Once We All Had Gills: Growing Up Evolutionist in an Evolving World

6. Transformations

65 Transformations After one more family move, I did my last year before college in another new school, Gateway Senior High in the Pittsburgh suburb of Monroeville. As many of my classmates were also new students who had just transferred there with the metastasis of suburban sprawl, no cliques of cool kids had built up and the teachers were good. PerhapsthebestwasourexceedinglysarcasticEnglishteacher,whosuppliedjusttherightattitudeforreadingabouttheodditiesoftheMacbeth family and Julius Caesar’s unfortunate misjudgment of his friends. Two of my Gateway friends eventually took doctoral degrees in science. Tom Taylor became a mechanical engineer, and Mary Boesman became an immunologist. She died in 2007. Mary and I both read history and lent each other books. This was the best of my twelve-year run of schools, and I remember it fondly. But that pleasant year also included the looming matter of where I should go to college. Given what my family could afford, my choices were limited.I could attend a universityinPittsburghandliveathomeor attend the state university and live away. Not much of a contest. Despite the good universities around Pittsburgh, living at home would suffocate my becoming independent. After all the adventures of filling in applications ,takingCollegeBoardexams,beinginterviewed,andsittinginona sprinkle of college class lectures, I left for Pennsylvania State University in the fall of 1959. My parents took me to State College and helped me move into my first dorm, but I was anxious for them to leave. I now had to make my own triumphs and my own missteps (ludicrous missteps outnumbered triumphs that first year). Our first assembly as freshman six 66 Becoming a Naturalist students included an address by the president of Penn State. He told us to look at the person on our left and the person on the right. One of them wouldbegonebeforetheyear’send.Perhapsthatencouraginginvitation to embarrassed sidelong glances constituted what might be described as a subtle preparation for life. My mother, who had tolerated years of pet salamanders, turtles, snakes, and lizards, kindly agreed to care for the last of the reptile host after I left. That was Ferdinand, my South American green iguana, who couldn’t be just released back into nature in Pennsylvania like the local reptiles I kept. Unfortunately, she didn’t know that reptiles are highly sensitive to insecticide, and so she sprayed his cage to rid it of fruit flies. It was a lethal neurotoxin for Ferdinand the iguana too. College was my first experience living away from home, and my first year was tough, because I was homesick and because I was not really enthralled by most of my classes. I was enrolled as a major in chemistry. This choice may seem surprising considering my natural history interests and my formative experiencesatCarnegieMuseum.However,myfatherwasachemistand persuaded me that doing biology required learning hard science as well. I had a strong liking for chemistry itself, but not for much of the rest of therequirementsoftheprogram,especiallythecoursesIhadnoaptitude for: math and German. I enjoyed the Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC) as something completely different–even the weekly drilling in brilliantly shined shoes and pressed uniforms. We marched with shouldered rifles across a well-mowed campus lawn accompanied by a brass band. The U.S. Navy is traditional in its ways. Our drill rifle was the bolt-action model 1903 Springfield, designed at the end of the nineteenth century. On the suggestion of my Carnegie Museum friends, I got in touch with George and Alice Beatty, two entomologists who lived a short distance away in a tiny village, Lemont, at the foot of Nittany Mountain, a long ridge that looms over State College. George was an autodidact with a photographic memory and a spectacular library of books on natural history.Hewassimultaneouslycharming,expansive,anddifficult.Alice hadaliltingTexasaccent.Shewasgenerousandineffectual.Onewasdecisive ,onewasindecisive,andsotheymadegoodpartners.Georgecame from the Philadelphia suburbs and lived on an apparently quite satisfac- Transformations 67 tory family inheritance. Almost unheard of in the twentieth century, he workedinthe manner of a nineteenth-centurygentleman scientist inhis house on his own funds, generating a vast private dragonfly collection. Despite his enormous talent, George completed little research, but he taughtmeatreasureofnaturalhistoryloreandthebasicskillsofwildlife photography.HeandAliceprovidedasortofhomeawayfromhomeand took me out on frequent weekend dragonfly collecting trips in the little known wild places in the mountains–a wonderful break from campus. The mountaintop peat bogs and the clear streams of the Appalachians were a world of unique environments with unusual plants and insects. That’s where I saw my first insect-eating pitcher plants. George and Alice introduced...