Memories from Horace
Hood, B.S. 1944
======================
Early Warning
In 1941, freshmen registered in the chemistry curriculum were
likely to hear stories about some of the courses that lay ahead
of them, especially the courses that were particularly difficult
or were intimidating in some other way. The stories I heard were
about Chem 38, Identification of Organic Compounds, and Chem 50,
Biochemistry. The Identification course was said to be both difficult
and time-consuming beyond all others. Biochemistry was threatening
for a different reason, perhaps for being invasive, an intrusion
into your personal space. I found out later that both course descriptions
were accurate to an astonishing degree.
In Chem 38 we had to identify 6 separate compounds and all the
compounds (up to 5) in each of two mixtures. I must have gone
through the 6 simples too fast. The friendly graduate instructor,
Ben Aycock, gave me two mixtures that cut seriously into the time
I normally would spend eating, sleeping, and studying for other
things. I had not even realized they would let you work alone
in a deserted lab at night. The final blow was that I missed one
of the compounds in a mixture. Ben had managed to add to one mixture
a compound, not listed in our textbook, with derivatives mentioned
only in Beilstein, and with properties that were unusualó2-amino-pyridine.
Try testing that for primary, secondary or tertiary amine.
The first thing to say about Biochemistry is that I took the
course in the summer in a fourth-floor lab with sunny skylights
above lab benches that were coated with a black substance that
reminded one of the perfect black-body radiator. In those days
I sometimes used a bit of solvent to help in cleaning my glassware.
One bright day when I removed the cork from the bottle of ether,
the contents began to boil!
The unusual part of biochem lab work is that you are often analyzing
your own bodily fluids, like blood, urine and gastric juice. The
blood experiment was easy once you got used to cutting your own
finger to get the samples. For urine, the main problem was the
large glass bottle you had to carry around the campus for your
24-hour sample. The main problem with gastric juice was getting
the sample: you had to swallow a stomach tube. We were advised
by the teacher, Carl Vestling, that nobody would be excused from
this procedure. With the stomach tube in place, we had to eat
a ìtest mealî (piece of toast), and then take several samples
over a period of time. This meant that after aspirating each sample
from your stomach, you had to have the tube still hanging out
of one side of your mouth while you fitted a pipette into the
other side of your mouth to draw a measured sample for analysis.
Our class all performed well on this experiment and when we left
the lab that day, I think we each felt a new sense of maturity.
=================================================
Dr. G. Frederick Smith
Dr. G. Frederick Smith taught the course in instrumental analysis
back in the days when analysis usually meant precipitation and
weighing. I remember the course with favor, but most of my memories
are of Dr. Smith and some of his unusual characteristics.
Dr. Smith evidently had one bad eye which caused him not to face
you directly in conversation but to look away at about 30 degrees.
This caused me some trouble one day when he called on me during
a lecture and addressed me as Mr. Hode while looking, apparently,
at somebody else.
Many professors had friendly connections with chemical companies
for whom they consulted on industrial problems, but Dr. Smith
is the only prof I knew who actually owned a company that made
chemicals. Some of the analyses required in our course specified
the use of perchloric acid or ceric sulfate, both products of
the G. Frederick Smith Chemical Co. Both of these reagents were
very useful indeed and had evidently not been readily available
before Dr. Smith started his company. At the end of one lecture
on the use of ceric sulfate in oxidimetry, Dr. Smith called the
class to come forward and get a free copies of his cloth-bound
monograph on the subject.
The lecture from Dr. Smith I remember most is the one in which
he talked about nitrous oxide, one of his products, that he was
promoting for use as a propellant for food products. The big market
at that time was for propellant in the whipped cream dispensers
used by soda fountains. At the end of the lecture one day, Dr.
Smith brought out a huge tray of cookies and a large dispenser
of whipped cream. With a great flourish he started spraying the
cream on the cookies and called the class to come forward and
get their cookies.
====================================================
Dr. Frank B. Schirmer, 1941
After graduating from a southern Illinois high school in 1941,
I came to the University and managed to get into Chem 8 (after
passing the placement test). My buddy, Bill (William R.) Schmitz
from the same high school got in too. We compared notes and found
that for my quiz class, I had the lecturer, Dr. Schirmer, while
Bill had some graduate student. I felt sorry for Bill, but later
thought he made out pretty well. His graduate student instructor
was Fred Basolo.
In his quiz class, Dr. Schirmer told us that it was a requirement
that we all have slide rules. At a given date, about two weeks
ahead, he said he required that everybody would have a slide rule.
At the appointed day, Dr. Schirmer asked for those having slide
rules to hold them up so he could see them. Those who had none
were dismissed from that session of the class and told to bring
them next time to get back into the class.
In one of his lectures, Dr. Schirmer talked about the properties
of hydrogen and its combination with oxygen to form water. He
had at the lecture table a toy cannon that he managed to fill
with hydrogen and oxygen and to explode the mixture. The cannon
had been fitted with a cork at the end of the barrel. At the explosion,
the cork went like a bullet and hit the glass transom above the
doors in the back of the lecture hall. It cause several cracks
in the glass but no fallen pieces. Dr. Schirmer went on with the
lecture, explaining, I suppose, about exothermic reactions, and
seemed to accept the event without further commentary. I wondered
afterward what the planned trajectory had been, if any, and whether
all this had happened in previous demonstrations.
And, later, I remember Dr. Schirmer in the lab helping a student
to check out of the lab, and do all the required things to drop
the course. Dr. Schirmer was very upbeat, telling the student
how lucky he was to find out early that chemistry was not for
him. He could take his money and do something else; he could go
into business, etc. Of course, we never saw that student again.
====================================================
Poisons, 1941-1943
As a freshman in Chem 8, I was astonished to see a big bottle
on the side shelf labeled, "KCN." It was a dilute aqueous solution
of KCN that was required for some of the analytical tests. I was
amazed that there were not even any warning signs. It was implied
that chem students should know what is poisonous and what is not,
and, in any case, should not be ingesting any of the reagents
anyway. I felt I had been elevated into a higher society where
there were not going to be a lot of warnings.
Later (1943), as a senior doing a thesis on a derivative of nicotine,
I worked with Dr. Robert L. Frank. The first step in the lab was
to prepare nicotyrine by dehyrogenating the pyrrolidine ring of
nicotine. I got my starting material from a 1-L bottle of nicotine
that Dr. Frank had in his lab. There was some discussion of the
poisonous aspects of the reagent and I remember the requirement
that after liquid was poured from the bottle, the outside of the
bottle had to be wiped with paper or cloth towels, and the towels
had to be discarded (in the general trash) immediately. Again,
the careful handling of very toxic materials was simply something
to be expected from youthful chemists. (Maybe the ones that flunked
this test are no longer with us.)
====================================================
Dr. Fuson, Happy New Year, 1943-1944
As an undergrad in Alpha Chi Sigma, I learned a lot just listening
to the grad students. I know they all spent long hours in the
lab with the normal day ending at 9 or 10 p.m. I am not sure why
I was around on the week after Christmas in 1943, but I remember
the discussion about whether they would be required to work on
New Year's Day. The answer was given by a Fuson student who had
asked the boss if they were expected to come in on New Year's.
He said, Dr. Fuson smiled and said, "Well, I'll be here."
====================================================
Dr. Reedy on the Stairs
My recollection of Dr. Reedy is seeing him come down the old
wooden stairs in Noyes Lab while glaring very unpleasantly at
my friend, Calvin Stevens. I had no reason to know Dr. Reedy and
Steve was explaining to me who he was and why he was glaring.
The glare was because Steve was whistling to annoy Dr. Reedy who
evidently hated public whistling, especially where he could hear
it.
Dr. Reedy was known to us undergraduates as the author of trim
little text on qualitative analysis of inorganic compounds, and
as the founder of a table of oxidation potentials. In one of my
chemistry courses, I was told that there were two main tables
of oxidation potentials that differed simply in their use of plus
and minus signs. I think that meant you could change one table
into the other by multiplying everything by minus one. But, then
I was also told that there was a third table authored by Dr. Reedy.
It is hard now to think how a third table could exist, with the
other two pretty well covering the field. The implication was
that, except for the students in Dr. Reedy's classes, it was probably
safe to ignore his table.
====================================================
Chemistry Personnel Department
The Chemistry Department had no personnel department for students,
but they had something much better: they had some faculty members
dedicated to students and their welfare.
My first purely personnel encounter was a meeting with Dr. John
C. Bailar, Jr. I was told by one of my instructors that, as a
student in the chemistry curriculum, I should make an appointment
with Dr. Bailar and just tell him how I was doing and what program
I intended to follow. My plan, unchanged from high school, was
to take chemistry, and if all went well, to go ahead and get a
Ph. D.
The second faculty member to take care of me was Dr. Robert L.
Frank, my senior thesis advisor. I do not remember any personnel
type discussions, but Dr. Frank did a lot of work that I did not
know about at the time.
The third faculty member that advised me was Dr. R. C. Fuson.
When I was about to graduate in the spring of 1944, I was advised
to pick a graduate school. I picked the U of MN with Dr. Fuson's
approval. He said something like, "It is a little different up
there. Some days you will think that they regard the Ph.D. as
something like the Nobel Prize. Also, I know you liked Illinois,
but try not to wave the Orange and Blue too much up there."
Three weeks after graduation I was inducted into the Navy where
I studied electronics for two years. A week after I got out of
the Navy, I discovered that Dr. Frank had found an NRC fellowship
for me to cover my stay in Minnesota.
====================================================
