AR Berkeley again

Life in Berkeley

When we left Oberlin, Mrs. Clara Jones had given us the name and address of her sister, Dr, Susan Sargent, who resided in the Berkeley Hills. She had also written to her sister that we would soon be arriving in Berkeley and had asked her to locate affordable and conveniently located living quarters for us. So, our first effort on reaching Berkeley was directed to finding Dr. Sargent at her home. We were fortunate and pleased to learn that she had located a small, second-floor apartment in an old house on the corner of Vine and Oxford, not many blocks to the north of the university campus, and conveniently close to a small shopping center. The apartment consisted of one room to which a small kitchenette, and a stall with a washbowl were attached. For sleeping, our all-purpose room was provided with a pull-down bed that, during the day, stood on end against the wall, hidden behind a curtain. Toilet facilities and a shower were available to us down the hall. The price asked by the landlady was $13 per month, with two additional dollars for the garage to accommodate our car.

On reporting for work at the university, I found that the Zoology Department was housed in a portion of the immense, four-story Life Sciences building that had been constructed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). It had been built around a huge central court into which several wings extended from the two sides into the interior to accommodate various laboratories.

It was explained to me that my custodial work would consist of caring for the small museum collection, growing various protozoans and other cultured organisms for class use, color-injecting and preserving all the dogfish sharks used in the introductory zoology course, color-inject and preserve all the turtles and pigeons used for dissection by the comparative anatomy class. Also to color-inject and embalm all the cats used in that same course. Additionally, my job description included collecting and preserving various invertebrates like starfish for class use and to collect various kinds of experimental materials, like planarian worms, the eggs of salamanders and tree tods, and the eggs of various marine animals like the fat innkeeper worm (Urechis caupo). The worms containing these eggs were to be had only on the outer coast of Bolinas Bay when the tide was out. On certain occasions other special research materials that a graduate student might need for his or her research purposes also had to be provided.

As already stated, this two-thirds time rated job required me to restrict my course registration to only six credit hours. But I was also assigned to teaching one laboratory section in zoology that, in itself, represented one-half of the teaching load of a half-time teaching assistant. My first assignment upon arrival was to tidy up the museum collections of the Zoology Department.

Berkeley is a beautifully situated city overlooking San Francisco Bay, and the Golden Gate beyond. To the south of the Golden Gate lies the city of San Francisco with its numerous tall buildings. On the peninsula to the north of the Golden Gate, majestic Mount Tamalpais dominates the landscape. The cool coastal climate often involves overcast skies in the summer, with October bringing abundant sunshine. Coast redwoods grow in some of the ore protected valleys of the coast ranges in the bay area. But the Berkeley hills generally support a more varied flora of live oak and bay laurel. Many Australian Eucalyptus trees have been planted here as throughout many other parts of California.

When school started on August 1, I was fully occupied with my work obligations and studies. We graduate students soon learned about a change in departmental policy to be inaugurated at this time. Dr. Charles Kofoid, Chairman of the Zoology Department, had got it into his head that the candidates for the doctorate were spending too much of their time and energy in preparation for the qualifying examination, and putting off for too long the pursuit of their research and the preparation of their dissertation. Therefore, the dates for these examinations were precipitously advanced, and my qualifying examination was scheduled early during the course of the second semester, at a time when I had only earned six credit hours at the university. Earlier, my supervising committee had designated what course work I was to pursue in order to supplement my undergraduate studies. One of the stipulated courses was Human Physiology. But when my examination was over, the professor who taught that course and participated in the questioning ruled that I should be excused from that requirement.

Lucile was looking for work. We really needed more to live on than the $600 annual salary I was paid. At first, she worked in various faculty homes. But on the 10th of December, 1934, she was able to capitalize on her studies in sociology and began employment as a pre-professional social worker for the State Emergency Relief Administration. The S.E.R.A. had been established by the State of California to help the countless number of unemployed workers who had lost their jobs during the Great Depression, which was then in full swing.

During our four years in Berkeley, this job helped her not only in paying off all of her college debts, but eventually even permitted her to purchase a small upright Wurlitzer piano.

Frequently, I had to make very early morning collecting trips across the bay on the Richmond Ferry, then to continue across the northern peninsula to meet the low tide at Bolinas Bay. But two memorable experiences stand out during my first year as zoological collector while at Berkeley. One of Dr. Kofoid’s students was writing his dissertation on the morphology of an elaborately complex ciliated protozoan that normally inhabits the caecum of the elephant’s gut. Dr. Kofoid had once shot an elephant in India, bringing back not only the tusks, but also the content of the caecum, properly preserved in fixing fluid. Near the end of the student’s research project the supply of specimens provided by the material collected in India had begun to give out. However, a circus was coming to town.

My assignment as the department’s collector this time was to go to the circus and collect some of the freshly voided dung of the circus elephants, to “fix”, that is preserve, this material properly with hot Schaudin’s fluid and to bring it back to the university in the hope that it would contain some of the desired, outstandingly complex, protozoans. The circus personnel were quite helpful and cooperative. Several elephants were instructed to rise up on their hind legs. This effort placed such stress on their abdomen muscles that they responded by voiding copiously. I was all ready for action, and fixed the warm, steaming dung in thermos jars containing the hot preserving fluid. Unfortunately, the passage from the caecum, down the colon and to the anus is not survived by the active form of this protozoan, and Dr. Kofoid and his graduate student had to do without. But many a grin and smile were directed toward me when the story of this collecting trip was mentioned.

The other really memorable experience of my year as collector, etc., was also occasioned by a shortage of research material for one of the graduate students approaching the end of her studies. This time, the need was a supply of wood roaches, whose parasitic protozoans were the subject of research. These large wood-boring, cockroach-resembling insects living in decaying logs were known to occur in the South River Redmond State Park to the north, near the Oregon border. So my 1929 Ford again served as the expeditionary vehicle for a round trip of about 800 miles. Through much of the night, two other graduate students and I drove the narrow Redwood Highway, often winding this way and that among the gigantic redwood trees. All in all, it was a wonderful trip into the country at that time entirely new to me and very much appreciated.

By the end of my first year, with the qualifying examination behind me, I was a full-fledged candidate for the doctor of philosophy degree. This time, I was appointed as a regular half-time teaching assistant. Thus I was able to leave the drudgery of the so-called custodial job and concern myself with more intellectual pursuits. This appointment also left my summer free of assigned work.

One of the requirements for the doctorate in zoology at Berkeley was a hand-on seaside course in marine zoology. For the summer of 1935, the Zoology Department of the University of California arranged for the rental of several cabins and a recreational hall at the resort town of Dillon Beach on the northern California coast near the open end of the long and narrow Tomales Bay (where the San Andreas Fault leaves the land and passes into the ocean). With Professor S.F. Light as instructor, several of us graduate students then moved to Dillon Beach for about two months to pursue our study of marine zoology. It was a wonderful, enriching intellectual and educational experience, an essential foundation for a zoological career.

The following three school years were crowded with obligations as teaching assistant in various courses in zoology, sometimes requiring theoretical as well as laboratory instruction, including the writing of the instructional manual. My research field was to be pursued under the guidance of Dr. J. Frank Daniel, my major professor. It dealt with the embryonic development of the head musculature of the local salamander or newt Triturus Torosus.

But there also was time for occasional outings with our colleagues and their wives. On one such excursion, we drove to the summit of Mount Tamalpais, with a fantastic view of the San Francisco area, including that city to the south and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Several times, Lucile and I were welcomed at Dr. Sargent’s woodland cabin on the Russian River.

After the first year of occupying the tiny apartment described above, Lucile and I greatly improved our living situation by taking advantage of the fortuitous opportunity to move across the hall to a larger apartment facing to the west. The living room of this unit has a picture window providing us with an obstructed view above the roofs to the west. This panorama across the bay centered on the Golden Gate with the city of San Francisco to the left and the northern peninsula with Mount Tamalpais to the right. We had arrived in Berkeley in 1934 when the foundations for the towers of the Golden Gate bridge had been laid and when the visible bridge construction included only the lower portions of the two great supporting towers. By the time we moved into our west-facing apartment the towers had, of course, “grown” taller. But it was to be our very special privilege to see most of the construction of that beautiful and renowned bridge from our living room as the towers grew taller and taller and as the road bed progressed from the south and from the north, eventually to meet at midpoint. This gigantic span, linking the southern peninsula and San Francisco with coastal northern California, was completed prior to our departure from Berkeley. Together with the Bay bridge that was also constructed during the depression years of the thirties, these two architectural achievements provided us with the first  part of the route for our departure to Walla Walla in 1938.

During the third summer of my Berkeley residence, Lucile and I took an extended trip to learn more about the state of California. For this adventure, we invited Lucile’s 19-year-old brother Leonard to accompany us. Our first destination lay to the north in Lake County. There we camped for a few days on the shore of picturesque Clear Lake, with its many birds. We then turned east and then north on the Golden State Highway to make our way to Red Bluff, and again turned east to visit Mount Lassen National Park. Although by this time we had passed the middle of June, the snow still lay deep at the base of this southernmost volcanic peak of the Cascades. We were obliged to make camp outside the park entrance at Bluff Falls campground. We did, however, ascend the lower slope of this deeply snow-covered volcano. And as I had already begun at Clear Lake, I continued to trap for small mammals, and here I added a beautiful golden-mantled ground squirrel to my growing collection of study skins.

After Mount Lassen, we returned to the Sacramento Valley and then ascended the Feather River Canyon to reach the lake country of the northern Sierra Nevada. On this canyon route, our old Ford developed differential gear trouble. So, we camped in a cow pasture along a mountain creek while awaiting the repair of our car. From the lake country of the northern Sierra Nevada, where we were tortured by dense swarms of very aggressive mosquitoes, we drove south to beautiful Lake Tahoe, visiting Emerald Bay and also hiking to Fallen Leaf Lake. By car, we made our way down the east side of the Sierra range, passing Mono Lake and then recrossing the crest of the mountains via Tioga Pass from the east, thus entering Yosemite National Park at Tuolumne Meadows, driving down to the valley floor a little later. After several days at Yosemite, visiting its monumental granite cliffs, spectacular waterfalls and giant sequoia groves, we descended the western slope of the Sierras into the San Joaquin Valley for a visit in Reedley. Then we headed south, crossing the Tehachapi Mountains to visit my relatives in Pasadena and Lucile’s relatives in Upland, as well as returning Leonard to his home.

The financial support that the University of California and the Department of Zoology extended to candidates for advanced degrees came in the form of the salary paid to the teaching assistants. The opportunities to earn these stipends were much sought after, and were rationed, so to speak, to three years for any one candidate. So the question naturally arose whether my first year as “custodian” should be so reckoned, or whether I too was eligible for a three-year-teaching assistantship. It was, of course, a real relief to learn that such would be the case, giving me a total of four years of salary income during my graduate study period.

More and more time now had to be devoted to advancing by research, involving the learning of workable techniques and skills. The teaching obligations of my job, including many hours of paper grading, always demanded precedence over time devoted to my own research and the writing of the dissertation. So our third summer was all spent in Berkeley, with me deeply engaged in my research and Lucile continuing in her employment.

Although my teaching obligations were heavy and time-consuming, they were also very important learning experiences counting toward my eventual employability on the faculty of some college or university. During the depression years, getting a job after completing the work for the degree was an overriding concern. One possibility that several of my teaching assistant colleagues and I were considering was a position on the faculty of a junior college, of which California had quite a few. That required special state certification that, in turn, required the completion of several courses in the Department of Education. These included field trips and visitations to several junior college campuses in the surrounding area. These concerns came on top of our teaching obligations, research and dissertation writing. During the spring term of the 1937-38 school year, I was an active, even an anxious, candidate for a job.

The Department of Zoology did receive inquiries from various institutions throughout the United States concerning available, trained personnel to fill vacancies on their staff. One such inquiry, I later learned, had come from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. They were in need of a vertebrate zoologist to fill a vacancy for an assistant professor at a salary of $2,300. I would have been the candidate for that job. Dr. Daniel, my major professor, who had become the Chairman of the Department of Zoology, apparently felt that he should first wait for a better offer, and so pocketed this inquiry until word came from Albuquerque saying that they had wanted a person from the University of California, but having received no reply from Berkeley, had turned to Cornell to fill their vacancy.