out for $30.00 and they wanted $25.00 so we split it--$27.50 a month and they were scholarly people, they were delightful people to be with, and I still correspond with the daughter of that family. The two daughters have a biography they wrote together--an autobiography, and that is in this museum that has been founded that I am contributing to--all of the history that I can get together. These two Phillips girls wrote their autobiographies. One has died, I knew her down in 00:11:00Lakeland, Florida. But the other one is in the east and I still correspond with her so I keep connections with that country school but it was otherwise a hideous memory because the big boys just about ran me out. I knew nothing about discipline. There was a long day. I built a fire in the morning. Waded through snowdrifts, built the fire in the morning, supervised the school. I had twenty-seven classes during the day. I began with the 1st grade and got the 8th grade ready to take their county examinations to go into high school and the front row was for the class. They would come then to the front row and I would hold the class. The rest were supposed to be studying. They might be throwing spitballs or anything but I had the reciting class in the front. So it was 00:12:00a--then I stayed after school to sweep out the school, to erase the boards. I didn't seem to know how to get monitors. But I did all of these things, got in the kindling for the fire for the next morning. The lollapaloozers were a heated luncheon. Lollapaloozer was a kind of a pie that had meat and potatoes and things in and those were taken out of the lunch boxes and put up on this flat top of this baseburner and they'd be nice and hot by the time that the children had their meal. Well--

SL: You must have been in your very early twenties at this time weren't you?

HP: Yes, yes because I graduated from high school at sixteen so I don't know I 00:13:00might have been eighteen or nineteen along then. See I started at five so I went on up through the school rather fast. Well let's see.

SL: Where did you go from this country school in Arkansas City?

HP: Well then I think that was the time that I began earning a little money. We moved out to the country. You see I went to the 2nd ward school when we lived in town but my father was born and bred a farmer. He was a pioneer so he didn't like the town so he bought--two miles out of town he bought a little farm, built a house there and there I learned to garden and to like crops and this spring 00:14:00after I got through the country school, I think I stayed at home then that winter. Then the next spring I raised tomato plants in the house but didn't put them out. Everybody else in all that region put out their tomato plants just in time for a great big freeze. I put mine out just after the great big freeze, I had all that part of Kansas to myself. My tomatoes bore well, there were no complications. I had the whole tomato crop. I sold tomatoes and the price kept up because I had captured the whole crop. So I actually accumulated enough money to take my sister and myself to the summer session of this teachers' college 00:15:00that just had been organized at Pittsburg, Kansas. And girls then, there was a home economics department organized there that all the girls who came there seemed to go to. That seemed to be a budding career. There was much offered about future careers and it was true that home economics came into its own and the demand for home economics teachers was great and so clear into my college days the demand was great. It was a good field, an excellent field. Clear in through my days of Dr. Mendel at Yale, trained home economics women to be heads of departments. He was very sympathetic to home economics, he liked these heads 00:16:00of home economics, women that came to him for their doctor's degree. So it was a rather natural thing.

That summer session at Pittsburg was interesting because it introduced me to something beyond the high school. But with our scholarly background, my sister and I could judge that that place was not a scholarly place. It wasn't only the curriculum, it wasn't scholarly. The people there were not scholarly. With our scholarly background of our families we could judge. So we had heard that KSAC was a more scholarly place as indeed it was. So my father--by that time--my father didn't collect his debts. He was a gentle soul, he couldn't bear to tell 00:17:00people that they had to pay their debts. They'd put up a story about deprivation and so they would often offer something in the way of services. There were the Pritenmans--photographers, and the Pritenmans offered to take out their medical debts so I suppose there wasn't a family in Kansas that had its picture taken so many times as our family. Oh my, the children's pictures we have. It's been very nice to have those.

HP: But he did collect some debts so that then, by fall, when we weren't satisfied with pictures, he could finance us to go to KSAC and there as I said 00:18:00we used our background, it was still an alluring field, most of the women at KSAC went into home economics. It was a promising field. We could use our credits and so we went into home economics there with wide electives. We could take what science we wanted to, and right away I elected bugs for--let's see, I believe that's ornithology? What is it? Well, anyway it studied bugs. By a very scholarly man I got a glimpse at once of organized science because of course these creatures were classified. I just reveled in it, I learned everything by heart. I still can recite the names of a great many of the bugs that my little 00:19:004-H children are interested in. I know that background. So then that led me into chemistry and physiology, and so the enriching of home economics with science became a very potent sort of thing to me that I understood, and so my sister and I both graduated there at KSAC. Then--

SL: Excuse me for interrupting. But did other women, who were your classmates for instance, did they also share your interest in science?

HP: Not that I can remember. I think it was obligatory to take some science but I can't remember any that shared my enthusiasm. My sister to some extent. She 00:20:00didn't embrace it with the enthusiasm that I did. So I can't remember any companions in this enthusiasm so--but it just captivated me. I hadn't encountered anything--as far as I can remember, I didn't encounter any science in high school. It was languages. I was to be a Latin teacher. When I went to this teachers' college at Pittsburg I had hoped that there would be a department of Latin because I had taken four years of Latin in the high school. My Latin teacher was a scholarly person. That is what attracted me, and there's no doubt about it, I was to be a Latin teacher. Oh my! I'm glad I got diverted from that. I remember in the University of Chicago--which I see I don't have down here at 00:21:00all--in the University of Chicago I had a very good friend, she was getting her Ph.D. in Latin and I remember she was studying the dative case, in Cicero, I believe, if he had dative cases. But it was one construction that she was studying in one writer and that was to be her Ph.D. thesis.

SL: It wasn't for you.

HP: Not for me.

HP: Well then I was interviewed for a job and I was, oh, so timid. I didn't have any feeling of how I should go about it and so I didn't get the jobs I was 00:22:00interviewed for. So again I stayed at home for awhile and then they passed on this Oklahoma job in the middle of the year. I don't remember how far along it was but their teacher had married and left and here they were, very proud of their home economics down in this little Oklahoma school. It was a well-financed--I tell you, the Indians in those days, down in Oklahoma, they got financed. I can't remember what the gimmick was but this school had plenty of money and they were so anxious for a teacher that they took me without any interview at all on the basis of the recommendation of KSAC. If I had been interviewed I don't doubt I would have lost that place. I didn't have the 00:23:00slightest confidence, but I went down there and oh, I just loved it. I began with the 3rd grade and then I alternated cooking and sewing, cooking and sewing, clear through the high school. I had all those classes and they were nearly all Indians and they were just charming children, they were delightful, they were lovely children. So--and I had a lovely place to stay, with very scholarly people, and it was a very nice experience. I tried to improve on my capacity for this place by visiting some people, some towns in Ohio I think it was, maybe Indiana, who were teaching sewing and cooking down through the grades. That 00:24:00intrigued me. I thought I'd specialize in that. So it was a new thing to teach cooking and sewing in the grades. So I visited in the scholarly research different towns that were teaching that.

Then, as I said, this Aunt Dick and her husband, Professor Miller, he was pursuing his Ph.D., so they found that Professor Watts was going to be away on a vacation for the summer, he and his wife, and would like to have somebody take care of their house for them and it was a great big house. And so this aunt and Professor Miller invited my sister and me to come. And the home economics head 00:25:00was Abby Marlatt, who was quite a famous person in her time. She had come from Kansas, in fact her father had owned all the land that KSAC was built on, so she had an immediate interest, and we interviewed her for courses that we could take and I remember it was an interesting interview, very characteristic. She asked if I had ever taken anything under Miss so and so. "Yes," I said, "yes, I had a course there in meal serving." "Well, what do you think of her?" she said. "Oh," I said, "she was a good teacher but she had no sense of humor. Oh!! Miss Marlatt 00:26:00threw up her arms. "Oh!!" Miss Marlatt said, "my poor brother." It seems that her brother, who was a very famous man, was engaged to this teacher of mine and that was my introduction to Miss Marlatt. "Oh, my poor brother." And she was a woman of a great deal of ability. So we signed up for several courses that she recommended and one was meal serving in the Home Management House, so my sister and I lived for a week in the Home Management House, and I--when she came to be part of the group, when we served meals, the noon meal, and so when it was my turn to be hostess I made some place cards and I remember the ditty that I fixed 00:27:00up for this place card, the place card said: Chemical life is a life for me, A chemical cook I mean to be, For life on this earth be it fast or slow Is a matter of air and H2O. Well it seems that that was a center shot. I learned afterward that that was the thing Miss Marlatt selected me as her assistant for, because that was her ambition--to correlate home economics with basic science. That was the thing, because she had led a scholarly life in some of the eastern colleges and that was her ambition and here it was, stated on this place card, 00:28:00and so at the end of the summer she offered me this place and I turned it down. I loved my Oklahoma school. Then I got home and told them that I had turned that down and did I get a raking over from my family. Why this would lead ahead. Oklahoma wouldn't lead anywhere. The University of Wisconsin, and I had turned it down. So I revised my decision and accepted it.

SL: Now this was in 1913.

HP: 1913. So my first task was to teach the university high school classes that came for training. You see the teachers training had the university high school classes come and I was the one that taught them their cooking, because Miss 00:29:00Marlatt thought it would be wonderful if I had been teaching there in Oklahoma, children, that it would be just the thing, so we were in the attic of Lathrop Hall. That was all Miss Marlatt could get. She had a little office on one floor down from the attic that hung out over the dance floor. So that when you entered, you--Miss Marlatt or if [inaudible] got anything from Miss Marlatt you hung over the dance floor, and Margaret H'Doubler was saying, "1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4," thump thump thump for the dancers down there. Then the attic had two 00:30:00rooms, one at one end of the attic, one clear across the length of the building at the other end of the attic, with boards laid along the rafters between one and the other, and they put up, oh, kind of dividers to make rooms and so I was in one little divider room across the divider from the clothing people that were teaching clothing, so that they had to wait when my class was using the egg beaters. They had to wait for instructions until my egg beaters got through. And then they would take over. There was a good deal of making do with our department.

SL: Right. Improvisation.

HP: But oh, it was interesting.

HP: So the next year I was turned on to university classes. I think they took back then--I think they didn't meet in our department any more. I think the children went back into the University High School and we broke the connection, because then I began with the regular--

SL: I think we ought to stop now. I don't think we have more than another--

[break in audio; change of reels*] Just continue and pick it up later.

HP: Well, what would you advise?

SL: We've only used up about 4 minutes, I could just rewind it and start it over.

HP: Well, what do I do? Do I go to Baltimore?

SL: Yeah, I'd like to go back a little, I really would. So let me--

HP: Alright, then, I go back. And I now am trying to be that bridge--with Miss 00:32:00Marlatt's hardy encouragement, I'm trying to be that bridge between science and home economics. Miss Marlatt pays my salary but I go to Dr. McCollum's classes. I grade the papers of his class that I am in and be as much help to him as I can. I enter on my master's degree with him so I have certain hours off to work at my own things and so I have started now on a scholarly career in biochemistry as well as home economics. And Dr. McCollum of course is an arresting personality. There were many famous people that I would run across afterward in 00:33:00that class I took in biochemistry under Dr. McCollum. Oh a great many who came to the faculty of the University of Wisconsin. Professor Kitt I remember was one of them, Larry Graber was one of them who was there in that class. The heads of some of the commercial concerns that I encountered later. Oh it was a famous class as well as a famous teacher but I was a very favorite in that class because Dr. McCollum wouldn't let us take notes, he wouldn't let us vary from gazing straight into his eyes. He said, "I want to have your complete attention. 00:34:00How do I know I'm having your complete attention unless you look at me. Put that pencil down and look at me as I talk." Well what did that do for our notebooks? So I sat in the second row. I laid my notebook open in my lap, I used my thumb to go down what would be a wide line, and I took notes--I learned--I practiced at home and I learned to take notes with my thumb going down my notebook here, and writing without--oh, I kept my eyes on Dr. McCollum, and then when I got home while it was all fresh in my mind as fast as I could I copied it into a 00:35:00permanent notebook. The class all borrowed my notebook. Nobody else could quite do what I was doing and they had to have notes too, so I was a very valued member of that department.

Years and years afterward I asked Dr. McCollum if he would like to have that notebook. Oh, would he! So I gave him that notebook. And he just reveled in it because he had kept no record at all of what he had lectured about in those early years. There it was word for word as far as I could take these notes down quickly. But he had a peculiar gesture with his hands. It would come down like that with those long bony fingers spread to emphasize a remark. He looked like 00:36:00Lincoln. He fattened up in later years but he was just skin and bones in those early years. Lank, and he had a mole on his face like Lincoln did, and those piercing eyes. He reminded all of us of a Lincoln figure, tall, lank. Well he was a very sympathetic teacher for my research. I had no idea of research of course. I broke precious equipment and the head of the department didn't see eye-to-eye with breaking equipment so Dr. McCollum had to protect me as a student in the department. Then he was very patient with my not knowing anything 00:37:00at all, he taught me the simplest technique and he had me verify--he would give me an assignment to do as a kind of a class exercise where the assay would be known, which is a good way to do it, and I came out with very respectable figures on these assays and he began to trust me more and more, and he gave me some unknowns, then, which was a thrill when it was something that would forward our research.

HP: Miss Davis of course was a part of that department and I didn't have any contact at first with the animal colony, and then I was given some animal work to do so I came in contact with Miss Davis and as I told you she lived in our 00:38:00apartment house there at the Irving. So I got quite well acquainted with her. When we went to Baltimore then Miss Marlatt had her transferred to her department.

SL: Miss Davis?

HP: Miss Davis became a part of her department so that Miss Davis's value more or less evaporated because she had gone along with Dr. McCollum's ideas. She had gone under his direction as far as the laboratory went but had wonderful ideas. He would listen sympathetically. She had perfectly wild ideas but so did he and so he never knew when she might be suggesting something that would come out as 00:39:00promising as his vitamins did. So they were in an entire agreement about just soaring into the blue as far as theory went. So she had a most happy time but when she came to Miss Marlatt's department there was no guidance. Miss Marlatt wasn't able to guide her, so her ideas, way up in the blue as translated into the work she did in the department, didn't amount to anything. She compiled and compiled and compiled things like x-rays and things like that. The reason Dr. McCollum didn't take her along with him to Baltimore--he didn't even offer her the chance. The work had got beyond any help that he could get from her because 00:40:00she could not keep records and of course that was a dismaying thing. So this promising student in his classes more and more took over the record keeping. Nina Simmonds was a student in his class and so without supplanting Marguerite Davis she more and more took over the real work that had got way beyond any help of Marguerite Davis. Marguerite Davis was still there in command to handle the animals and had all respect but it was Nina Simmonds around which the real work of the department revolved so when it came to transferring to Baltimore there wasn't any suggestion of Marguerite Davis. And you see it was very convenient 00:41:00that Miss Marlatt came forward with her reserve offer to transfer her, and Marguerite wanted to stay in Madison, so it was a logical transfer that she then went to home economics and Nina Simmonds then went to Baltimore.

SL: How did Miss Davis feel about it?

HP: Well apparently all right as far as I had any memory--that seemed to be all right because as I say she wanted to stay in Madison. Miss Marlatt's salary was the first salary she had ever seen. You see Professor Hart refused to have any women in his department so that Miss Davis's work with Dr. McCollum was paid with whatever he could pay her but she contributed--there was very little of anything that she got and so this salary from Miss Marlatt was an amazing thing 00:42:00to her. You see how it would seem like a wonderful bonanza. So apparently there were no hard feelings. Apparently it was all right and Dr. McCollum still kept that idealized picture of that woman without any salary that had gone on and on in the difficult early days. She had kept the animals alive. To some extent he kept some record of what went on which he didn't want to have to do. He wanted an assistant who would do that and Nina Simmonds came on to fill that bill. So apparently there wasn't any discarding of her, exactly, because this offer came when the whole thing was being built up and so it wasn't that she was discarded. 00:43:00In a way, you see, he still kept that idealized thought of what she had contributed without being able to let her go on in this new job. So you see it all worked out all right and she had her beautiful strong points. But she had such limitations that his thought on her is an idealized thought. She wasn't that good.

SL: Where did her strengths lie? She must have had something I assume?

HP: Well it's in that she carried on the experiment but she didn't keep the record of it. Which was the bad part, but she handled the animals. She observed. 00:44:00She could talk to Dr. McCollum about what she observed. The animals were kept and the colony was beautifully kept. She stayed there without salary, she came at all hours of the week and with utter devotion that kept the experiments alive. You don't realize how much that means.

SL: I guess that must really mean quite a bit.

HP: Oh my, so the appreciation was not overdone.

SL: I see. I'm beginning to get an understanding of that whole situation.

HP: But the limitations he never had in mind very much because Nina Simmonds came right in and supplied all that Miss Davis lacked. So I hope that gives you the picture that what Miss Davis contributed was just utterly invaluable. But 00:45:00she couldn't progress to an unlimited extent in the work.

SL: Yes I understand that now.

Now other than, I assume, a higher salary, what were the other factors in McCollum's decision to leave and go to Hopkins?

HP: Well I think it was that he went for an interview with what we call "Popsy" Welch. Professor Welch is one of the famous of the world. Popsy Welch had established this department of public health there, that was his child. That was his pride, to add that on to Hopkins. He was allowed only a basement room for it down under the medical school. Oh very primitive quarters but Dr. McCollum went 00:46:00on to interview Popsy Welch and Popsy Welch was a charmer. Oh that funny little plump man he was just delicious and delightful. We had a good deal of contact with him. He charmed wherever he went and he had Dr. McCollum in the hollow of his hand. Dr.McCollum came back talking of nothing but Popsy Welch and this new wonderful enterprise that was going to really save the world. You see here was Dr. McCollum's knowledge that nutrition was unlocked now in his work and it could save the world. Well Popsy Welch painted a picture of how the department 00:47:00of public health at Johns Hopkins was going to be just that. So you see it was very logical. Dr. Welch made him feel important as the head of a department too and he hadn't had much distinction here at Wisconsin under Professor Hart. See he hadn't been able to have his say in the budget, or a great many things, so that he didn't have freedom as he was promised at Johns Hopkins. So it was all very logical. There were other little contributing things but that is the very essence of it.

And so my salary as a matter of fact was less than what I was getting in Wisconsin here. He painted this beautiful picture to me and I kind of got a 00:48:00feeling of its wonders too because there was practically no salary connected with it. As a matter of fact I had my father come for an operation and I can't remember how it came about but there was some dispute about what the operation would cost because he was a physician and they went to the authorities at Hopkins to find out what my salary was. And it was so ghastly a salary that they didn't charge my father anything for the operation. It was really quite ghastly. 00:49:00But it was interesting.

SL: A question that I wanted to ask, and that was even before the public or semi-public controversy between various figures here, what kind of personal relations did you witness between all of these principal people?

HP: Well they were prima donnas, what could you expect. That's what Dr. Elvehjem said when it came to having to have a new head after Professor Hart's death. Dr. Elvehjem talked to me quite casually about it when they were making the decision and he said, "Well what have you? Everyone in this department is a prima donna, that's our glory. You can't point to another department of the like of ours in 00:50:00the United States. There are a few famous people and then there are others," he said. "Here Wisconsin has all prima donnas in this department. And it was offered--then the head of the department was offered to each one in the department, because all could have been the head of the department, and Dr. Elvehjem said, "When it came my turn I said I will interview each one and let you know," and so he said, "I went to each person's office. I sat down and I said to each prima donna in turn, `What would be your feeling about my being the head of this department? How would you react? What would you do if I became 00:51:00head? What's your worst?'" And he said he interviewed every single one and nobody wanted it. So when he had agreed with each person what would be the worst they would do to him, "Then," he said, "I caught the flu and I was in bed. And then I was interviewed in bed with a high fever." and he said, "Otherwise I wouldn't have ever been--" no, no, that was when he was president? I got ahead of my story. That was when he was president that they came to interview him. He said, "I never in my right mind would have consented to be the president. But I was sick in bed with a high fever and to get rid of them I said yes, yes, yes." But he took on the headship of the--I don't think that anything more is needed, 00:52:00than a whole glorious bunch of prima donnas. I don't think any other explanation is needed.

SL: I'll leave that up to you. Let's see where does this bring us? You've gone to Hopkins. What did you do there and how long did you stay?

HP: Well, I was given supposedly a research position, but Miss Simmonds, who was adequate for nearly all of it, she of course had the whole of the animal work so 00:53:00I prepared the rations. There was a good deal of science to some of those preparations so it did need somebody who was responsible and had a conscience about it. So for awhile I was satisfied with that and then Dr. McCollum had many public health connections. That is, for instance, we hired a University of Chicago woman to do a survey which was very popular at that time. A survey of the school children in Baltimore. Everybody was doing a survey, a health survey. They weighed, they measured, they didn't take blood samples in those days but they did what they could and so I was a go between. Between Dr. McCollum and 00:54:00things like that. Oh I can't remember all of that. I remember he was asked to put on many demonstrations. I was the person who put on those demonstrations. For instance, Hopkins.

Let's see, what was that connection? There was some. I guess it was in the Medical School. The Medical School each year put on a public display to educate the people, the public of Baltimore. Dr. McCollum was assigned a display of nutrition for the people of Baltimore. I went down--we were to take milk, which was of course the big thing in those days. Milk and green leaves were it for 00:55:00years. So I took a plan--my display. I had little bottles, a row of little bottles showing how much there would be in this bottle of milk, how much there would be of protein, of milk sugar, of everything down the row of all the ingredients of milk. And so then I had a double row showing this equal weight, I think it was, of meat--what there would be in this bottle, this bottle, this bottle, and this bottle. So then I went down and put it all up, but you 00:56:00understand that Johns Hopkins was essentially Jewish in those days. The big man there--a great many of them were Jewish. So the man that was overseeing this came and looked at my display--this row of bottles. They were all taken out--the protein was all taken out of the same bottle for milk and for meat. I didn't have milk and meat. I had a great big sign, "Milk and Meat" and then I had these bottles, all taken out--taken out of the same bottle--the calcium taken out, and he said they couldn't stand on the same table. Milk and meat can't be on the same table. And so I had to wait to finish my display until another table could be brought in and it had to be kosher. Here was protein representing meat, here 00:57:00was protein out of the same bottle representing milk, and yet they had to be across the room. We had to be kosher. Oh I remember that incident--such amusement. Oh, when we were kosher we were kosher in those days.

HP: So I was the link between Dr. McCollum and a good many of the public things. Then we had various connections with other departments. There was that perfectly wonderful connection between Dr. McCollum and Dr. Park, Dr. Park in the Medical School. He's another of the very internationally famous. Can't remember his front name but he's in any biographical dictionary, Dr. Park. And Dr. Park had 00:58:00for years and years studied rickets. It was the great unknown--and he was a pediatrician--and it was the great unknown in pediatrics, and Dr. McCollum had the one mystery with animals--rickety bones.

And it was just simply like an explosion of something when those two people got together and found that the medical pediatric and the animal work came close together. Now Miss Simmonds' work was so utterly reliable and thorough. Though they had no connection through all the years with what those bones meant, her 00:59:00records of autopsying every animal, there wasn't an animal that wasn't autopsied on death that she didn't take notes on. You see there's where Marguerite could never, never have done it, but they got out--you see Dr. McCollum had taken all his records--that's one thing that made eternal enmity. He had taken all his books of record, which I think was right. After all, they were his records. Professor Hart insisted they were his records. But anyway Dr. McCollum had taken all of his books that Nina Simmonds had kept all those years to Baltimore. He and Professor Park sat down, spread out everything.

SL: Last time you were just about to begin talking about this collaboration.

HP: Yes that was it. Dr. McCollum made contact with Dr. Howland. I think I didn't mention him. He was the head of the pediatrics there at Johns Hopkins and he and Dr.Park and Dr. Shipley had all been very interested in this clinical aspect because of course a good deal was known as a background of rickets. That is, they knew already that there was something very particular about fish oils. They had studied the field and they knew for instance that in some offshore islands where they produced fish oils for sale, the inhabitants ate the heads, 01:01:00they made a kind of stew with oatmeal--I believe this was up in Scotland--and they made a stew of fish heads and oatmeal (it sounds thrilling I will say) and not a person on the island ever had had rickets. That protected them. So they had gone in to the history of cod liver oil and that was well-authenticated. So well-authenticated that Dr. McCollum in the early days used to say, "I'm going to investigate goose grease. If cod liver oil had such a renowned history, my mother always cured everything we had with rubbing goose grease on it. "Now," he said, "there must be something there that turns out to be a new vitamin. I'm going to do that." So here was the pediatrician with a well-authenticated 01:02:00relationship of an oil without knowing anything about what it did or what the relationship was.

Here was Nina Simmonds who had kept these records so perfectly for years and years. I think it tells in that little reprint of Dr. McCollum's how many years the records represented with everything recorded--autopsies, the details of the diet, everything. So in this meeting Dr. Howland and Dr. Park said, "Oh isn't it too bad that there is no animal research on rickets. If we only could get an animal." "Oh," said Dr. McCollum, "I have the answer for you." So they went to work on a great big table and this was Nina and Dr. McCollum. Nina and Dr. 01:03:00McCollum laid out all those books they'd brought from Wisconsin and all the things they had had for all those years at Johns Hopkins, and they recorded everything on one column that had to do with yes or no on rickets. All the protein, all the salt, all the fat, ever single item of the diet was summarized, organized in a way that Nina was capable of. Nina could handle detailed records--data, and so they had the whole thing and they knew yes or no on rickets, whether protein? No, protein was reproduced regularly right down the 01:04:00column. Sodium chloride? No, sodium chloride was represented right down the column with a yes or no on rickets. But when it came to calcium and phosphorus, you see, all that was recorded in detail. When it came to calcium and phosphorus there was an astonishing answer. You could have high calcium/low phosphorus, you could have low calcium/high phosphorus--all of that was up in the yes, rickets column. Yes, rickets, but it didn't matter which way you tipped it. You could tip it either way and the answer would be rickets.

Then the other thing that came out very clearly that substantiated the clinical picture was that it made a difference what facts you had there. Sometimes butterfat would do it but it was butterfat from one source or butterfat of a 01:05:00different origin. I can't remember whether the Wisconsin butterfat was high enough in its ingredients to really protect. But sometimes butterfat protected, sometimes it didn't. But following the clinical record, cod liver oil always protected no matter how high the calcium was, no matter how low calcium was, in relationship with phosphorus. Sometimes butterfat but always cod liver oil. Well, there was the picture.

Then they selected a set--that's where Dr. McCollum doesn't make it plain, that all this came out in the former records. He implies that they came merely out of their heads. They set up experiments--it was always on the basis of this long record that Nina brought out of years of work--and then they set up a few 01:06:00experiments, and Dr. Shipley had developed by then an exceedingly accurate, exceedingly special kind of laboratory technique that would record a tiny implication toward rickets. Not just the great big bead along the rib the great big frontal bones of their clinical study. They took samples of course at autopsy, and they tested the bones. Well, sometimes they wouldn't have had the florid--what they called the florid rickets but they'd have a tendency to rickets, and any slight tendency to rickets this test of Dr. Shipley's would pick up. That is, the growing end of the bone they would pick out from the rest 01:07:00and these new experiments that they set up the growing point of the bone might be--I think they took a leg bone--the growing point put out a large band of cartilage, and then if there--just in three or four days, if the mates of these animals that had been killed and shown only this great bulge of cartilage--if this animal that was like it had received, oh, three or four days of cod liver oil--of course it hadn't made any visible difference but with Dr. Shipley's test--I just remember the table filled with those little glass flat dishes where 01:08:00he then took the little hand microscope and would slip in those little glass dishes and we'd look and in that cartilage there would be stained black tiny little points. And then as the cure advanced that would broaden and broaden, but just in those few days. The answer to the test was apparent, so different kinds of butter, different brands of cod liver oil, a wealth of things could be tested.

Then Dr. McCollum, having found Vitamin A in butterfat, could put the thing to a test because Vitamin A was very easily oxidized. It could be lost if one weren't careful. I had to be careful--in the preparations for Miss Simmonds--feeding her 01:09:00rats--I had to be careful in the heating of this pound of butter. We filtered it and got just the oil to feed. We didn't take the whole butter; we took the purer oil. I had to be careful so that it wasn't overheated and oxidized. So the cod liver oil was put into a flask and for hours at a time I bubbled through a stream of air that came up through the thing. Didn't hurt it at all. It was not Vitamin A in a special richness. That was the problem at first. Could it be Vitamin A with a special concentration? No it wasn't. Oxidation did nothing to it. We fed it and in just the three or four days' time the little row of black 01:10:00dots appeared in that bulge of cartilage. So it was proven. So Dr. McCollum didn't wait. He named it Vitamin D.

He didn't do anything further. He didn't have the--well, he started some experiments but he didn't have the chemical knowhow that Dr. Steenbock had. You see the whole thing was left for Dr. Steenbock to do. Also, that irradiation conferred this Vitamin D on materials. All of that was left for Dr. Steenbock, plenty of research materials for both Dr. McCollum and Dr. Steenbock. But oh was Johns Hopkins simply thrilled to death, and naturally it created quite a furor 01:11:00in scientific circles. My name is on the earliest--I came back to Wisconsin before this had gone very far, but the very earliest observations my name is on, so I sometimes get letters from various sources and this test of Dr. Shipley's is still being used every day out in the Research Foundation and is referred to as Miss Parsons' test. Well nothing of the kind. But I am identified with these early days, not the whole thing.

HP: Did you want any further questions at this point because that's about all I have.

SL: Well not specifically on the technique as I think that was very clear. There was something that you began last time which I just want to clarify for my own 01:12:00information. You had said that Dr. McCollum had taken his notes with him saying that it was his experiment, after all, and indicated that this had caused a certain amount of discomfiture in the person of E.B. Hart. I recall that McCollum had been accused of this very thing--of taking the notes--and he had insisted at least in his own book that he had offered to leave a duplicate set of notes.

HP: I had forgotten that.

SL: Was this done?

HP: Oh I don't know, I'm not sure.

SL: But was it mainly Hart who was objecting at this point?

HP: Well Dr. Steenbock resented it too, because he was very particular about things that belonged to him and of course he had done some of the preparations, 01:13:00he had been involved in all this. He considered it a joint affair, not just belonging to Dr. McCollum. But it couldn't very well be divided up. I think that Dr. McCollum was right, that essentially it was his thought, his planning that went into it, and Nina Simmonds' infinite care in carrying out all those experiments, so that I think he was right. I stand by that decision. I think it was correct.

SL: I know that from the very inception of McCollum's stay at Wisconsin he seemed to have the support of Babcock. What was he like? You knew Babcock, what kind of a person was he?

HP: Well he was a great enthusiast. It was really wonderful to just hang around 01:14:00and see him beam with a smile all over his face as he would look at Dr. McCollum. Dr. McCollum was his invention, he was his dear boy. There was a kind of a father-son relationship between the two, and Dr. McCollum though he was a good talker was also an even better listener, and intelligent, and Dr. Babcock sailed off into the blue about his theories. His theory went way beyond technique. He didn't have techniques and to a certain extent nobody there had techniques that would encompass these things, and some of his thoughts, Dr. 01:15:00Babcock's thoughts, dealt with world-shaking problems. The cosmos. He thought he could solve all the problems of the cosmos and so he had a set of instruments that were very delicate indeed, that would record earthquakes, but oh, he wasn't interested so much in earthquakes but in the universe, and so when they had the new biochemistry building they built him a little subterranean office way, way down in the ground, that he could go to by a series of steps, and there he tried 01:16:00to carry out some of those cosmic, earthshaking experiments. I knew at one time something about the sorts of things but I don't recall any details anymore, and Dr. McCollum didn't believe in those far out things, but he was a listener and Dr. Babcock didn't feel he had another understanding soul in the world but Dr. McCollum. And while he came back to earth and would talk about the things that Dr. McCollum could see any approach to experimentally, that is what Dr. McCollum got out of it. A good many of these thoughts--of course Dr. Babcock made that machine, which you ought to go and look at, which twirled by hand, made out of little scraps of things he found around barns, and it told the butterfat and my 01:17:00that put the university on the easy street.

SL: Yet he was so modest about it himself.

HP: Yes he was a very modest man. He was a charming person, just wonderful, so to know him was just one of the things I prized, and of course it was mainly just listening in to these two people before Dr. Babcock disappeared down through the infinite down below that would tell about the universe. They talked about more practical things first, that I could understand.

SL: How did he ever get interested in these cosmic philosophical questions?

HP: Well his mind was so alert. It's too bad when technique doesn't keep up. Now 01:18:00what's his name in Canada? I listened to his lecture in Toronto--oh, my, he's real famous, I'll think of his name directly--and he's reported to be the last physics professor that got his results with a string and a piece of wax. Because he didn't have the technique to get what--he was the one that got into the beginning of the ionization and that whole new field. He had the whole thing in line with a piece of string and a piece of wax. That's all he had, only those modest techniques and so he died before the great big breakthroughs, but he made 01:19:00the breakthroughs. And he was admitted to have done that. His place in history is secure. But he wouldn't have gone any farther at all because he didn't have technique and yet he visualized those ions so that the essential part was there with modest technique. Well, Dr. Babcock did that butterfat test. He could go that far, that technique, and it made an enormous difference to Wisconsin that he could accomplish that. But his mind couldn't stop at that. Just like this Englishman, his mind roamed widely, he couldn't stop at just what his wax and 01:20:00string brought out but he couldn't go any farther because he didn't have technique. So you couldn't stop Dr. Babcock from getting into the universe and the cosmos because he had that kind of a mind, he couldn't stop. He went on and on, but it didn't--nothing registered because he couldn't follow it up.

SL: In other words it was largely speculation.

HP: Speculation, that was all, but speculation about the butterfat, or anything that he could accomplish, but as I think I told you, that bas relief of him in the entrance to the lobby of biochem--there's a bas relief there of Babcock sitting before his very up-to-date balance, and the boys are always convulsed 01:21:00when they look at that. They say Babcock wouldn't have known any more what to do with that machine than anything. He didn't even know how to weigh something. You see he could only do things in the rough, and so the modern boys resent that the artist made that. He should have had his machine, his old butterfat machine, in that bas relief; that would have been honest; this bas relief was dishonest. So you see that answers your question to a certain point.

SL: It does it gives us some interesting insight into him.

SL: The thing that I find interesting in a way is that Babcock was so encouraging to McCollum. He seemed to have no deep prejudices about the nature 01:22:00of research, and yet I read in Russell's biography that he wasn't liked a lot by farmers. He wasn't really a farmer himself. He was really interested in nitty gritty research, as they say. Yet when McCollum broached the subject of using rats instead of cows for experimentation, Russell was opposed and his opposition seemed to be that whether pests--you know, rats are pests, whereas cows are useful animals, I never could understand why he was--

HP: Well I saw it repeatedly in the great persons that came to our laboratory, that utter repulsion of the popular mind toward rats. Even the great that came 01:23:00into our laboratory would nearly faint when they saw those rats in the cage. That utter repulsion. You just would have to see those cases to believe it. Dr. McCollum couldn't explain his experiments to some of the people that he would so long to interest in the results that he got because of that nearly fainting condition when confronted with a rat. So--

SL: Even little white rats?

HP: Even those beautiful little white rats.

SL: I guess that's just an emotional factor.

HP: It is, but it just shows how deeply--it's almost a folk thing, it's almost an instinct, so deep-rooted. Russell was an interesting fellow. He was very 01:24:00narrow as Dr. Babcock was broad. Russell had done this wonderful contact with tuberculosis in his foreign field so that his interests from the beginning were narrowed. Anything that he used, any line that he did, he could see. He even could see home economics. He thought cooking was fine. He wanted us to be practical. He was sympathetic. That touched him a little bit. So he and Miss Marlatt got on famously, but his mind didn't roam abroad like Dr. Babcock's, it rested very narrowly with a certain predisposed set of interests. So he wasn't a 01:25:00very good dean for he was all right up to the point that he served but he couldn't have helped much in the years that followed,

SL: Do you mean during the '20s, or after he retired?

HP: Yes as the things developed

SL: I know he was in a lot of hot water, a lot of controversy at that time

HP: Yes, yes

SL: Just a small point. I know that when you went to Hopkins in 1916 or '17 that some other students went along too, and I have two names, Victor Nelson and 01:26:00Barnett Sure. Whatever became of them? What role did they play in this?

HP: Well Victor Nelson got some kind of a semi-prestigious job after he left us. I can't remember just what it was but he just kind of faded out; he wasn't a true scholar. Barnett Sure was one of the clowns of all times. Oh we couldn't have missed Barney Sure. He came right out of Russia with a terrific name and so when he applied for citizenship the judge asked him if he wanted to keep that terrific name and Barney said, well, not especially. What would the judge advise? And some way Barney said, "I want to be sure about something, I want to 01:27:00be sure." So the judge said quickly, "B. Sure is the one you will be, B. Sure. Now what would you like for the B.?" And B. Sure said, "Barney would be--Barnett would be a very good name for the B." Well that's the background of him. He came. He was the clown. He didn't know he was so funny. He was--you would just die over that little fellow. He was a very short little boy and he was going to succeed through thick or thin. He was that immigrant that had the America as the opportunity, and you never saw anybody--he was assigned a set--in my remembrance 01:28:00of him there--that was here at Wisconsin--he was assigned a certain task to do and he had a whole set of ether distillations along here. There were flasks, a whole row of the flasks, and they wanted to distill off the ether that had brought out something out of its dispersals so that they wanted to condense this and they wanted to drive off the ether but they wanted to save the ether. So a condenser was put in there to condense the things, and there was a safety valve up at the top that the ether could get out of. Well, that was for safety's sake, 01:29:00and that was left open--deliberately left open.

Barney all day long put a stool there by the desk, got up on the stool, then got up on the table where this outfit was, then reached over and got the stool and put it up on the table climbed up on the stool and took corks and put in that whole row of distillations. Well, it wasn't supposed to be corked at all and one by one the corks exploded, going all over the room, so Barney got down--climbed down the same way, went around the room, picked up the corks, put his stool here, climbed up, put his stool here, and went down the row and put in the 01:30:00corks. America was his land. He was going to succeed. If they put him to distilling that ether he would succeed. So all day long that little fellow put the corks in the distilling apparatus.

Well that's the way he went through life. He got a fine position for research down in Arkansas. So he became a big name in Arkansas. He published paper after paper, mainly [worthless?], so terribly written. But beside being a comic he had a kind of appeal; people were kind of protective of him. The big heads of departments like Dr. Sherman, Dr.Mendel. Dr. Mendel particularly took little 01:31:00Barney under his wing and so Barney would sometimes send his completed papers to Dr. Mendel who would criticize them, put the English straight, reorganize it, make the paragraphs right and send it back to Barney. Then Barney would send it in to the Journal of Biochem and it would be published.

HP: --on Baltimore as a wonderful experience. You see it was history--and my little apartment hung out over the edge of the steep declivity down to the gulf and Fort McHenry was within sight and there the flag waved. The history of the 01:32:00Star Spangled Banner was right there. Well that was just wonderful. The cobblestones were--between my street and Johns Hopkins all of them were cobbled and the carts and horses coming by made a fearful noise on the cobbles. In my block those famous Baltimore steps were from one end--you see, they were little narrow houses. Each had an entrance with white steps. Occasionally they were wood but mainly--ours were white marble as it was supposed to be all during that region and the tradition was that the marble steps would be scrubbed every 01:33:00morning and the wooden steps would be painted every third morning. Ours being marble never a day but what those steps were scrubbed with a woman down on her knees scrubbing those front steps. Absolute rigorous demand, she just had to have the front steps scoured. So tradition was wonderful, the hospital was all full of tradition. The great big foyer, the central part of the hospital, had a two-story image of Christ in the foyer and circular steps going around that figure to the second story, and a Cardinal--and I can't remember who he was--a 01:34:00Cardinal that was oh so famous, came and spoke to us from those steps. He was a leader in the World War--oh, he was very famous. And our own Cardinal there had his church and his house right across from the hospital and it was spring when the tulips blossomed in that Cardinal's garden. I don't remember names any more. There were markets just a couple of blocks from Johns Hopkins and in those markets they were still selling the leeches because all the physicians, many of whom were foreign around there, believed in the drawing of blood, and oh those leeches were very hot sales all through that region.

SL: Really?

HP: Oh, my God! Oh yes, they were--the food was quite foreign, some of it. They were very fond of eels there; they were smoked and dried. I was very fond of those eels. I took my market basket and like everybody I had an eel's tail sticking out one end and the eel's head sticking out of the other end of my basket. The market down at the end right by the bay was wonderful because that had the most marvelous array of seafood. The Jews were orthodox Jews there so it was a wonderful study. You got the old world traditions. The brass that was 01:36:00brought from all those old world countries were just priceless brasses. But the immigrants saw the beautiful shiny aluminum pots and pans and so they discarded their brass. So we could go up and down and buy brass. They'd put it on--these priceless old things--they'd put it on and sell you for the price of crude brass, the copper and brass. I brought some home. But the interesting thing was that the women that would sell you the brass would have a lot of the traditions. She could tell you what this pot was for. I got a great big pot about like so and I said, "Why is it so narrow at the top and why isn't it just kind of an 01:37:00open pail?" "Oh," she said, "That has a history. You know in our religion we can't cook anything on the Sabbath; we have to lay off of any cooking. So we would die if we didn't have our tea and so we'd take this brass pot and bring the water to a boil and then set it at the back of the stove for over the weekend and that little top doesn't evaporate very much." And then I said, "Well, now, those old black umbrellas. Do they have a history?" "Oh yes," she said, "Those old black umbrellas have a history," she said. "Now in our religion we can go only so many steps from home on the Sabbath weekend but if you take 01:38:00your umbrella, your old black umbrella, you can--when you've taken that number of steps you can sit down on the curb, put up the umbrella, and you are at home. And then you can put the umbrella down and then you can go that number of steps before you sit down on the curb and put up your umbrella again. That way you can go anywhere you want to for the weekend." Well now wasn't that a treasure to get these old customs like that from the women selling us brass?

SL: What was Hopkins like compared to the University of Wisconsin--the atmosphere, the people?

HP: Well it was so conservative you never knew where you would bump up against a `no'. Dr. McCollum--you see, he was in touch with Dr. Howland and Dr. Park and 01:39:00they were much concerned about how many of the women couldn't nurse their babies and they knew it must be the diets so they wanted Dr. McCollum to study the diet. Well the dietitian was a very able woman--maybe you have heard of Pat O'Dea here in ball. Oh the [foot]ball crowd worshipped Pat O'Dea's memory. Well this was his wife and she was a very fine well-educated person at the head of the dietary department and of course she was intimately involved but she couldn't--Dr. McCollum approached her to come on their study of the wards and she said, "Oh, how I would like to but I am not allowed out of this one corridor 01:40:00that comes from the outside to my office here. I cannot set foot--"

SL: Why was that?

HP: Well, they hadn't done so before, and when my students became students of hers to get their internship they were not allowed to enter the library. That didn't have to be down those corridors; they could have gone around and entered the library from outside. They were not allowed to poke their noses in the Hopkins Library. They mentioned to Mrs. O'Dea what book or reference they wanted; she would mention it to the head nurse; the head nurse was privileged. She had won her spurs. The head nurse was privileged to go into the library. She would get the book, give it to Mrs. O'Dea, who would then give it to my 01:41:00students. Well, that's what I mean

SL: That's rather incredible.

HP: Well I should say so, and you never knew when you were going to run into that. You just couldn't believe the block that would be put into your way.

SL: Why do you think it was like that? Do you think it had to do with being so close to the South or what?

HP: No, that it was old, and I suppose partly the endowment. When I got--I get Johns Hopkins and Yale--I guess it was Johns Hopkins. It must have been Johns Hopkins that had to build the elevator in a contraption separate from the hospital because by the money that had been given them there was a prohibition 01:42:00of ever having an elevator in the building, and so they built a separate building for the elevators, and you clumped across a wooden connection. Planks were laid down so wheelchairs could be put in and you could clump across. Well I ask you, you just never knew where you would run into history like that. Imagine that for a hospital.

SL: Especially one with that reputation.

HP: One with that reputation.

SL: Amazing. When I think of the generosity of people who have bequeathed this university funds, well, McArdle--the center is so different

HP: And no strings attached. Well, strings were all over the place.

HP: But there were old customs that were interesting. I went to lectures, I went to very famous world-famous people lecturing, and I can't even remember his name now, the head of physiology was--oh, he was so noted abroad. But every head of a department that lectured--and they didn't have graduate students doing the lecturing, the head of the department did all of this business there--but they had what were called dieners, because of course most of these heads of department had got their education in Germany. Germany was the place you went to get finished off, and diener meant worker, you see. But the diener was the man that was a satellite of this great big person. He set out all--he was a 01:44:00well-educated or a non-educated person, but he belonged to this head professor; he knew all the professor's lectures. If the professor couldn't be there, the diener could give the lecture just as well but he wore the white coat. But the amusing thing was that each diener was so much a copy of his professor with all his mannerisms--the diener of physiology was George. George held his head at just the angle that the head professor held his head. He was an exact copy as far as--well, you see that was, again, tradition. So everywhere was the tradition.

SL: Why did you decide to come back to Wisconsin from there?

HP: Well, I wasn't getting anywhere. Quite rightly Miss Simmonds was the big 01:45:00person to assist. I didn't have any objection to her. She was my student, I was proud of her, but when it came to writing books I could have helped with the writing of books. Miss Simmonds had all that devotion and all of the perfection of detail but she didn't have ideas, and so I could have helped very much more. But I was never invited in, I never knew when a book was being written, when a book was being revised, and that wasn't helpful to my career. And what I was 01:46:00allowed to do was so circumscribed and I was repeating things over, so that when Mary Buell, who had taken my place--Mary Buell had been Miss Daniels' assistant in Iowa, she came when I left, she came to my place there, she wanted to fill a very fine place there at Johns Hopkins, not with Dr. McCollum but with some other people, and she wanted to leave. And so the call came that I was to come back, and they considered that I was on leave of absence. I think it was legally down that I was being loaned to Dr. McCollum, at least that was the implication of Miss Marlatt and she tried to--well it was all right because I was ready to come back, and so I came back into my former place with of course an advance in 01:47:00salary and position and a professorship and so on. So it was, oh, an enormous step up from the kind of under assistantship that I was given there at Johns Hopkins. Not getting any place further. Even there was objection from Miss Simmonds to my publishing that piece of research that I had thought up and I carried out, and there was resentment over that.

SL: What was this; what was this?

HP: The one on Vitamin C being necessary for rats that made quite a splash. That was quoted in textbooks by Dr. Sherman for his Columbia people. It really was 01:48:00notable and it was mine entirely. Dr. McCollum kind of blinked when I told him that I had this idea and wanted to carry it out. "Oh my," he said, "that's wonderful; that is a real research thing." So it really was, but Miss Simmonds resented that, that I should publish it.

SL: Do you think she was jealous?

HP: Yes, I think so. She didn't have any cause to be because she always was first and I agreed but she wanted to be entirely it.

SL: So when you came back to the University of Wisconsin, I imagine this gave you a great opportunity to do some real original research.

HP: Well, yes, because you see here there were no divisions set up, hard walls. 01:49:00That's a thing that again and again visitors to Wisconsin would exclaim over. "Why," they would say, "I couldn't any more walk into a neighboring biochemistry department in my university. Why I would have to finesse for years to get across what you do. Why you just march into every department on this campus and ask for what you want," and that was it. Now Professor Hart was still adamant that there would be no women in his department.

SL: He still was.

HP: Oh yes that until his death there would be no women in his department, but he was the most generous soul. Why I owed a lot to him. He wouldn't have me on his payroll, but in those beginning years when I was feeling my way into 01:50:00research I'd take a manuscript over to his office and I'd say, "I want some advice. What shall I do about this? I'm wondering how to manage this in my article." "Oh," he said, "I have plenty of time. Read it out loud to me, the whole thing." Now imagine that, from the head of the department. That was the kind of treatment I got from Professor Hart. I never resented not getting on his payroll. Everything else was all right for me to do and so that was wonderful. So I got some money, even I began to get money from the Department of 01:51:00Agriculture because we had an inspection every year. A woman came around--I can't even remember her name, she was quite famous--and she would come around from the Department of Agriculture, Home Economics, and she would inspect biochemistry and all the departments around but she would come over to our department and by that time I had some thoughts about what I wanted to do and she'd ask me, "Well could I give you some money for anything?" and so I got some backing that way, and so I started out on various lines of work and published, mainly in our little annual report. And so I began rather modestly and of course 01:52:00I had a diet squad, you see. I had all these fine students and graduate students who could be diet subjects so I began in a very, very modest way on some lines like that. So it was a step up, very much so.

SL: Right. You came back as an assistant professor, in 1920. I read that somewhere so I assume it's correct.

HP: I don't remember those details but when Miss Zuill came, oh Miss Zuill, just pushed, pushed, pushed. Up I went, salary and everything. I didn't care whether I stayed wherever I was. That didn't mean anything to me, but oh Miss Zuill--

SL: What was she like?

HP: Oh she was a hustler and she meant to have that department reflect her. She was very much an egotist but her egotism took the form of boosting all of our interest. Oh very much so.

SL: In other words the whole department was embraced in her egotism.

HP: Oh yes, oh yes, and so while Miss Marlatt had favored nutrition and biochemistry, Miss Zuill took a whole spectrum under her wing, and so I didn't get any special encouragement like Miss Marlatt had given. I didn't need it because Miss Zuill was back of me all the way. She was a wonderful head of the department. She could fight other departments to a standstill. The medical 01:54:00hospital organization wanted the hill beside us. She wanted it for that home management house and the nursery school and they fought it to a finish. They appeared before regents-- oh that feisty little woman, they were scared to death of her when she got through fighting them. There wasn't anything she couldn't fight for.

SL: She was head of the department. What was Miss Marlatt's position?

HP: Yes, well, Miss Marlatt--well Miss Marlatt had a rocky career. Her father I think it was had died when our home ec building was just being built and so she 01:55:00wasn't there when they played a trick on her and put the Extension in as part of her building--this building was hers; she had got it--but it was Extension and Home Economics over the door, which was an awful blow to her but she wasn't here to fight for it and she was only a department of the College of Agriculture. And so was Miss Zuill when Miss Zuill came in but that little feisty person wasn't going to leave it that way. She made us as a committee go over and interview the dean of the College of Agriculture and tell them that she wanted to be the head of a college of her own and that didn't do anything very much, but all I had to 01:56:00do was to mention it to Dr. Elvehjem how much she wanted it. Dr. Elvehjem was a saint for home economics. He was just a generous, fine person. He liked Miss Zuill. He believed in her fighting for her rights, and he saw no reason why she shouldn't be the head of a college all her own. He mentioned it and of course Dr. Elvehjem mentioning it was different from our mentioning it to the dean, so it happened very speedily, and so when Miss Zuill went to the great big meetings she was a dean of a college in her own right instead of just being the head of a department.

SL: Must have been a real powerhouse.

HP: Oh she still is, in retirement. She comes over for meetings. She retired to 01:57:00a retirement home but she comes over for meetings and she helps guide things from a very tactful distance. She still has the say-so.

SL: I know that after you had been back here for several years you went to Yale to get your Ph.D. around 1927.

HP: Yes and I told you a little of the history of that, how Chi Che Wang scolded me for not having got it and I decided, Well, why not? I thought. I never thought, why so? But I thought, Why not? And so I prepared in two ways. I noticed that everybody when they got Ph.D.'s had a good deal of physics and so I 01:58:00took a summer session here of physics and oh it was the most enjoyable session I ever put in. Physics had never passed by my ken before but, oh my, the head of the department--I don't know now who he was, he's long ago retired, I suppose he's dead now, but a wonderful person, a wonderful teacher, and I just peppered him with questions, so once when he handed out the--generally he laid our quiz papers up on the desk and we took them as we went out, but this time he looked at the seat number which we had put on our quiz paper and he delivered each quiz paper by going back and forth in the rows, and he got to me and he said, "Oh, it's you, is it," said he, "that makes all the hundreds on her quiz paper and 01:59:00asks all the questions?" He had to have me identified. And so that was the first part of the summer and the rest of the summer I went to their summer session down at the University of Chicago because I thought that was were I would get my Ph.D.

SL: Well when you were at Yale you did study for a while with Mendel and Osborn though, didn't you?

HP: Well, it's kind of a complicated situation. There again, traditions. I went there because influential people said that I ought to go there. The University of Chicago didn't pan out. They were not scholarly. They just weren't up to it. 02:00:00I could see that that wasn't the place I wanted. I was awfully glad to have had the summer there and got acquainted with them. Some of the people that had been there were really notable. Miss--oh, names are my plague--a fine woman who became then the head of the women's college in Connecticut was the head of the department. She was just about to leave so I wouldn't have had her. The instructors in the various courses were second rate, obviously second rate. I couldn't have studied under them, and so it was very obvious and then these influential people--Martha Kano with whom I had been closely associated in Dr. 02:01:00McCollum's laboratory--Martha Kano and I were the two people downstairs in Dr. McCollum's laboratory--and she had already gone to Yale for her degree with Mendel, and so I went thinking that it was with Dr. Mendel I was taking my degree. I was very shortsighted in a way because I got swept off my feet with all sorts of thrills with some operations on dogs that were going on when I got there to the department. I never had been in close touch with operations. I had leanings toward the Medical School, always, but I hadn't been in on operations. These operations were taking kidneys out of dogs and rats and doing various 02:02:00things to dogs. I forget all the series of things but they allowed me to give the anesthetic. Oh was I proud; I was the anesthetist in these operations. Well, good gracious, how could I leave that to do what Dr. Mendel--I interviewed Dr. Mendel and he indicated what he would have me do. It sounded like nothing at all. It was something about the digestive track which I came back to later as an independent worker but I thought nothing of it, and oh these operations just thrilled me. So Dr. Smith was a person in his own right. Now that's the end of the tape?

SL: Yes, we'll have to finish this up next time.

SL: We were talking about how the University of Chicago didn't pan out, it wasn't scholarly enough, and you were talking about functioning as a kind of anesthetist for dog operations.

HP: Well, that explains how I picked my thesis and that was important because it wasn't the thing that Dr. Mendel suggested, and it was, in the view of other people who had urged me to come to Yale, unthinkable that I would choose anything except what Dr. Mendel--and so I think that I probably interfered with my relations to Dr. Mendel, because he was shocked also that what he had 02:04:00suggested wasn't the thing I had taken. Of course Dr. Mendel was a very sour individual. The first year in which you knew him he just deliberately--well Miss Marlatt was the same way. Very sour for the first year. And Dr. Mendel regularly assigned to some of these important heads of departments that came to him for Ph.D.'s and were going back to their home economics department, he used to assign them something that you couldn't do. They could get technique, they could strive, they could organize, but he very often midway changed the topic to something that was within their grasp. So he was that sort, but he was just 02:05:00definitely sour. He would stop by my desk and he would say the most crabby things, criticizing anything he could fix on that was a criticism of me and my work. It didn't bother me; I'd gone through years of the same with Miss Marlatt. She was a warm-hearted crabby individual; everybody was scared to death of her, and so I'd gone through years of not minding that, why it didn't bother me at all, but I realized afterwards that not taking my thesis with him was kind of unforgivable and increased this. So that was--that year--that first year, I think, was at the root of Dr. Steenbock's having spent one year with him and departing, wiping the dust from his feet of Yale. Never forgiven. So I think 02:06:00that Dr. Steenbock didn't have the same philosophy of enduring that I had. Because then I realized that I really had sort of queered things with Dr. Mendel and what should I do? There was a convention there at New Haven, so I took Dr. Steenbock aside when he came to the convention and asked his advice and he said that I certainly should have accepted whatever Dr. Mendel offered me but that since I had started on this other, just to keep ahead and to not mind anything and to get on peacefully with Dr. Mendel. It showed that fundamentally he didn't 02:07:00still resent Dr. Mendel as he did openly. Fundamentally he didn't really, so that was an interesting sidelight on his relationship to Dr. Mendel.

HP: But then at the end of that first year I got a very nice fellowship given to me from AAUW and then Dr. Mendel's attitude completely changed. He remembered how Dr. Steenbock had wiped the dust of Yale off his feet and he thought surely I would take that fellowship and go to Columbia or somewhere where my path was easier. So, oh my, how his attitude changed. He invited me to his house--his dinners were quite famous, he had a very good cook and his dinners were quite famous, and he always invited his staff or graduate students by telegram. He 02:08:00would phone down to the telegraph office. They were supposed to know everything about where anybody was so I got a telegram inviting me to a dinner and I was deferred to, I was approached in the friendliest--why my jaw dropped to see Dr. Mendel as friendly as that, but it continued. He was very helpful then. From then on he was very mild and helpful. Why I had no idea leaving Yale at the end of the first year. I could stick it out even if he continued his meanness to me. That didn't bother me. But it was really very nice to see another side to him, and then during that second year Dr. Smith had to go on an extended vacation. I 02:09:00think he went abroad, probably but anyway it was quite extended. So that Dr. Mendel took over, and by that time I had my data pretty well in hand, but he immediately--to my great consternation, he immediately picked my results to pieces. "That doesn't prove anything," he said. "You added a protein that was different in phosphorous content from what you ran as supposedly control for your experiment. You can't do things like that." He was quite right but I didn't know how--he said, "You go repeat this all over again and choose your--or make 02:10:00an assay of the protein and the phosphorous in those two protein sources. Then build up the non-phosphorous one with added phosphorous." Oh it was quite right, but I didn't know. I never had learned how to do phosphorous determinations.

SL: Well who had you been--you had been working with Dr. Smith?

HP: Yes, he's the one that had the operations with dogs and so I joined in his experiments with great thrill to do these operations on my rats, and so that's why I didn't choose Dr. Mendel. But here I come to Dr. Mendel as my chief major professor, now with Dr. Smith off campus. Here Dr. Mendel becomes my professor and criticizes what I have done so far.

SL: Well how come nobody else had seen that flaw before Dr. Mendel?

HP: Had seen what?

SL: In other words, how come nobody else had pointed out that same problem with the phosphorous before Dr. Mendel.

HP: Well Dr. Smith should have but Dr. Smith wasn't as good a researcher. He ventured into a different kind of subject matter and he was all right but he was no scholar. He then went to Michigan University and rose in the ranks there and became a head of his department and a very meticulous, methodical worker but not with the brain of Dr. Mendel. Dr. Mendel didn't do completely well in research himself, because he came up in the ranks of the classics. But now I reaped his 02:12:00beautiful knowledge of how you write up things. I wrote my thesis under him but I went back and learned how to do phosphorous analysis first. Oh my, it was a burden to find somebody that would teach me how to do a phosphorous determination. I went all back through those experiments, running a control now, but I finally finished off and the results were the same. It hadn't depended on the phosphorous, but I had to prove that.

HP: But now it came to writing, and I was the despair of Dr. Mendel. I couldn't seem to put pen to paper. I came up with the most miserable, scrawny kind of remarks about my results. I don't know why I did so badly. I had written up 02:13:00articles to be published before I went to Yale. As a matter of fact there was one hilarious session at our--journal club, we'll call it; he called it something else--when one of the men chose one of my published articles to review for the journal club, and criticized it all over the place. Made me very funny in this presentation. And so I had written up material. His hilarity was unjustified, but anyway I could take it.

SL: Were you perhaps just afraid or intimidated by the whole thing?

HP: I think maybe I was. I wanted to please Dr. Mendel, now, after having treated him so badly. And he apparently forgave me. I wanted to stand well with 02:14:00him but I just couldn't seem to make it start or go. I was a failure as far as Dr. Mendel was concerned, so he finally said, "You talk very much better than you write." He said, "Your presentations in our journal club have been fine, just unusual," and I had given lectures. I loved oral presentations and so I had given lectures on nutrition over the town of New Haven. I had accepted things like that. He said, "You're quite outstanding so now I advise you to hire a Yale man. Advertise for one in the local paper, in the college paper. Get somebody 02:15:00that will take dictation and talk to him. Then he will transcribe these notes." And it really did go better. I could talk and this is an easier way than if I had been required to write all this down. So things went better and I remember the thrill that I had when once he took what I had done in the interval between our conferences--he took it on the train to some important meeting he was going to and mailed me back a little note torn from a piece of cardboard and it said on this little piece of cardboard in my, oh I think it was a special delivery letter, and on this little piece of cardboard, he said, "I think this is going better, don't you?" That was all of the note but oh that was so encouraging. So 02:16:00I had this very fine contact with Dr. Mendel at the end. Dr. Smith did come back and I had to rewrite some parts of it because he didn't agree with Dr. Mendel as to how it should be presented, and so I had to rewrite some of it. But essentially it was Dr. Mendel's supervision, so that was very nice.

So I was added to that--in his office when I first had my first interview with him I looked at the row of theses on the shelf above his desk and recognized a number of heads of home ec departments whom I had known and did know, but there was a severe jolt in store for me because here was the thesis of a very 02:17:00important individual that I had met in the course of official committees and things like that--Dr. P. Mabel Nelson from down along somewhere out in the west-- inscribed in gold letters on the back of this Ph.D. thesis. It said Precious Mabel Nelson on the back of a Ph.D. thesis. Her parents--she was an only child, she had come late in their marriage--and of all the things in the world she was precious, so she was christened officially and had to carry it for life--Precious Mabel Nelson as a head of a department, but to the world in general she was known as P. Mabel Nelson and only people that looked at this 02:18:00shelf on Dr. Mendel's desk knew. So I was added--my thesis was added. The Ph.D. was--the oral was not very enjoyable, I didn't mind it as we did it at Wisconsin. I thought that was the way it would be but, lo and behold, at Yale it is a public function. Anybody may come who pleases. There were kind of settees along the side of this room brought in for any of the public that wanted to come. You'd better believe the undergraduates and the ones that were working on their doctor's degrees came and made faces at you, from those seats. Oh, that was quite a trial. So there were a lot of local customs that I had to get used 02:19:00to. When we lined up for our commencement procession it took place in the old way, encircling the chapel, so we went along the exact pathway that the ministers--you see Yale had been founded for training Congregational ministers. I remember a great aunt of mine had written to my mother, "What in the world did dear Helen want to become a minister for. I notice she's gone to Yale," so we went in this same exact pathway that the minister had gone around. My wondering 02:20:00eyes when I crossed the campus one time beheld the mayor of New Haven arriving in an old fashioned carriage drawn by horses. He was wearing a cocked hat. The men with him were in cocked hats. They got out of this carriage. I stood with open mouth looking at them. It seems they were recreating, as they always did on that date, always--some occurrence of Benedict Arnold was created on the campus and you can't believe how odd that looked. The things that New Haven had done or 02:21:00Yale had done were always done then forever. Well now where, what were you--

SL: Well after that I know you came back to the University of Wisconsin as an associate professor in 1928 and I thought it might be interesting to hear about what was going on at the time in the home economics department and something about the relationship perhaps between that department and things like agricultural or chemistry.

HP: Well Miss Marlatt was still the head--it was only a department, she was the head of a department. There's a little bit of history that I thought was 02:22:00amusing. In the early days Miss Marlatt had her department in Ag Hall, on the second floor of Ag Hall. Dr. Peterson's desk as well as that of Miss Marlatt was placed in the general classroom on the second floor of Agricultural Hall. Dr. Peterson used to describe with great humor the chills that ran up and down his spine when he first began lecturing to the class in the imposing presence of Miss Marlatt seated at her desk in the same room. Well that picture changed. She now was in the separate building that had been meant for just her but was 02:23:00changed. Somebody got up on the ladder and changed the inscription over the door to the Extension and Home Economics. But she was there and she gave me all kinds of accommodation and encouragement, but she still was an exceedingly severe person. Criticism more than any encouragement was her way of proceeding but I had ceased to be so afraid of her as I had been in the early days because her attitude had changed somewhat and she was just delighted to have me share anything I could with the departments around.

HP: So we were not allowed to have--home economics was, well, that was the 02:24:00Graduate School and its supervisors where home economics was belittled and really hated. So this book about what's his name who was the head of the Graduate School that you said you had a copy of--

SL: Slichter?

HP: Yes, Slichter just despised home economics and Miss Marlatt, and so from that kind of a source we were not allowed to have Ph.D. candidates, you see, because we were only a department and a despised department. I wasn't afraid of Dr. Slichter, I knew what his slant was, I had to have a good deal of commerce 02:25:00with Dr. Slichter, but always with an atmosphere of being very much belittled. But I can remember so well. It was up here at Brittingham that we had a reception and Dr.--no he had it at his own house. Dr. Slichter had this reception at his own house to honor Dr.Steenbock for having founded the Alumni Research Foundation and so on and so Dr. Steenbock asked if he could take me there; he knew of this feeling of being belittled and he thought maybe he'd better protect me at that reception. Well we got to the reception and Dr. Steenbock could hardly hold in his merriment because Dr. Slichter was the most 02:26:00appreciative host to me. Oh the kind wonderful things he said to me. And Dr. Steenbock confided behind his hand that Dr. Slichter, whenever he had a reception, got riotously drunk so that he could say these nice things that he never could say if he was sober. So I was a test case you see. He couldn't have said meaner things if he had been--even as a host--if he had been sober, but he was a very fine host.

SL: What underlay his opposition? Was it similar to Hart's-- didn't like women and women were--?

HP: No, no, because Professor Hart was, oh, great hearted to us. It was only that he didn't hire women. That was all Professor Hart had against us. Oh, he 02:27:00was just wonderful.

SL: No, I understand that. I didn't mean to make that as a general statement.

HP: No that wasn't the basis of it at all.

SL: What was Slichter's opposition? That's what I mean.

HP: Well he and the other people in charge up there of Letters and Science were jealous of anything, they were jealous of Agricultural in general. We had the fat test, we could get any amount of money from the legislature that was made up of farmers. It was a bitter rivalry. They hated anything that had to do with Agriculture and home economics was even more, oh, kind of like a, well, a training--

SL: Was it that it was not academic enough, didn't seem to fit into a university?

HP: Not academic. But Miss Marlatt was quite academic and so she had us select a good many things "from the hills" we called it, but it was like a trade school, you see. To them, it was only a trade school. Those people did cooking and sewing. Well, it was much more than that, but they never got over the idea and so they didn't want to have the University smirched with a trade school reproach, you see, and so they never got over the idea. And Miss Marlatt was timid. For all that everybody was afraid of her, she was afraid of other people too. Anybody in authority she was scared of and so she didn't push her claims as she should have. I tell you that it waited for Miss Zuill to push the--

SL: That's just what I was going to ask.

HP: Oh, Miss Zuill wasn't afraid of anybody, the little Scotch woman. She just had her courage right up to the board, so things went entirely differently when Miss Zuill came. But Miss Marlatt was afraid; she didn't push her claims. And so we were, well, what I started out with was that we were not allowed to have a Ph.D. of our own until Dr. Elvehjem had his hand in things, but in all those years when I was doing research--very respectable research; it was published in the best journals--the people that did that were the--my students that did that were allowed to have only a joint major, so I had to get somebody over in ag 02:30:00chemistry, in the chemistry department, in bacteriology, in all these. They were great friends of mine. It worked easily, we never had any troubles about these. They would often let me do the lead in everything that had to do with the joint major. They were very considerate. I had no cause to bother about the kind of an arrangement. I liked it. It brought me in contact with--. Miss Marlatt--she liked to have me join up with these other departments, learning things, picking up things along the way.

HP: Dr. Fred taught me ever so much. I had a sauerkraut thesis with Dr. Fred.

SL: What is a sauerkraut thesis?

HP: A sauerkraut thesis. You see he had to do with fermentations and so it was his friends in the sauerkraut factory that asked to have this proved. Well he didn't have any space for guinea pigs. We didn't have space either but Miss Marlatt would make space, and so I had a sauerkraut thesis with Dr. Fred. So my student and I went over to Dr. Fred's laboratory. I think I told you that Dr. Fred's laboratory and office were furnished with orange crates painted a violent red. Red was his color. He liked to have students that--women that came to see him dressed in red. Oh he thought much more highly of them if they wore red. Red was his color. And so the orange crates that held his books, his theses, his 02:32:00manuscripts were all painted red, and the orange crates were sawed in half to make chairs and they were painted red. But that was immaterial. The thing about Dr. Fred's laboratory was to see what utter devotion to one's research would mean. I hadn't any idea what devotion would entail. It would entail that you wouldn't let your students have a radio set in the laboratory. Some of them worked better with very quiet music in the background; background music was really psychologically good, but no, no, he saw to it that there weren't any 02:33:00such things around. It was part of your duty to come for half a day on Saturdays and Sundays. It was part of your duty to get there long before class time, to check on your research. If you had a class that began at 8:00 you got there at 7:00 and saw that your research was all right before you went into your class lecture. Oh there were things--of course I couldn't quite adopt his way of having three and four hours of sleep at night because you worked at your manuscripts into the night and then you got up and got to your--oh he got to his laboratory long before 7:00 but he tried to train his people to be there at 7:00, but he needed--and then you see the war came on, World War I, and he had 02:34:00responsibilities for that war. He thought he was carrying that war on his two shoulders and he had even less sleep. He got along all right but he went to Washington but came back to Madison to the University, carried both things for the war effort. Miss Marlatt left for the war effort and had her committees there in Washington, so it was a time of a good deal of effort. So I had many of these contacts with other laboratories. But Dr. Fred, to have his contact, he 02:35:00had what he called a bible. He laid it out and said, "This is our bible." and in that they inscribed or bound--it was a great big volume--and they copied references. Of course there weren't so many references as there are now but he had every reference that had ever been published to cabbage or sauerkraut. He had reprints of everybody, he had everything that belonged to that, and that was the bible--thoroughness that I never dreamed of. So I began to try to imitate him in these ways and so I got a great deal of my education from Dr. Fred. He was just wonderful, he was very appreciative. He was of course a southern gentleman with all the courtesy that goes with that. So it was a liberal education to work in his laboratory. Well where are we?

SL: Well, it's kind of open. I imagine with such different personalities as Miss Marlatt and Miss Zuill that there must have been some interesting goings on between them in that department.

HP: Well, yes, I--one of the very first was when Miss Marlatt was relinquishing her jurisdiction but came back to see if the things she had hoarded so carefully for the museum were being taken to the museum. She had things like an old coal-burning cook stove, she had things like that. Miss Zuill had accumulated them to be taken to the dump out by the front door. Miss Marlatt nearly broke down and cried. She had kept those old, old things--the old treadle sewing 02:37:00machine, the coal burning cook stove, utensils that couldn't be ever reproduced, the old flat irons, things like that, and they were to be taken to the dump. Miss Zuill was for the latest in everything. I had an old cook stove that was just irreplaceable up in my laboratory because it had gentle heat. I could dry things in it, I could have heat that didn't vary in that oven for a great many of my experiments. I needed it, it had a high oven so I could stand and read thermometers. That was taken away and I was given a modern. With great pride Miss Zuill showed visitors how I had been getting along with a poor old broken 02:38:00down thing. She was the first one that had equipped me as I should be equipped. I had to get down on my knees to see into the oven. Nothing was right for my use about this hideous thing.

Well, you see, the viewpoint was just utterly different, but that is why I gave up--I have a record--kind of interesting. I haven't all of them but I have a few of them put together. I concocted a letter. Dr. McCollum had said to me, "Now 02:39:00you are retiring, now you must write the history"--he had a great respect for Miss Marlatt in our department--he said, "Now you must write a history," and so I concocted this letter that I sent out everywhere, that admitted that it was Dr. McCollum that had suggested it and I invited everybody to write in their reminiscences of the department as it had been in the past or was in recent times and I got quite a file of letters. I have a few of them that I have reread that I'll turn over to you and there will be many more when I can locate them in my files.

SL: We'll keep these at the archives then.

HP: Yes, they may be thrown out--

SL: Oh, no, they won't be thrown out.

HP: It may be that they aren't of enough value, but as I look them over then I 02:40:00will turn them over, there will be many more.

SL: Yes, we'd love to have them. These are then from--well, you wrote the letter on December 8, 1960, so most of them will be early 1961.

HP: Yes. They would be along there. Well, what I wanted to say was, I got this great file of letters. Every one was inspected--I had them come to the Department of Home Economics. Every one was inspected and read by Miss Zuill, sometimes with great distaste. For, well, for reminiscences about Miss Marlatt, glorifying her. I knew that as I would write this history, it would be mainly in praise of Miss Marlatt. Mainly to do--because Miss Zuill was quite recent. As the years stretched out it would be much more to do with Miss Marlatt's 02:41:00department than with Miss Zuill's School of Home Economics. I would have to have it typed down in the office. It would be wormwood and gall to Miss Zuill. It would simply cross off the friendly relationship that I had established. I couldn't do it. It would be just a terrible experience for me, so I bundled them up and made--then at the next meeting of home economics where they have--at commencement time they have a reception and a meeting and I was appointed speaker. And I took out just a few things and got some old time pictures and made a talk about the history of home economics. I said this will do instead of 02:42:00my written thing, and so that was that, that was all there was about it. And so I have these, and they are historic--they are interesting.

SL: Yes, we'd love to have them.

HP: So, there will be more, but my files--I need a secretary. My files are very poor, so I will--

SL: I'm sure we could probably, if you wanted, have somebody from the archives help you with that.

HP: No, it wouldn't be anything anybody could do but myself. So I will have more letters from Dr. McCollum. I will have this and that.

SL: Great. Just a few more questions on this very topic which you brought up. Was Miss Zuill's ill feeling, let's say, towards this project more directed toward the positive things that were being said about Miss Marlatt or the fact 02:43:00that Miss Zuill was being ignored?

HP: No, no, it never got to that. I said that these letters from people came through her hands.

SL: Right, but she read them.

HP: Yes, but there wasn't anything on the surface that I could quote at all. It was only a feeling that these were not especially precious to her.

SL: Sure, I understand.

HP: No, there wasn't anything outspoken. There wasn't any way of my finding what it was that made a certain feeling. See, there wasn't anything that I could point to.

SL: Sure. It'll be interesting to look at the letters though and try to figure out what it was that--

HP: Yes. Well, I may have assumed more--. It was my own feelings about how it would have been received. Maybe it wouldn't have been. But it was just a task 02:44:00that--I don't write very well and it just looked like a terrible task. Another thing is that with my training in science it would be just suffering if I couldn't verify everything I put in. Sometimes that would be interesting, but I couldn't verify it. Well that would be just terrible to me. To write up something and call it a history that I couldn't verify. That's part of what made it just so impossible to me. So altogether this is all there is now of that except that I have here--that I have rescued a history that started out to be a history of our honor society, Omega Nu but has a good many things about how the old department in the very earliest days--this is precious because I don't know 02:45:00where it came from. As I read it over, I can't remember ever having seen it before, but it's very good, and I turn that over to you.

SL: You don't know who wrote it?

HP: No, I don't. It isn't signed. Miss Cowles herself doesn't have the least idea who wrote it. So, but it's very good, and this of course, this goes on, this fits in with that about the very earliest time. I don't think that's included in that about being in Ag Hall. And then I was on a committee--now this is a little touch of history too--Miss Marlatt's precious course that she taught--

SL: Humanics?

HP: Humanics. In this she tells what the word means and so on. Then Nellie 02:46:00Kedzie Jones was--oh my, she was so important because she was Miss Marlatt's teacher, back in Kansas. So when Miss Marlatt had a department at all, the first thing she did was to send for Nellie Kedzie Jones and have her the Extension part of the department. And so, she was a picturesque--she has left her imprint in so many things and this is a little write-up of her. And then I was on a committee that was supposed to get up a little more information. And that is included in this. And Miss Zuill says, "I found this in my folder for Home Ec 109. I thought you would be interested in it. Please return when you have 02:47:00finished with it." Well, I knew she didn't care one hang, so I never returned it. And then here is a very interesting little write-up by our Betty Cass. Betty Cass you probably don't know. Betty Cass wrote a column in the State Journal, "Day By Day", that then was bound into volumes. I have many of those volumes, but this is a very picturesque little account that she wrote.

SL: Oh, I do remember. I've seen things of hers looking at old issues of the Cardinal, I mean the Journal.

HP: Yes, the old issues. Well, this was about our department.

HP: My Edith Klarin--I think I have mentioned Edith Klarin as one of the notable students that I had. She was from Sweden, and I have a picture of her and she 02:48:00took her thesis with Dr. Steenbock and me, and when she went back to Sweden she became the foremost woman of the year. She had all the hospitals in Sweden under her charge. She wrote the menus, she equipped all of the departments there, and was the foremost woman of the year, so designated by the ruler of Sweden, whatever, I don't know what was the ruling thing of Sweden, but she was it, anyway. She was a most amusing person. She was superstitious. It really was very 02:49:00nice how her superstition was stronger than her science when it came to her oral examination. She came early and took the little good luck woven thing that she had woven in Sweden of straw and took out a volume from the topmost shelf in the bookcase, put this little good luck thing in and put the book up again, because she wouldn't have faced that oral exam--she had had an intimate friend that had failed to get his doctor's degree in Sweden because in Sweden if in your final dissertation there is something that is quoted even mildly and doesn't have the source of where you got that statement, then you begin again on your doctor's 02:50:00degree. And this friend of hers had come up to his doctor's orals, they had found, in the dissertation, one thing that he hadn't quoted the source of, so he went back to an entirely different department and worked from the beginning up through three years. She thought there would be something found in her thesis that would put her back to the beginning again. So the little good luck thing was up behind on the top shelf. Well, it was really amusing to have her. Now, let's see, I forget what that was apropos of.

SL: Let me just turn this off. This is almost over, and I'll just turn it over.

SL: Back to the university. Let's see--

HP: Well, that designates a good deal. My life--this is an interesting thing that you may take along. This was Miss Marlatt's father that owned the farm that included the Kansas State College in his farm. The rest of the farm has now been made--with the old farmhouse--Miss Marlatt's home has been made into a park now, so that it is preserved. Now, what aspect--this about indicates my research. I was left entirely free and encouraged to go on. I could give a master's degree, 02:52:00but for a doctor's degree it had to be in combination with some other department, so that was my life. For awhile we had to have undergraduate theses too, so I had to manage those and they did some very respectable work as seniors in home economics.

SL: How did you get interested in anti-vitamins? The concept, even?

HP: Well, I believe it began with Dr. Mendel. You see I finished up my thesis with Dr. Mendel, and you see I had fed egg white and had obtained certain very 02:53:00queer symptoms. They were very, very striking. That's why he made me repeat, to see whether all these striking symptoms were from phosphorus. Well, it just happened that a woman in England had observed the same thing that I was observing and she and Dr. Mendel were in very lively conference by letter between England and New Haven. You see, it was this kind of a very striking 02:54:00abnormality. And so, I worked for years on that after I came back, and found--well, I made the original observation, but I didn't publish fully, so the credit went to somebody else. That was all right with me, I didn't care because I was fixed in the literature as having discovered that something was being abstracted by the egg white in the digestive tract. That was a kind of an anti-vitamin, if you take the broadest sense--it was later disputed that it had to be in metabolism for the anti part of it, and this was in the digestive tract. But that was only just a little technicality.

Well, I am getting mixed up, I guess. Before I went to Yale--I guess my other work--oh, yes that was before I went to Yale there was--Dr. Elvehjem really tipped me off. He and I had many conferences. He was a very companionable kind of person and of course I had links to his department so much, and oh there were many friendly things that we conferred about that weren't our students. And so I was in very close touch with him. I was always allowed to have a carbon typewritten copy of any address that he gave, so when I knew that he'd been off at any symposium giving an address I'd go over to his office and ask him for a copy of that. And then he would expand on the symposium, on whom he had met. And 02:56:00he said, "This is an interesting thing. I came back on the train as a seat mate with so-and-so who is a very illustrious person." And we were talking about my former student's work in Washington, in the Department of Agriculture there and he found that you couldn't make an assay of yeast. Now you had to say how much vitamin was in yeast in order to advertise it as containing thus and so. He found that you couldn't make that assay on the fresh, moist yeast. And this--I 02:57:00think it was Dr. Wilder of the Mayos that said--you see, Dr. Wilder of the Mayos was a very great friend of Dr. Elvehjem because they were both on the National Research Council. That was a wonderful group of scientists that decided about the standards of what we would need for our intake. Oh, it was a very prestigious group of people and Dr. Elvehjem and Dr. Wilder were great friends on this. So I think it was Dr. Wilder that said, "Isn't it too bad that we can't test this with human subjects." And Dr. Elvehjem wasn't passing it on to me, but I said, "Why can't we? I'll take that right home, and begin work tomorrow on that." He didn't mean it as handing it over as a task, but it wasn't any good 02:58:00for him. He didn't have human subjects in those days. He did later, but--

SL: Excuse me, when was this, approximately? We can add this in later.

HP: Well, it was written up. You should have a full set of these research things, and it was published in that.

SL: OK. I'll look it up in that.

HP: And so, I took that up as my topic and we just did yeast and yeast. Undergraduates could join in that as subjects. We found that the yeast cell was so resistant to the digestive tract that we could plate out--after the thing had been through the digestive tract, where you take some of those feces and plate out live yeast cells, the yeast went right through. We knew from Dr. Fred's work 02:59:00and Dr. Peterson's--you see they were in the same office, Dr. Fred and Dr. Peterson. Dr. Peterson particularly had to do with studying yeast, and we knew that yeast was just ravenous to take up the B-vitamins from anything around it, and so that gave the hint, and it was true, that if I fed a given diet, the output in the urine, which showed the metabolism--the metabolism of Vitamin B was quite high. But if I fed yeast at the same time, the output from the person went down, down, just plummeted down, just daily. So that we could even get a few symptoms of lack of Vitamin B because of the feeding of the yeast. Well, the 03:00:00yeast companies were just red.

SL: I'll bet they were.

HP: Oh, my. You see they were getting a great deal of their revenue from persuading the public to eat raw yeast. They called it a raw yeast cocktail, and oh, it was really universal here in Madison, and oh, my, was that yeast company--were all of the yeast companies just on their ear!

And so I was invited to go and present my case along with the yeast companies at a very prestigious meeting near Baltimore. It was an old club that we used--it was the research group that Dr. McCollum was quite prominent in. But this came 03:01:00from another set of people, this invitation, to come and lay my case before the prime researchers of the whole United States and to be defied by the yeast companies. So we went round and round. And they wouldn't agree to any of the evidence that I presented.

SL: They couldn't counter anything, though, could they, really?

HP: No, but they could interpret. Oh, that means so-and-so, and they would interpret it as the exact opposite of my interpretations, that yeast was still doing you just a whale of amount of good. I can't remember how that argument went, but oh my.

Well, then it came to my attention, a former pal of mine, who as a matter of 03:02:00fact had come in that same 1913 summer session--a small group of us, I think there were four of us women, that went to this summer class of Dr. McCollum's. She had been, had done research for the yeast company, and she had called the attention of the yeast company to the fact that her rats did not get on so well with that raw yeast, that you could not assay that raw yeast, that it was not doing what it was supposed to do. And they blotted it out. They wouldn't have anything to do with it. They cancelled something she'd written up for publication. That was withheld. So the Department of Agriculture, the Department 03:03:00of Food and--not Food and Nutrition, but Drugs--the Department of Drugs there was headed by some Wisconsin men that I was quite familiar with, and so I sent this evidence to them, and they had this girl go to--this woman go to a bank with her books, that she had been allowed to take home. I don't know how they allowed it, but she had taken them home, after she had stopped at this company, and the Department of Agriculture--Food and Drugs--had her take those books and deposit them in the safety deposit box in a bank. Because if the wind got out, you see. And so then they sent one of their department down to the bank to 03:04:00examine those books. They found it was just a flagrant case, and so they confronted them with it. And so, it came out that they threatened a good hefty lawsuit.

SL: Sure, I'll bet. Did this thing happen relatively frequently? When you're doing research in something as basic as a food industry, or something like that, and you come across something that indicates that a certain food is actually detrimental to the health, do you encounter, usually, a lot of opposition from the manufacturers?

HP: Oh, yes. If it is in commerce.

SL: That's what I mean.

HP: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, you do. You see, I was then endowed by a yeast company over at Milwaukee, because it looked as though I could show that if one became 03:05:00accustomed to eating raw yeast, there--I can't remember what hint--there seemed to be a hint from some other laboratory that if you became accustomed to this, you would get the full value of the raw yeast. And so they endowed me, hoping that I would get at the very heart of the trouble. But when it proved otherwise, they had to burn up $900 worth of their advertisements that were to be pasted on their yeast packages. It had cost them $900 to print those labels. They didn't protest when the evidence--when they were--because Dr. Fred, Dr.--

SL: Peterson?

HP: Everybody was in on that company--our own company here--they weren't 03:06:00dishonest, they didn't protest. They wanted the truth, but they wanted the truth to come along their side!

SL: Sure.

HP: --of the controversy. But when it didn't, they went right along with it.

SL: Well, that's--

HP: Oh, yes, they--it is quite a usual thing to--

HP: Well, for my egg-white work, I was insulted at the time of any of my reports I gave year-by-year on how this research was going before that prestigious group, the biochemistry national organization, and first an ag department at Cornell, a poultry department at Cornell, stood up and said, "I can't afford to have anything wrong with eggs. I can't afford to have that happen," said he.

SL: It's always the money issue.

HP: And then, the representative, who was a fine--she had her Ph.D., some of it was here at Wisconsin--she was a wonderful woman, but she was employed by--oh, who are those people up at Battle Creek that believed in the natural foods and were vegetarians. Kellogg's?

SL: One of those big cereal companies?

HP: One of those big--

SL: Kellogg's, General Foods, General Mills?

HP: Well, it's one of those very prominent ones. She came year-by-year and vouched that there was something else that was making this--it was not the egg white. She had tried to repeat my experiments and they were not so. I was 03:08:00misrepresenting--she said we cannot allow egg, we do not use meat, but we cannot allow anything wrong with egg white, as she said. Do you see what I mean?

SL: Sure I do.

HP: Yes, and so I would point out each time that she did not take the rats, she didn't deplete the mothers of the rats of enough of this thing, and she didn't take the rats young enough. I pointed out, exactly where she could repeat my experiments if she'd do so, so the University of Michigan had as the head of the University of Michigan a man who had got his degree when I did at Yale, and was a very good friend of mine. He repeated my experiment exactly, and it was--and 03:09:00then the Department--the Food and Drugs were a little afraid, what if they were led astray--that it wasn't really so, so that they repeated my experiment, and found that I hadn't laid it on thick enough, that they got their subjects going down in their output of the vitamin, that it was even more than I had said. But they couldn't publish--they never publish results. Much of my publication has been where somebody couldn't publish their own results. The corn-canning company, the pea-canning company--they couldn't publish their own results--too commercial. But if they would endow me and I would find the same thing that they did, guided by their amounts that you had to feed and so on, I relied a good 03:10:00deal on their experiments. But it was my work. Then I could publish, and they could cite that. But the Food and Drugs couldn't publish their results, but they knew that my results were correct. So they stood behind it and brought a lawsuit--a very famous litigation in court--that stopped all of this advertising--absolutely stopped in its tracks--advertising the cocktail.

SL: The yeast cocktail?

HP: Yes.

SL: Do you think that such organizations as the Food and Drug Administration are still too weak?

HP: Yes, they could be protected by law, because they know of a good many irregularities that can't be corrected until certain things happen. Then they 03:11:00can go in, and then they can only threaten, and the instigation of their lawsuits are slow things--they have to go through certain forms. By that time, the commercial company has changed its tactics just enough, so that the evidence that they got, that they put through this long series, no longer stands. Oh, they're just hamstrung.

SL: I guess they always have been. I just thought of a [day of course?]--in 1906 was the passage of the first really strong food and drug laws in this country. Was it about this time that a kind of scientific interest in home economics really started developing?

HP: Well, I've--no, I don't think necessarily so, because there weren't many 03:12:00centers of Home economics that did the research like we did. California, yes, but that was an academic department, that--their clothing and anything like that was in a separate place over in another state college. At the university there Agnes Faye Morgan got her degree with Dr. Mendel, and Dr. Mendel, when it came to placing me, I didn't finish my discussion of that, he got these openings that I could have had--anything that he would recommend--they would be placed. So, Agnes Faye Morgan had asked for somebody to work out in her department.

SL: Excuse me, this is when you got your Ph.D.?

HP: No, she got her Ph.D. there with Dr. Mendel, but she was one of the 03:13:00departments in home economics that published. She belonged more to chemistry out there than she did to home economics, but officially she had the department of home economics and trained people and got their Ph.D.'s. But when Dr. Mendel began talking to me about the openings he had, oh, he laid them out, he had a whole set of openings. He said, "I have one here from Agnes Faye Morgan. Don't you go there! She'd kill you!" So, I guess she probably gave him some bad times. Oh, Agnes Faye and I--Miss Zuill was scared to death of her. They were on committees together. Miss Zuill could hardly breathe her name.

SL: She must have really been something!

HP: Oh, she was something! Oh, Miss Zuill was just petrified over Agnes Faye 03:14:00Morgan. Oh, Agnes Faye Morgan and I were buddies. We went to the Russian meeting together and oh, my, we had a grand time. So, Agnes Faye must have given Dr. Mendel quite a hard time. He might have had to walk the straight and narrow himself. And then, he had one from the University of Illinois. "Now," he said, "this one would pay you two or three times what any of the rest of these would pay you. You would just be sitting pretty if you took that one. Don't you do it!" said he. "That doesn't have the prestige that Wisconsin has." He mentioned some of the others. There was one out at Seattle. Oh, I can't remember. The places I could have gone.

SL: Now, you're talking about now in 1928?

HP: In 1928.

SL: When you got your Ph.D.?

HP: When I got my Ph.D. And Dr. Mendel has all these home economics openings, because he's an idol of home economics. And he believes in home economics. He likes them. And so he said, "Don't you take that Illinois one. Don't let money tempt you. Go back to Wisconsin. Associate with a campus that has real researchers." Now you see, fundamentally he respected Dr. McCollum, Professor Hart, Dr. Steenbock, all the rest. He did respect them. He had to scrap with them, to save his own honor, he had to put up a good fight, but essentially they weren't so far apart as all that would seem to indicate in the literature. So he said, you go back. Work on milk or any of those favorite foods out in Wisconsin. 03:16:00That's all right, but whatever you do out there will be real research. He says, you go out there and you become a source of pride to me as my former student. So that headed me out and, besides my wish to come back out here, why, I had his blessing. So there was no doubt.

SL: Shall we end here? I think it's a good time. We end on a very happy note.