The Guardian Poplar : A Memoir of Deep Roots, Journey, and Rediscovery [1 ed.] 9781607819981, 9781607811824

Citation preview

The Guardian Poplar

Birger Sandzén, Guardian Poplar, 1929, lithograph. Courtesy of The Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery.

The Guardian Poplar a Memoir of Deep Roots, Journey, and Rediscovery

Chase Nebeker Peterson Foreword by Cornel West

The University of Utah Press Salt Lake City

Copyright © 2012 by the University of Utah Press. All rights reserved.

The Defiance House Man colophon is a registered trademark of the University of Utah Press. It is based upon a four-foot-tall, Ancient Puebloan pictograph (late PIII) near Glen Canyon, Utah. 16 15 14 13 12      1 2 3 4 5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Peterson, Chase N. The guardian poplar : a memoir of deep roots, journey, and rediscovery/ Chase Nebeker Peterson. p.  cm. Includes index. EISBN 978-1-60781-998-1 (eBook) 1. Peterson, Chase N. 2. Physicians—United States—Biography. 3. College presidents—Utah—Biography. 4. University of Utah—Presidents—Biography. 5. Harvard University—Professional staff—Biography. 6. Cancer—Patients—United States—Biography. 7. Mormons—United States—Biography. I. Title. R154.P46A3 2012 610.92—dc23 [B] 2011045223 Index by Andrew L. Christenson

“I would ask you to remember only this one thing,” said Badger. “ἀ e stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away when they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. ἀ is is why we put these stories in each other’s memories. ἀ is is how people care for themselves.” —Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel

Contents

Foreword by Cornel West  ix An Appreciation by Greg Prince  xi Preface: An Interesting Case  xv Acknowledgments   xix Part 1  The Sun Rises in the Pioneer West

1. “The Lord Was Right”: Peterson and Geddes Immigrants   3 2. “There Is Always a Way”: Nebeker and Hulme Immigrants   24 3. Zero to Fifteen: Growing Up in Logan   47 Part 2  The East, a Second Dawn



4. 5. 6. 7.

Concord: Middlesex School, a New Culture   61 Harvard College: A Unity of Faith and Reason, Intellect and Culture   69 Harvard Medical School: Professional Rigor   90 Yale Residency to Utah Practice: Thirty-six Hours on, Twelve off to Live Happily Ever After  101

Part 3  From Utah, Back to Boston

8. Harvard College Admissions: Rich in the Particulars   117 9. Harvard University Vice Presidency: Alumni and Development, and Faith Revisited  142 Part 4  Back to the West, a Second Sunset

10. Utah Medical Sciences: Max, Brigham, and a Favoring Culture   159 11. University of Utah: “Why Did They Make You President?”   179 12. “They Will Only Laugh at You”: Cold Fusion   212 13. “What Am I Now?”: Medicine, Teaching, Practice, and Sick Myself   242 14. The Matter of Home  274 Epilogue  280 Notes  287 Index  291 Photographs follow page 156

Foreword

Chase Peterson is my dear friend and brother. He is one of the most loving and wise persons I have met in my fifty-eight years on this blessed Earth. He also is one of the great figures in contemporary American higher education. I have known Chase since the fall of 1970, when we met at Harvard College, and I have cherished our friendship over four decades. I have been delighted to see him and his lovely wife, Grethe, when I have lectured at the University of Utah—including a Tanner lecture almost twenty years ago. And I was overjoyed at the notion of a memoir written by this educational titan of such high character and integrity. Yet I had no idea what was in store for me (and us!)—a powerful history of the past American century that weaves the rich legacy of a precious Mormon family in and through the complex threads of social, political, and technological change. This is a poignant narrative of a beloved and gifted individual named Chase, who made a journey from Logan, Utah, through Middlesex School to Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, then back to Utah medical practice and research, returned to a Harvard deanship and vice presidency, back to a vice presidency and the presidency of the University of Utah, and then back to medical practice and teaching. This is a classic American story of a profound appreciation of one’s roots and a passionate curiosity to pursue one’s routes to different corners of the globe. It is a fascinating tale of how one person accepts a call to “build up the kingdom” by always “remembering who he is” and “bringing home with him” wherever he goes. His commitments to personal dignity, individual responsibility, and social justice loom large in this colorful tapestry that constitutes his exciting life. When I first met Chase Peterson as a Harvard freshman—along with our joint friend and brother, David Evans—something deeply touched me. It was not only his sincere smile and open embrace but also a sense that here was a kind and courageous man comfortable in his own skin, secure in who he was, yet eager to encounter new persons, new experiences, and new challenges. Like the great American philosopher William James—whose house Chase and Grethe bought and lived in for many years in Cambridge—Chase struck me as an authentic

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American pioneer. He was from Utah in New England, a Mormon in old Harvard, and a medical doctor in the deanship of admissions. Little did I know that his journey would enhance and enrich my own—owing to his critical allegiance to his family, his faith, his friends, and his citizenship in the country and the world. His prophetic witness at Harvard in the turbulent ’60s and ’70s, his promotion of black priesthood in the Mormon Church, his support of antiapartheid protests in the ’80s, and his steadfast defense of academic freedom in the Cold Fusion controversy of the early ’90s all express his quiet and humble effort to be true to himself—a self grounded in, but not limited by, a rich Mormon tradition. He has never forgotten the event of 1857 when 20 percent of the pre–Civil War federal army gathered at Fort  Douglas (named after Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln’s electoral foe) to “keep watch over” or maybe conquer Mormons in the Utah territory. As a descendent of American persecution and a beneficiary of American opportunity, Chase Peterson represents much of the best of American history— trying to master the art of living by transforming our loneliness into true grit, sustaining our love through gratitude to others, and filtering our curiosity through fallible, scientific temperaments. Needless to say, the love of music—especially Mozart, Mahler and Christian hymns—is part and parcel of Chase Peterson. And his brave and prayerful dance with mortality is a spiritual inspiration and musical feat in and of itself. The world is a better place, America is a grander democratic experiment, and I am a more blessed person because of Chase Peterson. Thank you—my dear brother Chase! Your memoir is a testament to the best of the human spirit! •  Cornel West

An Appreciation

Chase Peterson has lived an extraordinary life. Born in a time and place where geography and education defined—and confined—destiny, he became a “doctor without borders” both in career and location. At the time I first met him in 1967, he had already broken with convention by leaving Cache Valley as a teenager to attend a prestigious prep school in Massachusetts, a move that was only possible because a scholarship offered funding that his father’s post–Great Depression savings could not accommodate. He returned to the East for college and medical school, initiated a practice in internal medicine in Salt Lake City, and was about to shatter convention again by setting aside his practice to move into a completely new profession as dean of admissions for Harvard University. Three official careers followed: vice president of Harvard University, vice president for health services at the University of Utah, and president of the University of Utah. Yet even these careers did not define or confine him. As emeritus president, he chose to return to the lecture hall and clinic to teach medicine—and much more—to students. And perhaps the most intriguing of his careers has been his decade-plus double role as cancer physician/patient. Chase has not allowed his mind and spirit to be any more confined than his body. While many are obsessed with their past to the point where they have difficulty dealing with their present and future, and others are obsessed with their future to the detriment of their past and present, Chase has managed to balance looking forward and backward with savoring the present. The result, both in real time and autobiography, has been an extraordinary sense of presence. What others would have seen as rooms to confine have, to him, become corridors to traverse. What would have presented impediments or embarrassments to others have been passports to even greater adventures for him. And pervading everything has been an infectious optimism that is rooted in experience and reality, rather than fantasy. Within the chapters of this extraordinary autobiography lies a refreshing blend of news and editorials. Rather than attempting to string his life story together as a continuous chain of beads, Chase relives and reflects upon his life and then offers the reader those anecdotes and observations that eight decades of life and thought have found notable. In some cases, the result is a single sentence; in others, a brief

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paragraph; and in still others, most or all of a chapter. Yet there is symmetry in this approach, perhaps because it mirrors the way we live our lives. Chase has managed to be self-aware without becoming self-absorbed, to take the reader along on his journey of rediscovery without preaching, whining, or boasting. It is clear that he has not only lived a full life but has also reexamined it repeatedly. To be given a passenger seat as Chase retraces his life journey creates an extraordinary voyage for the reader. As a man of science and faith—a rare combination in an increasingly secular world—he manages, to an unusual extent, to decipher the “so what?” of his life. In so doing, he offers assistance to others to do the same. Two parts of the book rise to the level of historical significance because Chase had a front-row seat for them. The first is the story of Barney Clark, the first recipient of an artificial heart. The behind-the-scenes account of the way to manage what might be called “celebrity medicine” is instructive to those who deal with similar situations on an increasingly common basis in a world where video cameras and the 24-hour news cycle are unending. The second is the ongoing saga of cold fusion, which began at the University of Utah. The passage of more than two decades has allowed a detailed and thoughtful treatment of an era that was often painful and embarrassing to individuals and institutions, but whose scientists and science have subsequently been vindicated. Put simply, cold fusion is no longer an “if.” The only question now is whether the phenomenon has commercial potential. If the answer to that question is yes—and Chase makes it clear that we still cannot articulate the answer—the work of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons will change the world. This story alone makes the entire book worth publishing and reading. As intriguing as these two pieces of history are, it is the story of Chase’s cohabitation with cancer that is likely to resonate most deeply with the reader. A decade and a half ago, he learned that a plasma cell—the type of immune cell that normally produces the antibodies that keep us alive in the face of continual assault from the microorganisms that surround us—had mutated and caused an aggressive form of cancer known as multiple myeloma. The prognosis was, and remains, poor for this kind of cancer. Fully aware of this, Chase refused to surrender himself to fate and instead seized the once-in-a-lifetime chance to understand oncology from the inside out and participate in managing his own disease. After a lifetime of challenging the status quo of everything around him, he challenged the state of multiple myeloma therapy. In collaboration with his oncologists at Utah and Harvard, he embarked on a journey with thalidomide, a drug that two generations earlier had been universally condemned—and shelved—because of the devastating

An Appreciation  •  xiii

effect it had on developing fetuses. In a remarkably choreographed pas de deux of tumor and drug, Chase—with a bit of good fortune because this therapy has not always produced positive results—has already outlived his prognosis by more than a decade—and is still going strong. A life is not lived this well by accident. Chase gives full credit to the parents, spouse, environment, and religion that liberated, rather than confined, him. While others cannot replicate the first three items on this list, those who choose are invited to participate in a brand of Mormonism that not only allows but enables intellects and spirits to soar without limitation. The founder of that religious tradition, Joseph Smith, once said of a doctrine, “It tastes good.” Indeed, the religion of Chase Peterson tastes good to me, and I am indebted to him for being a role model for my own journey within that spiritual tradition. •  Greg Prince

Preface: An Interesting Case

There is much about the prospect of dying that changes living. Those facing a terminal diagnosis seem to be either terrified or invigorated. The timing is critical. If death seems imminent in quantifiable hours, days, or months, the energy of the experience may be consumed by managing fear and attending to housekeeping: whom to thank, what papers to put in order, what misunderstanding to correct, what to leave to whom as expressions of love. However, a person lucky enough to have a year or more has an incentive and time enough to distill what substance and pattern underlie his or her life. Lucky survivors of the initial onslaught may better understand which of their joyful and painful memories are worth sharing. I had such an experience. My response to the diagnosis of my bone-marrow cancer—multiple myeloma—was at first intellectual. It was something I could imagine myself presenting as a medical resident at Yale some forty years ago at the weekly conference we called Grand Rounds. Those meetings were reserved for especially interesting cases. They took place in the physically tired, but intellectually revered, Fitkin Auditorium at Yale. What pungent words those are: an interesting case. How many times have uneasy patients heard their physicians comment, “What an interesting case you have”? The doctor in me provided an initial shield for the impact that was to come. I was like an airline pilot flying through turbulence. My training directed my attention to the aerodynamic challenge of the situation and blocked out most of the airsickness or morbid thoughts that might plague a passive passenger. Knowing enough of the process of my disease allowed me to stay focused on the details, the pathophysiology. The prognosis was that I would die in two or three years. That had a reality that contained some comfort. Knowing how much time I probably had, I set to work putting plans into motion that largely displaced panic. In any case, the prospect ultimately resulted in a decision to write down my stories, only to have good fortune and excellent medical advice combine to control my cancer—though not cure it—and extend my life beyond the initial diagnosis.

xvi  •  Preface

I have had time to see patterns in my life, probe the meaning of family and faith more deeply, and relish the challenge of telling my stories, which speak directly of those I love and maybe even relate to larger human issues. This book is not the memoir of a student or academician, although I have spent seventy-three years of my life on five college and university campuses. It is not the memoir of a scientist, although I have lived in that world on both quiet and conspicuous occasions. It is not the memoir of a teacher, although I have been one off and on all my adult life. It is not the memoir of a physician, although the way a doctor thinks has influenced all I have done since I left medical school fifty-two years ago, whether I was caring for patients or living in some corner of education or the body politic. Then what is this book? It is a collection of stories that shed light on my particular human and spiritual journey. These stories may provide some insight into several institutions and the people and ideas that populate them. If I can tell my stories well and honestly, they may transcend the boundaries of my life as a husband, father, doctor, teacher, administrator, and Mormon to reach those who are on their own path through life toward death. Mine are stories of a number of unexpected journeys that were simultaneously emotional, intellectual, and cultural, as well as geographic. I traveled far, yet in many ways, I never left home. The first pulse of my journey came from my parents and our family’s deep roots in the West. I begin with them and the ranch homesteaded in the nineteenth century by my great-grandfather and his son, which nurtured a sense of belonging to a culture, family, and religion, as well as to the land. The heart of the journey is a love affair with a woman—my wife, Grethe— extending to a love affair with our children and grandchildren. I would give all I am or will ever be in payment for the life my family nourished in me. (I ask the reader to pronounce the beautiful name my wife inherited from her Danish grandmother, Ane Grethe, as the Americanized “Greta.” It has served a wonderful person well after surviving the grade-school teasing of “Annie Gre-thee.”) A college campus in the West was a second parent, helping to raise me to adolescence. The rest of my travels were largely unplanned: a New England prep school; an old New England college; medical schools in Boston, New Haven, and later Salt Lake City. A two-year army medical service in Germany was followed by what I thought would be the lifelong practice and teaching of medicine. My stories continue with a medical practice in the urban West and later on the seacoast of New England. My journey encompasses an unplanned deanship at Harvard College, followed by vice presidencies at old Harvard and the relatively

Preface  •  xvii

new University of Utah. It touches on entrepreneurial work with the shah in Iran and biomedical start-up companies in Utah. Its conspicuous capstone was a university presidency at Utah, followed by a return to the new medicine of the latetwentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. My journey includes the way—as a doctor—I became a patient. The milestones are both institutions and people. The institutions enriched me and provided a platform for my ideas while they challenged me to remember who I was apart from them. As with the first pulse, the end of my journey returns to my parents and our family’s deep roots. This starting place—Logan, Utah—informs the beginning, the course, and the end of my story. T. S. Eliot’s familiar lines say as much: “And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”1 This leads me to ask, Did deep roots shrink or enlarge opportunity, dampen or strengthen courage? Did they narrow or broaden curiosity or imagination? Did they constrain or free the mind and spirit? I hope that those who read these stories find the answer . . . if not mine, then their own.

Acknowledgments

This book began with encouragement from two professors emeriti of English, Sidney Hyman of the University of Chicago and David Kranes of the University of Utah, and it is not likely that it would have taken on life without the regular encouragement of Professor Kranes. I thank them both. I also need to thank Greg Thompson of the Special Collections Department of the J. Willard Marriott Library, who earlier had initiated an oral history of my years at the University of Utah for the Utah Archives. In the process of writing, my appreciation has deepened for the experience of my parents and grandparents in the American Dream of the nineteenth century. They were part of the colonizing of the West while helping to create a culture that was both pioneering and spiritual. I received valuable assistance from Marianne Macy and Alice Peck. A good part of any grace that may have become part of this effort has come from their editorial skill and steady encouragement. Three physicists, Michael  E. Melilch of the Naval Post-Graduate school, Michael McKubre of the Stanford Research Laboratories, and David Nagel formerly of the Naval Research Laboratory, provided understanding and updates on Cold Fusion. Charles Beaudette has written the most comprehensive review of the history of that interesting topic. My conclusions are my own. The faculty and staff of the University of Utah Department of Family and Preventive Medicine have provided collegial and warm support for my reentry into the teaching and practice of medicine. Special thanks to Julie Fryer and Larry Bonnette for “computer tutorial” underscoring the mechanics of twenty-first-century writing. Glenda Cotter, head of the University of Utah Press, has become an invaluable advisor and friend. Peter DeLafosse, together with Jessie Booth, Linda Manning, and Barbara Bannon have each played a critical role in bringing the central process of writing into print. First and finally, my immediate and eternal thanks go to my wife Grethe for living and growing with me as a family of two, then three children and thirteen grandchildren. We have all helped and nourished each other.

Pa rt 1

The Sun Rises in the Pioneer West

1 “The Lord Was Right”: Peterson and Geddes Immigrants

“Brother Eccles, if I had your boys, I wouldn’t, either.”

Wallace Stegner, the great writer of the American pioneer West, wrote of the sense of rootlessness he suffered in his youth as his father moved from one western town to another in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in search of a livelihood, if not fortune. He wrote, “Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend,”1 to which I might add, “and the adventurous fully cherish.” My father never said as much, but his parents must have had some of the same emotion when they immigrated from coherent towns and cultures in Scotland and Bornholm, a Danish island in the Baltic Sea, to the vastness of the American West. However, there was something that did, in fact, root the family in the new American experiment. It was the Mormon colonization process that offered opportunities— if not great wealth—for all. Pursuing such an opportunity prompted the Peterson clan to move to Plain City, Utah, and then Baker City, Oregon. The American dream sat on the stage of a religious movement. David Eccles was also an entrepreneurial Scottish immigrant, attracted to America by the message of Mormon missionaries on the streets of Glasgow. He founded the sawmill and box factory in Baker City, Oregon, a small timber town near the Idaho border where available jobs drew many first-generation immigrants. It was pretty much a company town, perhaps even a Mormon company town. David’s son Marriner was the first to tell me a powerful story about my paternal grandmother, Agnes Geddes Peterson, who was a Scottish immigrant. The

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story must have made the rounds of the community, for my father later confirmed what Marriner had told me. David Eccles pretty much owned everything. The Petersons—father and sons— labored in the box factory. Walking a dusty path on the way to church services one Sunday, Eccles turned to Agnes and said, “Sister Peterson, what’s this I hear about you taking in boarders and doing washing to raise extra money to send your boys to college? Why, I’m not even sending my sons to college.” At something like fivefoot, four-inches tall, my grandmother faced up to him and said, “Brother Eccles, if I had your boys, I wouldn’t, either!” Actually the Eccles boys did go to college, and they turned out all right. Marriner, together with brother George, grandson Spencer, and other family members became the leading financial force in the Intermountain West. Marriner organized a consortium to build the Boulder Dam (now the Hoover Dam) in Nevada. Later, Marriner ended up as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board under President Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Marriner was the architect of the New Deal plan that infused federal funds into the economy, which in that day was revolutionary, though it is now commonplace. The Federal Reserve Building in Washington, D. C., carries his name. My encounter with Marriner was also a small testament to the American dream. When he told me that story of his father and my grandmother, he had retired from the Federal Reserve Board, and I was a Harvard vice president. I had approached him to inquire whether he would be interested in contributing to a project at Harvard to record and analyze the events of the Great Depression. Thanks to Agnes, all five Peterson boys—Joe, Preston, Hugh, Ray, and my father, Elmer George—called E. G.—graduated from college, together with their only sister, Edith. When I told Dad the story Marriner had shared with me, he verified it with a tear in his eye. My dad’s father, Augustus, was born in Bornholm, a low-lying island in the Baltic Sea near Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. Dad’s parents were part of the remarkable Mormon European conversion and emigration, which was a response to a compelling religious message and the lure of the American dream in the second half of the nineteenth century. The same message and dream resonated with my mother’s families—the Hulmes and the Nebekers—and enticed them to emigrate from England and Germany. A few years ago I had the chance to visit that beautiful green island of Bornholm, where I found the records of Augustus’s parents—Hans Pedersen and Anna Martine Andersen—in the Bornholm Lutheran Church. As you might expect,

“The Lord Was Right”  •  5

there was no mention of conversion to Mormonism, only the starkly simple notation dated 1856: “Gone to America.” Indeed they had. “Gone to America”: A  dutiful Bornholm Lutheran Church recorder wrote down those three words seventy-two years before I was born. “If I had your boys, I wouldn’t, either!” A proud and humble woman uttered those eight mighty words on a dusty Oregon road on the way to a pioneer Mormon Church roughly forty years before I was born. Together those eleven words shaped my upbringing and now define my quest to understand my life. Getting to America was not easy for the Peterson family, or for any of the Mormon immigrants. One infant Peterson girl died on the shipboard crossing through the North Sea, and my great-grandmother’s diary records that she insisted that her husband Hans, who was a sailor, take her body in a rowboat to a small island they were passing and give it a proper burial. He did, and brought back a leafy twig like some latter-day Noah’s dove, to prove he had succeeded. When they arrived in America, the Petersons traveled overland by covered wagon to the Utah Territory, first settling with their son Gus and other children in Plain City, a tiny town west of Ogden near the shore of the Great Salt Lake, which was as salty as its name suggested. Gus married Agnes Geddes, and they had six children—those five sons and a daughter, all destined for college. Agnes Geddes’s family had come from Ireland and Scotland. The Geddeses gained respect in their small Utah community, in part, for digging and scraping more dirt than any other family to build an irrigation canal and bring mountainfresh water to their fields. Alas, whatever value lay in the communal effort, the new water was a mixed blessing, for after a few seasons, it soaked into the undersoil enough to bring up the salt the lake had deposited centuries before, reducing the crop yield they had anticipated. This misfortune contributed to the Gus and Agnes Peterson family moving to Oregon. In only a few years, Dad rolled out of the lumber mills of Oregon and onto the campus of Utah Agricultural College (UAC) in Logan (now Utah State University). He did well: feasted on the words of educated teachers, edited the student newspaper, and played on the tennis team. When it was all over, his uncle, Jim Geddes, loaned him enough money to pursue graduate study at the University of Chicago. He chose bacteriology over English because, as he recalled, his first job offer out of college had been teaching science for fifty dollars a month versus something less to teach English. He spoke of the grand architecture of the Chicago campus, later saying, “We [at Utah State] needed a bit of grandeur as well.” After

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receiving his master’s degree, he transferred to Cornell, where he completed study for his PhD in bacteriology. He was able to finish his doctoral work by mid-1910 and left for Oregon State University at Corvallis for his first academic position. He became alarmed when Cornell did not send him written notice of his degree. He wrote the university only to learn that there was no record of his having attended Cornell! Apparently his lead professor had died, and his wife had cleared all the papers out of his office, including those that recorded the work of his graduate students. It took some months of transcontinental correspondence to reestablish the record of his work at Cornell, but Dad finally received his doctorate in June of 1911. Within just one year, he returned to UAC to be head of the Extension Service. It was a department set up within the land-grant college system to place an agricultural research and service officer in each county of the state to promote advanced agricultural practices. That year he met Phebe Nebeker. They had a whirlwind romance, and by 1912 they were committed to marriage. However, Mother had not received her college degree, and if for no other reason than she felt it would not be right to marry a college professor without that formality, she was determined to graduate before she married E. G. One specific academic obstacle threatened the romance: to graduate Mother needed to have two years of French. She had none. She screwed up her courage and registered for French II without revealing that she had never taken French I. Her teacher, Professor Arnold, was a taskmaster with a heart. She studied day and night to catch up with the class. One day—unable to grasp some assignment—she asked to see Professor Arnold. The conversation led to her confession that she had never taken French I. She remembered Professor Arnold’s roar: “Do you mean you had the audacity to register for my French II without having taken French I?” “I had to, Professor Arnold,” my mother replied. “I must get my degree this year.” She suspected that he suddenly remembered she was going steady with his tennis friend, E. G., for his next comment—in quite a different tone—was, “Well, I must say I think you can do it.” Mother graduated on June 3, 1913, having majored in English, minored in home economics, and survived French II. On September 3, she and my father were married. A College President

Less than three years later—on the first of September, 1916, at the age of thirty-three— Dad was asked to become president of UAC when the incumbent, John A. Widtsoe, left for Salt Lake City, ninety miles south, to serve as president of the University of Utah.

“The Lord Was Right”  •  7

Mother was just twenty-six. Their first child, Marian, was three months old. The Widtsoes were highly respected in the community and state. He had a doctorate in chemistry from Harvard, and his wife was widely known for both her charm and intellect. It could not have been an easy task for either Mother or Dad to follow the Widtsoes and take on such responsibility at their ages, but they did, and Dad went on to serve as president for twenty-nine years, longer than all but a very few of his peers in higher education. There were a few surprises in store for the young couple, and for the state of Utah. First, it turned out that my father’s appointment at such a young age may have reflected more than his ability. In 1905 the Utah Legislature had eliminated some courses from UAC’s curriculum, and there had even been some talk about possibly merging UAC with the University of Utah to make the educational system more efficient. Some said that President Widtsoe had accepted the job as head of the University of Utah with that plan in mind. Appointing a young man as president of UAC might make a merger easier. Dad did not support a merger, which he was quite sure would subordinate the agricultural college, but he was aware of the possible threat. While the two schools’ institutional roles were distinctly separate, the larger university would almost certainly cast a shadow over the smaller college. It is not clear how serious the notion of this institutional merger was. It never became a public campaign nor was any bill proposed in the legislature. In any case, President Widtsoe left the University of Utah within two or three years to accept an appointment as an apostle in the Latter-day Saint (LDS) Church. The second unexpected situation the Peterson presidency faced was the call to mobilize to train World War I soldiers. The college campus responded, and the war was won, only to have the influenza pandemic of 1918 force the school to function as a field hospital. Sick wards took over many of the classrooms. Dad was successful in convincing the legislature to appropriate an extra sum to finish two buildings—in the process of wooden construction—with permanent brick, and they became temporary hospitals. Brick also represented a symbol of permanence that was important for the college. After the pandemic, those buildings reverted to academic use. There was no specific therapy to treat influenza. Care was entirely limited to hydration, nutrition, and life support. Hundreds died on the campus before the epidemic ran its course. At the war’s end, the question of the endurance of the college—with or without the threat of consolidation—was still on the agenda. Dad came up with the idea of launching a summer school in the beautiful Cache Valley that surrounded Logan with outstanding faculty from around the country. That could shift the perception

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of the college to a year-round establishment and immeasurably enrich the intellectual climate of the region. When it came to the summer school, Dad was fond of the Shakespearean quote from Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”2  Why shouldn’t an agricultural college in Logan, Utah—however modest and remote—have access to the best minds of the nation by augmenting its full-time faculty with invited summer professors? What was to stop the college other than a lack of courage, vision, and self-image, dear Brutus? It is hard to imagine how Dad and Mother did it, but they signed up such people as Harvard’s Frederick Jackson Turner, the leading historian of the American West; E.  V.  McCullum, an early investigator of vitamin D, from Wisconsin and Johns Hopkins; Sigmund Speath, the Metropolitan Opera interpreter; Anne Carroll Moore, the dean of children’s literature at the New York Public Library; Eliot Blackwelder, Stanford geologist; William Trufont Foster, economist and founding president of Reed College; Chicago ecologist Henry Cowles; E. L. Thorndike of Columbia Teacher’s College; Emmett Angell, Yale professor of physical education; Berger Sanzane, a Swedish emigrant painter and engraver from Kansas; and a half dozen more. It was Sanzane who gave Mother and Dad the engraving he named ἀ e Guardian Poplar that titles this book and suggests something of its intention. Years later, when I was a boy, it was still family lore to tell of the moment when the first summer-school classes convened, and the question, “Would anyone come?” lingered. My mother remembered sitting nervously in the front row of the main assembly hall on the first day of summer school, reluctant to turn her head and see how many students had shown up. They did—in droves—that day and for many years. The classes turned out to be wonderfully popular with students of all ages from the entire state and equally popular with the visiting faculty, who returned year after year. However, the idea could easily have been a conspicuous and expensive failure. Someone on the visiting faculty described Cache Valley in the summer as “hot coffee and ice cream” for its warm sun and cool canyon evening breezes. The second year the enrollment jumped from 471 to 1,377. After ten summers, when Professor Turner grew too old to continue his yearly excursion to Utah, he left with this comment: My best wishes for all America are that the country were peopled throughout by such citizens as these. I have never seen before so congenial and so happy an academic gathering in such a beautiful location—stimulative and healthful and altogether fit. . . . To the eastern student a summer session

“The Lord Was Right”  •  9

here will be a liberal education in itself—a revelation of what the word America means. Utah Agricultural College is to be thanked and congratulated on having established this school. I know of no better situation on which such an institution can be built up.3 When he retired, Turner asked his successor at Harvard, Frederick Merk, to come in his place. Decades later, I took a course at Harvard from Professor Merk on the settling of the West. He saw my name and hometown on his class records, connected me to my parents, asked me to stay after a lecture, and spoke of his warm memories of E. G. and Phebe and summers spent at UAC. Without ever hearing it said, even as a young boy, I understood that Logan and UAC were defined not by longitude, latitude, years of settlement, wealth, or prizes, but rather by what we believed we were or could be and what we chose to gather. Frankly it was being five years old and playing croquet with the visiting faculty that I remember most vividly. There were other notable events as well. One day Dad was sitting on the rostrum in the main college auditorium after introducing the ambassador from Denmark, who had come to speak on child rearing in her native country. As she was halfway into her speech, my sister Martha, age five or six, entered the back of the auditorium looking for her father. She had three younger friends in tow. Sighting Dad on the stage, the children walked down the long aisle and up the side stairs to the place Dad was sitting. After much tugging and scraping—as Mother reported the episode later—Martha boosted each of the younger children into chairs lined up on the stage. The Danish ambassador tried to continue her treatise on the proper education of and respect for children as the audience began to murmur and chuckle. After a few minutes of apparent serious listening, Martha slipped off her chair and walked over to her father. She whispered into his ear something that produced four dimes, which he readily gave with no apparent embarrassment. The money was for icecream cones for her and the other children. The ambassador paused to give the respect due to this reasonable request of a “young student.” Like four ducklings, the children turned around and happily walked back up the aisle and off to the dairy. The college was decades ahead of the surgeon general and FDA in restricting smoking on campus. I remember hearing of the experience of a new professor from the East smoking on the central lawn. Dad happened by and—after gracefully introducing himself to his colleague—walked him over to the edge of the hill where the college perched to a spot appropriately called “Nicotine Point” with the gentle suggestion that it was the preferred place for smoking.

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Another memorable moment occurred in the president’s office. An energetic undergraduate student had originated something called an assembly that students put on periodically, a performance akin to vaudeville. The students were required to present a rehearsal for faculty review for tastefulness before the public presentation. The text passed, but the show changed significantly when performed for the public. The revised text contained what some described as “barnyard humor,” prompting the student in charge—perhaps with a sense of artistic martyrdom—to expect to be chastised. The student was, not incidentally, a grandson of Heber J. Grant, the president and prophet of the Mormon Church. A week or two later, having received no reprimand, the student asked for an appointment to see Dad as if to face the music. Dad spoke with him amiably for a few minutes, intentionally saying nothing about the assembly, which he had seen. Finally, the student had to blurt out that he presumed he would be disciplined for changing the text, but he wished to explain that the mildly off-color jokes came from some weekly magazine that “my grandfather reads regularly and finds some humor in.” With great fondness many years later, the student repeated my father’s gentle response. “Yes, I am sure that is true, but I note that your grandfather does not read from that weekly at the church’s semiannual General Conference!” By 1936, after twenty years of his presidency, Dad and Mother had never taken a formal vacation, prompting the college faculty to take a mock vote to “fire” them for three months to enforce a summer vacation with the recommendation that they tour Europe. I was six at the time and remember my two loving older sisters, Marian and Martha, keeping me alive with endless bowls of Campbell’s tomato soup and tuna fish sandwiches while my parents were away. My parents’ tour was a wonder for them. In England they visited the home of Thomas Carlyle, bringing back books written by that remarkable man for me to read when I was older. Dad wrote in the flyleaf of one of them: “We had a bite to eat in Carlyle’s kitchen, where years ago he received Tennyson. They sat where we sat, said nothing to each other for a half an hour, whereupon Tennyson stood up, walked to the door, and thanked Carlyle for their cordial exchange.” Scotland, France, Denmark, Bornholm, Sweden—the town my father’s family came from—and Germany followed. My parents sent letters of alarm and worry from Berlin. The impending Holocaust was yet to appear, but Hitler’s early military mobilization was apparent everywhere. Using the music of Wagner for his political purposes was particularly offensive to Mother and Dad. They remembered the loudspeakers up and down the central avenue, Kurfurstendam, pouring out the appropriated music. They attended the 1936 Olympics, where the

“The Lord Was Right”  •  11

African-American track star, Jessie Owens, won multiple medals to Hitler’s chagrin and disputed his claims of a “master race, Aryan and white.” An unforgettable moment occurred on the train from Germany to Rome, the last stop on my parents’ tour. There was some confusion about where and when they had to catch the train, which led to them being late. Dad got Mother settled and ran back to get their bags. The train took off without any evidence of Dad being on board. Mother grew understandably worried. Dad had most of the money and both of the passports. None of the other passengers appeared to speak English when Mother tried to explain her concern. She gestured with her hands to describe his bald head, glasses, and general build. Finally, a reserved couple spoke up and told her that if her husband did not show up, they would help her when they reached Rome. Another passenger walked by while Mother was describing Dad’s bald head, paused to get the drift of the conversation, and—with great excitement—indicated that there was a man like that in the last car of the train, sitting on a pile of suitcases! The bags and Dad rejoined Mother to a wave of polite applause from the nearby passengers. These stories were not lost on their six-year-old son back in Logan. Adventure involved the unknown, an unknown that could be mastered. Earlier in their trip, Dad had visualized his English and Danish forebears walking the low hills of their countries, and he came home determined to exercise. He walked each day with no more than a score of misses until he died twenty-two years later. My parents brought me a collection of flags from all the nations they visited, mounted on sharp long pins. I suppose those flags were responsible for my gaining something of a wider view of the world. My father did his part to expose his children to the world. For many years, Dad was on one committee or another of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC), an organization I chaired forty-five years later. It took him to Washington, D. C., each year. As we grew up, each of the children went with him for a grand trip to “the East.” My turn came in the spring of 1940 or 1941. So many memories of that trip survive—the first is the Union Pacific Challenger train with its Pullman cars. It pulled into the Ogden depot, not more than fifty miles east of Promontory Point, where the Union and Central Pacific railroads had met in 1869 to span the American continent. Driving the golden spike to join the two railroads could not have been more exciting than my stepping onto the Challenger accompanied by steam clouds and the sound of water draining onto the tracks. Once aboard I encountered the first black man I had ever seen in my ten years of life. I was not aware of any prejudice against black people in Logan or Cache Valley; there were just none there.

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The man was the porter. After making up the Pullman bunks, he rested on one of the cushioned benches in the men’s washroom, where I may have denied him the nap he needed. It seemed as if we talked for hours as the train rattled through Wyoming, Nebraska, and points east toward Chicago. His hands were a wonderful blend of strength and softness: light nails, dark creases on slightly lighter palms. He had finished high school and had some college education, but railroading was the only work available to him I suppose, given the discrimination of the day and the economy of the late Depression. His speech was as gentle as his hands. I was in wonder at the differences between us and what it meant. His blackness and my whiteness appeared to have some sort of cosmic importance that went beyond reality. I remembered that my mother had commented after an earlier visit to New Orleans that she was sad that black people on the street avoided her gaze and polite hello. Dad rarely failed to tip his hat to anyone on the streets of Logan and even, I suspect, New York! “How to do?” was his frequent salutation. I didn’t come to any conscious conclusions in that washroom, but it was a powerful first exposure to the concept of race, which I had never experienced in Logan. When Dad joined me in the washroom, he instructed me in the value of wiping the basin clean with the cloth towel I had used to dry my hands. In that manner, he said, a towel no longer of use until it was laundered could leave the basin clean for the next patron with almost no effort. I do that to this day, even with paper towels, with a silent nod to Dad. Washington, D. C., may have been an educational meeting place for my father, but it was also the site of the opening game of American League baseball the week I was there. Dad got tickets. The Yankees played the Washington Senators. Bill Dickey was the catcher; Red Ruffing, pitcher; Johnny Sturm (it might have been Babe Dahlgren) newly on first base, replacing the dying Lou Gehrig; Joe Gordon at second; Red Rolfe at third; Frankie Crosetti at shortstop; Charlie Keller in left field; Joe DiMaggio in center; Tommy Henrich in right: names never to be forgotten. The throw from third to first base stunned me then and has since. It was as beautiful an act of athletic poetry, maybe baseball ballet, as I had ever seen. It flew with almost no arc from hand to glove. What human muscles could have accomplished such an artistic thing? Had the throw taken a higher arc, the runner would have been safe; if lower, it would not have reached first base. The Yankees were no strangers. I had listened to radio broadcasts in Logan, and they had let me build up the greatness of Crosetti and DiMaggio seemingly far beyond what they could match in person. But while the players may have seemed

“The Lord Was Right”  •  13

superhuman on the radio, the visit to the Washington field did nothing to diminish their dimensions. My Father, the Man

Dad always spoke with pride of his boyhood experiences in Baker City. He spent his youth with his brothers, working in a rough factory that made boxes from the lumber the mill produced, yet he was a soft-spoken, mannerly, dignified man, a kindly Puritan. His compromise with informality was leaving his suit coat in the house when he ventured into the garden. He loved to grow tomatoes behind every home we had, but I never saw him pick any of them in anything but a white shirt and tie. He vied with a lawyer in town to raise the largest tomatoes. One day when his competitor left a basket of huge tomatoes on our front porch, Dad knew there was no way he could match them. He returned the basket to his friend’s front door with a note saying, “George, I meant for you to keep the tomatoes I left.” I have no memory of any coarse or vindictive statement he ever made—save one—in the twenty-nine years I shared with him. He never consciously preached propriety in manner or speech to me. However, I will never forget a trivial, but wonderful, moment when he shared his humanness with a young son and put his gentlemanly behavior into approachable perspective. You might call the moment an imperfect exception that made his properness lovable. He liked to play golf once a week on a beautiful course in Logan that was tucked into the canyon east of the college. His golf companions were generally a local butcher, a soft-drink bottler, and a tire-store owner. When I was around five or six, I loved to carry his bag, and Dad allowed me to hit a ball or two when the pace was slow. My other pay was a bottle of 7-Up in the caddy house after the ninth hole. Dad swung more like a baseball player than a golfer, but he was good enough to hit 40 to 45 over nine holes and enjoy the experience. His moment of imperfect exception occurred one day on the fairway of the first hole. I was holding his bag as he addressed his second shot. He doffed it terribly, and I heard a muffled “you son of a bitch!” He looked up and saw my baby face full of shocked disbelief. What had my perfect father uttered? He turned and with a kind smile said, Son, let me tell you how it was to work in the box factory in Baker City. Every so often you hit your thumb with the hammer. The pain was something.

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If you held it in, the thumb just seemed to swell larger and larger and hurt more and more. I learned if you held out the thumb at arm’s length and let it have a “you son of a bitch,” the swelling and pain just flew away. I never forgot that experience. Dad released a young boy, allowing him to be natural and spontaneous and love a slightly imperfect father all the more by freeing him from the burden of perfection. Strong language has also come in handy from time to time for me. I remember once addressing a small group of faculty associates when I was a university president. They seemed to be inordinately unappreciative of what I thought had been great efforts on their behalf. Unconsciously I guess I felt that I needed to get their attention and particularly break into what struck me as the narcissism of one particular individual. Out of my generally proper mouth came, “Why, you’re a real bastard!” After a gasp, some laughter broke the ice, and we all relaxed and solved the impasse. I suspect neither Dad nor I tried that approach very often, however. Another example of Dad’s human imperfection may have been the result of his graduate-school experience. In the last few years of his life—when he was seventy and I twenty-three—something caused him to say, “Chase, I am proud to notice that you appear to harbor no anti-Semitism. While I tried never to act on it, I have never been proud of the fact that I have such feelings. I have no idea why. I am pleased that my son is a better man in this regard than I was.” Nothing seemed grander than to hear something like that from an imperfectly great father. Rarely has a year gone by without a former student at the college telling me about some act of kindness that my father performed, either trivial or monumental. In the more minor category was Dad’s pleasure at pulling over in his car to pick up a student walking up the rather steep College Hill to get to class. The phrase I remember so often was “Can I give you a lift?” which then started a conversation about how the student was doing in class. More significant were the times during the Depression when Dad found out about a student who lacked the funds to continue in college. Apparently Dad occasionally placed small amounts of his own money in the students’ accounts. My father claimed the debt was usually repaid. Whether or not it was, Dad felt amply compensated. Other times students told me they had been told to “go see Mr.  Berntson in the business office,” and somehow they received the means to stay in school. In fact, the faculty formally voted to deduct a portion of their own salaries to create a loan fund for students in need. One day workmen were repainting the all-white frame president’s home where we lived on the UAC campus. They left their cans and brushes one night, and

“The Lord Was Right”  •  15

I decided to investigate. I guess I was probably three or four, and I remember the pride I took in the red stripe I painted part of the way around the white house about arm high. When my father saw my work, his comment was, “Why Chase, what a dandy job you did with the red stripe.” Nothing more was said, but the stripe was painted over the next day. I told that story to a friend fifty years later. He had played serious junior tennis in Southern California throughout most of his childhood. Tears came to his eyes as he remembered, “Chase, I never played a tournament match, win or lose, when my father didn’t criticize me for the shots I missed and ignore the aces I hit.” What is there about love that seems so difficult to give and even define? Too Good Too Long

In the late years of Dad’s presidency, Utah elected a new governor. He proposed that his office needed to approve the appointment of the county extension agents who worked for the college. The appointments essentially would have become a form of gubernatorial patronage. Dad had little patience with such ideas and perhaps—after twenty-five years as president—little inclination to treat the matter tactfully. Instead, he simply told the governor that a college faculty was not a place for political appointments. According to the Peterson memory of the incident, the governor was not pleased and set about filling each new opening on the Board of Trustees with someone who had a reason to disagree or be unhappy with my father. Three years into the governor’s term, there were enough trustees on his side to call for Dad’s dismissal. The alleged reason was that he had failed to emphasize agriculture sufficiently. The only truth to the charge might have been Dad’s conviction that every student destined for the life of a farmer or rancher needed to have some liberal education, even Shakespeare. However, Dad’s respect for the honest labor of farming was unbounded and was never in doubt. I even recall seeing my father bring home slightly wilted lettuce from the grocery store. Mother asked, “Wasn’t there a better head?” Dad responded, “Phebe, if I hadn’t bought it, no one would have.” He could never forget the effort some farmer had made to grow that lettuce and get it to market. The matter came to a head in the spring of 1944, Dad’s twenty-eighth year as president. The Board of Trustees abruptly announced his dismissal to the press for failure to emphasize agriculture properly. Students, faculty, and townspeople rose up to defend Dad. Headlines shouted the controversy. In a day or two, Dad

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responded, “I have reviewed the case against my work and find it inaccurate, and I therefore feel it is inappropriate for me to step down.” What wonderful simplicity and unimaginable self-confidence! I suppose the trustees could have changed the lock on Dad’s office, but they didn’t, and he continued to serve as president. A Salt Lake Tribune editorial, published a few days later, put it all in perspective. The editor, Johnny Fitzpatrick, a wonderful Irish Catholic and saint in my memory, described the controversy and concluded that the case against my father appeared to be that he had been “too good for too long,” a phrase never forgotten in the Peterson family. The trustees backed down, and Dad formally returned to his job with a facesaving compromise to stay on a final year, his twenty-ninth. It still must have hurt Dad, for that year was in fact the last one before he turned sixty-five, the expected age of retirement. But I never, ever heard Dad speak sharply of the episode. Fortyfive years later, I had a controversy of a different nature swirl around my decision to resign my presidency a couple of years early. During Dad’s last summer at UAC, I was working as one of two or three water masters for the campus lawns. I happened to be on the brow of College Hill at a spot that overlooked the town. I heard a faint drone that grew louder and more distinct until it became apparent that two large moving vans were coming toward the campus. The vans contained the belongings of Franklin Harris, who had been president of Brigham Young University in Provo and was coming to replace my father. Harris and his family were moving into the white house I had once decorated with a red stripe and lived in for all of my fifteen years, the home that had served physically and metaphorically as a base for my endless forays into the larger world of campus and town. Though I was not sure where the pit of my stomach was, it was certainly tight at that moment. I was losing my home . . . or would I ever lose that home? Time would tell. In a more immediate sense, the smell of a new can of tennis balls, the paint shop, or the tincture of benzoin on ankle wraps of the football heroes; or the sound of the “Grand March” from Aida that the UAC marching band played each spring at commencement would always return me to the fifteen years I had spent in that home. But now there was the drone of invading moving vans to frame forever the memory I have of that wonderful place. In Dad’s later years, his love of the Earth and its entire people became much clearer to me. He loved the grandeur of Logan Canyon seen from the road that led through a range of mountains to the Bear Lake home of the Nebekers. He occasionally pointed out to me some solitary juniper tree high up on the crest of

“The Lord Was Right”  •  17

a mountain ridge. Its unlikely survival against the elements depended upon its sturdy roots clinging to a rocky crevice and was, he said, reason to cry “bravo!” The family called these “bravo trees.” I never forgot the importance of strong roots. The mouth of that canyon was also the route of Dad’s daily three-mile walk, generally taken in the morning, up and back. One day lightning struck him on his walk. It burned a small hole in his hat and knocked him down briefly but somehow did no permanent harm and never deterred him from his exercise. Dad’s salary all through the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s was ample, but never large, nor would he have pushed for more, given the effects of the Depression and the meager resources of the students and faculty. Neither was there much growth in any of the retirement funds that likely stagnated during those tough economic times. As a result, when Dad left the president’s home after twenty-nine years, he had no home equity to depend on and little savings. Had it not been for some resources that Mother had inherited from the Nebeker ranch, it is doubtful that they could have easily afforded a retirement home. They were certainly not poor, for they were never low in spirit or deprived of opportunity. Rather, they survived, and I never sensed—nor once heard Dad speak of—them being pressed financially. Instead, they continued to support my education. Dad never grumbled about his treatment by the governor or trustees, nor about finances. Our entire family always lived with a sense of abundance. After six or seven years in retirement, Dad was asked to come back as acting president for a year while the trustees looked for a replacement two presidents after he had stepped down. Mother often spoke of that time as a parallel to the career of Winston Churchill, who lost reelection after the end of World War II only to be asked to serve briefly in the 1950s after Clement Attlee. Mother described Dad as “her Winston.” After his retirement and relocation to a home off College Hill, Dad had a neighbor/friend who wanted to show his new home across the street. The house was quite grand, and at the end of the tour—through some desire to demonstrate modesty—our neighbor pointed to a large fireplace in the living room and said, “Of course, this is hardly necessary.” Dad’s love of a fireplace, and all it represented in family warmth in the pioneer settlements of the West, prompted him to say, “Yes, as unnecessary as a sunset.” A Mormon Pioneer Heritage

Dad had great reverence for the Mormon pioneer experience, the emigration of his parents, and the rectitude of the social community that had developed in the

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Great Basin. He was respectful, but never pious. He taught an adult Sunday school class for many of the years of his presidency and my childhood. One day when I was ten or so, he came home and related what had happened in his class. It seems that the previous Sunday the lesson had been on some important aspect of Christian doctrine. The next week class opened with a male student raising his hand. “Brother Peterson, I have thought and prayed all week about the principle we were discussing last Sunday . . . and I have decided that the Lord was right!” Then he went on to explain why he believed this was so. “The Lord was right”: Dad found that statement profound. This man was a janitor in a local bank, had no real formal education or social standing, but he had taken it upon himself to reason through the principle under discussion, feeling it was important to report that he had concluded that “the Lord was right.” Dad did not have to tell me that the man’s statement bordered on religious impertinence—you can call it sacrilege—and yet Dad understood that his humble Sunday school student was reaching for the heavens, depending on no one—no priestly or theological intercession—making himself responsible for all the divine arrangements that united him with heaven. Dad ended the report with a simple observation: “Chase, never undervalue the power of a church that prompts such a man to take personal responsibility for the eternities.” He did not need to say that the man’s processing might not pass muster at any school of theology, but it worked for Dad and, more importantly, for that man. Dad loved the personal dignity and responsibility that the Mormon Church promoted. Those notions came back to me when I encountered the writing of Harold Bloom, a respected religious historian at Yale. In his book, ἀe American Religion, he wrote of an occasion when “John Greenleaf Whittier, Quaker poet and abolitionist, attended a Mormon service in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1847 and came away deeply moved.”4 Whittier observed, In listening to these modern prophets, I discovered, as I think, the great secret of their success in making converts. They speak to a common feeling; they minister to a universal want. They contrast strongly the miraculous power of the gospel in the apostolic time with the present state of our nominal Christianity. They ask for the signs of divine power; the faith, overcoming all things, which opened the prison doors of the apostles, gave them power over the elements, which rebuked disease and death itself, and made visible to all the presence of the living God. They ask for any

“The Lord Was Right”  •  19

declaration in the Scriptures that this miraculous power of faith was to be confined to the first confessors of Christianity.5 Bloom concluded, “Whatever his lapses, [Joseph] Smith was an authentic religious genius, unique in our national history.”6 Bloom described himself culturally as “an American Jewish intellectual but not an adherent of normative Judaism.”7 From this stance he argued, Smith implicitly understood not only his own aims but the pragmatics of religion making, or what would work in matters of the spirit. For that remains the center of his achievement: the Mormons have continued for over a hundred and sixty years; they change, but they do not die. There are now about as many Mormons in our nation and the world as there are Jews, and as I remarked earlier, the Mormons, like the Jews before them, are a religion that became a people.8 Josiah Quincy, once president of Harvard and a distinguished historian of mid-nineteenth-century America, described his own reaction to the impact of Joseph Smith. Figures of the Past includes this passage he wrote on May 13, 1844: It is by no means improbable that some future text-book, for the use of generations yet unborn, will contain a question something like this: What historical American of the nineteenth century has exerted the most powerful influence upon the destinies of his countrymen? And it is by no means impossible that the answer to that interrogatory may be thus written: Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet. And the reply, absurd as it doubtless seems to most men now living, may be an obvious commonplace to their descendants. History deals in surprises and paradoxes quite as startling as this. This man who established a religion in this age of free debate, who was and is to-day accepted by hundreds of thousands as a direct emissary from the Most High,—such a rare human being is not to be disposed of by pelting his memory with unsavory epithets. . . . The most vital questions Americans are asking each other to-day have to do with this man and what he has left us. . . . Burning questions they are, which must give a prominent place in the history of the country to that sturdy self-asserter whom I visited at Nauvoo. Joseph Smith, claiming to be an inspired teacher, faced adversity such as few men have been called to meet, enjoyed a brief season

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of prosperity such as few men have ever attained, and, finally, forty-three days after I saw him, went cheerfully to a martyr’s death. When he surrendered his person to Governor Ford, in order to prevent the shedding of blood, the prophet had a presentiment of what was before him. “I am going like a lamb to the slaughter,” he is reported to have said; “but I am as calm as a summer’s morning. I have a conscience void of offence and shall die innocent.” [italics in original]9 A twentieth-century Yale religion professor, a nineteenth-century Harvard historian/president, and a nineteenth-century Quaker/abolitionist experienced something in common, both sober and yet fully understood, just like the Logan bank janitor and the agricultural college president who taught a Sunday school class. Anything as powerful in the daily life of its members as the LDS Church inevitably creates tension between individuality and community. An experience I remember vividly involving my mother and my older sister, Martha, created a provocative tension between the two. I was around eight when I went with my mother and Martha, then about fourteen, to an LDS service. The sermon at the meeting was stern and puritanical. As we walked out of the building, my sister bristled at the harshness of the message and said so to our mother. I remember clearly my mother’s calm demeanor and smile as she said, “I don’t think I needed that particular message, but I suspect someone in the audience did.” During the same time, there was a charming, unassuming leader in the church named J.  Golden Kimball, who felt that humor deserved a place in religion, or more likely was unwilling to suppress his own love for it. His stories live on to this day and at the time did much to balance the grimness sometimes connected to religion. Predictably this humor offended some of the more pious members of the church. Some of Kimball’s superiors in the hierarchy were inclined to crimp his allotted speaking time at conferences to harness his colorful, albeit lovingly coarse, humor. On one occasion, he was scheduled to speak at the end of the meeting with time enough for only a few remarks. The speaker who preceded him talked at length on the nature of sin in the harshest of tones, incorporating plenty of hellfire and damnation. When he sat down, there was even less time for Brother Kimball. He ambled to the podium, paused to look over the audience, and said, “Well, considering the sermon you have just heard, my brothers and sisters, I guess there is nothing more for us to do than go home and shoot ourselves!” Church experiences like these, uniting reverence and community with free agency and individuality, gave me space to explore and sustain both faith and

“The Lord Was Right”  •  21

community and nurtured an early sense of responsibility to arrive at my working definition of the two. Twilight

When I was a third-year student at Harvard Medical School on surgical rotation, a call came from Logan that Dad had an abdominal aortic aneurism and urgently needed surgery. There were no artificial grafts or stints in those days, only the possibility of a transplant from a cadaver. He flew to Boston, where Dr. Robert Linton was one of the few surgeons in the country with the skills to perform such an operation. The day before surgery Dad was stable and able to have dinner with some classmates and me. He was touched to learn that some of these classmates had already given blood for his operation, but he wondered aloud if any of them could provide an aorta. He had no takers. He barely survived the surgery but recovered and enjoyed five good years in Logan before his aorta began to rupture again. He knew what the symptoms meant while he sat with Mother, waiting for an air ambulance to take him to Salt Lake City for an attempt at a last-ditch repair. Mother later spoke fondly of that last conversation. They were able to talk about the remarkable life and love they had shared, both suspecting that he was unlikely to survive the expected surgery. He died in the operating room of cardiac arrest. His obituary contained a tribute from an old friend and writer who recalled the Thomas Carlyle works they had both read and specifically the lines Carlyle had written describing heroes. The lines deserve repeating for what they say about an agricultural college writ large, about the work of the West and the mind, and about my father and mother. In chapter four of book three, “Helotage,” of Sartor Resartus, Carlyle said, Two men I honour, and no third. First, the toilworn Craftsman that with earth-made Implement laboriously conquers the Earth, and makes her man’s. Venerable to me is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable too is the rugged face, all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is the face of a Man living manlike. O, but the more venerable for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee! Hardly-entreated Brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed: thou wert our Conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so marred. For in thee

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too lay a god-created Form, but it was not to be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and defacements of Labour: and thy body, like thy soul, was not to know freedom. Yet toil on, toil on: thou art in thy duty, be out of it who may; thou toilest for the altogether indispensable, for daily bread. A second man I honour, and still more highly: Him who is seen toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but the bread of Life. Is not he too in his duty; endeavouring towards inward Harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all his outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when his outward and his inward endeavour are one: when we can name him Artist; not earthly Craftsman only, but inspired Thinker, who with heaven-made Implement conquers Heaven for us! If the poor and humble toil that we have Food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return, that he have Light, have Guidance, Freedom, Immortality?—These two, in all their degrees, I honour: all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth. Unspeakably touching is it, however, when I find both dignities united; and he that must toil outwardly for the lowest of man’s wants, is also toiling inwardly for the highest. Sublimer in this world know I nothing than a Peasant Saint, could such now anywhere be met with. Such a one will take thee back to Nazareth itself; thou wilt see the splendour of Heaven spring forth from the humblest depths of Earth, like a light shining in great darkness.10 So are my heroes—Gus and Agnes, E. G. and Phebe, and my mother’s family, the Nebekers, who dug into the land and became settlers in the most literal sense. The Petersons roamed the land with only modest worldly success. I found a reference to Dad’s father, Gus, that listed him in a census report around the turn of the century as a “manual laborer.” Others were more successful in worldly terms. Mother’s younger brother, Hulme, joined Joe Quinney, husband of one of the Eccles girls, to form one of the major legal firms in Utah: Ray, Quinney, and Nebeker. One of Dad’s brothers became attorney general of Idaho; another was head of the Utah Highway Patrol. Consciously or not, somehow they found their place in the new land of the mind. When Dad was named president of the UAC, it is reported that his father, Gus, got up on a pool table in Preston, Idaho, and bought drinks for everyone there! It is interesting that the Mormon Church that provided so much of the migration, the culture, and the spiritual power and daily clarity of both families helped

“The Lord Was Right”  •  23

converts like them to reach America with loans from a plan called the Perpetual Emigration Fund. Convert families in Europe received the money for passage to America and were asked to repay it when they could. This program played a central role in the growth of the LDS Church in the 1850s, ’60s, and ’70s. In the last fifteen years, the church has revived and redirected this fund under the title of the Perpetual Education Fund and made it available to support the education of bright, poor, energetic members in Third World countries. The notion of a Zion of the educated mind and spirit, regardless of geography, has replaced the idea of Zion, a physical gathering. The Petersons and the Nebekers were children of those two Zions: immigration and education, tilled land and developed mind.

2 “There Is Always a Way”: Nebeker and Hulme Immigrants

Mother’s ties to her girlhood home on Bear Lake and the ranch in South Eden were strong and never more powerful and poetic than when she was in her late seventies. After Dad’s death, she lived alone in Logan, sixty miles from South Eden over the west range of the northern Rockies. I was with my own family in Cambridge. My brother George and his wife, Cathy, lived nearby and helped her regularly. At one point, she apparently began to worry about losing her memory and was determined to face the problem head-on. She drove the sixty miles to South Eden alone, the last eight on that dirt road her father and grandfather had originally scraped out of the sagebrush. She arrived at her childhood ranch home on a late November afternoon determined to return to her roots and challenge her mind. By then no one lived in the house regularly, but she had a key, and the beds and furniture were intact. She walked up to her second-floor bedroom, lay down on perhaps the same bedstead she remembered from sixty years earlier, and set out to memorize the many pages of the poem “The Mountain Whippoorwill” by Steven Vincent Benet. The poem described a bluegrass fiddlers’ contest in the deep South. One of the fiddlers “could fiddle all night, he could fiddle all day.” Mother lay there hour after hour, determined to memorize the poem. She told me later of her decision to neither drink nor eat until she succeeded. Ten o’clock passed, then midnight, then two in the morning. Finally, at four she had won her battle and fell asleep; when she awoke, she drove home to Logan in a light November snowstorm. “He could fiddle all night, he could fiddle all day.”

“There Is Always a Way”  •  25

Always Remember Who You Are

Mother sat on the gray-green couch by our front window, her scarred and lightly bandaged left leg resting and elevated, with a yellow notepad in her lap. There began one of hundreds of letters to me when I was away at school in Massachusetts: “Dear son, the spring flowers are just beginning to poke through the late snow. . . . ” I remember few of her words, except that they were all reminders of who I was and how much she loved me. From my earliest childhood, she told me, “Chase, boy, always remember who you are.” I don’t remember any particular definition of “who I was,” but I suppose the phrase meant to suggest that who I was depended on me, and not on others. That admonition continued through the mail to Massachusetts. I still recall the quotes she regularly sent me, snippets from something she had read or a memory she treasured from her family. She was especially fond of a quote from the theologian/physician/organist, Albert Schweitzer. It went something like this: When you are facing a problem, first study it from all possible angles as thoroughly as you can; then quiet your mind, pray for wisdom, and wait for the inspiration for which your study and prayer have prepared you. The Schweitzer quote shows the importance of my family’s interpretation of the unification of faith and reason in Mormonism. It was a theologian’s version of “there is always a way” that was a prerequisite for my mother’s family’s survival at the turn of the century on a ranch on the Utah/Wyoming border miles away from the nearest neighbor. Not all the lessons she taught me were literary; I remember that scarred leg. Injuries, bruises, and bumps have stories; this is especially true of scars because they last forever. Mother’s scar was a half-inch by one- or two-inch open wound on her left shin. It had its origins in an infection she had contracted when she was about ten, living on the south shore of Bear Lake. We would call it septicemia now. It settled in her left tibia around the winter of 1900, causing a bacterial infection of the bone: osteomyelitis. Such an infection was untreatable before the discovery of antibiotics and still presents difficulties today because of the labyrinthine nature of a skeletal bone like the tibia. Mother remembered high fevers and cold compresses on her forehead. The medical advice then was to amputate the leg at the knee to save not only the rest of her leg but indeed her life; my study of medicine years later confirmed that was a common treatment for such a bone/leg infection in the preantibiotic era. While she lay in bed with pain and fever, Phebe remembered her mother, Almira Hulme Nebeker, putting on high boots and extra coats to go out into the

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winter snow of Laketown where the family lived and climbing over snow drifts to reach a neighbor who had just returned from Salt Lake City with a new “miracle drug” that might help her child. Mother recollected to the day of her death seventy-three years later the partial, but dramatic, relief she got from her leg pain and fever in minutes from two magic pills her mother obtained from that neighbor. They were a new discovery from Germany: aspirin. Mother told her parents and the doctor that she felt she could handle the infection somehow, and she would not let her leg be amputated. “Handle it somehow” became an accepted notion in our family. Later, it was phrased “there is always a way,” perhaps a prelude to her affection for Schweitzer’s statement. I don’t think that she felt there was always a happy solution to every problem, rather that there was a way to work toward something that might be an improvement or lead to a larger understanding. Somehow the fevers abated, the leg appeared to heal, and mother never lost her leg. But in her thirties, the infection recurred, almost certainly after lying dormant in some crevice of bone for decades. The sepsis broke through the skin to expose an inch or so of the tibia permanently and remained like that until she died some forty years later. Though penicillin became available during World War II and could suppress periodic infection in the fleshy tissue, neither it nor other antibiotics were successful in closing the open skin infection. Mother cared for her leg with daily cotton saline packs covered by gauze. Every month or two she teased out spicules of dead bone from the exposed tibia, which she correctly surmised reduced the growing site for bacteria. Removing those pieces of dead bone was painful. She used a dental pick. She indicated it hurt too much to let anyone else do it but said if she was careful and in control, she could do it herself. The procedure would now be called debridement and is entirely in keeping with modern medical care. She tended her open shinbone successfully that way for forty years. While I’ll never forget the story of the infection, my more vivid memory is Mother with her leg propped up on that gray-green couch with no sense of disability. She often patted that leg lovingly, speaking of it as “my old friend,” the friend that never abandoned her. I don’t remember her even having a limp. Science, intuition, and personal endurance all combined in her leg and spirit, which grew to seem natural to an observing child. There were all sorts of other idiosyncratic approaches to illness that seemed normal in my childhood but, when I think about them, are quite unusual. In my early school years, I got some sort of acute pain in both ankles and feet that lasted most of a week. I suppose a fever went with it, but there was no great concern that

“There Is Always a Way”  •  27

the pain prevented me from walking because I could climb the stairs on my knees, as though it were a game. Fortunately, in those prepenicillin days, my arthralgia apparently was not a sign of rheumatic fever or strep throat. A deep chest cold was treated with a thick coat of mustard, flour, raw eggs, and something else aromatic that was layered over my chest and covered with a wool wrap. I don’t know of any biochemical value to the procedure, but the smell was wonderfully potent and perhaps provided a bronchodilator effect that relieved the chest congestion. Most healing of all, perhaps, was personal attention from a loving mother. The scraped apple was another happy memory. Mother cut an apple in two and, using a dull knife blade, scraped out the pulp between the core and the skin, producing a mushy, tasty variant of applesauce. The same knife then fed the pulp to her open-mouthed, bed-bound son. One spring day while lovingly administering the apple pulp, Mother happened to look out the window and saw a tired-looking mother robin, feathers bedraggled, hopping around in the grass, digging up worms for her baby. She chuckled to see the plump offspring regularly opening his beak,—the way a prince might receive his due—to swallow the worms that mother robin repeatedly supplied. The memory blends a loving mother, a fortunate son, and the delight of staying home from school for a day or so with an illness that produced nine-tenths pleasure and one-tenth discomfort and was no major worry. In the same inventive fashion, Mother treated her seasonal hay fever with a nasal irrigation of warm salt water, experimentally mixed by trial and error to be isotonic and not sting the nasal mucous membrane. She placed a gallon can with a sanitized rubber hose attached to a nozzle high over the sink. The nozzle was inserted into each nostril to wash out the exudates of the allergic hay fever. Seventy years later, I occasionally use a variant of that kind of irrigation with a hand bulb and the same isotonic saline to relieve the crusting of nasal membranes from the dry air of Utah. The significance of these home remedies is clear to this day. They were instantly comforting, not harmful, and an unspoken expression of love and attention without exaggerating the undoubtedly minor significance of the maladies, which, in my fortunate case, healed themselves. I am lucky I did not become a hypochondriac, given the pleasure I associated with mild illnesses. In my mother’s later teen years, her mother and the rest of the family moved forty miles west to Logan each winter so the children could have regular schooling. Her father, Hyrum, with perhaps one or two ranch hands, stayed alone on the ranch.

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I do not recall ever knowing the details, but somehow my mother attended the New England Conservatory of Music for a year when she was twenty. She had finished high school and maybe completed a year or two of college when she went. I remember her pleasure at keeping in touch with a former Boston roommate who later lived in San Francisco. And I remember her telling the story of an experience she and another classmate had with a young Harvard student at a tea dance. With a chuckle, she described the moment when the three of them moved toward a couch between dances. The classmate quickly sat in the middle, effectively cutting my mother out of most of the conversation with the young man. She said she decided then that there were many things she had to learn besides music! Just imagine what it took for my mother and her parents to support such an endeavor, more than two thousand miles away at a time when people thought Mormons had some kind of horns. In any case, her experience in Boston must have had much to do with her support of my opportunity thirty-five years later to retrace her steps. Mother spoke often of the teachers who had influenced her life. One was a high-school English teacher who taught a class on Shakespeare. Years later, when she learned that he was seriously ill, she visited his sick bed to tell him what richness that single class had brought into her life. She never forgot how shaken she was by his soft answer: “Oh, Phebe, why didn’t you tell me? I rarely left that class without feeling that I was a failure.” I related to this years later when I attended college and joined students applauding a particularly stimulating or effective lecture. The Mormon Migration

Mother was inseparable from her parents and grandparents and her upbringing on Bear Lake, and so was I. The history I share with my mother begins in England. John and Charlotte Hulme lived in Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire. A son, William, was born in 1836, just six years after Joseph Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—called the LDS or Mormon Church—in America. Mormon missionaries were soon sent to all parts of the world to tell the story of the new religion. That religion professed individual and direct access to a God who was as interested in his children as had been the God of the Old and New Testament; the capacity for eternal progression of the soul through free agency; and the absence of inherited sin for any biblical, ancestral misdeed. Such doctrine was congruent with the growing promise of the American dream that each person could live by his or her own sweat, free of the burden of the centuries-old traditions of class that still stultified Europe, limiting social and economic mobility.

“There Is Always a Way”  •  29

The missionaries of this new religion audaciously offered an earthly metaphor of “sainthood” to believers gathering in America. The religion also offered a fresh start spiritually and economically to anyone brave enough to cross a frighteningly vast ocean and plow an unbroken wilderness. One such missionary told the story of Mormonism to my great-greatgrandfather, John Hulme, on the streets of Stoke on Trent. Hulme read the new book, the Book of Mormon, which Joseph Smith, the founder of the religion, said he had translated from golden plates buried in the American continent by earlier peoples. It is described as “another testament to the work of God.” The Book of Mormon told an Old Testament–style story of God’s connection to his children who had lived in America almost two thousand years before. After reading this book and the Bible and praying, John Hulme talked with the missionaries and became convinced that these were truths that he could not deny. He resolved to join the LDS Church and sail to America. His wife, Charlotte, was less sure and would not accompany him. In 1842 he took two of their children with him—Mary, age four, and William, age six—with the hope that his wife would follow in a year or two with the rest of the family. She never came. John settled on the banks of the Mississippi in Nauvoo, Illinois, which was the center of the growing Mormon population. Within the first year, he died from something that sounds like cholera, leaving his two children orphans in a new land. It is family lore that soon after his father’s death, young William Hulme was walking in an open field when he met a man named Clark, who asked the seven-year-old, “Whose little boy are you?” William supposedly replied, “I am nobody’s little boy. Can I be your little boy?” Clark promptly took William and his sister Mary in, and when the Mormon migration to the West began, he and his new family ended up in California, drawn by the prospects of gold. They found no gold, but William Hulme grew to young adulthood there and then chose to rejoin the main gathering of the Saints in the Utah Territory, where he met Phebe Daniels. She was the daughter of John Daniels, who lived in Manchester, Lancastershire, and had left Catholicism to become a Methodist pastor. His wife was Elizabeth. In 1837 Heber C. Kimball, an early Mormon missionary, asked Pastor Daniels with considerable audacity whether he could speak of the new doctrine of Mormonism to a meeting of his congregation. Pastor Daniels gave his approval. The response of many in his flock was so great that Pastor Daniels denied Elder Kimball further contact with his congregation. However, his wife, Elizabeth, was smitten by the message she had heard. After a time, she became determined to join the new church. John rejected the idea for himself and his family. Three years later, John was thrown from his horse and died.

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Within two years, Elizabeth, now a widow, chose to be baptized with her children into the Morman faith. Her daughter, Phebe, was two or three years old when Elizabeth sold her home and all her belongings and set sail with her children from Liverpool to New Orleans and then up the Mississippi to Nauvoo, Illinois. Soon after Elizabeth and her family arrived, mobs intolerant of this new religious group forced the entire Mormon community to leave. Sociologically it is easy to imagine what incited the mobs: the Mormon community tended to move en masse into a new area—first to Kirkland, Ohio; then Independence, Missouri; and finally to the swampy area of western Illinois they named Nauvoo. With each move, their numbers—in the range of ten to fifteen thousand—seemed threatening to the existing population; they were antislavery when the western reaches of the country were often proslavery, especially Missouri; they were hardworking and successful; their doctrine was a revolutionary return to a literal New Testament intimacy with God; and they claimed to have a prophet who received direct revelations from God. The Missouri Legislature, under pressure from the mobs, ultimately passed a resolution demanding expulsion of the Mormon community. Violence ensued, leading to some deaths and loss of property with no protection given by the state. The recent decision by the Missouri legislature, 150 years later, to rescind the earlier expulsion resolution seems ironic and wryly humorous. The Mormons in Nauvoo relocated to Winter Quarters in what is now Iowa, and then in 1850, Elizabeth Hulme traveled with her children by covered wagon to the growing Mormon community in the Utah Territory. The family settled in the southern part of Utah Territory, later called Payson. It was there that young Phebe Daniels met William Hulme on his return from California. They were married in 1860 and in 1864 were called to pioneer the Bear Lake region in northern Utah Territory. It was there that a daughter—my grandmother, Phebe Almira Hulme—was born in 1865. She eventually married Hyrum Nebeker in 1886. Frederick Jackson Turner, the preeminent Harvard historian of the American West, who taught many summers at Utah Agricultural College, spoke of the Mormon exodus from East to West as the greatest enterprise of its kind that ever took place on American soil. The Nebeker side of the family descended from Johan Martin Neubecker, who sailed to America on the Edinburgh in 1749 with a group of immigrants from the German Palatinate in northwestern Germany. He settled in Delaware. A grandson named John was born in 1813. As a young man, John moved to Ohio with his family and, at the age of twenty-two, married Laurena Fitzgerald. They soon relocated

“There Is Always a Way”  •  31

to Illinois. Laurena was the first to have contact with the Mormon Church and joined in 1840; John followed in 1846. In 1847, as part of the exodus Professor Turner so eloquently described, the Neubeckers began the trek to the Rocky Mountains with their five children. Four of John’s brothers joined them in the western migration. John’s outfit consisted of three wagons, including nursery stock, apple seeds, and peach pits, along with tools, food supplies, and other essentials. The party consisted of 566 wagons. There were no roads and few maps or trails. They arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in September 1847. There are reports that John harvested the first crop of wheat the next year and witnessed the widely remembered onslaught of crickets that threatened some of the pioneers’ early crops. His diary records the story: Yes, I had quite an experience with the crickets. They came to Arsenal Hill in great numbers. We dug and filled channels with water to prevent the spread of the crickets, but they would throw themselves across; it was impossible to fight them back. While receiving word from my son that our crop of corn in Hill Creek was in jeopardy, my attention turned to a dark cloud that proved to be a flock of gulls. They made a line for the crickets and remained half an hour until they had cleaned them out. The Indians also got fat on the crickets. They would gather them in baskets, then put them in willows and set fire to the willows; by the time the willows were burned the crickets would be cooked. Not surprizingly [sic], the arrival of the seagulls was seen as an answer to fervent pioneer prayers, perhaps also prayer for the courage to meet the challenge of losing some or most of their first crops. The seagulls responded for whatever reason to the prospects of a [sic] orgy of crickets.1 ”Come, Come, Ye Saints”

Ira Nebeker, my great-grandfather, was a son of John and Laurena. In 1856, at the age of seventeen, he attended an emergency meeting in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, where Brigham Young announced that nearly three thousand immigrants from Wales, Scotland, and Scandinavia were trapped in Wyoming in an early snowstorm. They had lacked sufficient funds to purchase wagons and oxen and, using only handcarts, had walked from the Illinois/Nebraska border. They needed immediate help to reach Salt Lake.

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Ira was one of the first to pack his horse and reach the Willy company more than 150 miles away in Wyoming. His diary reports that some of the people were so exhausted that they fell forward and died around the last fire they had built. Many perished, but with food and clothing from the rescue party, the majority made it to Salt Lake. Out of this and other experiences of the western migration came the signature Mormon hymn, “Come, Come, Ye Saints” that chronicled the trek of both oxen-pulled wagon trains and human-pulled handcarts that brought the pioneers to their home in the West, both physically and metaphorically. Come, come, ye Saints, no toil nor labor fear; But with joy wend your way. Though hard to you this journey may appear, Grace shall be as your day. ’Tis better far for us to strive Our useless cares from us to drive; Do this, and joy your hearts will swell— All is well! All is well! Why should we mourn or think our lot is hard? ’Tis not so; all is right. Why should we think to earn a great reward If we now shun the fight? Gird up your loins; fresh courage take. Our God will never us forsake; And soon we’ll have this tale to tell— All is well! All is well! We’ll find the place which God for us prepared, Far away in the West, Where none shall come to hurt or make afraid; There the Saints will be blessed. We’ll make the air with music ring, Shout praises to our God and King; Above the rest these words we’ll tell— All is well! All is well! And should we die before our journey’s through, Happy day! All is well!

“There Is Always a Way”  •  33

We then are free from toil and sorrow, too; With the just we shall dwell! But if our lives are spared again To see the Saints their rest obtain, Oh, how we’ll make this chorus swell— All is well! All is well!2 Johnston’s Army

In 1857 a large armed force named for the commanding general—Johnston’s army—and estimated to be as much as one-fourth of the entire United States troops, was on the march to Utah, intending to dispose of “the Mormon threat” to the Union. Some suspected that the Utah colony was planning to secede. Who knows? I suppose there might have been some reason to think so, for when the Mormons were evicted from Nauvoo and traveled west, they were in fact moving to land that was not yet part of the United States. No sooner had they reached the Utah Territory than the Mexican War of 1846–48 resulted in the annexation of the area that later became Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California. The Mormon migration thus found itself back in the United States in a region that would later be called Utah, a name derived from the Ute Indian nation that had originally occupied that area. You can imagine the fears that the report of advancing U.S. troops must have generated among the Mormon settlers. No one knew what “dispose” might mean, and total annihilation was not beyond consideration, given the attacks the church had suffered from mobs in Missouri and Illinois. As already mentioned, the Missouri governor had earlier issued an order that the Mormons were to be exterminated. Was this equivalent to the term genocide that we use to describe the horrific recent events in Armenia, Bosnia, Africa, and elsewhere? The Saints were prepared to burn their new community in Salt Lake City in a scorched-earth tactic and move south. Straw was even stored in the attics of homes, ready to start the fires. As the army drew near and encamped up a canyon some ten or twenty miles east of Salt Lake City, Ira Nebeker and others watched over the settlement. When evening fell, they even built large campfires and walked sentry duty to show the army that the pioneers were prepared to resist and had a larger force than they really did. Reasonable minds prevailed, and the threat subsided without bloodshed. Thomas Kane, a non-Mormon newspaper writer, had come to Utah a few years earlier as a reporter for an eastern newspaper. He saw the Saints as innocent

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victims and was reported to have been one of the sensible people who prompted the U.S. troops to return east. A county in Utah is named for Kane, and ninety years later—when I was a student at Harvard Medical School—Oliver Cope, a distinguished surgeon and teacher, learned that I was from Utah and introduced himself as a direct descendent of Thomas Kane. The conclusion of the episode left a military encampment on the east bench of Salt Lake City that was named Fort Douglas in honor of Stephen Douglas, the senator who debated Lincoln. Parts of the fort still stand, and most of the land has been transferred piecemeal to the University of Utah as the campus grows. Utah’s story is one of swords to plowshares, armed force to education. The University built a large student residential center and dining hall a few years ago on the old Fort Douglas land. Ira Nebeker might be pleased to know that the central building was named the Chase N. Peterson Center to honor the great-grandson he never saw. It seems that university presidents’ names end up on buildings, and I must say I am proud of that placement. I have thought of scratching Ira’s name in the bricks next to mine. With the outbreak of the Civil War, many of the officers and men left; some joined the Confederacy, and others the Union ranks. Ira survived that experience and married Delia Chase Lane. They helped to develop Toquerville in southern Utah, only to be called by Brigham Young in 1869 to colonize, with fifty other families, the Bear Lake region of northeastern Utah. Soon after that, Ira was called again, this time to be the bishop of Laketown at the south end of Bear Lake. A bishop is the leader of a congregation of Saints between one and three hundred. He held this position for thirty years. While loyal to his office, Ira exercised a considerable degree of independence. He said, “I can’t worship the General Authorities [the church leadership]; it is hard enough to worship the Lord!” The leadership of Brigham Young was indeed often heavy-handed, for like an American Moses, he engineered the colonization of vast regions of what are now Utah, southern Idaho, northern Arizona, and even parts of southern Canada. It was not a task for the fainthearted or weak willed. My predecessor as president of the University of Utah, David Gardner, tells of the time when his ancestor, Archibald Gardner, had a squabble with Brigham Young over the title to a sawmill that Gardner had built up a canyon near Salt Lake. It was a time when federal confiscation of property over polygamy in the church was a growing threat. Titles were often transferred back and forth to avoid that risk, so just who owned what became blurred. With considerable anger, Gardner left Salt Lake and went to southern Utah, where he reestablished a successful sawmill. A few years later, the church headquarters sent Gardner a request for some of his best trees to construct the Assembly Hall in Salt Lake City. The Gardner family

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records that Archibald wrote back, “If it is Brigham Young who wants the trees, tell him to go to hell; if the Lord wants them, I’ll send them.” An answer soon came from Salt Lake that “the Lord wants them,” and Gardner sent the trees! The Assembly Hall still stands and was the home of the Utah Symphony in its first years. Bear Lake

The William Hulme family settled in the northern part of Bear Lake in a town called Bloomington, where he served as the bishop for about as long as Ira Nebeker did in Laketown at the south end of the lake. Within a few years, a daughter of William’s family named Phebe Almira Hulme met Hyrum Nebeker, a son in Ira’s family. Hyrum and Almira married and had six children. The second was Chase, whose name I bear, and the fourth was Elliott. Both died before their first birthdays of the “winter disease,” which was presumably influenza or pneumonia. They lie buried on a hillside overlooking the south end of Bear Lake. Hyrum, my grandfather, was a gruff man, quick to remind us to come back and close the screen door without slamming it. But his love was never totally hidden, especially for the delicate Hulme girl who somehow agreed to marry him and bring some beauty and grace into a hard-bitten ranch existence. Grandma always had geraniums growing on the front porch, apple trees well tended, sweet peas in bloom in the summer, and cookies layered with raisins or dates, but woe to the grandchild or hired hand who ever used vulgar language at the dinner table. Grandma Nebeker stayed with us in Logan in her last years. Mother was sixty; Grandma was eighty-something. Mother told me one day that she had been speaking for some time on the telephone within Grandma’s earshot. The conversation apparently included a number of “uh-huhs” on Mother’s part, perhaps as a way of affirming and encouraging the conversation. When Mother hung up, Grandma quietly said, “Phebe, for a lady of your distinction, it may be inappropriate to say ‘uh-huh’ quite so often.” At eighty she was still the schoolteacher and mother. Like his father, Ira, Hyrum was too busy to spend all his time on church matters. He focused on the need to “pull an ox out of the mire on the Sabbath.” In that context, imagine the courage and loyalty he exhibited when a call came to preach the Gospel without “purse or script”—meaning living off the land and the generosity of strangers—for two years in far-off Mississippi in the early 1890s. There was no church law that required him to accept the assignment, and some other men didn’t, but in those days it was just “what you did to build up the kingdom.” Because the Nebekers had lost their first two boys before the age of two, the family

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children at that time consisted of two young girls: Luella and my mother, Phebe. The last children, Hulme and Sidney, had not yet been born. Hyrum later wrote of his departure from his family’s ranch in South Eden: While I had some faith in the Church it wasn’t as strong as Mrs. Nebeker’s, but between the two of us I mustered up courage on the 14th of January, 1896, to get on my old black saddle horse, Blackhawk, put a grip on the saddle in front of me about noon and start the eight miles to Laketown. When I got out onto the hills that would shut the South Eden homestead from my view I turned my horse around and thought I would take one last look, but my eyes were so filled with tears that I had to forego that pleasure.3 Almira—left to raise two young children and manage the ranch with what help she could hire—records her good-bye to Hyrum in her diary: “You go, we will get along someway. We will go to work, that is the best way to forget our loneliness and to make the time pass quickly.”4 Hyrum’s mission was relentlessly hard. There were few converts, and he was fearful of physical harm at the hands of the Mississippians of the late nineteenth century and plagued with unrelenting homesickness. In one of his letters home, he asked Almira to purchase an organ for the girls. He said he wished them to learn how to play and sing, and a beautiful Newman organ was purchased. Fifty years later, I tried to play it since it was still in good shape in the farmhouse. Most of the effort of playing was in fact pumping the foot pedals that provided the air pressure to blow the pipes. While he was in the second year of his mission, still deeply homesick, Hyrum’s diary describes him falling asleep beside a Mississippi haystack dreaming that he was no longer in Mississippi and walking up the lane of his beloved South Eden home, only to find Almira at the door saying, “Hyrum, what are you doing home early?” He wrote that he was never so glad to wake up back in Mississippi! Chase Family

On a Memorial Day a few years ago, I was forty miles from Bear Lake in the Logan cemetery where my parents are buried. I went to the sexton’s office to see if there were any vacant lots adjacent to my parents’ plot. After shuffling through old files, the sexton looked up and said, “If you can prove that you are related to Delia Chase Lane Nebeker, there are ten open lots available to her family, for which she paid

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in full more than one hundred years ago.” Indeed she was a great-grandmother of mine. Together with my uncle, who died in infancy, and now my grandson, I share the name she brought to the family. The name comes from one of two Chase brothers who settled in Newberry, Massachusetts, in the 1630s—Thomas and Aquilla. My ancestor was Thomas, and I later came across many of his descendents still living in New England, one even a fabled hockey coach at Harvard, John Chase. A story speaks of Thomas’s arrest for planting peas on the Sabbath and his sentence to some number of hours in Puritan stocks. He was so angry that he “jumped bail” and fled to Maine, never to return. At the annual Chase reunion in Boston, a young descendant stands in the stocks for a few minutes to pay off the family debt symbolically to society, however belatedly. My branch of the family went from Maine to Wisconsin and there joined the Mormon Church and came to Utah. All American Chases came from one of these two brothers. We also claim Heber C. (for Chase) Kimball, the missionary in England who introduced the church to Phebe Daniels; Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the treasury under Lincoln; the founder of the Chase Manhattan Bank; and who knows how many scoundrels? Polygamy or Plural Marriage

Polygamy was an Old Testament practice of early Mormonism until the end of the nineteenth century. We generally spoke of it with pride. It was noncoercive and limited to a small percentage of the faithful who were called to take another wife to build up the kingdom and ensure that those women who wanted children could have them within a marriage. Almira Hulme’s father was called to take a second wife, Ann Maria Briscol. The calling was a church process, reserved for those successful enough to be able to support multiple families and presumably of an upright nature. Whatever the justifying theology, it was a plan that worked more often than not, and Almira’s father took good care of each of his two families, raising eight and nine children, respectively. When the federal government grew increasingly alarmed by polygamy and ultimately outlawed it in the Utah Territory, the LDS Church abandoned the practice. But it took the membership the rest of a generation to adjust to the new law and finish raising each family to adulthood without making orphans of any of the children. In many instances, the U.S. marshal in charge of enforcing the law looked the other way. In the case of Almira’s father, the marshal let it be known discretely

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when he would be coming through St. Charles, a small town on the northwest corner of Bear Lake. My great-grandfather could spend the day working out of sight in a potato cellar while the marshal pretended to look for him! Given the range of circumstances—from sublime to hideous—that have been associated with sexuality and reproduction over the centuries, the history of Mormon polygamy has been uneven but largely responsible. Instances have ranged from tender and true love to callousness. The two Hulme families exemplified the former. The parents fed and raised good children and were proud of their tie to this colorful remnant of the nineteenth-century Mormon West. Undoubtedly some members of polygamous families were deprived of love and even the necessities of life, but the Hulme family thrived. Children and grandchildren share this heritage with pride. Polygamy sometimes supported a kind of premodern feminism through the cooperation among the sister wives. One of the first two women to become physicians in the Utah Territory was Ellis Shipp, a plural wife whose sister wives provided financial support and cared for her children so she could attend medical school at the far-off Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in the 1870s. The New Frontier and the Old Natives

Pioneer stories generally abound with rugged individualism. The Mormon pioneer saga had that quality but also a remarkable communalism. Leonard J. Arrington, one of the finest Mormon historians, published the definitive biography Brigham Young: American Moses in 1985, comparing the communal nature of the western migration and colonization of the Mormons from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the Israelites’ earlier exodus from Egypt. Brigham Young then civilized and cultivated the Utah Territory by calling families like Ira Nebeker’s to move wherever they were needed. Although these stories are usually about Europeans settling the Utah Territory, the Shoshone Indians had lived in and around Bear Lake for centuries. Inevitable conflicts arose as white men began to compete for the land. The diaries of Amos Wright, a contemporary of Ira Nebeker, collected by Geneva Ensign Wright and published in a book titled ἀ e Adventures of Amos Wright, Mormon Frontiersman by Council Press in Provo, Utah, record one of the many confrontations that the two cultures had during the last half of the nineteenth century. Let me paraphrase one story in the diary that I remember hearing in my childhood. In 1867, when the Shoshones came back to their fall rendezvous place, they found that new settlers had gone into their traditional hunting and camping areas

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and plowed, fenced, and planted crops, breaking a treaty that Chief Washakie had made with Brigham Young and Charles Rich, his representative in Bear Lake. “Young and Rich lie again; we get even this time,” vowed Washakie, who threatened to kill every white man, woman, and child in the valley. In record time, word reached Rich, who called on Wright. He in turn asked Ira Nebeker and Ed Austin to ride with him to the Indian gathering at the south end of the lake. A circle of tepees with smoke curling skyward and the chanting of warriors greeted them. A shower of arrows fell, and a shot or two were fired into the air. The three men rode swiftly into the circle and were pulled from their horses. Wright opened his shirt wide, exposing his breast, and in Shoshone said, “We come to make peace, but if you don’t want to listen, go ahead and shoot.” Nebeker felt the point of a spear pressing into his chest as he looked into a scowling face. He stared back without flinching. The Indian finally dropped his knife and said, “Brave man.” Wright said, “You have a right to fight. White men have taken your campgrounds. But these land jumpers are not Mormons. Young and Rich can’t make them get off. We speak for Mormons only. Did Young and Rich lie when they promised they would share their food and blankets with you? Do you go hungry since the Mormons came? When Sioux come and steal your horses, do you kill the Blackfeet to get even?” Finally, Chief Washakie responded, “Let’s eat and then talk some more.” Amos Wright stayed as a hostage while Ira Nebeker and Ed Austin mounted their horses and went to get the meat. Bonfires were built; huge slabs of beef were lugged in and cut into strips. It was almost midnight by the time the feast was finished. At long last, Chief Washakie said, “I need sleep; wait ’til morning, and we’ll talk again.” My great-grandfather and his two companions were held for three days and nights before Washakie agreed to give them another chance. Finally, a peace pipe was lit, and Washakie stepped forward and passed it through the four cardinal points—north, south, east, and west—then pointed it to the sky and the Earth. He took a long puff from the pipe and handed it to Amos, Ed, and Ira, who followed suit. This is the way I heard this story, but who knows how much its heroic overtones may have benefited from charitable family interpretation? A few years later, it was clear that the conflicts would never be easily settled. Rich called a council of the tribes and the settlers. As each tribe presented its grievances, it was clear that the villains were white men. Rich turned to the blue waters of the Bear Lake and asked his red brothers to watch the waves ripple the sand. As the small waves kept coming toward them—coming and never ending—he explained that the white men would do the same; there was no hope that the good old days would ever return for the Indians. Sadly, Washakie asked the Mormon

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leader to ask his “great white father” in Washington where the Shoshones could go: “If he tells us where, we will go.” Then turning to Rich and pointing toward the valley, he said, “We give this land to you. Take care of it.” In 1868 the Uinta Wind River Reservation in Wyoming was set aside for the Shoshones. Although the Indians were assigned to the reservation, they still made trips to the Bear Lake Valley to harvest fish. My mother remembered with both fear and excitement times when they came to Ira and Hyrum and demanded meat, but never war. Nor, I suspect, did the Indians ever find a secure home through the promises of white men. At one time in the last years of the nineteenth century, a Shoshone even tried to take Mother’s favorite pony, prompting this teenage girl to look him in the eye and successfully retain her beloved Perk. The Nebeker Zen

The ranch homesteaded by my grandfather, Hyrum, and his father, Ira Nebeker, was eight miles north of the nearest town, Laketown, on the east shore of Bear Lake on the Utah/Idaho/Wyoming border. They named it South Eden. The only route to Laketown was a one-lane dirt road through the sagebrush plowed wider in later years by Hyrum with his D-4 Caterpillar tractor. The ranch became the summer work home for most of the grandchildren of Hyrum and Almira Nebeker. I had sixteen Nebeker cousins—four boys were within eighteen months of my age. We worked each day at chores appropriate to our ages, weeding the garden and gathering eggs at first, then progressing to being members of hay gangs in our teen years. The history we shared was infused with the sweat, horseflies, and daily business of the ranch. It became as much a part of my life as was school in Logan in the winter. Either divine providence or dumb luck watched over me and the other grandchildren. We shot chipmunks with Uncle Sid’s twenty-two rifle. I killed more than a dozen rattlesnakes one summer after I found one of them scaring the cows as we herded them back to the barn for evening milking. It was safe if I first threw large rocks at the snake’s head from some distance until I hit it and then smashed what was left with a stick. For a while, I tried to make belts from the snakeskins, but that soon grew tiresome. My mother later expressed some regret at our killing the rattlers, even though a bite could severely wound and even kill an animal or a young child. She said that she always considered a rattlesnake a gentleman snake for it was not apt to strike at humans unless it was startled. We used to race our horses bareback from our ranch to the Alley Ranch half a mile away to the north. My last good ride, at about six or seven, ended when a

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horse shied suddenly at a snake crossing the dirt road. I was thrown off and dazed for a few moments, and, despite the aphorism of the West, I never got back on a horse comfortably again. My first chemistry lab was the ranch. If soil, water, seed, and sun provided the elements for the Earth’s primordial chemistry laboratory, a ranch is today’s version and was even when I was growing up. The land and the laboratory would have lain fallow and empty until a human brain invented curiosity and the words “why” and “how.” As our forefathers advanced from hunting and gathering, they ultimately discovered what there was to cultivate. The farmer/rancher must have been the world’s first scientist. There were as many questions in the air as the horseflies and mosquitoes. I can’t remember anything passive at the ranch, except maybe the sunsets. There was no television, and primitive radio provided the only contact with the outer world. There were soil, water, seed, and sun; everything else waited for curiosity and work. What a laboratory, what a mental and physical playground the ranch was! It was a fresh canvas each day, waiting for the creative impulse, not to mention inventive pranks. I best remember one involving Grandma’s chickens. Somewhere I had heard that if you held a chicken on its side and stroked its beak with a piece of straw, you could hypnotize it. I thought I’d try. I held a hen firmly on its side on the ground. By dragging the piece of straw down its head, over its beak, and out onto the dusty ground, I discovered I really could put it into a trance. At least it didn’t move. I tiptoed back to the coop and brought out more hens, one at a time, and each succumbed to the technique. I must have had ten or fifteen hens lying on their sides—immobile and apparently dead—when Grandma came out to the yard, saw them, and let out a cry. Eggs and fryers were sold in Laketown and provided extra money to buy a book or a shawl to brighten up ranch life. That would be gone if all her hens died. I wasn’t entirely sure what the state of the hens was, but I clapped and shouted loudly. They all jumped up unharmed and went back to their business of laying eggs, and I had achieved my moment of creative ranch science—call it a blend of reason and curiosity. That same summer I learned about the damage that magpies can do to sores on the backs of young lambs and how they pester livestock in general. One day when I was about ten, I was in the pigpen feeding slop and noticed a magpie on a nearby fence post. I had Uncle Sid’s twenty-two rifle with me and took a random shot at the bird. By golly, I killed it and felt understandably proud. I then wondered if I tied the dead bird to the fence post, would it attract other magpies? It did, and I managed to kill almost a dozen curious birds, no simple feat given that magpies

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are mostly feathers, and a twenty-two bullet is tiny. In any case, I piled up the dead birds into some sort of victory pyre. At supper that night, Grandpa asked, “Who killed the magpies?” Expecting praise, I piped up, “I did, Grandpa.” Instead, he said, “Every summer the weather is warm here on Bear Lake, so the food and company are plentiful. When winter comes, the lake freezes, the guests are gone, and only the magpies stay with me. I love those magpies; please don’t shoot them.” I have so many memories of Hyrum Nebeker—half tough and half gentle. When he woke his grandsons in the early morning to milk the cows, it was often with the cry, “Aren’t you tired of sleeping?” He was a Theodore Roosevelt Republican and later an FDR Democrat and never missed the scratchy evening radio world news while stretched out on a hard couch cleaning his teeth with toothpicks—now called flossing. He and his father, Ira, were renowned horsemen with a rope and saddle. In his older years, he had more money and enjoyed spending some of it to buy a nice car. But he never hesitated to treat a new car like a horse and drive it off the county road and over low sagebrush if he saw something he wanted to inspect at closer range. It was a rare Nebeker car that didn’t lose a muffler. There were the magpies, of course, and there was unspoken generosity. The last year my cousin, Steve Nebeker, and I worked on the hay gang, we were planning to go to law school and medical school, respectively, in the fall. At the end of the summer, Grandpa quietly handed each of us an extra check for a thousand dollars, considerably above regular wages in the early 1950s. Almira worked as hard or harder than Hyrum to make the ranch survive. She cooked all the meals for the family of course and even larger meals in season for hungry workers. On these occasions, when all the plates had been eaten clean, I remember her saying with a smile, “Well, I guess I made just enough.” When a full hay gang was eating, we worked our way through a cow a week: slaughtering on Tuesday, curing for a day or two, then cutting off steaks, then roasts, then stews, then back to a new cow the next Tuesday. My grandmother churned butter, boiled pig fat with lye to make soap, and sold spare eggs (from unhypnotized hens) and milk to the general store in Laketown. Making do with what you had at hand was an unspoken rule on any ranch that was hours or days from the nearest store or repair shop. We grandchildren grew up with the understanding that almost any mechanical problem could be fixed with whatever was available within arm’s reach or at least somewhere on the property. This meant that a pair of pliers, some barbed wire, a board or two, or some scraps of sheet metal were generally sufficient for any job. Years later I suggested that the excellence of the University of Utah—considerably in excess of its state-tax

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support base—was perhaps due to some combination of dreams, moonbeams, barbed wire, and the freedom to innovate. Perhaps the ranch economy, remote location, and the self-sufficient sense of an isolated religious and cultural Zion lay at the core of my mother’s axiom, “there is always a way.” Looking back, I cannot overvalue the notion my family had that almost all of life’s problems could be managed, and the means generally lay within arm’s reach. In the 1970s, a powerful book entitled Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance came my way with much the same message. The author, Robert Pirsig, suggested that you had to earn the right to own and ride a motorcycle by mastering the ability to quiet the mind—the Zen part—to harmonize your soul with the machine; only that way could you maintain and repair it. Many years later, in the 1970s, when I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Irving Street in the home built by the pragmatist William James, I remember facing a prosaic Kenmore clothes dryer that stopped working one Saturday morning. I quieted my mind, sat down by the machine, and slowly removed one part after another until I came to something that looked broken. I couldn’t fix it with barbed wire, but I could take the broken part to the Sears store two blocks away at Porter Square and find a replacement, install it, and sustain the Nebeker Zen in a fashion that might have satisfied Hyrum, Phebe, and Robert Pirsig. Even the pragmatic William James might have approved. You can’t halt the operation of fourteen men on a hay gang to go thirty miles and get a part. That phrase—“there is always a way”—pointed to solutions sometimes, but on other occasions, it at least indicated that there was an approach to survive a disaster. When a crop failed for lack of rainfall, Hyrum figured he could obtain a bank loan to sustain the ranch until the next season. To be sure, there were rites of passage at the ranch. I was not as rugged as my cousins until my middle teens. By thirteen or so, I had a job as the driver for the haystacking forklift. It amounted to pulling a cable attached to a stripped-down Jeep back and forth to raise and lower the fork that received heavy loads of hay delivered by buck rakes from the field. The fork tossed the hay onto the growing pile, where two men on top moved it around to ensure a stack was stable enough to stand fifteen to twenty feet high, one that would essentially protect itself from water and snow through the winter. My job was simple enough and something I was proud to do, especially because I could not legally drive on a road until I was sixteen. One afternoon I came down with a violent case of intestinal flu and vomiting, yet if I stopped pulling the fork up and down, the whole hay operation would grind to a halt, and I was determined not to let that happen. I ended up driving the Jeep forward and back, jumping out of the cab occasionally to vomit, then jumping

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back in time for the next load. My memory likely exaggerates the number of times I vomited. In any case, the hired men had called me Baby Dumplings until then, based on a less-than-heroic character from the Dagwood comic strip. The nickname was friendly but not flattering. I was a bit pudgy and not the best horseman in the gang. After that experience at the haystack though, I felt I had earned my standing. It was a rite of passage, I suppose. George

When I was twenty—at the ranch during a summer off from college—I became the stacker of baled hay at a branch farm appropriately named North Eden, five miles north of South Eden. It was quite an operation. After the alfalfa was mowed, it had to dry for a day or two so that it would not rot when stacked. This meant that we had to cut and then bale the hay within a window of good weather. If it rained, the whole process had to wait for new drying. Once the bales were tied, they had to be picked up and brought to the haystack. A moving-track elevator belt then dumped them on top of the stack. It was my job to move the bales into a stable stack and get the same seal from the elements over the winter as the loose hay stackers had achieved. I was challenged by the exercise and the sense of crude geometry required to fit the bales into an interlocked shape. That last summer working on the ranch I had my closest day-by-day contact with my brother George. His life was as hard as mine was rewarding. George’s story is encapsulated in an event that occurred when he was a small boy. Dad’s PhD from Cornell was in bacteriology, and he must certainly have talked about germs with the family. So imagine everyone’s surprise when George was seen walking down the main street of Logan licking the doorknobs of one store after another! He was born just three or four years after Dad and Mother assumed the heavy responsibility of managing a fledgling college. What special burden did that put on his parents, as well as George, to measure up? I remember hearing that his first-grade teacher became irritated with some prank he was pulling, undoubtedly harmless. She apparently chastised him severely in front of the other students, adding the barb that “even though you are the president’s son, you can’t get away with such behavior.” That had to be painful, for our father was prominent in the community. My only personal negative memory of my brother was a moment when we were wrestling; he was probably fifteen, and I was five. It was playful at first, but suddenly he was holding me down with a pillow over my face as if to smother me. I tore free, mad and frightened, and grabbed a metal bookend that was nearby and

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threw it at him, but it missed and crashed into a mirror on a side table. The crash and broken mirror seemed like a catastrophe to me at the time. George was a good athlete, although he lost his temper too often when he was chided by an opponent. One day in high school, he lost the semifinal heat of the 440 race, so he ran on the grass infield to support a friend who was competing in the final race, and they both won. That last summer we were together at the ranch was our last close contact. We slept together in a bunkhouse. I had the better job of stacking the baled hay. George, ten years my senior, was relegated to the lesser work of picking up the hay in the field and bringing it to the stack. Working on the ranch with an older group of cousins, I felt that he was often the one who was distracted and apt to leave a cattle gate open, leading to a waste of the workmen’s time rounding the stock up. Many mornings George woke up and, with a tired and frightened voice, turned to me and said, “I can’t go on.” Somehow or another George and I managed to get through that summer. For him it was regularly painful. For me it was a second rite of passage as I weathered the test of never having a stack fall down. Was there “always a way” for George or our parents to alleviate the problems he had? Many remedies were tried, but much of his psychic pain remained. I came along ten years later. Undoubtedly his difficult life served as some conscious or unconscious motivation for me as I grew up. He was always a poor student, though people saw him as smart. Even a year at a military academy in New Mexico was unsuccessful in teaching him academic discipline. He enlisted in the army in World War II, was stationed in Texas, and then finally was moved to a base near Liverpool, England. He seemed to be regularly promoted to corporal and then demoted to private again for some minor infraction. In other words, he had a tough life growing up, although the reasons aren’t clear. He was alert, smart, and, when at ease, charming with jokes for everyone. George married a lovely girl—Catherine Foster—whom he met in England. They raised two fine children. In later years, I learned from his wife that he frequently woke up with such anxiety that he had to get out of bed, dress, and walk the dark streets of Logan until he could calm himself enough to go back to bed. The Logan police grew accustomed to his nocturnal walks. They always waved to him and asked if he needed help. “Nope, I’ll be all right,” he always said. Soon after his military discharge, George’s emotional distress was sufficiently severe that a surgeon at the local V.A. hospital proposed some experimental variant of a prefrontal lobotomy to reduce his anxiety, but the operation didn’t help. This type of surgery was later abandoned. Its only effect on George was giving him headaches.

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Who can know what George’s real impact was on me, and mine on him? Years after our time on the ranch, I suffered from what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after a bizarre illness in an ancient Prague hospital. The PTSD only lasted a few months. I have since wondered if George and I carried the same neurologic tendencies. He suffered his whole life in an era when there was little therapy. I benefited by undergoing my trauma later when I was older and more experienced in an age when such problems were more manageable. Was the shadow of the college campus a burden for George while it represented an exploring playground for me? What did my parents learn about child raising with George that may have benefited me? Whatever emotional illness disabled my brother, he ultimately became a hero in my mind, able to survive decades of frustration and marginal worldly success to raise two fine children with the help of a strong and loving wife. To my knowledge, he was never abusive either to others or himself with drugs or alcohol. He was never in trouble with the law and was almost always ready with a friendly quip. Did I feel some obligation to make up for George’s failures and ease the anguish for my parents? Did I feel some guilt for my good fortune? Who knows? Managing to the End

During Mother’s last years in Logan, I was working at Harvard. I remember frequently calling her to share some bit of news about what the family and I were doing. I recall thinking that was a nice thing to do, given her widowhood and probable loneliness; also she was in her eighties. She died quietly at eighty-three. She had told us all earlier that if and when she became bedridden or mentally impaired, it would be time for her to die. Her terminal illness was some combination of pneumonia and heart failure, and she chose to stop drinking all fluids. After a day or two, she lapsed into a peaceful coma, eased when needed by appropriate medication, and died within a week. Grethe and I drove from Cambridge and participated in a lovely funeral and the dividing up of her material possessions—pictures, paintings, silverware, a piano, books, and the like—and then drove back to Massachusetts. I shall never forget the impulse I felt over the next months to pick up the phone to share the events of my life with my mother. Only then did I realize that my calls to her, however well intended, probably had less to do with brightening the life of a widowed mother than endowing my deeds with the timeless significance telling a mother can give . . . whether the child is five or fifty.

3 Zero to Fifteen: Growing Up in Logan

If there is truth to the notion that it takes a village to raise a child, there was certainly a village available to me in Logan and the college campus. Logan was a green, small, safe, and friendly town of ten thousand people located on the bench of the Wasatch Mountains, the western extension of the Rockies. The bench was formed from the shoreline of ancient Lake Bonneville that covered much of Utah and Idaho in prehistoric times until it cut through its northern shoreline and spilled most of its contents into the Snake River drainage. All that remains of the original lake is the Great Salt Lake, which has no outflow except for evaporation, so that its salinity over the ages has come to rival the Dead Sea. Except for summer work on the Nebeker ranch forty miles to the east, in my first fifteen years I rarely ventured out of Logan and Cache Valley (named for caching of furs by early trappers). The memories tumble out like shiny taws from a bag of marbles. I became an imprint of the Utah Agricultural College (UAC) campus. When I was barely old enough to toddle and remember, my parents took me on walks around the campus in the evenings. The trees were Norwegian maples and three species of poplar— Carolina (globular), Bolleana, and Lombardy—each tall and slim, one with silver leaves, and the others with green. I was told the Mormon pioneers planted the Bolleanas and Lombardies along roads and paths in the manner of Napoleon, who wanted to mark the routes of his conquests. When I was not learning the names of the trees, I was swinging like a milk pail between my parents as we strolled along. These recollections of childhood are so warm and positive that even memories of being disciplined seem happy, although I suspect I may have filtered out any

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negativity. When I misbehaved, my mother sentenced me to sit on a chair for some prescribed time appropriate to the severity of my crime, but she had no objection to what I did while serving my sentence. I took satisfaction in starting out in the dining room, where there were lots of movable chairs, and made a train of them while traveling through the house. The sentence to the chair was the important part. It meant my mother was serious, that I had done something that needed correction, but neither the offense nor the punishment was meant to curtail the expression of my energy or imagination. My mother made her point, and I got it. But I was free to continue exploring the world and my options. I guess it was an exercise in punishing the sin, but not the sinner. A more severe punishment was doled out one day for failure to do my Saturday morning house chores, which consisted of scrubbing the kitchen floor, vacuuming rugs, making beds, and doing whatever else needed to be done. Like any eightyear-old, sometimes I did as little as I could get away with. However, once I was in such excessive rebellion that I lost my right to go to a college basketball game that evening. The punishment was painful. Nevertheless, I figured out that I could peer with binoculars out of my upstairs bedroom into the windows of the college gymnasium fifty-odd feet away. I was able to follow the scoreboard from this vantage point and keep up with enough of the action to ease the punishment. The college had a central bell tower rising four or five stories above the top of the hill called College Hill. Occasionally Dad let me borrow a key to the doors that provided access to the bell tower. There was great fun in climbing up there with the unneeded portions of the Sunday newspaper, folding the sheets into airplanes, and throwing them out the windows to sail for blocks—miles it seemed—over the campus, College Hill, and sometimes down to Seventh East Street, two blocks away. No one seemed to fuss about a few paper planes scattered over the campus on Monday mornings. On New Year’s Eve, I took a ladder to the same tower to pull the bell rope at midnight. Its peal carried even farther than my airplanes. A bus connected the campus with downtown and cost a dime. The fare box made a clinking sound as the driver twirled a handle that recorded the amount and separated the dimes, quarters, and nickels. When I could, I sat in the left front seat to watch one driver who was especially adept at twirling the box handle with his right middle finger while he steered with his left hand. By the time I was five or six, I had discovered that the city bus offered voyages to a world larger than my family and school: the two miles to downtown. Once there I could go to Rechow-Morton’s store and pick out my new shoes to take home, ostensibly on approval. I never remember taking them back, even though

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the pride of personal selection likely prompted me to keep a pair even when the fit was imperfect and heel blisters plagued me until the shoes were broken in. However, they were my shoes. I shudder to think of the X-rays that poured into my body from the store’s fluoroscope machine as I wiggled my toes for minutes at a time to see how my feet fit into the shoes when I tried them on. The radiation may have contributed to the bone cancer I contracted decades later. The machines were eventually removed. The Whittier School

In the first grade, learning was fun, enriched with cheerful and pretty education majors from UAC who served as teaching interns. Parents picked us up after school. One day there was some misunderstanding about the time schedule, and no adults showed up. After a reasonable wait, some classmates began to whimper. I remember choosing to walk the mile or so home. When my parents saw me arrive and heard what had happened, they declared me a Magellan for having navigated my way home. All good parents praise little and big things their children do, but I still think that my parents placed the first stamp on a passport to a world of my own that day. I repeated such a walk on a snowy evening in West Concord, Massachusetts, a few years later and in many times and places metaphorically thereafter. All the boys played marbles at the Whittier School. One afternoon after a day in the second grade, Jerry Clyde and I decided to play for keeps. We played rounders, which consists of a yardwide circle containing each person’s ante of marbles. In turn Jerry and I shot from the perimeter to hit and knock out the marbles in the center. Any marble we could knock out became the property of the shooter, the booty of the game. That day after school, I had a first lesson in fairly earned booty. To Jerry’s surprise, I won most of the marbles. Then he claimed that we had agreed to play “not for keeps.” I remember my outrage. Words escalated into a brief scuffle, and a chance blow of mine gave him a bloody nose. The blood ended the fight. I claimed the marbles and started the mile walk home. I was trembling with a mixture of excitement and pride, along with some fear at the seeming immensity of what I had done. It was my first fight using any force. Was I a hero or some sort of rowdy? I don’t remember if I told my mother, or if I did, what she said. The main memory I have is that it was the first and last fight in my lifetime. Perhaps this first fight was the inner one that only has to be fought once, providing some pheromonelike protection in warding off future outer bullies and inner fears.

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Mostly Pride

Brain studies have shown that the memory of smell may be as forceful as any we have. Mrs. Humphries was my third- and then later my fifth-grade teacher. I cannot even guess at how much she contributed to my development. She received publishers’ copies of books and often loaned them to me for a day or two to read at home. She seriously instructed me on the way to open a new book: first in the middle, press down the front and back, and then push the first and third quarter of the book down at the same time. She said this was to break in the binding. My memory of the smell of a new book has lasted as long as anything I ever read between its covers. When  I got to the fifth grade, interest in sports led a gang of classmates to organize afterschool softball and tackle football games in season against the fifthgraders of the four other elementary schools in town. We were told that this was not allowed—I suppose in the name of avoiding premature emphasis on sports— but my classmates and I didn’t see any harm in it, so we played all the schools anyway. More than once we also found a teacher willing to serve as a softball umpire. I can’t remember how we generally chose teams to play softball or touch football for the thirty minutes of recess, but Mrs. Humphries once asked me to devise a random-selection process to avoid cliques always playing together. So I cut up two colors of paper into enough pieces to represent two teams. For one color, I selected a type of paper that was oddly called construction paper. It was thick, colored, and softly textured. For the other, I chose a slick, thin, white paper. Then I whispered to friends who were good athletes to feel for the fuzzy pieces of paper when they reached into the hat. We had a great team for a while until it came time to reshuffle with someone else in charge of the drawing. I still can’t decide whether to store that memory under pride or shame. To be honest, I feel mostly pride. More Than Teachers and Students

The college had a band instructor named Callister. I began to listen to the band as soon as my legs were long enough to keep up with the practice marches. I came to think that Callister enjoyed or at least tolerated my presence. I suppose I was about four when I was given a small baton about two feet long with rubber nubbins on each end. I was never invited, nor would I have been bold enough, to march with the band in a formal performance, but the practices were enough fun to watch and hear.

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The smell of saliva-wet clarinet and oboe reeds is with me still: a soggy, humanized, woodwind scent that somehow connected puffy cheeks and red faces with the sounds of John Philip Sousa. My parents must have known what I was doing with the band, but I don’t remember any discussions. It was my band. The campus was more than teachers, students, and reeds. Those same years it was painters, electricians, lawn mowers, farm-animal keepers, and more. I remember I thought that the painters were some of my first close friends when I was five years old and they ranged from thirty to sixty-five! The smell of turpentine, linseed oil, and musty drop cloths was their trademark, and like Mr. Callister, they didn’t tell me I was a pest. At first I just watched them; then I began to do small chores and errands for them; and finally, I was allowed to do a little painting in safe areas. While the smell of the paint is my most vivid memory, I must say that the next one is the dirty jokes they shared with each other. They laughed and presumed that I didn’t get most of the humor, or figured that the jokes I did get wouldn’t hurt me. They didn’t, except to make me feel a bit worldlier. My partnership with the paint crew grew so strong that I began arriving at eight and staying most of the day. After a while, I began to feel that I would surely be paid. The conviction grew so strong that I eventually went to the college pay window at the age of eight or nine on payday on the possibility that I might get a check. I didn’t. Over two or three summers, I hung out with most of the other workers. Electricians had their own mystique, involving sparks, black tape, and thick copper wire. It was fascinating to see that most of the workers could somehow touch live 110volt wires with no harm. I couldn’t, but I was in the balcony of a handball court one day—idly reaching out and under the balcony—when I found a hole that turned out to be an open light socket. When my finger hit the inside of the socket, my whole body began to vibrate with the shock. For seconds or more, I tried to pull my finger out but couldn’t. Shaking as I was, I reached out my other arm and hit the entrapped one, successfully freeing my finger. It wasn’t until I was in medical school years later that I learned that when equally stimulated, i.e., shocked, flexor muscles are more powerful than extensor ones, so an arm so stimulated will go into involuntary flexion contraction and cannot straighten. I suffered no apparent damage to muscle or brain; it was only an interesting adventure and heightened my respect for electricity. The farm crews made daily trips in hay wagons from the edge of campus to the college experimental farm a few miles north. We fed cows, bulls, sheep, horses, and pigs. The feed was hay, grain, and wonderful fermented silage. When waste cornstalks and other cellulose materials are dumped into a closed silo together

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with the right amount of water, they ferment and break down the cellulose into more easily digested cattle feed. I was later told about silo fillers’ disease, which results when a worker illadvisedly climbs down into a silo without ventilation, unaware that the fermentation process has consumed most of the oxygen, and heavier gases produced by the fermentation have displaced what was left. We had a case study in medical school fifteen years later of a young boy who entered a silo from the top by a ladder and lost consciousness from lack of oxygen; when his father climbed in to save him, he fainted as well, and they both died. I may have been the only one at Harvard Medical School who fully felt the impact of this tragedy. In any case, the silage of my childhood had the rich odor of cornstalks, straw fermentation, mustiness, and hungry animals. An experience of a lighter kind came from participation in the college’s little theater productions. There were occasionally roles for young boys and girls, one as fairies in ἀ e Merry Wives of Windsor, as I remember. A group of fairies surrounded Falstaff, who was drunk and asleep on a bench. Shakespeare specified wands for the fairies, with which they were to poke and torment the loveable old man. We had small flashlights instead of wands, but there were not enough for all of the fairies, so a diplomatic director divided them up. The first, even-numbered wave charged at Falstaff and was supposed to return and give the lights to the alternate fairies, who would make a second attack on the sleeping figure. My partner didn’t pass me the light quickly enough, and I missed the second assault wave. Feeling that I had not been treated fairly, I grabbed the light and made a third attack on Falstaff all by myself. I was not about to miss my chance at artistic expression. Were They Strangers?

How did this campus life start? I suppose I just began to watch the workers, the musicians, the actors, and the athletes. Soon I became a kind of mascot, helping with simple things, running errands, feeling and generously being made to feel that I was part of the crew, the band, the cast, and the team. I cannot imagine now how I pulled it off, but one of my peak experiences was being asked to umpire women’s softball games: balls, strikes, safe, or out! Except to be a ball boy—an unpaid job that I actually had to apply for—I never asked for permission from anyone, including my parents. Thinking back on those men and women with whom I interacted, I wonder now about something I never thought of at the time: did they mostly put up with my presence because I was the son of the president? Maybe so, but even if that was

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true, their tolerance of me—or what I described as their friendship with me—was an extension of their connection to our campus-defined community. The faculty, staff, workers, and students really were one, and people knew most of those they worked with. To this day, Utah State University has much that same reputation. Curiosity, I guess, was the trigger for my involvement, together with the absence of fear of strangers. Those workmen, students, and even faculty members weren’t so much strangers as parts of “my campus” and “our college.” After all, who is a stranger but someone who is different? And all these people seemed to be like me. Later in life, I never valued labels like Yankee, Irishman, Jew, snob, or disabled much. Like the black Pullman-car porter I met on the Union Pacific, none of these people seemed to have the quality of a stranger if that meant otherness. As an example, Mr. Batt, who ran the campus heating plant, was always simply Brother Batt, one of the group we were all part of on campus and, to some extent, in the town of Logan. In fifth grade, my interest in sports led me to apply formally and earnestly to be the ball boy, first for the college football team and the next year for the basketball team. I say formally and earnestly because that’s the way it was handled and the way I felt about it. An observer might be justified in taking a more cynical view of the appointment process. While the coach insisted on an interview and a recitation of the responsibilities, I suppose that the twenty-year friendship between him and my father, the president, might have given me an advantage. Anyway I became one of the two ball boys. There was no pay, but the job kept me busy for three or four hours most afternoons and in the company of mostly wonderful heroes/giants aged from eighteen to twenty-two, who took as good care of me as I thought I did of them. The smell of tincture of benzoin is still with me, rubbed on ankles before taping for football. Even the timeouts with the water bucket had a smell. One hot afternoon I climbed over a fence separating the practice field from an orchard to bring back a shirt full of apples for the players. At the time, it didn’t seem like stealing. What were apples for anyway? Seth Maughan, the senior captain and quarterback, made a few plays with a taped broken hand at the end of the last game of the season in a snowstorm against the University of Wyoming. With the score close, he was brought back in, unable to pass but able to run the team and hand off. On the Wyoming four-yard line, he took the snap from center and started around the end, only to stop, place the ball in his heavily bandaged hand, and shot put it into the end zone to a waiting undefended receiver to win the game. In those halcyon days, our Aggie team got most of its players from the three surrounding counties, and Seth Maughan was one of three brothers from nearby

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Wellsville who played for us. Seth, Murray, and Ralph are names I can never forget or sufficiently thank for their generous friendship to a kid just breaking into adolescence. The following year that I spent as the basketball ball boy is memorable for the evening sky. Practices generally ran until six or seven o’clock, causing me to walk the two blocks home from the new field house after dark during the winter. The walk was directly south. In the fourth grade, I had learned all I was ever to know about the stars, and I recognized the constellation Orion and its giant star Betelgeuse. I remember Orion moving across the winter evening sky, allowing me to tell the time within fifteen minutes or so from the position of Betelgeuse against the college tower. Orion continues to be a winter-evening friend. I know where he is, and I think he knows where I am, no matter where life has taken me. Once during a varsity basketball game, a nail popped up from the floor. Time was called, and someone handed me a hammer. I walked out on the floor in front of five to ten thousand people and knocked the nail back into the board to generous cheers from the stands. That was heady stuff for an eleven-year-old boy. Real paid employment came a few years later. My first job was in the college library, where I did all the simple chores from stacking/filing books to helping with binding. The Dewey decimal system was still in use at that time. Like a hungry moth flying around lamplight, it didn’t take long for me to find 612.5, the section on sex. That summer I must have scanned five to ten books in that section, most of them as dreary as dishwater because their topics were along the lines of “sociological studies of prostitution in Chicago,” hardly the heady stuff I was looking for in the pre-Playboy 1940s. There were a few interesting books, and I suppose they gave me some healthy sexual perspective. The irony of the summer was that my mother, realizing that I had not asked many questions about the subject, signed out a couple of the same books for me to read. They weren’t even the best ones, but I didn’t tell her that. Did the status of my parents give me an advantage in being given these campus experiences? I never asked for favors, but surely they came my way mostly because of my own curiosity. Yes, I was the president’s son, but nothing embarrassed me quicker than for someone to taunt me with those words, which I sensed were an accusation of privilege. As a seventh-grader, I decided I wanted to learn how to type. The college summer school had a class, and I enrolled. It was thoroughly fun. I was the only person in the class of twenty under the age of eighteen. My only handicap was my inability to spell the words of a dictation that we had to write down each week as the basis for a timed typing exam. A misspelled word was judged a typing mistake,

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and that didn’t seem fair. The class, after all, was not a spelling course. So I asked Mr.  Neuberger if I could come early or stay late and get a written copy of the upcoming typing tests, not to practice but just to get the spelling right. He saw my logic, and there was no problem. A few years later, I got a summer job at a downtown hardware store. There was a clear expectation that all kids my age should have a job. It was a great experience: cutting glass and selling and delivering white lead pigment and other paints. The warmest memory from that summer is the cracker-barrel nature of the store, its service as a community center for conversation. One of my favorite visitors was Mr.  Adams, a retired high-school principal. With me as an audience between customers, it seemed as if he could tell interesting stories forever. One day he closed our conversation with this observation: “You know, Chase, the older I get, the more I realize that there is very little that I don’t know quite a bit about.” He was right, albeit a bit arrogant. He prompted me then, and since, to wonder why old men talk so much. My conclusion is that the plethora of experience that inevitably accrues in the old brain—multiplied by what we now know to be continuously growing neural connections—creates a kind of “ideational epilepsy,” an automatic, involuntary outburst of connectedness. The phrase, “ah, that reminds me..,” precedes a seizurelike outpouring of memory, as enriching from the mouth of a wise man as it is terrifying from a bore. I have more to say about this later. My Tennis

I had slightly better-than-average athletic skills during those early years, just enough to let me think I could do a number of things. Tennis became my joy and private passion. It grew out of the fact that the two college courts where the varsity players practiced and competed were less than one hundred yards from our house. I spent dozens of hours—probably hundreds—watching them. It got so that I could tell a player by his backhand or serve from a block away. This endless observing taught me how to play tennis. My particular varsity hero had a right-handed Australian topspin serve. By the end of the summer, so did I from watching. And mine was left handed, making it even more devilish. The ball was tossed high above the opposite shoulder and struck with an upward and outward motion that, from a left-hander, produced a spin that caused it to veer to the receiver’s left and then bounce right. Many were the games I won with that serve. Particularly rich is the memory of watching an opponent move to his left when the ball was in the air, only to have it bounce back into his chest. That serve

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was my own discovery, found without words or diagrams. Sixty-five years later, when I taught medical students by letting them discover, rather than listen passively, I was exercising the same philosophy. I played every city tournament: boys under twelve, moving to under fifteen, and then under eighteen. I won some of them. The excitement of looking up tournament pairings in the local paper matched any I’ve felt from reading a sports page since. The only price I paid was almost complete loss of cartilage in my left shoulder by the age of seventy, occasioned by that twisting topspin serve, but I’d pay that price again anytime. Where were my parents? So much is said about soccer moms these days, describing the phenomenon of parents’ support for the athletic ventures of their children. Grethe and I did as much for our children as they have for theirs. I played tennis for hours most summer days and participated in countless tournaments, but I have no memory of my parents ever being at one of my matches. Nor have I a memory of feeling unsupported because of their absence. I cannot probe any more deeply into the implications of their absence except to conclude, quite likely, that tennis was mine to own, and they were busy at a job whose importance I understood. I only remember that I loved tennis and never felt pushed to win or explain losing. In fact, the most powerful memory is olfactory: the rush of the strong odor of new tennis balls on opening a can. By summer’s end, they were always played down almost to the rubber. Another memory of tennis includes Egbert. He was thirty or more when I was around six or eight. He seemed to be mildly mentally handicapped and partially paralyzed on the right side. I remember he often drooled a little from his lower lip as he talked. He liked to watch the tennis matches on the college courts as much as I did when I was not playing. We sat for hours talking about things that seemed to be important then. It is hard to remember why his company was so natural and pleasant in spite of the thirty-odd years that separated us. I would like to think that we engaged on some common level that overcame his spittle, his withered right arm, and my youth. I have not seen Egbert in sixty-five years, but I think I could pick him out of any crowd. I wonder if my distance from childhood would deny me a renewal of our conversation. Or have I ever lost my connection to that childhood? My World Changed

It was the late spring of 1945. I was fifteen, and my father brought a draft of a letter back from his office. The letter was intended to decline an offer I had received to attend the Middlesex School. That spring day changed the direction of my life.

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It had all started a few months earlier in the library of the Logan Junior High School during ninth grade. The principal had asked if I would be interested in taking a scholarship test for a “school in the East.” I said, “Sure.” I generally enjoyed taking tests. In an eighth-grade algebra class, every test was followed by reseating based on score. Mary Ann Heinrich and I generally vied for the top seat, only to lose it to the other person after the next test. So I thought tests were fun, and the test for the school in the East turned out to be no exception. A month or so after I’d taken the test and forgotten all about it, my family received a telegram (that itself was a notable occasion) offering me what was described as a national scholarship to Middlesex School. The school turned out to be in Concord, Massachusetts. The offer was for most or all of the tuition and board, although there would be some significant additional school and athletic costs, plus transportation twenty-five hundred miles back and forth two times a year. My parents contacted people they knew who might be acquainted with the school and found out it was more than reputable. The school had been founded forty-four years earlier as a nondenominational counterpart to the traditional church-based private schools in New England. Middlesex even lent part of its name to the phrase “St. Grottlesex” to describe a group of similar schools in New England, including Groton, St. Paul’s, and St. Mark’s. There were many questions: Should I go? Did I want to go? How did my parents feel about their last child leaving home at fifteen for a place a couple of thousand miles away? After a week, I told my parents that I had decided not to accept the offer and would continue in the Logan high-school system. Dad had the letter to decline prepared by his secretary and brought it home to review with me before signing and mailing it. What was on his mind? What was on mine? I was concerned about the family finances, and, of course, probably a bit challenged by the uncertainty of what awaited me. Dad was leaving the presidency of the college after twenty-nine years. I was not a party to any family financial discussions, but I had the sense that money for travel and miscellaneous expenses might be more than we could afford. If this was true, I did not want to create stress with a venture that certainly would cost more than staying in school in Logan. The image of my father leaning against the mantle of our fireplace is as clear now as it was sixty years ago. “Are you sure, Chase, that you do not want to go?” Somewhat to my surprise, as well as, I would guess, my father’s, I quietly responded, “I really do want to go.” Dad, without a word, tore up the letter. It was settled; I would go to Middlesex School. No questioning. No “are you sure?” No advice about my future conduct.

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No warnings about the hazards of the big world beyond peaceful Cache Valley. As I think about it now, my father’s simple and single act of tearing up the letter without comment must surely have been the most powerful statement of confidence that a parent could ever offer. I began on that day in May to prepare for my travel east, readying myself to leave Utah for Massachusetts in September. I remember reviewing the school catalogue as soon as it arrived, reading about the classes I could take like Marco Polo unrolling a primitive map of Asia. I sensed that I needed a little extra preparation for math and asked my ninthgrade teacher, Mr.  Evans, if I could tutor with him. He generously agreed, and I rode my bicycle down College Hill (now named Old Main Hill) to his home and back once a week for much of the summer. Otherwise I felt ready to go. I learned only years later about my mother’s trip in 1910 when she was twenty from Laketown and Logan to Boston for a year at the New England Conservatory of Music. She went not for professional musical training, but rather for a larger view of the world. Her experience must surely have contributed to her confidence thirty-five years later in letting her last child go East at the age of fifteen. The President’s Son

As I’ve mentioned, as the son of a college president in a small Utah town, I was occasionally mocked: “Yeah, yeah. You’re the president’s son.” I suspect I was so terribly proud to be the son of my father that I was anxious not to flaunt my good fortune. These words remind me of occasions after I had graduated from Harvard and was asked where I had gone to school. To my wife’s amusement and perhaps chagrin, I was apt to answer wryly, “Logan Junior High School.” Surely this embrace of pride and desire to avoid the appearance of smugness is at heart a considerable dose of both. Maybe it was Harvard diffidence. I was both proud and uncomfortable with the privilege of being the president’s son. I was later proud to have attended Harvard. Yet I bit my fingernails to the quick for most of my adolescence and stuttered quite painfully for five or six years, which hints that all was not as serene as I remember.

Pa rt 2

The East, a Second Dawn

4 Concord: Middlesex School, a New Culture

I wondered how my mother could deal with her youngest child leaving home at fifteen and every September and January after that. Later, she told me that she quickly set about changing all the bed linens, just as Almira and her two children had coped by turning to work as soon as Hyrum had left on his LDS Church mission fifty years earlier. I flew to New York and took the train to Boston and Concord with my sister, Marian, who was living on Long Island with Madison, her Army Medical Corps husband. The learning curve started. It turned out that Concord was not “Concord”; it was “Concurd.” We arrived for the headmaster’s reception on a warm Sunday in September of 1945. My sister told me later that she decided I could handle myself when she heard me referring to the teachers at the reception after only a few minutes as “sir” after picking up the lingo from others. One of the sirs took me aside and tactfully explained the school rule requiring ties and coats for all classes and meals. I was wearing a sport coat, but I had on a sport shirt and no tie. He offered to loan me a tie if I had none. One can only imagine what he and the rest of the school were anticipating in this young Peterson boy, the first student they had ever had from Utah and, for that matter, the first Mormon. I thanked him for the loan of the tie and told him I had my own in my bag. In fact, if I remember correctly, I had three ties, along with two sport coats and three pairs of pants. Never to be forgotten is the Saturday in Boston a year or two later when I found myself entering Brooks Brothers on Newberry Street to buy myself a rich brown herringbone “New England” suit.

62  •  Chapter 4

My sister left that Sunday and presumably reported to my parents that I would be okay. I thought so, too. My room was a tiny single bedroom on the second floor of Bryant Paine dormitory, the upper two floors of which were reserved for upperclassmen. I received my class schedule the next morning and was puzzled to see that I was in the fourth class. What was that? I thought that the third class equated to the tenth grade I had planned to attend at Logan High School. The fourth class would be the same as ninth grade, which I had already finished. I reported the discrepancy to the headmaster’s office and, after some discussion, learned that I had been placed in the class that matched my earlier work in Logan. In other words, I was held back a year. When I reviewed the telegram my family had received earlier that spring, I saw that the school indeed had awarded me a scholarship for the fourth class. We had missed the significance of the numbering. What was I to do? I half expected to stay one year, see the world, as it were, and return to Logan High School as an eleventh-grade junior, not a held-behind sophomore. The Middlesex authorities sympathized but assured me that it would be better for me to attend the fourth class. Did the discussion last minutes, hours, or days? I can’t remember, except that I politely rejected the notion of falling back a grade and told them that I expected to be in the third class. We compromised. I was assigned to ninth-grade/fourth-class French and Latin since they were both new languages for me, and placed in tenth-grade/third-class math, English, and history. Paralleling my mother’s earlier behavior, I was sure I didn’t need to have my leg amputated! And so the year began. There was a new boy named Sam Shriver two doors down the hall, a returning boy across the hall, and four or five others I can’t remember. Sam was the person who taught me how to tie a bow tie and who later became famous in my mind for fathering Pam Shriver, the elegant tennis player. Memories of another new boy are still painful, for he was never able to fit in and seemed to walk a bit hunched. This led to the cruel nickname “Creeper” in the lexicon of teenage boys. He needed a friend, so I became his comrade, and he mine. He left after that first year, however. Everyone played sports unless he opted to be a manager. I went out for football with the serious handicap of wearing glasses before the era of contact lenses or even face masks. Trying to catch a pass as an end without my glasses was no easy task, especially when the ball did not come into focus until it was only a few feet from my face. An athletic rite of passage occurred when I, not surprisingly, was slow to tackle a ball carrier running around my end in practice and got the back of his shoe in

Concord  •  63

my face, instead of his legs within my arms. My housemaster in Bryant Paine recognized my apparent toughness when I continued to play for a few days until it became apparent that I had indeed slightly relocated my nose. The injury prompted a number of trips to a doctor on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston and also qualified me for a New England code of manliness not unlike Cache Valley ones. The trips to Boston took an unexpected turn when I discovered Scully Square, a place slightly akin to a red-light district. The Old Howard Theatre was an urban counterpart to the 612.5 section—sex—of the Logan library that had caught my attention a few years earlier. Scully Square was home to classic vaudeville performances intermixed with—by today’s standards—fairly modest striptease. The one dancer I remember by name was Rose LaRose—a stage name never to be forgotten. Forty years later, a friend who had attended Penn while I was at Middlesex shared a similar memory with me because Ms. LaRose traveled up and down the East Coast to satisfy the surging emotions of teenage boys like me, not to mention the bald-headed old men in the first three rows. Medical school later confirmed the rough correlation of high testosterone levels with baldness and high libido. Those trips to Boston narrowed my nose and broadened my view of the world. I am quite sure that my visits to Scully Square vaudeville shows and Rose LaRose did nothing to erode my moral or aesthetic standards, however. I knew they were naughty, an unconscious rationalization that probably provided immunity as I sat undisturbed as an avid occupant of the fourth row. My attendance may have been an exercise in voyeurism but a harmless and aseptic one. I knew the Old Howard was not proper, just worldly and perhaps educational. I did pay, however, one price. The last appointment for my nose and the side trip to the Old Howard made me take a late Boston and Maine train the twentyodd miles back to Concord. I fell asleep until aroused by the conductor’s call: “. . .  Concurd.” I jumped out only to find that the train had passed Concord and was in West Concord. It was after ten, and there were no taxis or buses. So, like that day in grade school nine years earlier, I figured I had to walk home. It was three to four miles on side roads across western and northern Concord. An early, light November snow began to fall. I reached the school before midnight, evaded any discipline for lateness, and slept soundly. I recall having no dreams of Rose LaRose. Of Millstones and Milestones

The English, history, and math classes went well. The French was okay except for my shyness in speaking with an accent without feeling self-conscious, but the

64  •  Chapter 4

Latin was another matter. My knowledge of English grammar was spotty, making declensions and cases even more foreign to me in Latin. Mr. Locke, nicknamed Fundy for reasons never clear to me, gave tests twice a week on a one-through-ten scale with six and below marking failure. All through September and October, I swung between threes and sixes, flunking by any measure. For some reason, I didn’t panic, figuring that everything would be okay if I just studied harder, and especially if I could figure out what that damnable word diphthong meant. Third-classers had to turn out their lights at nine or ten. Whatever the deadline, it was too early to allow me to learn Latin. So I bought an extension cord and light bulb at Richardson’s Drugstore in Concord, pulled the covers over my head and the Latin text, and set about learning my declensions, genders, and diphthongs. It took me some time to realize that a diphthong, like most obstacles, became inconsequential when understood. The Latin challenge turned from a millstone to a milestone. In the February midyear exam, I got 100. I wrote an error-free exam, something that can be done in Latin, a precise language, but is next to impossible in French. Without question it was the most important academic achievement of my life until then and probably since. It gave me the confidence to know that there were extension cords—actual or metaphorical—within reach to fix most problems. Hyrum had learned that in South Eden. And my mother believed there was always a way. I may have matched my mother’s feat when she conquered French II without ever taking French I. Later that year I learned that my Latin teacher had told Ethan Bisbee, my housemaster, that I would never pass Latin. When I did, Mr. Bisbee cheered along with me. I guess it is too late for me to apologize to dear Mr. Bisbee for another small achievement that involved him. He called up the stairwell every Monday morning to remind us to throw down our dirty bedsheets. I decided to roll up my sheets one morning and somehow tied them into a tight ball. When Bisbee came into view in the stairway two flights down, I threw my bedsheet missile with sufficient accuracy to hit him squarely. He never found out who threw the linens, and since he was a rough-hewn Yankee, I suspect he admired the aim of the launcher more than he minded the impertinence. The year progressed. Some of us started a basketball team as a winter sport since we couldn’t skate or play hockey. When spring came, we had a holiday for a week or two in March–April, and my basketball coach invited me to drive to Florida with him. I remember discussing the invitation with my parents, who left the decision to me. I chose to stay at school.

Concord  •  65

I was elected class president in the spring for the next year, second class, and was soon back in Logan for the summer. I had loved the year and the school, but over the summer, I decided that it wasn’t in the cards for me to return. The considerable amount of money for transportation and incidentals seemed an inappropriate burden to put on my parents during their first years of retirement. I wrote the school of my decision, expressed my appreciation for a wonderful year, and registered at Logan High School for my junior year. To my surprise and great pleasure, within a week or two, Middlesex notified me that a generous sponsor was prepared to underwrite the extra expenses. I accepted, returned, visited my benefactor in his office in Boston to thank him, and began a job in the school kitchen to earn a portion of the rest of my expenses. The lasting lesson the kitchen and its automatic conveyer-belt dishwasher taught me was always to wash off egg yolk with cold water before putting it into hot water, where it solidifies. In addition to washing dishes, I started washing my socks and underwear to save the money of adding them to the laundry that was sent out. I may sound like a poor boy, but I never felt poor. I accomplished this task in the bathtub while bathing since it seemed both simple and logical to use the same water, as well as a good use of time, to wash my skin along with my outer clothing. With some sadness, my marriage brought propriety and the argument that the washing machine uses no more water for extra socks. New England turned out to be a wonderful place. I sensed it honored fundamental values over show. Quality was more important than novelty, understatement more powerful than exaggeration, old better than new until the new had time to prove its merit, and money something to have but not flaunt. Another Culture

I’ve already mentioned my basketball coach; he was a recent graduate of a New England college, taught English, and was an early and good friend. For whatever reason—beneath consciousness, I suppose—I chose not to spend the spring break in Florida with him. In the months that followed, I slowly sensed that he was probably homosexual; he was, however, foremost a friend. On basketball trips, he generally drove but occasionally had a beer or two with dinner and allowed me to drive the team car back to school. It was rumored that he had misbehaved with one student or another, but I never knew for sure, and he never made overt advances toward me. He was a good English teacher.

66  •  Chapter 4

In my last year—when I was in first class—I awoke one morning in my single bedroom with a sense that something was out of the ordinary. It must have been around 5:00 a.m. Sleeping on the floor beside my bed, smelling of beer, was my friend, the English teacher/coach. What was a seventeen-year-old boy to do? There was nothing I could or should do, so I went back to sleep. When my alarm went off at 7:00 a.m., my friend was gone, and there was a note tucked in the mirror of my dresser: “Chase, you will never know how much I appreciate your friendship and understanding. Your friend . . .” Not a bad experience with homosexuality. The next year I was a freshman at Harvard, and I learned that my teaching/coaching friend had been inappropriate with one of the younger Middlesex boys and been immediately expelled from the school. I heard that he had returned to his college town and “married a young girl from a mill family.” The starkness of that line has never left me; I fear for a girl who perhaps may have been used to prove an impossible point and feel sad for my friend, who was at odds with himself and his times. What star was I born under that this story is one of affection and friendship, not teenage confusion, vulnerability, or abuse? I later learned that my parents had sensed the inappropriateness of a sixteen-year-old boy driving to Florida alone with a twenty-eight-year-old teacher and coach, but I have no memory of them advising me not to go. When I painted our white house with a red stripe, and when my father tore up the letter to decline the Middlesex scholarship, I similarly recall no second guessing or advice. What was in my parents or me that prompted such restraint? And why did the absence of parental hovering seem to work? It was certainly nothing that I ever consciously earned. Middlesex Imprint and Memories

As a class, we pulled weeds at Emerson’s home, visited Thoreau’s pond, and walked the stone walls of the Concord minutemen. However, a worship of trivial traditions occasionally bridled my equalitarian frontier sensibility. For instance, a silly rule stated that only the first class (seniors) could walk through the front door of the dining hall; all others had to go down a flight of stairs to the basement and then up two more flights to get there. Down with powdered wigs and effete manners and up with American frontier equality! I took the cause to the student council, and we changed the rule. No one seemed to notice after a week, or care. The social scene was probably typical for any group of teenage boys. When I arrived, there was a group called simply, “the boys.” They seemed to be the popular set, the best athletes, and the most likely to know how to hide a forbidden

Concord  •  67

six-pack of beer on the right occasion. I liked most of them, admired their style, but never sought their approval. Not surprisingly, my unobtrusive diffidence soon gained me acceptance without my losing any sense of who I was. The minor politics of Middlesex—illustrated by the change in the dining hall front-door rule— might have been progress, but happily the school had an inertia that was strong enough to withstand almost any other wind blowing in from Utah. I don’t know why I roomed with Dick, and two other boys, in our last year. Perhaps we recognized a tenuous bond as scholarship outlanders; Dick came to Middlesex from Iowa, and I from Utah in the same year. He was the most literate in our class. In a timed advanced-Latin test—without being asked—he successfully translated a long poetic passage from Latin into English in iambic pentameter. Dick was very smart but no athlete, perhaps less than secure socially, and seemed to seek acceptance from the reigning clique. During our last year, he was asked to edit the graduation yearbook, but he had made little progress by late into winter. I can’t remember how the subject came up, but one day I found myself talking with our housemaster, who was also the yearbook advisor: “Mr. Bourquin, I  would be willing to put the yearbook together if Dick doesn’t want to do it.” I have never forgotten the sting of his response: “Chase, who told you that you had to make up for everyone else’s problems? Let Dick sink or swim; sooner or later he’ll probably swim!” He did. Dick tweaked me in the end, writing a comment that accompanied the onepage photograph and description that each of us had in the yearbook: “Chase came to Middlesex like a bomb going off in a sandpile.” More to my liking, I won a class prize sponsored by Time magazine on current events. For some reason, I enjoyed reading Time from cover to cover each week. The prize was a book of the winner’s choice. I got the first four volumes of Carl Sandberg’s Abraham Lincoln—two at a time over two years—but lost the prize to another classmate in the final year and left Middlesex without the final two volumes and, you might say, at risk of not knowing who won the Civil War! I bought the last two volumes a decade later. Wall plaques were another tradition. The school required all graduates to carve an eight-by-twelve-inch oak panel with a design they chose. The panels—now numbering more than two thousand, I guess—have been placed on the school walls since it was founded in 1901. In the second class, we practiced with pine, and in the first class, we worked on our design and carved it in oak. I chose to carve the story of the seagulls diving to eat the crickets that were about to devour the life-sustaining crop of my Utah pioneer forebears. As the first Utahn to attend and graduate, it seemed then and now an appropriate statement. The problem was the beaks of the seagulls. In the tradition of oak carving and the

68  •  Chapter 4

school, the only allowable tools were a mallet and chisel. The gulls’ beaks were too slim to be chiseled easily. Mr. Kettell was the shop overseer, and he rebuked me roundly when he caught me using sandpaper to smooth out a gull’s beak. One Sunday the teacher who supervised the panel carvings, and also coached the tennis team, invited me to dinner with his “maiden” sister in a nearby suburb (he was also unmarried). The meal was delicious. When I was offered a second helping, I modestly declined. Mr. Kettell quietly said, “Chase, if you enjoyed the food—and you seemed to—it is a compliment to the host if you accept another serving.” The little things you learn. The plaque was finished with mallet and chisel and occupies a place on the wall along the stairs to the dining hall, and I am inclined to rub the gull’s beak gently each time I visit. The Utah frontier boy may have moved a bit to the side of tradition, but even so, the seagull symbolized the origins of my odyssey. I felt I had been like Brigham Young “going east.” In Concord I represented my family, my state, and my church, as well as myself. If there was teenage rebellion hidden in me, it was into family orthodoxy. As an abstemious Mormon boy, I was far less likely to drink a bottle of beer in Concord than in Logan. The Next Chapter

As the last year at Middlesex wound down, I found myself with admission and scholarships to both Harvard and Yale, and a study plan at my beloved Utah Agricultural College (UAC), now Utah State University. While I was pleased to receive the admission and scholarships to Harvard and Yale, at the time they seemed merely two alternatives to UAC. I figured they were the best colleges in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Utah, respectively! I chose to go to Harvard for reasons that were never clear to me, perhaps because their scholarship was a little better than Yale’s. I learned later that the scholarship that had brought me to Middlesex was derived from a similar program at Harvard, both described as national scholarships. Conant, the Harvard president in the 1930s, and Windsor, the founder of Middlesex, had in fact been friends and developed the national scholarship plan at the same time for the same reason: to broaden the geographic and cultural outreach of their respective schools.

5 Harvard College: A Unity of Faith and Reason, Intellect and Culture

Harvard College turned out to be full of remarkable ideas and people, and I made discoveries about many things, including myself. Middlesex had provided the bridge, and now a larger experience waited. In the fall of 1948, the railroad towns of Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois were again way stations east for me. The names of those midwestern places continued to remind me of the western trek my forebears had taken just one hundred years before. They had sought a refuge from persecution and a home—a new Zion. Without knowing it, I was seeking a Zion of the mind, a place that had no physical boundaries. Their march was powered by faith, mine by curiosity. It turned out that faith and curiosity existed in each other’s shadow at Harvard. I could not ignore that I was in some sense a twentieth-century emissary of my ancestors. But as tiring as the three-day train trip was, it was obviously a hundred times better than the covered wagons and handcarts that the Nebeker brothers, then the Geddeses, then the Petersons, and then the Hulmes had had to use in their era. In any case, I was at Harvard. Now, what was it? President Nathan Marsh Pusey, after eight years as president, told alumni that he was still not sure just what the college was. If he didn’t know, how could I? Well, first of all, it was old, really old—older than anything I had ever encountered—more than three hundred years old. There were not many working institutions in America that were as old. The age of the place enveloped me in a way that made me feel instantly mature and simultaneously incredibly young. I felt I was now a part of something bigger than myself.

70  •  Chapter 5

If John Adams, two Oliver Wendell Holmeses, two Roosevelts, a Thoreau, and an Emerson had walked those paths in Harvard Yard, there had to be a touch of reverence that rubbed off. And during the Revolutionary War, Washington had headquartered in Massachusetts Hall. Didn’t that deserve a salute or at least a nod as it sat just fifty yards away from my dormitory? Age and modernity sharply contrasted early that first fall when station wagons were allowed in the Yard so that new freshmen could unload their bags. It was hard to tell what emotions predominated. Was it the pride of parents delivering their children to the altar of education and independence? Or was it the nervous excitement of their offspring, who were about to be pushed out of the nest? In either case, there were a lot of new folks in a very old and revered place. The question persists: what was education at Harvard going to be? Most of us faced it with a firm, even grim, determination to survive and somehow grow. It turned out that it was harder to get into Harvard than it was to survive there or graduate. But as the faculty names began to roll off our tongues, an expectation of excellence predominated: Edwin Reischauer and John Fairbank in Japanese and Chinese history; Sam Beer in political theory; Robert McCloskey in constitutional law; James Q. Wilson in a later generation in politics; Louis Fieser, who will forever be linked to his invention of napalm but was much more; and John Finley in all things Greek, who was soon to take up another year of pacing the stage of the Sanders Theatre, bringing to life pagan gods that were totally unknown to some of us. Excellence also seemed to have something to do with learning how to dissect a new idea and discuss it intelligently. And, of course, there was also the foppery associated with casual acquaintance with a lot of information that was probably useful only to enhance ego or answer questions on a TV quiz show, if the chance ever came. In addition to exposure to faculty who inspired excellence, students had the opportunity to develop leadership skills through the innumerable organizations in the college. I got involved in one of them—the student council—as a freshman representative. Before my time, the council had founded the Salzburg Global Seminars in an empty, postwar Austrian castle. The seminars were designed to promote talk and study among students and leaders across the divided portions of Europe and later specifically across the Iron Curtain. They were well attended and probably quite useful. Our council was less involved once the seminar was up and running, but seeing what student initiatives could do was inspiring. The years I spent on the

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council were not earthshaking but in retrospect were probably a good exercise in developing group and leadership skills among able people with high standards. C and C: Classmates and Colleagues

A considerable part of the value of Harvard was its ability to draw a lot of interesting and smart people together. A popular joke said that student education would go on for quite a while even if the entire faculty disappeared. There was so much to learn intellectually and socially from the rich variety of students Harvard collected. The joke was put to the test later by a survey in the 1960s. Faculty members were asked what factors they most valued or enjoyed at Harvard. Was it the pay? The libraries and laboratories? The climate? The list was lengthy, but surprisingly the faculty ranked the inquisitive nature and abilities of the undergraduates as the leading reason why they stayed at Harvard. Graduate students ranked lower than undergraduates, perhaps because of the narrower knowledge required of those pursuing life careers. The faculty answers might also have been impacted by the time of the poll: the protest days of the late 1960s. Don Blackmer, a classmate, was an example of this type of student. He was on the tennis team with me. Off the court, his speech and thoughts were so sharp, and his learning was so broad that I almost found it hard to speak in his presence. But he was no precious dilettante, just bright and well read. I don’t know how much, if any, rubbed off on me from Don and others, but they provided an intellectual standard I never forgot. Zeke Robbins was another classmate and a roommate who came to Harvard with me from Middlesex. He was not an intellectual by any traditional definition, but he was enormously learned in politics. He could, and often did, recite whole lines from William Jennings Bryan or James Michael Curley, the lovable, but corrupt, mayor of Boston. Curley once served jail time while continuing to hold his seat in the U.S. Congress. As Zeke told it, one day His Honor was walking down a street in fair Boston with his henchmen when a pauper came up. “Ah, Your Honor, I need a job. My wife and kids are starving. Can you help me?” Curley supposedly pointed to someone in his entourage and said, “My boy, this man will have a job for you when you come to see him next week.” “Oh, Your Honor, mother of Jesus, bless you.” As they parted, Curley turned to the henchman and said, “If you give that son of a bitch a job, you’re fired.” Zeke occasionally drank too much beer. He was famous for conning the waiter at Cronin’s Tavern, just off Harvard Square, by drinking most of the beer in his mug, then discretely dropping a dead fly he kept in an envelope in his shirt pocket

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into the mug, triggering an irate call to the waiter, which could only be soothed by an apology and the offer of a fresh drink. After excess libations one night, Zeke threw himself into bed in our suite. The only problem was that the third roommate and I were trying to study for an exam the next day. Zeke’s sonorous snoring became so loud we couldn’t concentrate. I grabbed a bottle of underarm deodorant—popular in those days—that was composed mostly of bitter alum. When squeezed, it came out as a heavy spray, which I aimed into Zeke’s gaping mouth. There was a loud snort. Without breaking his snoring rhythm or deep sleep, he leaned over his bed and spat out the offending liquid with the trenchant comment, “Damn cheap gin.” I considered Don and Zeke educators in their way, at least to this kid from Utah. A third classmate illustrates another type of education. Chau Chu-chi came to our class from the People’s Republic of China. I knew him reasonably well, and he was gracious and generous. By sophomore year, he had left school, only to reappear years later on American and Chinese television standing by the prime minister when President Nixon came down the ramp to reopen relations with China. We didn’t see Chau again until he returned for a class reunion in the 1990s. He then shared the story of finishing his education in China, followed by teaching in one of its universities. He reported that soon after, he was swept up in the red guards’ Cultural Revolution for the “sin” of being a professor who wore glasses. He was sent to septic rice fields in western China, abused by the very students he had taught, and frequently at risk of dying from enteric disease. Yet—like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela—he told us a story of forgiveness and asked patience for his nation as it groped toward greater civil liberty. He suggested that if we wanted to hear free speech, we could get an earful by getting into a Beijing taxi and shutting the door. I can’t leave the freshman yard without retelling the story of Rheinhart, which says something about collegiate loneliness. It was the custom to shout up to someone you wanted to talk to if he was living on an upper floor of a dormitory. I had been called in that fashion a time or two with a loud “Peterson!” Rheinhart, a student who preceded me at Harvard by many years, didn’t seem to have friends to call for him, so in the early hours of the evening, when others went out in friendly clusters to get a snack or a beer, he adopted the custom of calling his own name to give the illusion he was popular to impress those within earshot. Ultimately, his scheme was discovered, and it lived on in Harvard history. In my time there, an occasional cry of “Rheinhart!” rang out in the yard to sustain the tradition by someone who just wanted to be heard. In later years, the cry became a call to arms for a frivolous or even serious social protest.

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Not Just Cotton Mather and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but Joseph Smith as Well

Harvard, a cauldron for ideas and people, also set the stage for considering faith. I grew up through high school and early college with religious loyalty but very little understanding of what is called faith. I shall always appreciate my college years for putting faith into the cauldron. My loyalty had saved me from most of the dumb and even dangerous impulses that swirled around my friends and me. As a college sophomore, I decided that it was time to examine my religious allegiance and determine what, if anything, faith meant. This laboratory exercise could not have come at a better time, which, of course, is probably why it happened when it did. For reasons I will never likely understand, I began to stutter quite badly around the eighth and ninth grade. There must have been a trigger. Some say confused hand preference is the problem, or perhaps it reflects something deeper. In any case, I grew up as a mixed-handed person, writing, throwing a ball, and hitting a tennis ball left-handed. I also kicked a football with my left foot. However, I swung a bat and hit a golf ball right-handed. I also shot a rifle from my right shoulder using my right eye. The stuttering became socially and academically painful. I lived on the third floor of a freshman dorm at Harvard. The common pay phone was on the first floor. When a call came in for me, a loud “Peterson, telephone!” rose up through the stairwell. As I ran down the two flights, the obligation to say “hello” grew more and more unavoidable and oppressive. Hello is a hard word for a stutterer to get out. I found out that if I did calculus in my head—a course I was taking that year— I could distract myself enough to be able to bump into the phone, grab it, and say “hello” before I became too apprehensive. If  I were a parachutist, I might have learned to jump out of the plane using calculus in the same way. My technique worked to answer the Thayer Hall telephone, but it didn’t when I raised my hand to ask or answer a question in class or call a girl to ask her on a date. My embarrassment was enough, but it was compounded when I was home for the summer. I remember leaving my house to make a call to a girl from a downtown pay phone so my parents would not experience the pain of hearing me stutter, and my embarrassment wouldn’t be intensified by their discomfort. If my mother felt there was always a way, what was the solution to ease this pain? I did not find one, but at least I kept on talking. It was painful and probably an impediment to academic, as well as social, efforts. Two forces converged during my sophomore year: a desire to investigate the meaning of faith and the psychic, intellectual, and social pain of stuttering. I can

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remember the moment and place when this happened as clearly now—sixty years later—as anything in my life. I knelt in my dormitory bedroom and prayed, “Dear Lord, if I am on this Earth to be useful to my fellow human beings or myself, stuttering is an inefficient way for me to express myself. Will you please help me stop?” If there is such a thing as a sacred blush, I still have one when I remember what was either my sophomoric arrogance or naïveté. I am not sure whether I ended that prayer with a humble plea or a quiet order, a question mark or an exclamation point. In any case, I awoke the next morning never to stutter in any serious way again. Like most people, I suppose I stammer on a word or two on rare occasions. I remember the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s speech pattern when he got really worked up—he erupted in an “Irish stammer.” That is not stuttering. Stuttering is a painful social and intellectual block on the road of life. My excursion into the meaning of faith took me through that roadblock, never again to limit my usefulness to my fellow human beings or myself. I thereafter lived a life of frequent public speaking as a physician or educational administrator. I fully acknowledge the role that positive thinking probably played in my recovery. I don’t pretend to understand the exact mechanism of my cure. In medical school, I learned about the placebo effect, where the body somehow provides a therapeutic remedy, unconnected to the medication provided. In fact, not all modern drug interventions have a perfect and entire molecular explanation. If they work and we know generally why and how, the physician and patient are justified in accepting some degree of ignorance. I only know that five years later, the most important words I ever said—“Will you marry me?”—came off without a stutter from me or a snicker from my intended. Grethe only said, “Of course.” My faith and nearness to God have increased decade by decade, sprouting from that bedrock plea as I knelt beside my sophomoric bed. Stuttering turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. Taming it gave me the courage to stand up to other dragons. Its pain gave me empathy for the greater impediments so many people face. Moreover, it gave me the confidence to believe that I could explore questions in the bright light of available facts, emboldened by the inspiration of hope and faith. Religion has its epiphanies. The Bible describes God’s decision to knock Saul of Tarsus off his horse or camel on the way to Damascus. As the Apostle Paul, he became an instant defender of Christianity. During those first years at Harvard, I set out seriously to see for myself if Christianity and Mormonism contained important truths for me. Conquering stuttering offered a minor epiphany. My personal spiritual journey moved from familial assumptions and tradition to a lifelong personal quest.

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I had been quietly—and I suppose fiercely—loyal to my Mormon upbringing in those years at Middlesex. I knew very little about the theology of the religion, only that I was a Mormon and had chosen to walk the path of my church through the new social and spiritual forest I was encountering. My attitude was in large part loyalty to family tradition and a stubborn determination to be who I was regardless of where I was. I suppose many Jews feel similarly while navigating gentile society. Mormons use the same word—gentile—to describe all other people. In any case, when I got to Harvard I found a vibrant LDS community of students from Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Wellesley, and other smaller schools. They were mostly graduate students in law, business, medicine, and science, together with a few undergraduates. There were also old-time families, who were the anchors of the LDS community. Principal among those, for me, were Ruth and George Albert Smith Jr. Albert’s father was a Mormon leader who became president of the LDS Church for a short time from 1945 to 1951. His son, Albert, had been a professor at Harvard Business School since the 1930s and an early pioneer in the study of business ethics, among other subjects. I became Albert’s assistant Sunday school teacher. He taught an inspiring class, focused mostly on the teachings of Christ. He was broad minded and free of institutional blinders. Like my mother and father, he was open to all truth and full of good humor regarding his frailties and those of other church members. It was an honor to help him. A bright young student named Richard Bushman came to Harvard a year after me and became a close friend. He went on to a distinguished career as an endowed professor of history at Columbia and a recipient of the Bancroft Prize for history. I shall never forget a pungent phrase he used as a freshman in discussing preexistence: “spirits itching to get into their skins,” in other words, to be born. Many other students lived and spoke in a manner that confirmed a comfortable and productive partnership between spiritual and intellectual inquiry. I experienced a growing ease with spiritual convictions and Christian brotherhood and sisterhood. Intellectual challenge Monday through Saturday seemed to fit comfortably with spiritual renewal on Sunday, not as an either/or, nor an apology of one for the other, but as two elements of a healthy four-legged stool: intellectual and spiritual life and my own two legs. Weekday and Sunday thoughts were not compartmentalized. It was a little like the productive balance I later enjoyed combining the aristocratic Porcellian Club from September to June in Boston and the tough old farmhands stacking hay on the Utah/Wyoming border in the summers. Each experience enriched the other.

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Christianity and Mormonism became vehicles for discovering truth. My journey to move from familial assumptions to personal conviction started then, based on the union of thought and spirituality I had perceived earlier from the inspirational advice based on people like Albert Schweitzer in my mother’s letters. In religious terms, insight based on a combination of study and prayer could be called the Holy Ghost. Uniting the intellectual and spiritual generated a productive tension. I enjoyed the luxury of generally being the only Mormon that my gentile friends knew. I was thus freed from most of the stereotypes that others had about the church and allowed to be simply who I was, not someone’s preconception of a Mormon. In later decades, I came to appreciate another productive tension: the one between my individual actions and the community of my church. It shaped the powerful alliance of individuality and personal responsibility that I have tried to achieve. A moment of spiritual good humor occurred one day when I was asked to take charge of organizing the Sunday school, specifically making sure that we had teachers and support for all the age-grouped classes. Bill Cox was the husband of the devoted leader of the women’s organization called the Relief Society. However, he was inactive, meaning he did not participate in church affairs. He was a good man, very generous when there was a building fund, but he was impeded from full fellowship partly because of his smoking, a definite prohibition in the church’s teaching. It was suggested that I ask Bill to join me in managing the Sunday school, even though he was more than fifty and I was only twenty. He thought it over for a few moments, smiled, and said, “Could I smoke my cigar on the stand and at the pulpit?” I answered, “That’s for you to decide.” We joined forces. Within a few years, he was president of the stake, which included all the LDS congregations of eastern Massachusetts; later, he became president of the Oakland, California, temple and finally president of the Manti, Utah, temple, where he died after a full life, probably without a cigar. The Pieces of Harvard

Those days of endless tennis on the UAC courts paid off with enough skill to get me onto the Harvard team. My game was mostly my left-handed Australian topspin serve and a volley, but the combination won a lot of matches and allowed me the fellowship of one of the subcommunities of the Harvard student body.

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Harvard was a small college, and the residential house system helped to reduce its size to human dimensions even more. However, to become fully immersed, it was helpful—and perhaps essential—to be part of one or more of its smaller communities, ranging from a bioscience laboratory, the literary magazine, the glee club, the crew, or the Harvard Lampoon to hundreds of others. Mine were tennis, the student council, Thayer Hall and later Winthrop House dormmates, the adjacent Mormon Church on Brattle Street, and in my sophomore year, unexpectedly, an entirely new phenomenon—one of the organizations that Harvard called “final clubs,” the equivalent of fraternities. Mine was the Porc Club, or Porcellian, named for the first meal served to the founding members in 1791. The die was cast when I showed up in the office of Dean Skiddy von Stade in December of 1949. He was a warm, kind, and broadminded counselor for new and returning students. I remember I had broken the plastic frames of my only pair of eyeglasses and had taped them together rather unstylishly with white medical tape when I arrived in his office on the second floor of University Hall. “Dean von Stade, I have been asked to join a group called the Porcellian Club, and I wonder if I ought to do so,” I began. “They have a small monthly membership fee, and I can probably afford it, but my national scholarship covers the costs of my attendance at Harvard over what I can pay from my own and family funds. Is it proper to accept funds from a Harvard scholarship while I am paying for a social club? The members seem like nice people, and I think I might enjoy it. Can you advise me?” I’ll never forget his slow smile. “Chase, I happen to belong to that club, as did my father, and have always enjoyed it. I think you would, too, and I am sure that the financial matter can be handled.” I ended up accepting my election in my sophomore year, along with twelve other students. The process of election and acceptance speaks volumes about an ancient and honorable aspect of Harvard and both New England sophistication and simple, elegant manners. In the early fall of sophomore year, invitations for cocktail parties, and later dinners, go out to the young men who have come to the attention of the undergraduate membership as potential recruits. The fraternity world calls it rushing; At Harvard it is known as punching. The process continues through September, October, and November, elections occur sometime in December, and initiation is in early February. As selections narrow, the parties get smaller and more intimate. One Sunday we drove up to Boston’s north shore to the country home of Tim Clark, a wonderful gentleman and graduate Porcellian member who had been a Harvard football

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hero in the 1920s and became a force in Boston finance. I remember wearing my best suit—that Brooks Brothers brown herringbone I had bought a few years earlier at Middlesex. I felt quite “spiffy,” as my father used to say. After lunch we were roused from our sedate manners by an order from Clark to get up and work for our meal! He ordered us out to his pastureland to round up his sheep. Over the fields we ran, hollering and generally feeling like a strange mix of western cowboys and New England gentlemen. Other dinners followed, the last at the Boston Tavern Club, where we were asked to provide some song, story, or joke to pay for our supper. I forget what lame joke I told, but I enjoyed the dinner. A week or so later, a knock on my door drew my attention to a letter slipped underneath. It announced my election. After my conversation with Dean von Stade, I accepted. The punching season had been full of warmth and new friendships, not to mention real punch. I had long before decided not to drink, yet you can imagine that I was a little unsure about my association with a group that regularly toasted and drank. Would I be a wet blanket? Apparently my choice of nonalcoholic drinks was not a problem for the members. Nevertheless, would I be an outsider in some way? I wasn’t entirely sure but decided I’d continue to be the person I was. A day or two before the initiation dinner, Harry Myers, steward of the club, a gentleman of old manners and formality, called a meeting of the thirteen newly elected members. Myers, whose father had been steward before him, told us what to wear, when to be where, and other important details. He spoke with intentional gruffness, designed in part, I suspect, to intimidate us just a bit. When he finished, he asked, “Where is Peterson?” I raised my hand. “You are not to drink,” he said. There was nothing more. I have never forgotten the power and generosity of those words. Clearly Myers knew that I had not drunk alcohol during the punching season, and he and the members took that moment to let me know my choice was welcome and they wished me to be at ease. What graciousness and wonderful sophistication to extend the meaning of a drinking club to something a great deal deeper. I became very comfortable in the presence of alcohol. It was and is the custom of the club for every member to be prepared to present a song or story for the pleasure of the table when called on. Some members sang the same songs for decades. After a month, the undergraduate head of the club ordered three of us who had not done a presentation to do so immediately. He suggested that if nothing else came to mind, we could look through the “Club Catalogue” that contained hundreds of songs sung by members in the past. We could use one of these songs if we acknowledged the original presenter.

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In the collection of the class of 1871, a song written and sung by Brother Thayer caught my eye. It was called “Up in the Mormon Land,” and here is how it went: Some folks like to spend their time in Long Branch or Cape May, While others like in rural haunts a pleasant time to stay. But if I had a week to spend, I’d spend it out of hand. I’d take my sweetheart, and we’d go. . . . Where? Up in the Mormon Land! Chorus: Up in the Mormon Land, folks are not shy. Up in the Mormon Land, how is that for high? Up in the Mormon Land, I’ll tell you it is grand, A jolly place for courting . . . is the Mormon Land. The rules of strict propriety are not the Mormon taste, So if you choose, you put your arm around your sweetheart’s waist. Their notions of morality are something very grand. In fact, you do just as you please. . . . Where? Up in the Mormon Land!1 There was considerable satisfaction in learning that song and singing it with the special nuance of changing “their” in the second verse to “our notions of morality.” I am sure that future generations of the club will be required to acknowledge Thayer, class of 1871, and Peterson, class of 1952, if they ever choose to sing that sweet and lusty song from the nineteenth-century American West. During that first year in the club, we began the task of learning all there was to know about the history of the ancient organization. Mild chiding accompanied every miscue the new members inevitably made. It was all in good fun, but there was a lot to learn, resulting in a lot of chiding. If Harvard had the aura of New England and occasional New  York tradition, the roster of past members of the Porcellian Club proved it: President Theodore Roosevelt’s portrait hangs over the stairway, class of 1880; his dear friend and “brother,” Owen Wister, was known for writing ἀ e Virginian, said to be the first literary portrait of the American West. It is likely not widely known that brother Roosevelt appointed brother Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to be a Supreme Court justice. Teddy’s cousin, Franklin Delano, was not elected to the club. Robert Gould Shaw, a white man, led the first free Negro regiment in the Civil War. Dozens sustain the club honor as governors and senators with names like Leverett Saltonstall, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Tudor Gardiner. One member was also widely recognized for his incarceration for Wall Street fraud.

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The democrat in me was comforted by the fact that the potential snobbery of about a dozen clubs at Harvard was mitigated by their small enrollment and relative invisibility. If you belonged, you belonged. If you didn’t, you paid no attention and were unaffected. In recollecting and writing this memoir, I have tried to trace the source of appropriate memories. In the case of Owen Wister, I remember he composed a song that was often sung over dinner at the club. I received permission to print the words of the song, which brings back the warmth of that earlier time: Dum Vivimus Vivamus

(While We Live, Let Us Live Well) Cambridge, 1882 In old days of glory, So I have heard the story, When true were many, And false hearts were few, Libations crowned with flowers, They poured out to the Powers To bless their mortal hours Each day anew, To bless their mortal hours Each day anew. But we need no roses; The wine to us discloses A flower more precious That blooms within the bowl. And no man e’er shall blame us That brothers here we name us: Dum vivimus vivamus! With heart and soul. When these days are no longer, Our memory grows the stronger. To it we shall hearken As through the world we roll. Its voice we cannot smother, And when we meet a brother,

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We’ll drink to one another With heart and soul.2 I sense no problem with ignoring the symbol of wine while honoring the spirit of fraternity. The Art of the Nudge

There was another “club” that deserves mention—a delicatessen called Elsie’s. It was not much more than ten by fifteen feet, located at the corner of Mt. Auburn and Holyoke Streets, and open to anyone. It boasted sandwiches of roast beef, pastrami, turkey, cheese, and pretty much anything else delicious you could think of. It also had a mechanical pinball machine in the corner. This was in the days before high-tech electronic machines. The one in Elsie’s provided an opportunity to bump the machine deftly to guide the pinball into a high-value hole or away from a low-value one. The art lay in the nudging. The penalty for too forceful a bump was seeing the word “TILT” flash across the screen and losing the game. The reward for high scores was free games. My great triumph at Elsie’s occurred one afternoon when I ran up a magnificent total of free games, maybe as many as fifteen or twenty. Alas, I had only ten minutes before I had to get to an hour-long exam. I could not miss the exam, nor could I abandon the remarkable total of free games I had amassed. The pay phone in the corner came to my rescue. I called a friend a block away in Eliot House and in an urgent, but generous, tone invited him to come to Elsie’s immediately and take over my bounty of free games. This was a true friend who understood immediately the significance of my request. I told him my exam deadline, and he appreciated the gravity of the situation and raced up to Elsie’s. When I returned an hour later, I was no worse for the exam, and perhaps better for a broader sense of priorities. My friend still had ten or twelve free games left, which he transferred back to me. The situation was a perfect illustration of the healthy mix of play, exams, and a few people who could appreciate the importance of free games at Elsie’s—all part of an education that meant so much to me at Harvard. You Never Left Home

During my sophomore year, I took a class called Human Relations. It was a small class of ten or so students. We discussed case studies from Harvard Business School

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for their human relationships—not the economics—in the workplace. I loved the course. In the process of our discussions, we became much like what was, in those days, called a T group, where the students and the course instructor got to know each other well. One day, while walking across the yard to the class in Sever Hall, I fell in step with Hugh Cabot, the instructor. For some reason, our conversation turned to homesickness. From discussions in class, he knew about my upbringing in Utah and move to Concord at fifteen. I had not thought about it before, but in response to something he said, I blurted out that I could not recall ever feeling homesick at Middlesex, or now at Harvard. He responded, “Of course not. You never left home.” “Never left home”: what did that mean? Was it an insult? Was I a prisoner of my upbringing? Could I not escape Cache County, Utah? Cabot went on to suggest that I had brought my home with me. I began to sense that my family, culture, and identity could turn out to be a passport, not a leash. That seemed to have something to do with the desire to open an unusually large number and variety of doors without knowing fully what lay behind them, a curiosity and perhaps courage that likely seemed reckless to some but never once so to me or Grethe, the woman I married six years later, who opened them with me. Time would tell. Cabot was probably right; I had brought my home with me. My teenage physical separation from family gave me a lot of freedom with the result that the lifestyle I chose turned out to be close to home, my own and those I later experienced. Perhaps the paradox that freedom from the halter draws the horse closer to the barn is truer than we think. Soda Springs

That next summer I came directly to Soda Springs, Idaho, from Harvard for a survey job at a phosphate mine. The contrast with Cambridge remains vivid. The camp cook drove the ten to fifteen miles into town from the mining camp to purchase the week’s food and pick me up. He had to wait quite a while for my train to come in, which apparently gave him too much time for an extra beer, and he became mildly tipsy. We loaded my sleeping bag and personal belongings in the back of the open Jeep and started off to the camp. His driving took him all over the road—almost into barrow pits—until he finally allowed me to take the wheel. He gave directions. After an hour or more of driving in a thirty-odd-mile circle, we missed the camp and arrived back in Soda Springs. By then he was sober enough to give better

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directions, and we finally got into camp by sundown. The side trips into the road ruts had jostled the week’s food supply enough to break eggs onto my sleeping bag. One night the crew had an unforgettable poker game. It was seven-card stud: two cards are dealt down, followed by four cards face up, and a seventh card face down. Bets occur with each card after the third. The betting grew ferocious with almost everyone raising. Finally, by the fifth or sixth card, it was clear that we were mistakenly playing with a pinochle deck made up of eight aces, kings, queens, jacks, tens, and nines, so almost everyone at the table had a full house. There was an immediate clamor to fold the hand and divide the pot. I was the youngest at the table but happened to have the best hand—three aces and two kings. Others had hands that were almost as good. My argument was that we had all started with the same innocence—at least in card terms—but the bets in the pot had become uneven by the fourth round. My logic prevailed, and I successfully claimed the pot. The cook who had picked me up earlier was in the game and boasted that he had once run his own restaurant on Route 66 in the Arizona desert. He was especially proud that he could serve five fish dishes each day and make them all out of frozen cod. So much for the desert palate. Another memory is more intense. While I carried my six-foot surveying rod through dense chaparral underbrush one day, wasps suddenly covered my face, mouth, and eyes. My rod must have hit their hive. In any case, I dropped the rod and frantically rubbed the wasps off my face and glasses as I plunged through the underbrush. My panic was so immense that I remember no pain, and for whatever reason, the stings were transient. I never found my glasses, however. Wiping wasps off my face and winning an argument at poker probably provided a healthy balance to the intellectual swarm and misdeals that occasionally erupted around me at Harvard. After all, wasps exist wherever you found them— at a mining camp in Idaho or on Boston’s Beacon Hill. Remembrance

The intellectual impact of Harvard College speaks for itself. My ties to my upbringing should be clear. My introduction to spiritual faith came next. The hay gang, Soda Springs, Middlesex, the college generally, and the Porcellian Club intensively enriched my social education. Each experience strengthened those legs that upheld me. There is something more to emphasize about the Porcellian Club quite apart from Harvard College. It was and is a timeless place. If possible, nothing was allowed to change. My experience as an outsider was undoubtedly different

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and perhaps more poignant than the one for members raised in the shadow of New England culture. For me the club was a unique and initially foreign experience that strengthened that fourth leg of my life, the cultural or social one. When I went back for lunch at the club during my fiftieth Harvard reunion a few years ago, I could have closed my eyes and seen myself as an undergraduate again. Much of the charm of the club was its Yankee understatement and respect— even if only symbolic—for the old until the new more than proved itself, conservative use of money over generations, avoidance of ostentatious wealth, and unquestioned superiority of Boston over any other part of the world, especially New York. Three seemingly trivial, but telling, stories exemplify that attitude. In 1942 a terrible fire at the Coconut Grove nightclub in Boston led to the death of 492 people, in large part because the exit doors did not open out. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed a law that all public doors had to open out. It was a sensible idea certainly, but who thought the Porcellian Club was a public place? Well, the law did, so the club changed the hinges on the door fronting Massachusetts Avenue. Then Senator Leverett Saltonstall (Massachusetts) and Governor Tudor Gardiner (Maine), both club members in their sixties and as outwardly dignified as anyone you can imagine, approached the front door to attend a dinner. They pushed the door in, but it would not budge. However much they supported the new law to save fatal stampeding at blocked public doorways, they felt obliged to make a statement about the violation of club custom that the reversed hinges symbolized. They went around the corner and down Holyoke Street to the alley behind the club, where they climbed up on garbage cans and boosted each other over a chainlink fence to gain access to the rear door. That door opened inward, allowing them to avoid the indignity of change. Their historically proper acknowledgment of club tradition was greeted with appropriate approbation. The Cabot family of Boston and the club provided their own share of stories of confident conservation. Charlie Cabot was a dear friend, classmate, and member of the club. His father was a respected judge in Boston and served as the graduate president of the club during the first years I was a member. One day I saw Charlie walking to class in a grotesque overcoat—too big for him around the waist, down to his ankles, and missing some of its buttons. I asked where he had found such an ugly coat. With a mixture of nonchalance and family pride, he replied that he had lost his overcoat, and when he had asked his “old man” for money for a new one, his father had told him to go up in the attic where—still hanging—he could

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find the overcoat Charlie’s grandmother had worn when she was pregnant with his father. That explained the large waist. Charlie was not offended by my asking. Charlie’s uncle, Paul Cabot, also a member of the club, was a rising financial figure in Boston—probably just pushing thirty—when the leading bank in New York elected him to its board. He was the bank’s first Bostonian board member. Knowing Paul’s outspokenness and abundant self-confidence, his friends urged him to behave himself when he went to the “big city” and not embarrass Boston. There being no commuter planes in the late 1920s, Paul took the overnight sleeper train to New York, drank a bit too much, and overslept the next morning in his New York hotel. He arrived at the large boardroom of the bank a few minutes after the meeting had started. His seat as the newest member was at the far end of a long table. As the story goes, Paul, also the youngest on the board, walked slowly down the length of the table to the cold stares of the New York establishment. He paused before reaching his seat, looked down the table at the assembled frowns, and said, “For chrissake, haven’t you ever seen a hangover?” Paul Cabot did well in New York and Boston, was the founding force of State Street Research and Management Company, and after World War II, became the manager of the Harvard endowment. With his acknowledged wisdom and selfassurance, he revolutionized the management of the endowment assets, transferring them out of safe, but stagnant, low-paying bonds into balanced equity investments. The rest is history because most other universities followed suit, and the Harvard endowment is now in excess of thirty billion dollars, with its largest part in managed growth on top of the gifts that have come to the university. I barely knew Paul Cabot, but such stories embody the special flavor of old Boston. There was a mixture of simplicity with quiet, but enormous, self-confidence, comfort with marching, as Thoreau said, to the beat of your own drummer. Chauffeured cars were rarely the taste of Boston executives, and leather elbow patches on old sport coats still found their way into the closets of the old as well as the young, whether wealthy or not. A Spiritual Debt to a Grand Man

The confirming capstone of my quest for a unity of faith and reason came in the person of a fellow Mormon, Henry Eyring. He was a distinguished chemist at Princeton and later joined the faculty of the University of Utah and played a leading role in leading it into the ranks of reputable research schools. Until he died, he

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was widely considered to be in the running for a Nobel Prize in chemistry. His son and namesake is a current leading LDS Church official. While still at Princeton, he sometimes visited Boston and occasionally met with LDS students for an evening chat that often centered on the tension between science and religion. For him there was no more conflict between faith and reason than the normal tension that accompanied the scientific search for truth. The following quote from that dear man comes from his book, Reflections of a Scientist: A prophet is wonderful because he sometimes speaks for the Lord. This occurs on certain occasions when the Lord wills it. On other occasions, he speaks for himself, and one of the wonderful doctrines of the Church is that we don’t believe in the infallibility of any mortal. If in his speculations the Prophet thought there were people on the moon, this has no effect on my belief that on other occasions, when the Lord willed it, he spoke the ideas that the Lord inspired him to say. It is for these moments of penetrating insight that I honor and follow him.3 On another occasion he said: “Still, I also like to see one of the Brethren [church leaders] make what appears to be a mistake now and then. I make them all the time. So, I think that if the Lord can use one of the Brethren and they’re not perfect, then maybe he can find a way to use me.”4 The beauty of such observations lies with the empowerment of each member of the church to be responsible for his or her personal conclusions about divine matters while still buttressed by and contributing to the community of the Saints. This blend of intellectual, spiritual, and social education combined with considerable force on an occasional Sunday when a breakfast at the Porcellian Club was enveloped in the heavy atmosphere of cigars. After breakfast I walked a few blocks down Brattle Street to the Mormon Church on Longfellow Park with my suit reeking of cigar smoke. No one seemed to care, certainly not Bill Cox. Some things are more important than others. Time to Focus

In the middle of my junior year, I finally decided to combine a concentration in American government with premed. I needed to catch up on necessary science courses, so I stayed in Cambridge for summer school to take intensive inorganic

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chemistry. It turned out to be a wonderful immersion—lectures all morning, lab sessions all afternoon—for six or eight weeks. I was able to live at the home of a classmate who was working away from Cambridge for the summer. My friend’s parents were lovely, of somewhat timeless gentility, and most gracious. The summers in Cambridge were muggy. I generally went to the Porcellian Club at noon to make a lunch and take a shower before going to my lab. After a few weeks of this regimen, my hosts became increasingly concerned with my apparent failure to bathe. The house was small enough that my not running bath or shower water was something they noticed. In the nicest voice, the woman of the house told me how pleased she was to have me at her home and that I was “certainly free to use all the facilities whenever I wished to.” The summer went well, and my total immersion in chemistry and daily immersion in the club shower earned an A+, the only one I ever received. I doubly appreciated this because I was thin in the sciences. My senior year was occupied with finishing up my premed studies. Two colorful members of the faculty round out the complexity of my college experience. Louis Fieser was a respected cholesterol chemist and taught the basic organic chemistry course for undergraduates. One day when he had a few minutes left after his regular lecture, he began to tell us about his World War II invention of the jellied gasoline called napalm, a cruel—but I suppose sometimes necessary— military weapon. After explaining the chemistry of napalm, he began to describe another project of his that had been nearly ready for deployment and involved attaching tiny napalm packets to the legs of bats collected from Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. The plan was to take the bats in airplanes over Japanese cities in the late hours of the night and drop them in parachutes designed to open at a low elevation over the city. The bats would then fly in every direction and roost under the eaves of Japanese structures when the sun came up. Timers on the napalm packets were set to ignite thousands of these small firebombs simultaneously—exploding all over Tokyo. Fieser seemed mesmerized by the ingenuity of his project, unaware of its grotesqueness or the increasing nervousness of his students. We began to hiss, softly at first, then louder. He looked up startled—as if wondering at the noise—and said, “But the project was canceled when the atomic bomb worked.” We can only wonder—given the extensive damage that traditional firebombing had already inflicted on cities like Tokyo—whether the magnitude of the damage of this venture might have been even greater, and more grotesque in its own way, than that

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inflicted by the two A-bombs we did drop. But no one brought the subject up at the time. Remember, we were students of the “silent generation” of the 1950s. In Professor Fieser’s defense, note that before the atom bombs were dropped, the Japanese homeland and the emperor had sworn to fight the impending invasion by allied troops to the honorable death, if necessary, of every Japanese soldier and civilian with corresponding fatalities in the attacking force. The atom bombs may have provided a shock effect of such emotional—as well as physical— magnitude to allow the emperor to choose surrender for his people. Who knows what a bizarre bat attack might have done? A professor in fine arts provided a gentler eccentricity with his manner of speech. It was elegant Oxfordian English, so impeccable that one student decided to look up the teacher’s bio. He found no study or residence in England. In fact, the professor had been raised in New  Jersey! Later, at a cocktail party, the student worked up the nerve to ask the professor where he had gotten his accent. He calmly replied, “My boy, it is pure affectation.” He combined honesty and foppery in one sentence. I presume that Oxford English marginally sweetened the salary in the fine arts world. His class was endearingly called “Darkness at Noon” because it was scheduled at midday in the Fogg Museum, where its many art slides were projected in a darkened classroom. I was admitted to Harvard Medical School nine months later—in the spring of my senior year—and made plans to start my professional education in the fall of 1952. Graduation

Bill Rutter, a highly successful California scientist and entrepreneur I once met, told me he valued his years at Harvard College as a dilettante might. He quickly clarified that he did not mean it was a shallow experience, but rather offered what he called “an astounding epiphany of the mind. It was the most stimulating period of my life, providing intellectual independence and an understanding of great people.” I understand what he meant. Senior year came all too soon. I remember an aching pain during the last week of school when I realized that there were many in the class I would never see again. The class of 1952 elected me to a position akin to class president—first marshal— an office I still occupy. Bill Bender, the man who had helped Harvard president James Bryant Conant devise the national scholarship program and was the dean of the college during my four years, sent me a letter that spring awarding me the Paul Revere Frothingham Prize for “contribution to the college” over my four years.

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Enough money came with it to buy a German microscope for my next year at Harvard Medical School, but his respect was even more valuable. At graduation my mother and father—because of my election as first marshal—stood with President and Mrs. Conant in the receiving line at the class party. Memories must have taken my mother back to 1910, the year she attended the New England Conservatory of Music, and my father must have been reminded of his earlier doctoral work at Cornell. Undoubtedly I am guilty of preferentially remembering the happy and brave moments, both social and physical, of my life and blocking out or deliberately omitting the dumb, thoughtless, and crude acts that were there as well. Perhaps I have saved my family from embarrassment. In any case—however short of perfection I was—I survived and grew steadily.

6 Harvard Medical School: Professional Rigor

Until now I have never asked myself why I chose to go to medical school. My mother’s initial life-threatening childhood bout with osteomyelitis and her subsequent uncomplaining accommodation to an exposed chronic infection of the shinbone must have had something to do with seeding my interest in medicine. That one-inch spot on her leg where the childhood infection flared up in her thirties was a part of our family life until the day she died. It suggested that disease was something that could be managed, if not cured. Hers was an exercise in the optimistic side of medicine. Since Dad had his PhD in bacteriology, he loved to share ideas about disease avoidance with me. One memory is going to the single local hamburger stand in Logan with my parents, which was a special occasion in those pre-McDonald’s days. A mug of root beer came with the hamburger. Dad suggested a way that we could protect ourselves from exposure to the germs of the last person who had used the mug if the hamburger stand had failed to wash it thoroughly. “Hold the handle of the mug away from your mouth,” he enjoyed saying and illustrating; that way you drank from the opposite side. It was unlikely that anyone would have done that, so the far side would be relatively germ free. Beyond this nostalgia, I had come to be a pretty good student of the medically related sciences: biology, chemistry, and physics. Finally, I never grew up fearing disease, and I was attracted to the human interaction that was a part of medicine. I spent the summer after graduation from Harvard, before I entered medical school, in Grandfather’s hay fields. One day cousin Steve struck his forehead with a recoiling iron bar so forcefully that it bled and required a trip to the nearest doctor

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to sew up the wound. I volunteered to go with Steve and let the doctor know that I was beginning medical school that fall. I was allowed to watch the stitching and remember an admiring chuckle from the physician when I was not fainthearted. Then off to Harvard Medical School I went. Vanderbilt Hall, on Avenue Louis Pasteur in Boston, was much like Winthrop House at college. We studied, ate, and lodged together, some two or three hundred of us, as unmarried students over the four years of medical education. Only very few in my class were married, an illustration of Sir William Osler’s statement that a student of medicine should not marry until he was fully educated (Osler knew few female students). He suggested thirty-nine as a good age! Gaudeamus Igitur

Our first-year class numbered about a hundred, and about twenty more transferred into the third year from a number of the two-year medical schools that still existed in those days. Most classmates were biology or chemistry majors, and a few had advanced degrees in related fields. We went to work. There was no Zeke Robbins, my politically savvy college roommate. No more dabbling in novel fields of study. No more dilettantes. We had entered our trade school and were eager to get on with it. The curriculum was simple: for two years, we dove into gross anatomy/human dissection, microscopic anatomy/histology, biochemistry, physiology, microbiology/bacteriology, pathology, neuroanatomy, and pharmacology. The courses were straightforward, but they were mostly a foreign tongue to me. We learned the new vocabulary of the body by rote, as if studying an unfamiliar language. The anatomy final test asked something akin to describing the muscles and nerves used to walk on the stage of a concert hall and play a violin. Biochemistry was particularly difficult for me because of my limited background. The teacher was a kindly man but not a good teacher. I struggled and struggled and probably got only average grades, but I ended up overcompensating by specializing nine years later in endocrinology and metabolism, the field dealing with the biochemistry of the body. In that first year, I was momentarily flattered to be asked to have lunch with Dr. Davidson from the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory at Boston City Hospital. He asked me questions about the circulation of the liver. I knew very little about the liver’s unique double circulation—the second called portal circulation. At the close of lunch, Davidson told me that the dean’s office had named me as a student

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who had little exposure to human anatomy and suggested that if he pitched his lectures to my level of understanding, “they would not likely be over anyone else’s head.” It was hardly an endorsement of my competence. The relentless onslaught of preclinical science was relieved by wonderful clinics on Saturday morning with Herman Blumgart at Beth Israel Hospital. He exposed us to living patients and disease. I will never forget his first presentation. It focused on a patient with angina, who was willing, for our sake, to exercise safely by climbing up and down three steps until he taxed the capacity of his heart and developed the classic angina chest pain. He then demonstrated the relief he got from putting a pill of nitroglycerine under his tongue that temporarily dilated his narrowed coronary arteries. Growing into Medicine

The weeks and months passed. For some time, I rarely felt scientifically smart compared to many classmates, but somehow that was all right. I did what I needed to do and figured I would learn what I had to learn. There would be a way to succeed or survive, day after day, as Hyrum and Ira Nebeker had learned on their remote ranch and my mother had experienced with her leg. Thinking that I had to live up to some past familial model is not in my conscious memory, however. Rather, I figured I had sufficient ability to do what was needed. In spite of all the seriousness of medical school, there were moments of both tradition and humor. We were, after all, new students in the ancient and honorable field of medicine. Each day we walked to classes past a quote from Hippocrates carved in stone on the pathway of the school quadrangle: Life is short, and art long, Opportunity fleeting, Experiment dangerous, And judgment difficult. Saturday nights in the inner court of Vanderbilt Hall, another variation of immortal truth was occasionally provided by upperclassmen with beery serenades of “Gaudeamus Igitur,” an old German drinking song included in Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture. After a verse in German, the pungent, Anglo-Saxon reprise told us that “all first-year men eat shit.” We had entered the guild with all its vulgar and noble rites of passage. It certainly was a man’s world. I remember only three women in our class, and they must have felt like the pioneers they were. Professors—some knowingly

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but most unknowingly—were outrageously sexist by today’s standards. One of our brightest classmates, a woman, committed suicide during her residency, and I always thought that she never had a chance to feel a sense of belonging. Teaching was alternately humane and designed to beat us into mastery of a finite body of knowledge through rote memory. During my second year, a classmate and I touched our first patient. We were in the ancient Boston City Hospital that forever seemed to smell of boiled cabbage, excretion, and the unwashed. We were trying to learn how to examine the human body. As we finished, our patient—an aged Asian man—looked up at me and asked, “What’s wrong with me?” I will never forget that moment. I had no idea what ailed him; I was merely trying to find out where his liver was! What could I have said? “You appear to have a mild case of hypoesthetic, neurovascular, iatrogenic dysplasia”? That answer was gibberish but might have allowed me to get out of the room with my superficial dignity intact. I could have said I didn’t know or care, that I was just using him to learn about the body. That was hardly generous. Other unsuitable responses flipped through my mind until my partner spoke up and said, “We don’t know yet.” “Yet”: the word is one of hope; it is honest and almost contractual, and it saves both doctor and patient from smugness. And it is a commitment to access the information the physician needs, from written, electronic, or collegial sources. Dr. William Castle was a distinguished hematologist at the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory. We respected him for his pioneering work in discovering a cure for pernicious anemia. We also loved him for his insistence on simplicity—New England style. The cause of pernicious anemia lay in the loss of a certain secretion in the stomach. In even the best scientific journals, Castle straightforwardly referred for years to the substance as “stomach juice” because it was juicy and came from the stomach. Today it is called “intrinsic factor,” which says little about the substance and requires future medical students to learn where it comes from and its consistency. During my third year, I needed access to a car to travel back and forth between Vanderbilt Hall and the many hospitals of Boston for clinical clerkships. One afternoon I noticed a common three-by-five card with a message on our bulletin board: “For sale, a 1934 Ford sedan. If interested, call Dr. W. B. Castle, at Thorndike Laboratory, Boston City Hospital.” It was common knowledge that Dr. Castle drove old cars, but I hadn’t known they were that old. I wondered if the notice was a joke, but a phone call proved the offer was legitimate, and the price, fifty dollars. He said he’d drive the car by Vanderbilt Hall that evening.

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It was beautiful—almost an antique—a black Model-A Ford. I wanted to buy it on the spot, but Castle insisted on taking me for a test drive. Off we went through Brookline, onto Route 9 toward Worcester, and got back to Vanderbilt Hall half an hour later. He drove it, I drove it, we tested everything, and he delivered title and car the next day. I shared the expense with a classmate—twenty-five dollars each— and it served us well for two-and-a-half years. I found I could relicense it by mail in Utah, which turned out to be a valuable maneuver. It would have had difficulty passing required local inspection with Massachusetts plates. At a gas station, the Utah plates prompted respect and such comments as, “How did you get that car all the way back here?” In the spring of my third year, the car also advanced my romance with Grethe by providing both transportation and coziness. Soon after I met Grethe, one of the front doors stopped latching and required wire to hold it shut. We could always get in from the other side or climb over to get out. The engine and brakes worked perfectly. Ninety percent of the teaching in medical school was professional as opposed to anything in the humanities. Yet plenty of inspirational examples taught more than the science of medicine. Oliver Cope was that kind of surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital. We grew to be friends. Learning I was from Utah, he told me about his ancestor, Thomas Kane, the respected Philadelphia journalist I  mentioned earlier, who had taken an interest in the persecution of the Mormons before and after their trek west. Kane had traveled to Utah to report for a Philadelphia paper in the nineteenth century and became an advocate for those “different” people. His statue stands in the rotunda of the Utah Capitol building in appreciation for the clarity he attempted to bring to the nation’s understanding of the Mormons religiously and as pioneers. Cope had some of Castle’s simplicity. He pioneered a surgical procedure called a lumpectomy, where a breast cancer lump was excised and the rest of the breast and surrounding tissues preserved when there was no evidence of disease in the lymph nodes. Before the value of the lumpectomy was established, a radical mastectomy was always performed for all tumors. Cope’s method was simple, and so was the terminology. Whenever we went to work in a hospital, we were expected to wear a coat and tie. Dr. Cope was giving a lecture at Mass General to twenty or thirty of us one day when a good friend of mine was sitting in the front row without a tie. Cope looked down, smiled, and told my tieless friend that a necessary relationship of respect existed between teacher and pupil and his missing tie was disrupting it sufficiently to distract him from his lecture. “You are welcome to stay in the class, but would

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you be so kind as to sit in the back row, where you will be less distracting to me?” he asked. My friend was generally well dressed, even a dandy by some standards, and he loved Cope until the day he died for that respectful moment in education. Dr. Seegal, A Life Change

Between our third and fourth years, that same classmate invited me to investigate a clerkship with a professor reputed to be a wonderful teacher at Columbia. He was Dr. David Seegal, and it was his practice to recruit two students each summer from Harvard, Virginia, and two other schools into an intensive training program that was halfway between being a student and an intern. He taught at the Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Welfare Island—now called Roosevelt Island—off the east shore of Manhattan and the Bronx. The program looked good. We applied and were accepted, and I spent the most important time of my life in medical training with a wonderful man. When we arrived, Seegal announced he was willing to tell us exactly what he thought of us after the summer was over. He suggested that might be the last opportunity we would ever get to have someone who had gotten to know us well speak honestly about what he saw in us. For the rest of our lives, he said, many people would either “flatter us to our faces or defame us behind our backs, and there was little value in either.” The first week on the wards of Goldwater, Dr. Seegal asked me to present the case of one of my patients. A presentation is one of the formal and important rituals in medicine where one doctor tells others the nature and challenges of a case so that they can combine their experience to help the patient. It is also a test of the presenter’s understanding of the important aspects of the case. Such a presentation should take one to two minutes. Halfway into my effort, Seegal slammed down his notebook and said something like, “Peterson, quit rambling. I’m not smart enough to chase you down every path you want to follow.” I started again. “Peterson, quit trying to impress me with how much you think you know. We’ll find that out sooner or later. Your job is to tell us what we need to know—not what you know—so that we can understand and discuss the case.” I must have been interrupted four or five more times during a presentation that should have taken only a few minutes and was still struggling to be coherent after ten or fifteen. Of course, I was initially embarrassed because I was presenting before Dr.  Seegal, two other staff doctors, and seven of my student colleagues, but for the rest of my life, I have thought of Dr. Seegal whenever I attempted to transmit

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information on any subject. He helped me reach rural legislators in Utah with a message on liberal education, the economic impact of a research university, and the value of academic freedom. Those subjects require the clarity, focus, simplicity, and ability to reach the listener that Seegal began to drum into me that day and continued throughout the summer. Seegal and his wife, a PhD herself, had no children, and I suspect students like me were beneficiaries of his large reservoir of affection, though he could be gruff at times. He did something else important: he saw talent and potential in his students that they were often unaware of, abilities that, if unappreciated, stood less chance of ever maturing. At the end of the summer, he asked us again if we wanted a private report of what he saw in us. My Harvard classmate went in first and came out grinning and cussing. “Do you know what that son of a bitch told me? He said I was a good student but probably didn’t want to work too hard, so I ought to consider marrying a rich woman, setting up practice in Virginia, living on a horse farm, and being a urologist.” My friend did indeed end up a successful urologist and—if you can believe it—settled down outside Houston (not Virginia) on a small horse farm. I never found out if his wife was wealthy. For some reason, I cannot remember what Dr. Seegal said to me that day, but with lasting gratitude, I will share the letter he sent on my behalf a few months later, when I applied for an internship. Dear Peterson, Before sending off my appraisal of your performance here, may I show you, in confidence, the letter I propose to send? I have come to believe that a short decisive note is more useful than a page-and-a-half treatise. What are your wishes? Mr. Chase N. Peterson spent June and July 1955 as a clinical clerk and substitute intern under my direction at the Columbia University Research Service, Goldwater Memorial Hospital. In that period, our staff formed the following opinion concerning Mr. Peterson’s performance and promise: Gentleman in all respects. Highly intelligent, serious and effective worker. Accepts clinical responsibility with poise and is entirely reliable. Presentations are well organized. Appears to have leadership qualities and a variety of other assets, which lead some of us to guess that he could go on to occupy a dean’s chair.

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That was my medical diploma, the precious confirmation that I had in fact learned the medicine, chemistry, and vocabulary that had been so foreign just three years earlier. I had passed my Middlesex Latin again. Thanks, I suspect, to Seegal’s letter and Cope and a few others, I received the award in my class at graduation for demonstrating promise for clinical medicine from the Massachusetts Medical Society. There might have been a self-fulfilling prophesy at work after my experience with Dr. Seegal during the summer of 1955, but I never once thought about or planned an academic career until events presented themselves. In fact, I had forgotten about Seegal’s letter or his reference to a deanship until I ran across it while cleaning out old files a few years ago. It was Dr.  Seegal and a few others like Dr. Cope and Dr. Castle—probably ten or fifteen in all from grade school to residency—who opened my eyes to what I might be and a world of wonder and delight. Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience

In the fall of my fourth year, our class applied to teaching hospitals for the internships and residencies that constituted our final block of graduate medical work. Representatives from nearby Boston and East Coast hospitals met with us the first day to tell us about their programs. Later, representatives visited us from the Armed Forces Medical Services, which in those days had the advantage of paying interns a living wage. A man from the military hospital in Hawaii waxed especially eloquent on its advantages: “You don’t have to do your own lab work, the on-call hours are humane, and the salary is as described.” He praised the beautiful island and—in line with the chauvinism of the era—added that the nurses were gorgeous, too. When the military representative was finished, Herman Blumgart trudged up to the podium unannounced. Professor Blumgart was the beloved chief of medicine at Beth Israel, one of the Harvard-associated teaching hospitals. He had not been able to meet with us during the other Boston hospital presentations. He was quite old and full of human and Talmudic wisdom, and through our four years, he had successfully reminded us of the reasons most of us had come to medical school: to diagnose and treat diseases and the people who had them. He looked us over as if to measure our collective merit and then said in a soft voice, “We at the Beth Israel offer only poverty, chastity, and obedience.” He said nothing more and sat down to silence. The class—stunned at first—broke into roaring applause. It wasn’t lost on some of us that this saintly Maimonides from Beth Israel had offered us the vow taken by members of the Catholic clergy!

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“I Didn’t Come to Boston to Meet a Nice Boy from Utah”

If I hadn’t left Logan and gone to Middlesex, Harvard College, and Harvard Medical School, I would have never met Ane Grethe Ballif. Everything I have done since the spring of 1955 would have been unimaginably different and diminished if that encounter had never happened. And it nearly didn’t. Grethe had become seriously interested in a Swede she had met when spending a year before college in Stockholm with her Aunt Esther Peterson (no relation), whose husband was in the American Foreign Service. Incidentally Esther went on to be a member of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter cabinets in labor and consumer affairs. It was she who launched the consumer-information movement and to whom we owe partial thanks for the information on the labels of grocery products: calories, ingredients, and nutritional value. Aunt Esther is indicative of the strong stock from which Grethe came. On her return to America from Sweden, Grethe entered Brigham Young University, which was a few blocks from her home in Provo. She wanted—and her parents urged her—to complete college before any further thoughts of romance. Her education at BYU turned out to be truly stimulating and broadening, while she and her parents were gentle rebels in the otherwise comfortable culture of Provo. After graduating in three years, Grethe accepted a scholarship to attend a one-year offshoot program from the Harvard Business School at Radcliffe College, taught by professors who were moonlighting, as it were. Fortunately for me, the Swedish romance had faded by the time Grethe finished BYU. Arriving in Cambridge and living on the Radcliffe campus, she immersed herself in serious business education. Grethe had an uncle—a brother-in-law of Esther’s—who was a clinical teacher at Harvard Medical School. Our paths had crossed a few times, and he suggested to his niece that “you ought to meet this fine boy from Utah, Chase Peterson.” Her response during the fall of 1954 and spring of 1955 was “Uncle Bri, I didn’t come all the way to Boston to meet a nice boy from Utah!” Shades of “Brother Eccles, if I had your boys, I wouldn’t, either.” We finally did meet one electric evening in April. I was invited to a church party, and Grethe—who’d had little interest in the LDS crowd until then—was talked into accepting a date to the same party. The affair was in a private home, and I was talking with someone else when a six-foot-tall strawberry blond came walking down the stairs in a pink spring dress. “Are you Grethe Ballif?” “Are you Chase Peterson?” Our interest was immediate.

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I called her the next day for our first date. We went to see the touring Metropolitan Opera’s performance of ἀ e Marriage of Figaro. She knew the opera better than I did, but I could keep up fairly well as we hummed bits of Cherubino’s aria afterward while walking down Huntington Avenue to the parking lot. By the time we reached the last stanza, we were nearly in love, and we both knew it. She turned down my next request for a date, for reasons she confessed later were pure coquettishness. She didn’t really have to finish a report, but I suspect her refusal did fan the flame of my interest. The next date was merely a walk along the Charles River, which happened to be on the day after I’d had a plantar wart cut off the sole of my foot, making my gait a little unsteady. My impairment justified holding hands ever so modestly, and my wobble caused our held hands to bump ever so innocently against our accommodating legs. Hardly the stuff of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but it was communication enough for us. She claims she kissed me first. Two months later, on her way home for the summer, Grethe visited me on Welfare Island, where I was working with Dr. Seegal. We sat and talked for what must have been hours on a bench looking west from the island to the Manhattan skyline and sunset. I must remember to find that bench sometime and carve our initials in it. She took a job in Boston that fall without telling me. When  I asked her in October if she would marry me, she said, “Of course.” Her aunt and uncle gave us an engagement party in February, most notable for freezing sleet that began after the guests arrived and rendered cars and even streetcars inoperative for a few hours, keeping guests longer than they had planned. It was a rousing party. The Porcellian Club loaned us the punch bowl, a beautiful silver thing with boars’ heads for handles. In place of its usual contents, we prepared a hot, spiced, mulled cider. It was a great drink for nasty weather. One good friend from the club who was accustomed to the usual alcoholic contents of the bowl came up to me saying that he was worried about driving home. He had stayed longer and drunk more than he intended and wasn’t sure he should drive, especially in the sleet. He was amused to learn that his cups had contained no alcohol. I had often enjoyed the same vicarious mood when not drinking alcohol at parties. Getting Married and Becoming a Doctor

My internship appointment to Yale in New  Haven came in March. Grethe and I made plans to return to Utah after I graduated in early June, get married, and

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then drive back to New Haven by July 1. That all seemed perfectly natural until one evening in April, when the gang in Vanderbilt Hall was giving a party for Jim Ryan, a classmate known for his charm and imagination and for throwing the passes for Yale when they’d beaten Harvard in football four years earlier. Jim’s most recent adventure in chutzpah, albeit the Irish kind, had been to wrangle a one-month fellowship to do his fourth-year obstetrics rotation in Dublin. In his words, “Where should a good Irish lad learn how to deliver a baby if not in Dublin?” So we had a party to send him off. His plan was to drive down the Merritt Parkway that night and meet the Île de France in New York the next day and sail to Ireland. One thought led to another. Everyone knew of the plans Grethe and I had to marry in June in Utah. Why go all the way to Utah just to come back to New Haven two weeks later? Ship’s captains can marry people, can’t they? Yes, that seemed clear. I could somehow arrange my remaining elective academic responsibilities, couldn’t I? Passports. I called an aunt—my father’s sister—who had also gone to college fifty years earlier in spite of David Eccles’s discouragement. She worked for a longtime congressman in Washington. Could she do anything to arrange passports? She thought for a moment since it was 8:00 p.m. and said passports could be airmailed to Le Havre and be waiting for us when the ship docked. What an adventure we plotted! Finally, it was time to call my sister to let the family know, or at least get her opinion. Her tone of voice said it all: weddings are for family. Nothing else trumps that. And she was right. We ran out the rest of the evening, sent Jim off, and have dreamed of our vicarious elopement ever since but are pleased that we went home to marry. And what could have been more exciting in early June, after marriage, than to put everything we owned in a seven-year-old used Pontiac and drive to a new life in New Haven? (The ’34 Ford had been stolen in the early spring, having more than fulfilled its purpose and its fifty-dollar investment.) Our Île de France unfolded on an ocean of asphalt stretching to Connecticut. The road runs before us still.

7 Yale Residency to Utah Practice: ἀ irty-six Hours on, Twelve off, to Live Happily Ever After

The Sum of the Experience

As I have said, I have concluded that the first twenty-six years of my life—from my birth in Cache Valley through medical school—provided me with four legs to stand on—intellectual, spiritual, cultural, and hereditary. Each of them alone would have been insufficient, leaving me unstable and wobbly. Together they supported and steadied me in most circumstances the next decades offered and gave me the capacity and willingness to smile at the foibles that we all commit and quietly enjoy at times. Grethe and I arrived at Yale, where I was proud to receive fifty dollars a month, free uniforms, all the food I could eat, and—had I not been married—a free room at the hospital. I was at the hospital for thirty-six hours on and twelve off for two years with two weeks of vacation each year. With some rationalizing academic snobbery, we felt that any more support or relaxation would have challenged the excellence of the program. I had entered school four years earlier with vague reasons for choosing medicine. How did I feel after the four years were over? That question became important as I carried on my career, and it is equally crucial in understanding what role medicine played in my life when I was not actively practicing or teaching. Some of the answers are obvious. The attraction generated by the intense human interaction between patient and physician grew steadily. Those relationships were rarely superficial and universally interesting. Furthermore, science played a continuous role in disciplining and enriching the medical relationship. The academic fields on which modern medicine was based fit me with at least

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some degree of aptitude, scholastically and physically. The comforting role of healer stood up well compared to the tasks most other professionals undertook. Finally—though I didn’t think about it at the time—medicine was unique in calling for the repeated expectation and effort to engage the problem that the patient brought to the clinic and do whatever the doctor could to relieve disease, disability, or pain as well as teach healthy lifestyles. That is a high aspiration, but it fits entirely with the notion that medical practice and discipline do not allow the professional to be a bystander. It speaks to engagement and passion, as well as empathy. This philosophy turned out to fit with some of the other qualities that life had equipped me with: a strong sense of duty and a ready inclination to get involved and not stand on the sidelines when an issue arose, even to the point of “paddling the river.” Blood, Guts, and What Else?

Blood, monitors, intravenous infusions, and rolling gantries, mixed with shouting doctors and fragile patients, have become the stuff of television drama. Sometimes emergency rooms really are full of drama. A high-tech Robert Frost could have easily written that the emergency room is the place, “where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”1 The ER has been the front door—if not a home of sorts—for many folks. My first assignment at Yale as an intern was the ER. I knew a lot of physiology and biochemistry; now I needed to apply them. The turf was familiar enough; I had spent a month in my fourth year in medical school as a clinical clerk in the Mass General ER. But as a student, there was always a senior doctor somewhere within a few feet to explain things or advise me. Now my name was on the white coat that said I was the doctor. The most interesting case that first week of my internship was truly dramatic. A patient pushed open the outer door of the ER and collapsed face down in front of the nurses’ station. The staff and I imagined he was drunk, pulled him onto a table, and discovered a clean one-inch cut in his bloody shirt over his left chest. His heart sounds and pulse were absent, and there was no blood pressure. I called for a thoracic surgeon to come running, it became obvious that he had been stabbed and his heart had pumped enough to get him to our door, but it wasn’t pumping now, and he needed immediate cardiac massage. Two of us pulled on gloves, cut open the chest and rib cage, squeezed a hand between two ribs, and felt a pericardial balloon filled with blood. (The pericardium is a saclike encasement around the heart normally devoid of blood or fluid). My gloved hand squeezed the heart

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as hard as I could. Blood gushed out of the pericardial sac and the heart, giving it room to restart contractions. Soon the surgeon arrived and quickly whisked him off to the operating room, where doctors found discrete knife wounds in his pericardium and heart, stitched them up, and replaced his lost blood. If you can imagine it, he left the hospital ten days later without infection or impairment. Apparently he had been stabbed with a knife long enough to cut through the chest wall and pericardium and just reach the chamber of the heart. He was able to make it to the ER because the pericardial sac had partly contained the hemorrhage from the heart until it became so full that it compressed the heart and stopped its ability to pump, a condition called cardiac tamponade. Patients and Patience

“Doctor, we expect you to get our father better.” The man’s face and tone of voice seemed to add, “Do you get it?” but he didn’t need to say that. The nurses knew my patient. They said he was the “Gypsy king” of New Haven. The three Cadillacs taking up space in the patient-unloading dock belonged to the family. The patient was having a severe attack of asthma. If he hadn’t been working so hard to breathe, I guessed he’d be an interesting man to talk to. I started routine treatment, and he began to respond. Apart from the desire to help him, I didn’t want to be threatened again by his entourage and was comforted by the clock. My shift would be over in an hour; by that time, he should be better, or he’d be someone else’s problem. That strategy had served me well the year before as a fourth-year student at Mass General. The police brought in a wildly abusive drunk who was bleeding profusely. He had sat on his whisky bottle, broken it, and jammed the shards of glass into his buttock. He was swinging drunkenly at anyone near him, threatening to do us harm when he got free. He had no entourage following, so it was easy to devise a treatment plan. While the police were still there, we turned him over on his belly, pulled his pants down and his shirt up, and bound him with three-inch tape to the gurney from his ankles to his neck like a mummy, except for the lacerated buttock. At that point, he couldn’t swing at anyone. I then proceeded to clean the wound and sew him up. I hoped he might be sleeping by the time I finished, but he wasn’t and still vowed to kill us. The police were gone. The therapeutic plan? Leave him taped to the gurney until he fell asleep or sobered up. I came to value a roll of tape as much as my

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grandfather had esteemed barbed wire and a pair of pliers; both were all-purpose solutions to a lot of breakdowns, whether on a hayrake or a gurney. We also had a few patients at Yale who came for ER care with no discernable physical disease. The extreme cases had a name—Munchausen syndrome. It was a special disorder, often particular to academic ERs. In the extreme, these patients possessed a sophisticated knowledge of medicine, which drew them to teaching hospitals. Such places are more likely to go the extra mile in trying to discover or rule out any disease. My first experience with Munchausen syndrome came when a fellow staggered through our door and fell down in what appeared to be bloody vomit. Put those symptoms together, and you have to worry about upper GI (gastrointestinal) bleeding from an ulcer or something equally serious. Yet a blood test revealed that his hemoglobin level was only slightly low, perhaps explained by his recent bleeding. He was admitted, and we later found that he had skillfully used a razor blade to cut under his fingernails so he could suck and swallow enough blood to be able to vomit it and the contents of his stomach when he got to us. Since the cuts were under his nails, they escaped detection for some time. Our discovery didn’t prove he wasn’t sick, only that the illness was exquisitely in his head, not his stomach. I suppose that his motive was to get attention, a warm bed, and food. Teach by Example

Paul Beeson was the chief of medicine at Yale, a soft-spoken, gracious man, greatly respected in the field of infectious disease. He taught us a lot of medicine and equally as much about a high standard of care. More than once, I saw him in the late evening take a sputum sample, coughed up by one of his private patients with pneumonia. He collected it himself so he could do a chemical staining to determine under the microscope the probable bacterial species causing the pneumonia without having to wait for one or two days for the sputum sample to grow a culture. This extra step often allowed him and us to start the antibiotic most appropriate for the patient’s particular infection immediately that night. This was not brilliant medicine; it was merely a wonderful example of dedicated care that shortened the time to specific treatment. Beeson was also an expert in what was called fevers of unknown origin or FUOs. This put us interns and residents in position to work on a number of rare and puzzling cases that began with fever before showing more specific signs or symptoms.

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Blue Cross Joe

During the year, we also rotated to serve a hospital across the street, where private patients of selected doctors in the community were admitted. The variety of practice was interesting to see. One doctor stood out for his determination to do every test possible for each of his patients. We, on the other hand, were training to do only tests that would give us useful information, positive or negative. That doctor may have been insecure, or he may have wanted his patients to know that he was especially thorough. Either way, we called him Blue Cross Joe for this tendency to overstudy. Blue Cross insurance paid for his insistent habit. We were inclined to forgive him because he was also the attending physician for the local theater used by Broadway shows for their final trial performances before hitting New York. As a result, he had free tickets and was generous in sharing them with those of us limited by our fifty-dollar monthly stipend. I was waiting at that hospital one late evening around 2:00 a.m., as I remember, for a new patient to come up from the ER. I had slumped down in a soft chair with a tattered copy of Life magazine, only to have my intern partner inform me I was leafing through the magazine upside down! While we generally got some sleep on the thirty-six-hour work shift, we did work too many hours for most of the internship year and the first year of residency. I do not believe fatigue ever caused sleepy thinking that harmed a patient. Nevertheless, long hours were an unwise holdover from the Spartan—or more precisely, Germanic—origins of medical education. Consecutive working hours at teaching hospitals are now limited by law to a more rational number, no different from those of our truck-driving or plane-flying colleagues. It never occurred to me or anyone I worked with to complain or consider the schedule excessive. The same can be said for our fifty-dollar monthly stipend; the low wage was just the cost for the privilege of extending our education into the postgraduate years. Low salt/sodium diets were about all we had to treat hypertension in that decade. There was a low-sodium regimen called the Duke diet that we often tried. It was successful only with the patients who were unusually sensitive to salt. To supplement my small salary, I volunteered to eat a low-sodium diet and suffer a variety of benign tests to research different salt hypotheses. I believe the pay was twenty-five dollars per month, which represented a 50 percent improvement in my salary, but the diet was certainly stressful. I had to consume less than 250 milligrams of sodium per day, and a normal diet contains much more. I received special low-sodium foods. I still remember the tasteless tuna fish and milk. My honor

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not to cheat was confirmed each week by a urine test. The kidney is a marvelous organ that controls salt balance. In a healthy person, the twenty-four-hour excretion of salt equals the previous twenty-four-hour intake, minus any sweat loss. It became obvious that I might not be paid if my urine contained much more than 250 milligrams of sodium. Patients Came with Their Culture

There were so many interesting cases and people. One elderly Italian lady was under my care when her demise was nearing. It was common for a patient’s priest to give her the last rites of her faith in the presence of her family at that time. After that ceremony, I was surprised to see her husband and her large family gathered again with the same priest the next afternoon. After a few minutes, the door to her room opened, and the relatives started to leave. Curious, I asked the oldest son what had happened since I thought the last rites were the final sacrament of the Catholic Church. With a tear and a smile, he whispered to me, “Mom and Dad came from Calabria [Italy] seventy years ago, and they never had time to get married. Father Anthony took care of that today, and now she can be buried in the church cemetery.” Ethnicity expressed itself in a different fashion at the West Haven VA Medical Center, where we rotated as residents. A number of doctors shared my office, and one fall an odor became impossible to ignore. I decided to search the room and identified a particular desk. The second drawer on the right seemed to be the epicenter, and upon opening it, I discovered a paper sack full of what turned out to be uncooked, home-stuffed Italian sausage. A grateful patient from the New Haven Italian community had given it to an earlier resident, who had apparently forgotten it or could not bring it home. It took on a life of its own in that drawer until its ripening odor could no longer be disguised. Episodes like the eleventh-hour marriage of two lovely people, or even the homemade sausage, probably encouraged racial awareness and appreciation for other ethnic eccentricities. I grew to feel these incidents, even oddities, were the zest of life. But it required some care and tact for an outsider to express interest and respect for these events without sounding rude. Perhaps that is what ethnic uniqueness is: enrichment reserved for those inside the fence. Others must engage cautiously. When families gathered at the bedside of a deceased loved one, I learned to tell from some distance what the person’s ethnicity was by the response. The Yankees, the Italian Americans, the Jews, and the African Americans each had their own

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way and rhythm of grieving. I presume each pattern provided comfort and peace to those experiencing the loss while creating an interesting challenge for an outsider to decode. Death also had a scientific and educational component. Whenever possible, we wanted to do an autopsy so we could give the family any genetic details they ought to know and learn more about disease for ourselves and the field of medicine generally. Dr. Beeson created a small motivation for us to obtain necessary permission from the family to do the autopsy. The intern and resident with the highest percentage of autopsy permissions received a trip with Dr.  Beeson and others on the faculty to the annual spring clinical research meetings in Atlantic City. Success in obtaining permission generally resulted from the relationship the intern or resident had established with the patient and family before death. I was pleased to win the prize in the first and second years I was on the house staff and found myself eating saltwater taffy on the boardwalk with the boss. Teaching and Learning

Three days a week a member of the faculty did rounds with the interns or residents assigned to a particular ward. They were our best teaching exercises and also promoted the highest possible level of care for the patients assigned to us. In my second year—as the resident in charge of a ward with two interns assigned to work with me—it was my job to pick out the cases to use for rounds. Naturally we wanted interesting, tough, or complicated cases, and there were usually plenty to fit that bill. As the assignment period for one attending faculty doctor was drawing to a close, we had not had a patient who fell within his particular field of expertise. By tradition we were required to present only real patients for these rounds. Lacking an appropriate patient, I decided to invent one and have the intern present the concocted case to the attending physician. Such a presentation is usually done at the bedside with proper deference to the sensitivity of the individual. Since we had no patient, we primed the nurse to tell the doctor that the patient was having X-rays, not an unusual reason for absence from the ward. The case was intentionally shaped to involve intricate aspects that would elicit the expertise of our attending doctor, and so after a good discussion, he said he would come back the next day to see this interesting patient. When the next day came, the patient was at physical therapy, and the next day, out with her family. By the fourth day, the attending physician took me aside and thanked me for developing an excellent teaching session on this most interesting patient. With a wink, he wished the patient and me the best of health.

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Those Wonderful Twelve Hours Off Duty

Given my thirty-six hours on, twelve hours off schedule, the internship year flew by quickly, as did my next year as a resident. Grethe and I had our nest on Elliott Street, three blocks from the hospital. We rented a two-and-a-half-room thirdfloor apartment from Mrs. Brownstein that suited us well. It almost became a ritual for us to touch her mezuzah as we reached our door. As Deuteronomy advises, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, with all thine soul, and with all thine might . . . and thou shalt write them [my words] up on the post of thy house, and on thy gate . . .”2 There was another door-entering ceremony we quickly adjusted to. Our bathroom entrance was five-feet, ten-inches high. Grethe and I were both six feet tall. No matter how urgent our need to reach the bathroom, we were obliged to bow slightly because of that architectural impediment. There were Jewish flavors to many of our other contacts. Three or four of the medical students were Orthodox. On the Passover holiday—when all open boxes of food were discarded in memory of the Israelites’ haste to escape Egypt—Grethe and I became the accommodating gentile recipients of our friends’ religious largesse. It was a pleasure to let these friends know that they were “reciprocal gentiles” by my Mormon definition, even if my religious practices provided no leftovers to pay them back. Leaving New Haven for a Spell

By the spring of my second year, it was time for me to honor my deferred military obligation. Grethe and I drove our aging Pontiac down through the Blue Mountains and west to San Antonio, Texas, home of Fort Sam Houston Medical Center. I underwent a month of basic training, learning how and what to salute and how to fire a rifle. My most vivid memory from that time is the colleague next to me alphabetically on the firing line—a psychiatrist, I believe—who kept pointing his rifle at me and others nearby between turns. It made me wonder if they gave Purple Hearts for being shot on your own firing range. After four weeks, we stood at attention on a hot August parade ground while the commandant read alphabetically through the list of Army Medical Corps officer trainees to announce our assignments. It seemed to take forever for him to get to P, but when he did, we received Grethe and my heart’s desire: assignment to Germany.

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I went ahead to Europe, living in the officers’ barracks for a couple of months until Grethe could join me. I spent my spare time learning more about army ways and sitting on a bench watching Mercedes drive by. I was looking for just the right car, the first new car we would own. The color was graphit grau, model 220-S. When it came time for delivery, I took an American check for $2,800 to the military finance office, where I could get the best exchange for deutschmarks, stuffed 11,200 of them—at a one-to-four exchange—into my black doctor’s bag, rode the trolley downtown, and counted out the cash to the local dealer. We shipped the car home when we returned to America, and it lasted for sixteen years until its underside rusted so badly that the frame would not hold a jack to change the tires. Elvis and Hitler

Elvis Presley was in the army that year and was admitted to the Frankfurt army hospital for—if I remember correctly—a tonsillectomy—not a trivial procedure for someone with his singing ability. I never attended him but remember wondering if I had, how unethical it would have been to propose a contract with him to take a long strip of an EKG tracing of the contractions of his heart for later sale, like a baseball card: one EKG heartbeat should have added value when glued to an Elvis album. I was favored with a commanding officer who played serious tennis and needed a good doubles partner. He picked me, and I “obeyed.” We played the U.S. military tournaments together and even reached the European finals in Bavaria. When Grethe arrived in the early fall of our first year, the apartment I had initially rented proved unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, we wanted to live on what they called “the economy,” meaning not in an American military compound. Happily we soon found an ad in English in the Frankfurt paper looking for a “distinguished American couple” to rent in the suburb of Bad Soden. We were never sure what the people meant by distinguished, but we passed muster and spent two fine years with Frau Bayer and Herr Becker. She was a German war widow, he a natural widower, but she could not remarry without losing her war-survivor pension. She was honest about the Nazi experience and bitter about what Hitler had brought to Germany, but she could not forget how charismatic the movement had been for young people like her in the late 1930s. On one occasion, as a teenager, she had waited at a train station as part of a huge crowd to see Hitler and hear him speak. As the train left and the crowd began to disperse, she looked down and found that her shoes had been torn off in the hysteria of the event and her feet were bleeding without her having felt any pain.

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Then There Were Three

Grethe and I were in Alsace-Lorraine for a long-weekend leave toward the end of my duty at the army hospital in Frankfurt. We found lodging in a comfortable farmhouse only to find ourselves surrounded by bird hunters on the first day of the fall hunting season. But the charm of breakfast more than compensated for the crack of shotgun fire. The table was set with plates of large grape leaves holding butter and a variety of jams. The mistress of the home was full of good cheer and especially pleased to see Grethe. She declared, “Ah, madam, you are in a condition trés intéressant.” Yes, she was; her tummy was bursting. Our first child was due soon, and that day after breakfast, we felt we better get back to Frankfurt and closer to maternity care. The ride home was full of expectation. I felt that by driving, I was somehow part of a delivery process that—with the magnificent effort by Grethe the next evening—would produce our firstborn. We slept at home in Bad Soden, about ten miles outside Frankfurt, and the next day, when early contractions began, we headed to the hospital. Driving those last miles that afternoon is hard to describe. We were both holding our breath, both pretending to be calm, but both aware that we were fast becoming partners in the largest venture we would ever experience. We were going to have a little girl. Of all the millions of little girls who preceded and followed her, she would be the first and only one she was already designed to be. Grethe went to the ER and soon to the delivery room at the army hospital. I found my way to the cafeteria, only to be halfway through a bowl of soup when some staff doctors sat down in their scrub suits at the table next to me. “Did you hear about that delivery upstairs? Her blood pressure dropped out when she was given an epidural (spinal anesthesia), and they couldn’t find the key to the medicine cabinet where the pressors were kept!” one said. Grethe had been the only woman in labor when I had left the maternity floor. The woman must have been her. I abandoned all protocol and ran up to where I had left my wife, prepared to smash the medicine cabinet with the fire axe if personnel hadn’t opened it by the time I got there. The cabinet was open, Grethe was fine, and Erika Peterson was born in the next few minutes without any complications. What’s more, she had five fingers and five toes in the right places, as my father used to say, and to boot, zwei grübchen—German for two beautiful, parallel dimples under her lower lip. The next months were a wonderful blur. We washed Erika’s cloth diapers and then sterilized them in a large blue foot-and-one-half-wide boiler. Frau Hetz was a neighbor experienced in such things, and she soon became part of our family.

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Erika grew steadily and displayed remarkable lungs when she and her mother took up quarters on the lower deck of the troop ship that took us back to America the next June. Unfortunately her sleep pattern did not adjust to the western course of our ship, so she awoke an hour earlier each day of the journey. The Peterson, Ballif, Geddes, Nebeker, Hulme, and Eggertsen immigrants had never seen the Statue of Liberty when they docked in America a century earlier, so we cheered a little extra on their behalf. We moved into the servant’s quarters of a lovely estate home in the New Haven suburb of Branford, and I started my third year of training. The year after that was devoted to a fellowship in metabolism, encompassing the biochemistry I had worked so hard to master nine years earlier. The field was composed of endocrinology (the glands of the body) and the kidney (which balances the concentration of water, salts, and minerals while excreting waste chemicals). A high point with Erika was building an igloo after the first snowstorm, which I thought was as close to meeting the expectations of our child as I could come, albeit not up to the breast feedings Grethe successfully provided. Our hearts and minds throbbed that fall with the excitement of the Nixon/ Kennedy debates we watched with our landlords, something we didn’t experience again until the election of President Obama. Hurricane Esther

Stuart arrived two years later. The weather service had predicted a hurricane for the delivery day, and it delivered. The bridge connecting Branford to New  Haven was swaying quite noticeably as Erika and I drove Grethe in early labor to the GraceNew Haven Hospital. The hospital was fully staffed in anticipation of victims from the expected hurricane, but there were almost no patients when we arrived. There were no locked medicine cabinets like the one that had frightened me during Erika’s delivery. Stuart also had all his toes and fingers, and the next day when Erika and I waved to him and his mother at a window high up in the hospital, Erika was convinced that he had indeed come from heaven and was still in the sky. Erika named him Baby Stuts. By the time Stuart was nine months old and Erika two and a half, we were on our way to Utah to “live out our lives.” I had accepted a position at the Salt Lake Clinic. Travels Were Over; We Were Now Settlers

The work was challenging, and my medical practice grew quickly, given the referrals I received from clinic colleagues and others in town. I was about half a

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generalist and half a specialist in endocrinology and renal disease. I soon began to teach as a volunteer at the University of Utah School of Medicine and was pleased to be asked to present academic Grand Rounds at the Department of Internal Medicine. Our first Christmas in Utah was memorable for the small, but comfortable, apartment we had rented and our decision not to spend scarce money on presents for each other. A week or two before Christmas—because I was a new doctor in town—the Walgreen Drug Company sent me a maroon engagement calendar, bound in fake plastic leather. A misspelled “Chas. M. Peterson, M.D.” was stamped on the cover in fake gold letters. It occurred to me that it might be clever to scratch out the misspelled name, cover it with a piece of tape inscribed with Grethe’s name, wrap it up, and put it under the tree we had for the four of us. It wasn’t a good idea. Expecting no gift as we had agreed, Grethe opened the package and burst into tears. Her reaction to the tawdry calendar has since assumed mythic proportions in our family lore: classy or nothing at all was the lesson I learned. In our ninth year of marriage, we welcomed our third and final child, Edward, into the family. While Stuart came with a hurricane, Edward arrived easily (as we fathers say), but we discovered that he never woke up or cried in the nursery when the other babies made noise. After he came home, I became more concerned about his hearing, so I finally took a metal wastepaper basket and hit it with a hammer near his ear. He didn’t blink or jump. Sophisticated tests were scheduled within days. I will never forget the image of Grethe holding him in a sound-testing room while the volume of a range of sounds was steadily increased until the window almost shook. The test determined that he had less than 10 percent of his hearing, a devastating discovery, and we decided to order hearing aids in an attempt to get at least some sound into his developing brain; even the sound of doors slamming or the wind blowing can educate the brain. We shopped around the country for programs that might help him develop as near normally as possible. The Tracy Clinic and school in Los Angeles seemed particularly good, and we began to consider moving to that area. As is usual in the Mormon faith, we asked our local bishop to bless our child. The blessing asked that the parents, family, and child might be empowered with the strength and wisdom to handle this challenge, however it evolved. A few weeks later, when Edward was about two months old, he was lying in his crib next to the phone. It rang, and he was startled! I ran to get the infamous metal wastepaper basket and hammer and repeated the test. He now flinched with each

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blow of the hammer. Whatever had blocked his hearing those first weeks was gone, and it has been entirely normal ever since. As you can imagine, I read all the medical literature on infantile hearing but could draw no conclusions. My own guess is that his nerve fibers to conduct sound within the brain were like some in the spinal cord that are not fully insulated or myelinized at birth. Such a malfunction in the spine is unimportant because walking or crawling does not take place in those early months. I suspect the hearing defect is probably not uncommon, just usually not noticed before it has cleared spontaneously. Was there a miracle? Yes, the miracle was the gestation and delivery of a beautiful boy and the commitment of parents and family to value the miracle we had, minimize the effect of any handicap, if there was one, and reach for the potential this new embodied spirit clearly possessed, deaf or not. This lump of protoplasm, molecule for molecule, was as miraculous as any celestial nebula, no matter what the state of his hearing was. We settled down again. On Wednesdays in the winter, I enjoyed the ritual of making hospital visits to my patients in the early morning, coming back home by eight thirty, having skis on the car rack and lunch packed by nine, and arriving at the Alta slopes fifteen miles away by nine thirty. Grethe and I skied until our half-day passes expired at about one thirty and then went home, where I took a hot bath and was off to the clinic to see patients from three until six or later. I was working very hard and enjoying it when we moved into our first house in our third year back in Utah. We set out to live happily ever after. Another Call from the East

It was the spring of 1967, and I was five years into my practice. With a male patient stripped to the waist sitting on my examining table, I was asked to take a phone call. I excused myself and answered the phone. It was Fred Glimp, the current dean of admissions at Harvard College. I had helped interview Utah applicants for Harvard and knew Fred. “Might you be interested in being considered to be the dean of admissions for the college?” Pause. “I don’t think so. I’m a doctor,” I replied. Nevertheless, we went on talking for five or ten minutes, long enough for me to be embarrassed when I returned to my patient, who was understandably a bit cold and miffed. Grethe and I discussed the offer in detail, and we decided that I should at least go back and talk with Fred and President Pusey. I did and came home interested

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but unconvinced that I should leave medicine. A week later, Fred called to offer me the job, and I turned it down with appreciation for their interest and respect. Fred said, “You don’t sound as if you are entirely convinced. Why don’t you take a week to think it over and call me back?” I said, “Sure.” Grethe and I reviewed all we had discussed, studied and mulled it over again with each other, and prayed in the manner of the Albert Schweitzer passage my mother had so firmly taught me in my early years. It was probably significant that our memories of our courtship in Boston were fond ones, embellished with faint strains that were still with us of Cherubin0’s aria from another courtship, Mozart’s ἀ e Marriage of Figaro. Finally—at a dinner party at a friend’s home later that week—someone asked, “What’s this about you considering taking some cockamamie job at Harvard? Are you going to do that?” I locked eyes with Grethe across the room in silent agreement, paused, and said softly, “As a matter of fact, we are.” Twenty-two years earlier Dad had written a letter to decline an offer from Middlesex School, only to tear it up when I said, “As a matter of fact, I do want to go.” At that moment, it was clear to both Grethe and me that our minds and spirits were in sync; a new world had opened up. I was going east again twenty-two years after my first excursion from Logan and this time with Grethe and our three children. The clinic generously offered me the insurance of a leave of absence. We were simultaneously uncertain and confident about what we would find and where it would lead. If we relived our life together, would we make the same decision? I have no idea, particularly because I didn’t know then—and I don’t know now—why we did it. To be vaguely analytical, I think we both must have been largely free from insecurity and open to new experiences. But that only begs the question: Why were we secure? Why were we willing and able to imagine a new life? I found medicine challenging, and my practice was both intellectually and financially successful and full of human warmth and interest. Maybe there is nothing more to say than that we imagined a world out there full of richness worth the tasting: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”3 What sort of passports were in our pockets?

pa rt 3

From Utah, Back to Boston

8 Harvard College Admissions: Rich in the Particulars

In 2005 Harvard chose to honor David Evans with a scholarship fund in his name for distinguished service as an able and pioneering admissions officer for more than thirty-five years. David had a graduate degree in engineering from Princeton. He came from an African American sharecropper family in the Arkansas Mississippi River delta. His father had died young, and his mother—as stubborn as my own grandmothers or more—had dealt with widowhood and the huge handicap of poverty and racism. Somehow she’d supported and guided every one of her children into and through college. Some of them, like David, received graduate degrees. By 1967 he was in Huntsville, Alabama, where he worked on the NASA project. On his own, he started helping minority students apply to colleges. He had early success with his efforts, writing to schools, including Harvard, to promote the applications of his protégés. His story is also my story because it relates to our separate decisions to work at Harvard. David Evans came to Harvard two years after me, and the particular opportunity and challenge we, the college, and the nation faced was advancing educational equality. An article on David in the spring 2005 issue of Harvard’s ἀe Yard magazine tells the story of our similar decisions: All of the admissions offices had answered me when I wrote them, but one of them struck me as more impressive than all the others—the guy at Harvard, Chase N. Peterson ’52. Chase Peterson answered in three pages of longhand, and he urged me to call him collect, because he was very enthusiastic about what I was doing. I told him George Hanford [of the College Board] had offered me a job to leave engineering. He said, “That makes

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it easier to say something I’ve wanted to say for a year.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “I would like you to work in the Harvard admissions office.” I said, “But I’m an engineer.” He said, “I’m a medical doctor.” I said, “You want me to take a leave?” He said, “I’m on leave.” I said, “I’m a country boy from Arkansas.” He said, “I’m a country boy from Utah.” I said, “I’m a Soul Brother.” He said, “I’m a Mormon.” He matched me card for card. So eventually I came here on a two-year leave of absence in May of 1970 and never went back.1 David continued, One of the things that impressed me about Chase was that he said we would not change the admissions process to recruit minority students. Rather, we would adjust the process we’d had all along. Some other colleges set up separate admissions committees, some in separate buildings, and maintained separate standards. But he stood by Harvard’s standards, and it must have worked because, since that time, 15 times more AfricanAmerican students have been enrolled at Harvard than were enrolled in the 334 years before that. The U.S. Supreme Court has twice cited the Harvard College Admissions Office when it ruled in favor of affirmative action, in both 1978 [Bakke] and 2003 [Michigan]. The transition over which Chase presided started a great sea change on this campus and in this country. Frankly, I wouldn’t have come had it not, because I didn’t want any stigma stamped on black students who came in because they entered through a different door.2 David Evans played a large role in that process, and the similarities in our origins and expectations strengthened a bond that continues to the present. We were also born exactly ten years apart on December 27 in 1929 and 1939. David’s comments describe the fruition in the late 1960s of the policy that President Conant and Dean Bill Bender had started in the late 1930s. They initiated an effort to reach out to the geographic, ethnic, and social corners of the country to uncover and encourage atypical, often-rough-hewn students of high potential. These were young men who might never have considered Harvard because it was too far away, too expensive, or—maybe in their minds—too snobbish or intellectual. At this time, Harvard College was still admitting only men, a practice that continued into the 1980s, even though cooperative education with nearby Radcliffe had already brought coeducation closer and closer.

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In any case, central to the success of this effort to enroll the highest-quality young people was the enlistment of what came to be called the Schools and Scholarship Committee, composed of alumni who were willing to beat the bushes to find young men like that and advocate for them. By the 1960s, many hundreds of alumni were recruiting and interviewing. I had been one of them in Utah. We set out to enlist outstanding prospects from an ever broader slice of America. In Cambridge we sought the help of our own, relatively few minority undergraduates to go back to their homes in the summer and find and encourage strong candidates. We told these students that we could not promise admission to the boys they found, but that should not discourage them or the applicants from applying. They came to understand that the applicants should be proud to know that their admission depended upon their personal strength, not their race. In spite of this policy, there were a number of student recruiters who felt we had misled them when someone they thought was a strong prospect was not admitted. That was tough love, I guess, but I think everyone ultimately bought into it. The GI bill that followed World War II had been a parallel national attempt at widening the door to higher education. Harvard President Conant and the president of MIT at first opposed it because they felt that there were an insufficient number of able students to justify such a massive higher-education scholarship program. To Conant’s credit, he later publicly admitted he had been wrong. The success of the GI bill on a national scale confirmed Harvard’s own earlier move to recruit students, rather than settle only for those who by family or tradition were interested in the college. I had been a beneficiary of that program with the national scholarship I had received, and that approach continued to grow through the 1950s and 1960s. So when the events of the civil rights movement and the work of Martin Luther King Jr. succeeded in opening the eyes, hearts, and minds of America, the existing Schools and Scholarship Committee of Harvard alumni was already in place to expand its efforts to find the people of color who had been, tragically, “invisible,” to use Ralph Ellison’s word. It was a zealous and generous effort on the committee members’ part. For every young man admitted from these newly recognized places and cultures, there would be one less space for traditional applicants, who included the children of the very alumni who were seeking new students. Because the process had been in place for two decades for disadvantaged whites or students simply outside the regular Harvard orbit, the transition may have been smoother than it was at many colleges. The pain of social change was accommodated more easily. I think James Bryant Conant would have been pleased.

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What Is a Nietzsche Bird?

Articles and even books have been written from time to time to criticize a policy that used anything more than academic grades and test scores for admission. In the 1920s, Harvard’s president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, “argued that Harvard would suffer greatly if too many Jews were admitted. It would drive away other qualified students. . . . Lowell proposed a [15 percent] quota on Jewish admission.”3  Such blatant racism suggested the possibility—even forty years later—to suspect that anyone admitted with lower scores or grades than another applicant might be the historically delayed beneficiary of reverse bias on an ethnic or religious basis. While I was dean of admissions—and as best I can tell during the decades before and after—there was no such discrimination. I never heard committee members talk about a person’s ethnicity or religion either by name or in code as some suspected. Harvard admissions policy was content to walk to its own drummer with no outside governmental or legal oversight. Because of that independence, it was essential that its many constituencies have faith in the fairness of its policy. A high-school guidance counselor wrote, “Billie [not his real name] ran crosscountry for us. He is probably not good enough for your track team, but he is too stubborn to stop running. If you admit him to Harvard, I am pretty sure he won’t stop running there, either.” Billie came from a mixed, ex-GI, African American/ white marriage and a tough side of an industrial town. His test scores were below average, but his grades were excellent, albeit at a high school with low standards. The alumnus who interviewed him said he would struggle but would survive and grow and urged us to take him. We had a second alumnus interview him, and he gave us a similar recommendation. If this was social engineering, we did not want to be guilty of putting a good young man in a position where he was likely to fail. Billie was admitted and came to Harvard. Later, he told me that soon after his freshman year started, he was sitting with some classmates in the Union dining hall. The nervous conversation of new freshmen somehow turned to Nietzsche. Our cross-country runner had never heard of the man or the word and was quite certain that he was the only one at the table who hadn’t. He listened intently but got no hints about what or who Nietzsche was. Unwilling to expose his ignorance, he didn’t ask, and later that day, he could not spell the word so he could find it in a reference book. From what he had heard, he wondered if Nietzsche might be a bird. It wasn’t until his sophomore year that he found out that Nietzsche was a philosopher. Billie got low grades his freshman year, did much better his sophomore year, and by his junior year was earning honors and was a summer stringer for the Wall

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Street Journal. He went on to Harvard Law School and today is a successful East Coast lawyer. He never ran track at Harvard, but he never stopped running academically or culturally and has continued to help other students in need. This admissions case and many others like it were consistent with a study we employed under the direction of Dean Whitla to compare the preentrance SAT (scholastic aptitude test) scores of applicants to their grades once they were admitted. It seems logical that there would be a direct linear relationship: the higher the SAT score, the higher the grades, and conversely, the lower the SAT score, the lower the college grades. Instead, we uncovered a U-shaped curve. The study showed that the relatively few applicants who were admitted with low SAT scores actually received higher grades—often after a tough adjustment in their freshman year—than their classmates who had better, but middling, scores. These applicants did almost as well as the top-scoring students. The conclusion to be drawn is not that lower SAT scores predict higher grades. Students with low SAT scores were regularly rejected. Rather, the exceptions who were accepted had to prove that they had significant strengths beyond those measured by a test like the SAT. The notion that there were such strengths is consistent with the work of Professor Howard Gardner of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He described multiple intelligences and traits beyond those traditionally tested: mathematics/science and verbal. One needs only to scan a list of successful people to see confirmation of such diversity of intelligence. My Nietzsche-bird friend is an example of an applicant with untraditional strengths holding great promise. A second conclusion of this study caused sober concern for the middling, but qualified, admittees whose academic records and school recommendations made it easy for them to be accepted, but did not meet the rigorous challenge by our committee that they possessed the other skills, traits, and types of intelligence that also created a successful college experience. I remember another applicant—not a member of a minority—admitted with marginal grades and scores because he had strong letters of recommendation, interviews, and other evidence of what you may call collateral intelligence. He was also a good hockey player. In November of his freshman year, an economics professor stopped me in the yard: “Chase, please tell me why you admitted so-and-so.” At first I felt defensive, afraid that the professor was about to accuse us of admitting a less-than-brilliant hockey player. I started to tell the professor what I thought the lad’s special strengths were, but before I could finish, he broke in, “He is wonderful. He is the only student in my class who is willing to ask a question that may sound dumb. He makes the lessons move, often identifying the issue

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that needs explanation. And he won’t back off until he gets an answer that makes sense. Thank you for admitting him. The rest of the class just sits there, trying to look smart.” That trait was probably the one that helped him, as well, to dig pucks out of the corners of a hockey rink. He was as white as our Nietzsche bird was black. They both had abilities—immediate and potential—that College Board exams didn’t measure. Writing this forty years later, I wonder if that inquisitive and stubborn freshman economics student could have benefited the nation if he had gone on to a career in finance. I can see him asking his Wall Street boss just what derivatives and credit-default swaps are and what are the bases for their value, and not settling for a glib answer. I’ll always remember a crude, but effective, letter of recommendation for another applicant. It arrived written in pencil on lined notepaper. It said something like “so-and-so worked for me last summer on the city garbage truck. He was the hardest worker I had and was always on time. He was really smart and developed new ways to pick up the garbage better, and he still always got along with everyone in the garbage department.” A letter like that—coupled with good grades and academic recommendations—was far more effective than one on engraved or senatorial stationary, saying something like “I don’t know Billy very well, but his father has sold me my insurance for years, and I can tell you he comes from an outstanding family.” Admissions committees undoubtedly have some blinders and insecurities. Some years ago, after I returned to the West, I got a call from a young man who had come from a rural Idaho high school and just graduated from a nearby Utah college. He had applied to Harvard Law School and been rejected in spite of a perfect eight hundred on his LSAT exam and nearly straight A’s. He wasn’t whining, but he knew of my earlier experience at Harvard and asked if he could talk with me about why he’d been rejected. “Sure,” I said. “Bring a copy of your application.” One essay was a response to the question of why he wanted to go to Harvard Law School, which I had always thought was a dull question but apparently was one that had to be answered. He wrote something like “I want to go to Harvard to be able to mix with the people who will be powerful in the world and can help me make contacts.” I could only smile. His answer was probably as honest as any the law school received, but it had to be embarrassing to any committee claiming to try and select the best future lawyers. Other good law schools admitted him. He might well have been Harvard’s gain had he been less transparent.

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An occasional freshman did feel pushed to attend Harvard for family or social reasons. More than once his rebellion was expressed in clumsy stealing from the Harvard Coop (bookstore). A student in need of resources rarely perpetrated such theft. Our student-advising office came to believe it was a way to get out of Harvard by being expelled. In any case, the happiest student was generally the hungriest. To Harvard’s credit, students who were asked to leave for academic or personal reasons were never forgotten; most were asked to return and graduated after some time off. My earlier academic hunger had undoubtedly been intensified in college days by physically demanding summer jobs: hay stacking on the Nebeker ranch most summers, and dodging wasps on a survey crew mapping for an Idaho phosphate mine. “The Older I Get, the Better It Sounds”

At the turn of the century, Harvard’s President Charles Eliot had gone to Washington to talk to “Mr.” Theodore Roosevelt about intercollegiate athletics and the need to avoid excesses. Years later, when the rest of the nation moved toward almost professional collegiate athletics, Harvard had to decide which direction to take. The University of Chicago opted for largely intramural sports. The colleges now called the Ivy League agreed to form a conference that played serious athletics but did not offer specific scholarships and generally limited the year-around intensity of the sports programs. Harvard continued to enjoy the vigor of serious athletics, incorporate students with physical talent into its student body, and maintain historic rivalries. Football, hockey, and crew were kept as amateur sports and had large followings, together with others to a lesser extent. The annual Harvard-Yale football game played to crowds of fifty to seventy thousand in the college stadiums and seemed as important to the fans as any game between Ohio State and Michigan. Using athletic ability as a measurement, it is doubtful that either Harvard or Yale could ever have won more than a game or two, if that, in any of the major conferences, but the Ivy rivalry was still intensely competitive. The presence of serious amateur athletes in Harvard’s houses, dining halls, and classrooms seemed to add further richness to the total college experience. Each year on the weekend of the Harvard-Yale varsity game, seven or eight additional tackle football games were played on Friday afternoon between Harvard and Yale nonvarsity teams. The players had played in high school but were not good enough or prepared to spend the time necessary for varsity competition.

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In most ways, these teams were ragtag with only fifteen to twenty players on each side, but the enthusiasm was on the highest level. Thus, not all of Harvard was effete, and the college’s continued commitment to athletics can best be illustrated by the Harvard-Yale game I observed in 1968, during my second year as admissions dean. For the first time in more than sixty years, both teams came to the last game of the season undefeated. The game was played at Harvard. Yale was favored, in part because of its quarterback named Brian Dowling and a fullback named Calvin Hill. It was said that Dowling had not played in a losing game in his entire career, from peewee football through high school in Ohio and his four seasons at Yale. Yale had lost during his years, but in those games, he had been out of action with injuries. The Soldiers Field stadium was totally sold out, standing room only. The November day was crisp and dry, perfect for a football game. It soon became clear that while the game was competitive, Yale was the superior team. By the fourth quarter, the score was 29–13 with two minutes to go, and Yale appeared to be driving for a final touchdown. Then Harvard got the ball on a turnover. The team moved steadily down the field until it was within the Yale five-yard line with fortytwo seconds to play. Harvard scored and successfully made a two-point conversion with the clock stopped. The score was now 29–21. Harvard had an onside kick that was recovered on about the Yale forty-yard line with 35–40 seconds left. Steadily, the team moved down the field and was near the goal line again with time for only one more play. Harvard scored. It was now 29–27. With no time on the clock, Harvard was allowed to try for the extra point(s). Harvard threw into the end zone and was unsuccessful, but the referee called a penalty on Yale and gave the team a second chance. Harvard threw again and scored: 29–29. The headlines in the local papers the next day acclaimed, “Harvard beats Yale twenty-nine-twenty-nine.” Harvard claimed as much glory that day as any team in America. Brian Dowling went on to immortality as the lovable B.D. in the comic strip Doonesbury, which chronicles the humor and politics of America and is written by Garry Trudeau, a Yalie of the same era. A few years later, I was asked to serve as the chair of the Faculty Committee on Athletics. Our football coach wanted to step down, and we were looking for his replacement. Old and new worlds dined together at our table on Irving Street one evening when we entertained Willie Davis. He had just retired from an all-star career with the Green Bay Packers in the Vince Lombardi era. Davis had a reputation for high intelligence and principles, and it was thought he might be a good coach for Harvard.

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I sat at the head of the table with Davis on my right, and our soon-to-retire athletic director on my left. The director was a wonderful man who had given his life to Harvard athletics. Davis was black; the athletic director was white. The casual conversation around the table was soon dominated by our director’s steady recitation of all the black people he had ever known, a not-uncommon reaction from wellintended white folk who are not used to the company of black people. The problem was that our director continued to say, “I knew this black boy . . . I remember that black boy . . . there was another black boy” when most of the people he mentioned were adults. I became so uncomfortable that I turned to him and said that I knew he meant well, but the term “black boy” used to describe adults was a put-down to the dignity of black men. I had barely finished my sentence when Willie Davis reached over, placed the large hand of an all-star defensive end over mine, and said, “Don’t you worry, Dr. Peterson. The older I get, the better it sounds!” Blacks and the Priesthood

No sooner had I arrived to assume the deanship than there was an article in the Boston Globe about my new position with the pointed question, “Dr.  Peterson’s church does not admit blacks to its priesthood; will he admit blacks to his college?” That was a painful matter for me and many of my faith, but it was a fair question to ask of anyone connected to a process that was so subjective. For some reason, I was not distraught over the article. I was confident that I  was not bigoted about race and that would become apparent as people got to know me. I just needed to be myself. There would be “a way,” as my mother often said. Furthermore, I would be judged by my record, not by labels. The Black Muslim movement was in the news at that time. The lurid claim of the movement’s leaders was that white men were “blue-eyed devils.” Yet digging deeper revealed that the movement deserved credit for promoting high standards of work, family responsibility, good health habits, avoidance of drugs and alcohol, and even healthy ways to prepare food. In discussions with black students, I made it clear that I was not prepared to condemn the Black Muslims for their blanket condemnation of white men without acknowledging the virtues they promoted. Neither had I the right to insist that a follower reject the movement on those grounds. I asked that I be given the same understanding about what I believed was a practice—a changeable one, as it turned out—in the church I held dear of denying the priesthood to black members. I believe the students and I came to understand each other better than if there had been no challenge. I wonder now if those black students might have had an

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unconscious affinity with the particular white guy I was because we were both initially outsiders in the world of Harvard. Logan, Utah, was probably as far away from Harvard as some African American communities. I had made it, and my survival—if not my success—might have suggested that they could, too. Of course, my history had not contained the abject horror of slavery and postslavery Jim Crow laws. No one in my family was lynched for his or her ethnicity, but early Mormons suffered tar and feathers, as well as lethal mob violence, for a decade or two in Missouri and Illinois. I would like to think that my heritage made me approachable. Quotas and Choices

In my first month as the dean, the leader of the college Hillel House, the undergraduate Jewish support group, called me. We met in my office, and within a few minutes, he gently probed the attitude of the admissions office toward Jewish applicants. After we had said all the things that would be called “politically correct” today, he asked simply, “How many Jews do you admit?” The question implied a quota—which we didn’t have for Jews or anyone else— so I told him I didn’t know. But I was unwilling to leave it at that and risk appearing I was hiding behind ignorance. I suggested we get out the freshman register, which contained names and pictures of all the freshman, and count how many might be Jewish. We went through all twelve hundred and concluded that, based on their names, ranging from Rosenberg to Green, some 30 to 40 percent of the class might be Jewish. When we counted only those who had obvious Jewish names, the number was around 10 percent. He laughed and said, “I guess you’re all right.” As David Evans noted, the Bakke case was a legal confirmation of our admissions policy. To quote from the Supreme Court decision, Justice Powell stated, “Preferring members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin is discrimination for its own sake.”4 Powell found that quotas insulated minority applicants from competition with regular ones and were thus unconstitutional because they discriminated against nonminority applicants. Powell, however, stated that universities could use race as a reason to find and encourage potential students who would otherwise not consider applying. He cited the Harvard College admissions program, which had been filed as an amicus curiae, as an example of a constitutionally valid affirmative-action program that considered all of an applicant’s qualities and success in rising above handicaps, one of which might be the challenge presented by American race relations. There was no need for any arbitrary quota.

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Hiram Hunn was an Iowa lawyer and a typical member of Harvard’s Schools and Scholarship Committee. Each fall he closed his law office and drove around the state in a car that was described as barely able to get from one gas station to another in rural Iowa. “Who do you have this year that I could talk to about Harvard?” he asked high-school principals and guidance counselors. After more than a decade, most of them knew him and had been keeping an eye out for students who could be called out of class to speak with him. He was warmhearted but tough. When he felt he had an outstanding applicant, it showed in the interview report he sent to us, and we felt it when he called to make sure we were paying attention to his “great kid.” It was not easy for the Cambridge committee to ignore the Hiram Hunns of our network, though we tried to judge all students evenly. Hunn was part of our advocacy system, matched with the staff person representing Iowa applicants, who presented the case when it came time for full committee consideration and voting. It was a wonderful, brutal process that occasionally came close to what appeared to be log-rolling deals among the committee members. “Remember, Mike, I voted for your boondocker [an affectionate Tagalog phrase for mountain hicks]. Help me with my applicant.” It was part of my role to promote the sense of ownership and advocacy that assigned staff people had for each of their applicants while keeping the process from dissolving into deal making. The Process

The admissions committee met to discuss and vote eight to ten hours a day from January through early April with about ten staff and five faculty members in attendance. I sensed that exhausting process was justified in part by the importance of convincing the faculty and ourselves that we had done as fair a job as we could. Of course, we were imperfect, but I think we came as close as humans can to eliminating bias, or at least balancing it with opposing bias. On the other end of the traditional scale, two grandsons of an eminent and active graduate and leader in American business applied one year. We agonized about the case, heard arguments for the talents the boys had, but finally voted not to admit them. I felt our decision deserved a special conversation with the grandfather, a man I knew only slightly. He took my call in his office, and after I explained the reason I was phoning, he thanked me. His response was polite but cool. He phoned me back the next day to say that he thought I might be interested— “amused” was his word—to know that when I had called, a representative from

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Harvard had been in his office asking for a large donation for the university. Furthermore, he wanted me to know that he appreciated that we had given his offspring every consideration, and he respected our judgment. But he wanted us to know that the refusal hurt, and now he could “tell the sons of bitches” who called him to complain when their children were rejected that he knew how they felt. He remained a stalwart of the first order in supporting the university for years to come. An exchange of a different kind occurred the same year. An  alumnus knocked on my office door, someone I had met once and vaguely remembered. “Dr. Peterson, good to see you again. My son is applying this year to the college, and it reminds me of my undying gratitude for what Harvard has done for me. Would you please”—and he pulled out an open envelope from his coat pocket, giving me a peek at the many wrinkled hundred-dollar bills it contained—“take this money down to the development office and give it to them anonymously from someone who is so grateful for his Harvard experience? I wouldn’t want them to know my name.” A touch of anger and embarrassment flitted through me, quickly displaced by sadness for him, before I said, “That is a wonderful impulse. I feel the same way about this old place. But the development office deserves to get your gift from you directly and feel your appreciation. It is located downstairs on the fifth floor. Give your donation to the people there.” I checked later and discovered that no such gift, anonymous or not, ever reached the development office. Nor did I put anything in the folder of a son whose father had undoubtedly fanned a pile of hundred-dollar bills before in the process of a casual conversation. I deliberately chose to neither mention the story to the committee nor check later to see whether the graduate’s son had been admitted on his own merits. We probably were never entirely immune from some outside influences, consciously or otherwise. One fall someone on the committee told us that the music professor in charge of the undergraduate orchestra had mentioned that all his French-horn players were graduating in the spring. There was no particular discussion, but the comment may have stuck in some subliminal corner of the collective minds of the committee members. The next fall the same professor called to thank us for the twelve new French-horn players in the freshman class! Another musician was interviewed by an alumnus who suggested, “Yo-Yo, your musical skills will be enhanced by a liberal education. Can’t you continue your music training on the side while you enrich your mind broadly?” Yo-Yo Ma came to Harvard and commuted to New York for cello training.

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We worked especially hard on that case. Situations like Ma’s caught our attention just like any of the other rare applicants who had already shown evidence of true brilliance in their fields. Our acceptance rate was 100 percent for such rare candidates, whether they were skilled in physics, music, writing, or anything else. A Social and Political Revolution

The admissions process was a part of Harvard that by the late 1960s was enveloped in the politics of a true social revolution over racial and gender equality, the meaning of education, sexual norms, street drugs, and of course, protest against the Vietnam War. For a period of time, the college was actually out on strike. In April during the student strike, as heavy canvas postal bags were filling with the three to four thousand letters of acceptance or rejection, there was a rumor about an attempt to hijack the mail, thereby “bringing the college to its knees” by disrupting the admissions process. It was suggested that if applicants did not get our letters on the appointed day and it took us another two or three weeks to resend them, Harvard might lose a significant portion of its incoming class to rival colleges. I suspect some of such talk was romantic revolutionary imagination, but to avoid any possibility, I took each bag containing that day’s letters to my house for safekeeping and then transported them en masse to the post office on the appointed day. There was no hijacking. The college was closed down for a considerable time by a strike of students and some faculty. The strike came on the heels of an occupation of University Hall to protest the alleged complicity of Harvard with the war in Vietnam. The strike turned into street theater for the University Hall occupants, who dared the university to call in the police. Early on a morning after a day or two of occupation, President Pusey did call in the Cambridge police. They stormed the building and did not spare the billy club in removing protestors who were not willing to come peacefully. The violence was predictable, in part as an expression of decades—if not centuries—of Cambridge town/gown suspicions. I suspect that the billy clubs carried a little Irish (police) payback for presumed Yankee (Haav-ad student) snobbery. A day or two after the incident, I spoke to a couple of the protesters who had faced the police. They happened to be sons and grandsons of old Harvard families. I asked them how they felt as they elected to stay in the occupied University Hall, knowing that they risked physical violence if the police were called. One of them said with a smile, “This is our Yale game.” He and I understood what he meant. His father and grandfather had proved their manhood in the Harvard-Yale

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football games; he proved his in the protest on the Harvard stage against an ill-conceived war. Rumors predictably began to circulate that the admissions office was out to deradicalize the admitted classes. I never had that sense. No one from President Pusey down ever broached the topic with me or, to my knowledge, anyone on the committee. Even if we had wanted to do it, the predictive capacity of an eighteenyear-old’s admission folder was far too limited to provide any accurate forecast of political inclinations. I am quite sure that some committee members must have voted according to the way subliminal aspects of the candidates attracted or repelled them. If a candidate or his school expressed unasked-for observations on politics, that was bound to be noted along with the other complicated mosaic pieces of a highschool senior’s life story. I believe the process continued to find those applicants who showed originality, rare brilliance, human strength and toughness, and some concern for fellow human beings and the planet we all shared. Arch conservatives and liberals continue to pass into and out of Harvard Yard—inevitably changed to the left or right in the process—and many more continue to search for the truth in a complicated world while making a commitment to do what they can. A Bystander to Social Revolution

I suspect that my decision to leave full-time medicine and go to Cambridge was easier because of the option the clinic in Utah had offered me—to go for a year or two, take a sabbatical of sorts—and still return. But the issues that erupted in the late 1960s and ’70s proved to be too important to ignore, and college campuses were often the main stage where many of them were acted out. In Cambridge the issues were in all our faces, so we stayed. In the days and weeks after the student occupation of University Hall and the subsequent police response, the Harvard Yard was jammed with questions, bullhorns, true believers, doubters, and those in between. Up to a point, it was, in fact, a wonderful education. I found myself wandering into Harvard Yard from my office across Massachusetts Avenue in Holyoke Center. Students who wanted to debate the issues with the establishment frequently surrounded me. I was a small corner of it, but I experienced good and mostly honest debate, which was, more than anything else, intensely interesting. My position then was that Harvard’s role was to educate the mind as well as we could and leave it to the individual to act on wherever the convictions of an educated mind took them. I saw a significant difference between protesting in the streets of Washington, Boston, or Utah and

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stopping the processes of education on a campus. I saw no value in holding Harvard or the educational process hostage with a strike or threat of violence because I believed in the neutral position of education. But I had to acknowledge the street theater power of the brief occupation of University Hall and subsequent strike as a protest against the war. Not Only Vietnam

The important revolution in race and gender equality was another matter and probably benefited tangentially from the fresh look at our assumptions prompted by Vietnam. In any event, I found myself occasionally on one side or another of a conversational Harvard Yard bullhorn: fascinated by the issues, not entirely clear where I stood on every one, but passionately protective of the educational process and Harvard’s role in it. Matters got nasty. A student conspicuously brought a meat cleaver into a faculty meeting that was to vote on establishing an African American studies department, which had been one of the demands of the striking students. It was voted in and has since prospered, but the circumstances of its birth were distressing to most people, whether they were for or against it. One older member of the faculty rose to recite the folk tale of a Danish cathedral whose inner walls were lined with statues of the saints. The legend has it that when mobs invaded the cathedral and began to violate its holy implements, the statues of the saints came to life, faced the mob, and threw them back. He asked the same of the other faculty members. John Kenneth Galbraith, professor of economics, was a vocal participant in the faculty debate and one not easily silenced. At one long faculty meeting, Professor Galbraith rose to his lanky six-foot-plus stature. “I arise with some diffidence,” he said, only to be met with a chuckle from some of his fellow faculty members. He paused, surveyed his audience, and said, “I arise with my usual diffidence,” then proceeded to scold President Pusey for what he felt was failure to understand the nature of the student protest. At the height of the strike, Paul Freund, a distinguished member of the Harvard Law School faculty, agreed to speak with students in one of the campus houses. Afterward he said he was surprised that the students did not want to hear his views on the political scene but to know what it meant to be a professor, and why and what they should learn from him. This challenge of the primacy of knowledge and the educated mind reached its apex when it was rumored that some of the radical students or hangers-on were

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going to attempt to burn down Widener Library to “free their generation from the tyranny of past dead knowledge.” Three professors took the rumor seriously enough, I heard, to station themselves inside the doors of Widener all night. They were hardly muscular mesomorphs by any standard, and their resistance to any mob would have been feeble, but they felt they were obliged to do anything they could to protect the library. The mob never came. The experience of my classmate, Chau Chu Chi, that I learned about some decades later comes to mind. As a professor in China, he was convicted of betraying Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The evidence was his use of eyeglasses and title of professor! The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during those tumultuous days in the Harvard Yard in the late 1960s seemed almost a fantasy. But on reflection—apart from the legitimacy of the anti-Vietnam War protest—there is little to separate their rhetoric from that of the Red Guard. Professor Freund could have been swept up in the hysteria of the movement and found himself in the American equivalent of a septic rice field. That such a revolution never happened is, of course, a reflection of the basic stability of the United States and its people. A Home with Intellectual Ghosts

After our first year—when we made the decision to stay in Boston for some time— we decided to move from a rather cold house we had rented from Harvard. We learned that Jack James, a grandson of the Harvard philosopher William James, wanted to sell the home his grandfather had built on Irving Street in 1879. It was two houses off Kirkland Street and three blocks from Harvard Square, the Harvard Yard, and my office. The asking price was around $125,000. We visited Jack and the home. It was lovely, still full of the lingering aura of William and his wife, Alice, not to mention his brother, the author Henry James. I was told that Jack had been an OSS officer in World War  II, living a dangerous and brave life, on occasion behind enemy lines. It might have been hard for him to leave war and retire into the slow pace of the home of his parents and grandparents. In any case, he was ready to part with the house. For some reason we didn’t pursue, he was angry with Harvard and unwilling to sell to the university. I suggested we offer him $95,000, but Grethe said that would be insulting. We offered a little more, and he accepted. In the banter after our purchase, I suggested, half humorously, that the sale was contingent on him leaving something that retained the feeling of “the James home.” Jack looked up at the portrait of William James over the mantle and said that it had been promised to some family member, but he would find something else. He

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did—a wonderful oil portrait of William painted by Jack’s father—William’s son, Billy. It had been in the attic, rolled up and tied, but fortunately it was in good enough condition to be unrolled and framed. Billy was reputed to have been a frustrated artist, often unwilling to finish a painting completely by signing it. Such was the case with this one of his father. For a modest sum, we bought everything else that Jack did not want to take: a spinet piano, a desk of William’s, and hundreds of books from the library. Few of the books are of collector’s quality, but we continue to find marginalia from William or his wife, Alice, in some of them. A third-floor artist’s studio, facing north for good light, had been used by Billy and thereafter a series of artists over the years. When we bought the house, the incumbent painter asked if he could continue to work there once a week. We were pleased to agree as if the psychic energy of the James home somehow required the continued presence of painters. Our painter did things one better: he practiced the violin as well as painted when he visited our home. We could hardly have asked for a nicer ambience for our family. Living in Cambridge—the Human Scene

“What are you doing besides raising a babeee?” It was at a cocktail party in Eliot House that some conscious or unconscious snob cornered Kevin Starr’s wife with that remark. Her husband—a two-fisted, young junior professor of English— overheard the remark, grabbed the offender by the neck of his coat, lifted him up, then dropped him on the floor with the terse comment, “I didn’t bring my wife to this party to be insulted.” Family life in Cambridge for Grethe and me and three school-age children was a change from Salt Lake City. The social revolution was on, and the ramparts in Cambridge were as hot as anywhere. Our children were raised with “aunts” and “uncles” from the ranks of students at Radcliffe and Harvard. Grethe occasionally cut the hair of some of the students while listening and providing loving counsel in the process. It was a rich life: Harvard was three blocks down Kirkland Street, and the LDS Church was on Brattle Street across from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s home, about five blocks from our house. Grethe prided herself on thoughtful family dynamics that took no backseat to the life of the mind. Mormonism implied exaggerated domesticity to many people we encountered. Upon the suggestion of Claudia Bushman, a number of Mormon women in Cambridge set out to publish a journal for LDS women, inspired by an early Mormon publication entitled ἀe Woman’s Exponent. A friend had found old

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copies of this journal in Widener Library, the last published in the late nineteenth century. The journal expressed a vigorous brand of pioneer feminism. Even before Utah gained statehood, women had won the right to vote in the Utah Territory. So these modern reverse-pioneer women in Cambridge set out to revive the journal. Exponent  II, a Paper for Mormon Women reached a significant paid circulation over the next two or three decades. While we lived in Cambridge, it was published out of William James’s third-floor attic. Shady Hill School

We couldn’t imagine a finer school for our children than the one located in the shadow of Mount Auburn Cemetery on Shady Hill. Education was as rich for our children in Cambridge as it had been for me earlier in Concord. The best of New England intentions seemed to reside in that school. One spring Stuart’s fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Bellows, arranged for his class and their parents to meet on the Cambridge shore of the Charles River, which separated Cambridge from Boston. We gathered at midnight on April 18, 1975, at a spot where we could see the Old North Church, where a lantern had been placed just two hundred years earlier to signal whether the British Redcoats were going to cross from Boston “by land or by sea” on their way to march via Lexington to Concord to put down the nascent American revolution. If coming by sea, the soldiers would have crossed the Charles River, signaled by two lanterns in the Old North Church, as Longfellow’s poem records. The class and parents, twenty strong of us, then took off to intercept the route where the soldiers had marched to Lexington. The road is now Massachusetts Avenue, then called Menotomy Way. The hike took us the best part of six hours, past memorials to the heroes and victims of the British march that we’d never noticed when passing them in cars. One was to a woman who had dumped hot dishwater from her second-floor window onto the British troops when they had retreated from Concord and who had died for her act from a single shot. As the dawn came, we arrived at the Lexington green, where the first shots were fired in the Revolution. A mist was just coming off the grass. A charming cross-cultural moment occurred when a long black limousine pulled up. Some social protestors presumed the car carried “rotten” capitalists. “No, no, we are from the People’s Republic of China, not capitalists,” came from the open windows of the limousine and identified diplomatic visitors!

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The next day we learned that members of the Harvard Lampoon, a magazine and club devoted to humor, had dressed up in English Redcoat uniforms. When a reenactment of the ride of Paul Revere to warn the minutemen in Concord and Lexington that the English were coming took place on one of the bridges over the Charles River, the red-coated Lampoon boys jumped out of the bushes, “arrested Paul Revere,” and declared that “the American revolution therefore never happened.” There was also a toughness to learn about living in Cambridge. Edward came home one day to report that some thugs had threatened to steal his bike and that of his friend Eric Wiseman. They must have been about ten or eleven when would-be thieves accosted them. Eric—all of five feet, four inches—immediately shouted, “Dad, Dad, get over here.” There was no dad within five blocks, but it was enough to scare the thieves away. Street drugs had also hit Cambridge as they’d hit every other place in America. Our refraining from alcohol may have provided clarity when our children’s classmates toyed with stronger chemicals. Some parents who drank their evening martinis while warning their children against drugs sounded hollow. I believe our children accepted the logic that it was as easy for our family to bypass LSD and pot as alcohol. The anti-Vietnam War movement was a toughening experience as well as an educational and broadening one. One weekend a warning was circulated to prepare for a peace march that might turn violent. The advice was for families living near Harvard Square to evacuate on the day of the march. Grethe and the children went to her uncle’s home in Brookline (the one who had suggested she meet a “nice boy from Utah” twenty-five years earlier), but I stayed, too interested to miss the drama and opportunity to understand what it all meant. By the hundreds, a mixture of a few troublemakers and mostly sincere young people marched down Massachusetts Avenue. One of the former ignited a bundle of crumpled newspapers in a metal barrel near me in front of the Cambridge Savings Bank. He then lifted the barrel some four feet high and appeared to be about to throw it through the bank window with the burning papers inside. He paused to utter some obligatory oath about the evils of capitalist warmongers. I was a few feet away, and since I didn’t see any guns or knives, I looked him straight in the eye. Without much forethought or rancor, for that matter, I told him firmly to “put down the barrel!” He looked straight back at me, complied, and walked away. The protesters had walked all the way from Boston—over the Charles River, past MIT, and down Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard Square—in their peace

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march. Little damage was done, but the demonstration was street theater at its height. Citizens had had their say about Vietnam, and the family and I had another seminar on a wide screen. I can’t recall what was going through my head, but the protests were intriguing to someone like me, whereas the personal stakes were much higher for draft-age students. Boston Library Society

Our voyage into the historic, quite capitalist, past of Boston was colored a few years later by my election to something called the Boston Library Society. Publisher Edward Weeks and John Finley, the master of Eliot House and beloved professor of classics, had become good friends and suggested I join the group. The original purpose of the association was to choose new books for the Boston library in Copley Square. That effort had served its purpose by the mid-nineteenth century, but the fellowship of the association was deemed worthy of perpetuation with a dinner in each member’s home from time to time dedicated to good conversation and good cigars. I left the cigars to my colleagues—as I had earlier to Brother Cox—and found the occasional gatherings a charming look back to slower, more genteel times in old Boston. I Was Still a Doctor

As my first year as the admissions dean came to a close, I was able to arrange to work for a month in the summer at a medical clinic in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. Two full-time doctors staffed it, and they took me on to help with the influx of summer vacationers. Since I presumed that I would stay at Harvard for only a limited time and then return to Utah and the full-time practice of medicine, it was important that I keep my hand in the field. Wellfleet offered the whole family a wonderful experience. I worked at the clinic while Grethe and our three children—Erika, Stuart, and Edward, now ten, eight, and four—lived in a rented home near the beach. My medical training had been in endocrinology and renal disease, but a good half of my patients in Salt Lake City had been for general medical conditions, so I felt comfortable with the patients who came to our Wellfleet clinic. Still, there were things to learn. Using local anesthesia, I became proficient in advancing a fishhook to make the barb come through the fisherman’s skin so I could cut it off with surgical pliers before retracting the rest of the hook from the original entrance point. They didn’t teach us that at Harvard or Yale.

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There were many more new things, some memorable. A unique problem came up one Sunday when I was taking an emergency call. I heard a commotion at the front desk, and our nurse saying, “We only do emergencies on Sunday, and piercing your ear for an earring is not an emergency.” I came to the front desk, heard the story again, and thought I’d be honest. “I’ve never put in an earring before, but I’d be glad to try.” The protest ended immediately as the would-be patient quickly ducked out the door to find an experienced piercer. I also diagnosed my first case of Rocky Mountain spotted fever that first summer, two thousand miles from the Rockies. Winchendon

After a few years, we knew we were settled in Boston for the foreseeable future. We decided to buy a small farmhouse in Winchendon, about sixty-five miles northwest of the city. It gave us a place to go on weekends, open space, and theoretically a way to teach the children how to work with their hands. There was an annual hay crop that a neighbor cut for us on a cooperative basis, but we had to put our share of the bales into the barn. We raised a couple of sheep—one named Mary, of course; she delivered a lamb and provided a loving lesson in reproduction for our children. A grumpy, butt-prone goat, a pig named Pigasso, and a calf completed our menagerie. Our rustic knowledge was called into question when a neighbor asked what animals we were raising, and Grethe listed the sheep, the pig, and “one cattle.” The farm was a great place for Thanksgiving gatherings, when—with the students we had invited to share the day—we cut down an oak each year for firewood. When we left New England a few years later, we sold the farm for the same price we had paid, resulting in no cost for the many lessons and weekends it had provided. My tie to medical practice moved from Wellfleet to an emergency room in Gardner, a neighboring town to Winchendon. I spent from Friday night through to Monday morning working in the ER with two nurses one weekend a month and found it a satisfying, albeit exhausting, experience. I slept when I could between patients, and it was generally enough. Each of my sons came with me on occasion. It was an opportunity to expose them to good health habits, like the time they helped clean up and prepare to transfer to the neighboring hospital a young fellow with a leg fracture and massive abrasions from crashing his motorcycle while mildly drunk. We also learned to play cribbage in the off time.

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One of my patients was a stumpy fellow with bad teeth and hypertension named Ives. As a French Canadian, he might have pronounced his name Eeeves, but he stuck to Eye-ves. In any case, I became very fond of the guy. He ran a truckand-auto-repair operation a few miles from our farm. Moreover, he was a genius with wrenches and iron. Many were the Saturday mornings I conjured up an excuse to drop by his place to talk and watch him work. A self-made log splitter he had concocted from odds and ends in his shop especially impressed me. He could take an eighteen-wheeler apart as fast as he could open up a VW Beetle. Pleasure in watching and talking with him was matched by the impatience of the family when I suggested I would “just drop in for a minute to ask Ives a question” if we happened to be driving by. They claimed the promise of “a minute” was rarely kept. John Finley

If Ives was one kind of material genius, John Finley was certainly one of another stripe. His lectures on ancient Greek history and mythology were packed as he strode back and forth on the stage of Sanders Theatre in old Memorial Hall, built to honor the graduates who had given their lives in the Civil War. Since only the names of the Union dead were inscribed on the walls, some suggested wryly that the memorial was in part dedicated to the accuracy of Confederate sharpshooters. Finley’s lectures disproved the well-worn cliché that large classes were cold and remote. For most undergraduates, a fifteen-student class with Professor Finley might have been too intimidating. There was something half theatrical and half classical about a Finley lecture. The gods indeed came to life. Finley was also the live-in master of Eliot House, one of the seven student residence houses at Harvard at the time (there are now more), where three-hundredodd sophomores, juniors, and seniors lived and ate together in what was designed to be—and was usually successful as—a very small college within the larger Harvard. A number of young faculty members and tutors lived with the undergraduates, and a senior faculty member served as the master with his family. In any case, Finley was the master of Eliot House, named for Charles Eliot, who presided as president over the beginning of the modern university in the nineteenth century. I was also to learn the importance of spelling E-l-i-o-t when William Yandall Elliott came to the Harvard faculty from Vanderbilt in the 1970s as a professor of government. He enjoyed telling the story of one of his first afternoon teas in an aristocratic Beacon Hill home. “Oh, Professor Elliott, how do you spell your name?” Our new professor responded, “Two l’s and two t’s.” “Too bad,” was the simple reply of his host.

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Finley was the quintessential housemaster. He usually got to know every member of the house over his three years and became renowned for the letters of recommendation he wrote to graduate school or employers for each student who asked. Most letters were loving voyages into Greek history, where the subject became like one or another of the heroic figures of Greek history: “Bill came to Harvard like rustic Apollo. . . . ” Finley then went on to describe the Apollo-like merits of the young man, who might have come to Harvard as one of Hirum Hunn’s boys from an Iowa town. The letters could have been an asset for graduate school or employment, but they were possibly an even greater tome for the young men’s sense of themselves. Finley also had a cunning tennis game, and it was my pleasure to play more often with than against him at an indoor clay court on Hemmingway Street in Back Bay during those years of my second stay at Harvard. Professor Finley’s father had been a university president and later an editorialpage editor of the New York Times. He was one of the rustic people from the Midwest who came east and whom his son admired so much. I learned that the senior Finley had been a longtime advocate of the virtues of walking, even in New York City, and had a medal cast to honor anyone who had walked two or three miles daily for some extended number of years. My father had practiced the habit of walking up and back from the Utah State campus into Logan Canyon since 1936, when he and my mother had noted the healthy walking habits of Europeans on their extended trip. A mutual friend brought Dad’s walking record to the attention of Finley’s father. It resulted in a letter to my father written on the menu of a New York club, saying someone “has reported on your splendid record of walking for over a decade, which qualifies you for the Finley medal, which I hereby enclose.” Apparently the anointing conversation had occurred over a dinner in New York City, and my father was highly pleased to receive the medal. The tie to the senior and junior John Finleys was a pleasure my father and I shared. The last time I saw John Finley was in a nursing home in Concord years later— that same town I had landed in some four decades earlier. He was dying slowly of Alzheimer’s disease, but we were able to recognize each other enough to tie a final bow on the friendship we had shared. A Look Back

The admissions process was about as sensitive an operation as one can imagine. It was sustained only by the confidence that the many communities in and around Harvard had in it: faculty, alumni, the students themselves, and the near and far

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towns for which Harvard College symbolized a special form of tradition and excellence. I believed we ran it with high standards, fairness, and honor. But given those expectations and the responsibility that came with the job, I wondered more than once just what had been in President Nathan Pusey’s mind when he hired me to oversee admissions. I will never know for sure, but I at least got his recollection twenty-odd years later. The moment occurred in Harvard Yard at commencement during the 1990s. I was attending as part of one of our class reunions when it was announced from the podium at the close of the commencement exercises that former President Pusey was in the audience. I rushed down and found him to say hello. After a handshake and inquiries about our families, I said, “Nate, I have always wondered what prompted you to hire me—such an unlikely person—for a job as sensitive as the admissions deanship.” Before I could get another word out, he responded as if it were 1967: “Oh, Chase, it was easy. I asked Paul Cabot about you. He told me that you had belonged to the Porcellian Club for four years, and you never took a drink. I figured you had character.” That’s all he said. President Pusey probably gave me excessive credit for not drinking socially. Yes, there were a few moments when I felt out of step. But such moments were trivial compared to the larger sense of who I was as a boy and the even larger sense of what I became as an adult: someone who relishes the abundant pleasures of life as they come unadulterated. Alcohol was really no social threat, for I enjoyed some friends when they were gently intoxicated as much as I did when they were sober—and sometimes more. Yeats said it succinctly: “The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.”5 Of course, I cannot claim to understand the buzz or mellowness from having a few drinks. But as a sober bystander, I became a pretty good judge of appropriate drinking limits in others and grew to feel, in a quiet sense, that some part of the alcohol high was a placebo effect just as available to the nondrinker: be relaxed, lighthearted, maybe a little funny, cautiously uninhibited, and even eloquent. Most of all, do not deny yourself the company of interesting people because of the alcohol they choose to drink, and you do not. One day I was walking through Harvard Square with my professor on his way to a lecture. He paused to duck into a bar with the wry observation that he might have been born “a drink below par.” He had his shot and delivered a masterful lecture. I felt that most people—myself in particular—could have what we needed without the risk of becoming a sloppy drunk or being bereft of sober judgment

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while driving the road or navigating the social scene, not to mention the risk of addiction. But  I valued his lecture and didn’t quibble with his preparation. The only aspect of the nonalcohol/alcohol relationship that grew tiresome was the occasional drinking friend’s concern that I might be standoffish or judgmental, vocalized in the oft-repeated, “Ah, c’mon, have a drink.” That brings to mind the charming moment at a medical school poker game with my regular buddies, mostly Catholics and Jews. They protested my play after my announcement that any winnings of mine that night would go to the building fund of the Mormon Church in Cambridge. With nickel and dime chips, the amount could never be large, but the invocation of “divine favor” seemed a bit unfair to them. I did win that night, and I think the take-home pot may have been as much as fifteen dollars, which I gave to the director of the building fund without burdening him with having to report the gambling route the money had taken. Whatever there was to this drinking thing, it was something that President Pusey had not forgotten in the twenty-five or thirty years since his decision to hire me.

9 Harvard University Vice Presidency: Alumni and Development, and Faith Revisited

Professor John Dunlop was a powerful and lovable person, skilled in economics and especially experienced in labor and health issues. When Derek Bok replaced Nathan Pusey as president of Harvard University, he asked John to be the dean of the faculty of arts and science. These teachers were the core faculty of the university apart from those in the graduate professional schools such as law, medicine, business, and divinity. They included the faculty for the college and the PhD programs. John assumed the deanship as the university was in its deepest political turmoil. He directed meetings of the faculty with a firm hand, and he and Bok and the ultimate good sense of most of the faculty and students got the university through those trying times. John came up to me at a Christmas cocktail party in 1971 and asked if I would be interested in talking with President Bok about a new position being created, vice president for alumni affairs and development. The position would cover the entire university, not just the college, as had the dean of admissions. I was in my fifth year back at Harvard, and I had begun to wonder if it was time for me to return to full-time medicine. You can imagine the conversation Grethe and I had later that evening. Put simply, Bok and I did talk, he outlined the job, and I took it. The word development had been used for years as a euphemism for fund-raising, generally for private institutions. Harvard had done it relatively successfully for decades but in a somewhat informal way. Fund-raising was on the brink of a major shift. President Bok, like most people, was not naturally comfortable with asking for money but understood his responsibility and took it seriously. He requested that

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I study the ways we were raising money and how we might improve if we could. While Harvard had seemed to be well endowed for years, in fact its endowment was less per enrolled student than a number of similar institutions. Our peer public universities received annual appropriations from their state legislators in addition to tuition from students, as well as research support from private and federal funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health. A private college or university had to raise money to make up for the absence of legislative appropriations. Paul Cabot, who long before had admonished a New York bank board regarding his hangover and gone on to be a successful financier, initiated the first grand move by revolutionizing the management of university portfolios. For decades— if not hundreds of years—institutions like Harvard had raised what money they needed and managed any sums not spent for immediate purposes by investing them in fixed-interest bonds. Such investment was considered prudent and safe and a responsible way to husband funds given by donors. It was safe, but Paul Cabot proved that it was too conservative to the point of being an irresponsible way to meet the financial needs of a private university. He began to manage Harvard’s funds aggressively in the style of mutual funds that became important after World War II. He was a founder of State Street Research and Management Company, which dealt with large investors. The firm had been very successful. I suppose the greatest virtue I brought to this new job was my ignorance and willingness to learn. Harvard’s fund-raising seemed gracious, low key, and comfortable. Good people who worked in this arena for Harvard, whether as staff or alumni volunteers, took on the responsibility often as a lifelong avocation. The college did well with smaller annual gifts but not as well as many other schools either in total gifts or percentage of alumni who contributed. What school seemed to be doing a better job? Stanford came to mind, for the university had just successfully completed the first nine-figure drive—three hundred million dollars, as I remember. So I called Stanford and fortunately found a name or two I knew, one in particular who was their development director. He could not have been nicer in talking to this neophyte from, as he called it, the “Stanford of the East.” “Can I come out and see how you managed your successful campaign?” “Sure, we’d be glad to have you.” I must have stayed more than a week: listening, watching, asking, and coming away with some confidence that we could meet the growing demands for private support at Harvard. Our first problem was our relative success. We had done well by traditional standards. We had a network of loyal supporters who were friends of longtime

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staff people. When a specific project needed funding, these people were called on and generously met our needs among themselves. But the group was small, often moving in restricted social circles and not easily accessible to fresh blood. Because friendships were so much a part of the process, there was minimal need for professional record keeping and what came to be called “research.” And particularly there was only a modest effort to develop wider sources of understanding and support from new alumni and potential friends. The president is the central fund-raiser for major gifts to a university. But Bok was heavily and skillfully occupied with putting the university back in running order after the four or five years of widespread protest and challenge to the role of a university in a time of social awakening. As I mentioned earlier, the unrest was centered on the Vietnam War, but the protest also focused on the important issues of racial and gender equality, as well as a change in personal standards of living. So Bok was eager to develop a more methodical approach to university fund-raising. One of Harvard’s strong points was—and continues to be—the individual strengths of each of its academic units and the responsibility that each school and its faculty feel for their own efforts. The phrase was “each tub on its own bottom,” a wonderful, pithy Yankee maxim of self-responsibility. The advantage was unit-byunit responsibility, but the disadvantage was that people saw only the parts of the university, not the power of the whole. We set out to organize files, develop a larger professional staff, do research on prospects, generate follow-up, and strengthen the alumni commitment to classby-class effort to support the parts of the university as well as the whole. In this way, we were successful in broadening the base of giving, both with small and large gifts. Under the leadership of President Rudenstine in the next decade, further progress was made in deepening focus on the entire university. The endowment of the university in 1972 was $650 million. As of 2008, it had reached $38 billion. Much of the growth came with the surge of prosperity in America in the late twentieth century after I had left Harvard. Probably more came from the aggressive management that Paul Cabot initiated and his successors advanced. And much more has resulted from a professional staff working with committed friends of the university to focus on what a school like Harvard can do for the country and the world. What better and more reliable place to study a topic than Harvard if a high-minded prospective donor wants to help solve a world problem? The total endowment did take a jolt in 2008–9, along with markets in general, but stands to recover. I have two atypical, but interesting, memories in that regard. A family that was considering a donation of its valuable oceanfront property on the coast of Maine

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contacted me. I visited the lovely people and discussed what their generosity might accomplish within the university. They had no alumni or familial associations with Harvard, making me wonder why they had approached us with a potential gift. One never entirely understands the philanthropic impulse, but this one turned out in part to be connected to the family’s desire to ensure the responsible management of a family burial plot on their property. Who had a better lasting reputation than Harvard, so why not entrust the school with burial management? A midwestern ethnic group asked us to consider the establishment of a history professorship in the area of their Euro-Asian culture. There was no central donor, just a number of good folks who wanted to make an academic effort to preserve their history. The project was sound, and the faculty was willing to take on the responsibility. Money began to come in but generally in small amounts. Gradually the reports of giving increased, but little was passed on to the university. We were told that the donors wished to raise the full amount before formally presenting the gift. Finally, we learned that these enterprising folks were raising modest sums at weekend cookouts, taking the money to one of their number who worked at a factory that had a matching program for philanthropic giving, and getting a oneto-one match for the dollars they had raised. When they had doubled the amount, they assigned the money to another of their group who worked for the same or another company with a matching gift program. You can imagine the potential for such a plan, doubling with each exercise of industrial generosity. Alas, the scheme came to our attention when the gift office of the donor company noticed the remarkable increase in employee matching requests, tracked them down to their ultimate destination, and called us. We all had to chuckle over the ingenuity and, after a discussion with the imaginative donors, returned the doubled, quadrupled, and octupled funds to the company, which, understandably, was prepared to match any single gift of an employee but not the collective giving of a clanship and certainly not willing to redouble ad infinitum the money as it recirculated from donor group to the company and back. The donors’ cleverness, while not an acceptable strategy, gave me considerable faith that their culture would not be lost. They were ultimately—though more slowly—able to fund the professorship. A classical story of generosity occurred when Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid Corporation, came into President Pusey’s office to consummate a pledge he had made to help build a new science building. He carried a large paper sack, which contained piles of Polaroid stock certificates. He pulled one after another onto President Pusey’s desk and signed over ownership to Harvard until they both agreed that he had done enough.

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The Booty of War

The Harvard experience I lived was one rich in its particulars. What do you do when Widener Library folks come to you to say that a restoration committee from Fort Louisburg in Canada has identified a large iron cross that hangs on the wall of the reference room as one taken from its original home at the fort? On questioning I learned that during the early eighteenth century, French ships harbored at Fort Louisburg on the Canadian east coast had regularly pirated colonial vessels. Our English protectors were preoccupied with the French elsewhere and provided no support for the colonists or their shipping. In June of 1745, thirty years before the American Revolution, a sturdy band of Bostonians decided to attack the fort. It seemed impregnable by sea, so they marched laboriously overland, launched a surprise attack, and leveled and burned the fort. Only the iron cross from the chapel survived and was brought back to Massachusetts by someone now forgotten, who, decades later, perhaps responding to an impatient mate to “get that thing out of the house,” donated it to Harvard. Like the family burial plot in Maine, who better to care for such a thing? More than two centuries later, a committee to restore Fort Louisburg somehow discovered that its cross was on the wall at Widener Library. They offered to give Harvard an accurate replica together with a note of appreciation if we would give the cross back for the restoration. There was nothing in my experience or training to address that question. We took very seriously the responsibility to care for anything we received as a gift. If that confidence was eroded, a major element of the Harvard phenomenon would be diminished. A cross today, a gift of a forest tomorrow, and an endowment to study mid-European history in perpetuity—all would be on a slippery moral slide. Fortunately we had scholars of war among the faculty. I remembered Professor Samuel Eliot Morison, a leading authority on naval histories. I had spoken to him earlier on a project to provide a space near Harvard Yard where emeritus professors could hold occasional afternoon receptions for interested students. He seemed like the ideal person to start off such a program: wise, worldly, literate, respected, and warm. I don’t know what happened to the faculty-reception idea, but I soon received Professor/Admiral Morison in my Massachusetts Hall office. I outlined the events of the battle of Fort Louisburg in June of 1745 and the subsequent gift to Harvard of an iron cross that had been brought back by the victorious colonists. Then I asked him, “Professor, do you have any advice about the request of the Fort Louisburg restoration committee to recover the cross? Should we give it back?”

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With only a moment’s pause, he banged his fist on my desk. “Absolutely not! It is the legitimate booty of war.” And there the matter rested until I read in Harvard Magazine some fifteen years later that a restoration committee from Fort Louisburg had again come to Harvard to request the return of the cross. I was no longer on watch. Professor/Admiral Morison had passed on. The cross was returned, I hope with no apparent damage to Harvard’s reputation for timeless dependability caring for gifts. “Are You about Finished?”

It was obviously important to reach out to alumni and nurture their loyalty to the university. We developed regional meetings structured as weekend refresher courses on topics of interest with Cambridge faculty as the presenters. They were well received and took Harvard to two or three areas of the country each year and, somewhat later, became international. Every state with a major population center had a Harvard Club. It was often my job to visit those clubs to report on the current state of things in Cambridge. The effort was taxing but pleasant, and the alumni were more than hospitable. I must have visited most of the fifty states in my eleven years as admissions dean and development vice president. I pushed hospitality about as far as it could go one evening at a gathering at a Greenwich country club. The summer evening was warm, the meal was filling, and considerable alcohol flowed. I was halfway through my talk when, right in front of the podium, an alumnus fell forward onto his table. Fortunately the plates had been removed. My doctor’s instincts took over, and I rushed to his table, only to find no palpable pulse. Was he dead? With help I pulled him off the table and onto the floor, where, within a few seconds, a regular pulse returned, and he regained consciousness. He presumably had suffered a transient reduction of blood flow to the head, or postural hypotension, exacerbated by sitting, the warm evening, alcohol, and maybe a boring speech. What was I to do? The best treatment was for the alumnus to remain recumbent on the carpet. Moving him to a car immediately would only raise his head and risk circulation to his brain. So I knelt over him, confirmed his alertness and lack of any signs of stroke, and advised him to lie right where he was for a short while so I could watch him, “and if it is all right with you, I will finish my speech.” He said that would be okay, so I did. Keeping an eye on him, I had nearly completed my talk when he raised his hand and politely asked, “Are you about finished?” I called him the next morning and got a healthy report. Some decades before my adventure in Greenwich, my father had been asked to visit the Uinta Basin Ute Reservation in eastern Utah for the annual powwow.

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Just as with me in Greenwich, he was asked to speak at a luncheon—in his case before the meal. After not too many minutes, Dad felt a tug on his coat. The chief, who was sitting behind him, said, “You stop, we eat.” I suspect Dad responded as quickly as I did. Virginia?

The University of Virginia was looking for a new president in the mid-1970s, and Professor David Riesman in social relations and Professor Hartwell Harrison of the medical school/Peter Bent Brigham Hospital proposed my candidacy. David had become a fast friend as we had tried to work and think our way through the student turmoil of the preceding decade. Hartwell, a Virginia alumnus, was an occasional tennis doubles partner and friend through medicine. David in particular was widely respected as an academic broker and wise old man in education. So down to Charlottesville Grethe and I went for an interview. We were as inexperienced in the world of university presidencies as we had been earlier in admissions and fund-raising. Nevertheless, why not see what was there? The University of Virginia is a distinguished place of genteel manners, history, academic excellence, and pride. Thomas Jefferson was a founder and remains as the icon of the institution, the subject of something close to worship. We made two trips, saw many of the faculty and the Charlottesville supporters of the school, and absorbed a heady dose of the gravity of the institution. It was more southern in tradition than many states farther south. It truly had a grand history. I was told I ended up on a final list of two, the other a respected incumbent member of the faculty. The school chose the faculty person, and we exhaled a sigh of relief, clearly not sure ourselves that we were ready for a position in such a new, distinctive place and culture. Having lived within the culture of Utah and Boston, were we ready or willing to become involved with another one? The story ends six or eight years later, when I had considerable exposure on national television as the University of Utah spokesperson for the first artificial heart transplant. Barney Clark was the patient. The amiable chair of the Virginia Board of Trustees—what is called the Board of Visitors—phoned me one day and said, “Dr. Peterson, it was good to see you again, if only via television. I hope you are well. We are here at Virginia. As you know, we chose the safe candidate for our presidency, and he has done well. But I have always wondered how this old place would have done with a Mormon medical doctor from Utah as its president. I presume quite well.”

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“Who Made You the Shah?”

The shah of Iran wished to advance education in his country and asked Harvard to study ways we might help. With a couple of faculty experienced in Middle Eastern history, we set out to consider possible options. The shah thought a graduate institution would serve his country the best. He had previously tried to work with another university without much satisfaction. Obviously the equation would be a complex one. He’d had an earlier experience on Harvard turf when he was awarded an honorary doctorate for his effort to transfer feudal lands to small farmers. It was known as the Green Revolution and almost certainly cost him support from the religious mullahs who historically had monopolized the land. His visit to Harvard in 1968 to receive that degree was amusingly highlighted at a reception after the ceremony. The reception was in President Pusey’s residence on the edge of Harvard Yard. The main room was crowded with guests and security and reeked of protocol. A wife of one of the Harvard deans was sitting on a couch with an Iranian lady when a hush came over the room and everyone started to stand up. The dean’s wife had had too much to drink earlier in the day and was not about to abandon her comfortable spot on the sofa. In a loud voice, she asked, “Why is everyone standing up?” Her Iranian companion whispered, “His Highness, the shah, has entered the room.” “Who’s the shah?” she answered in an even louder voice. By that time, the shah had come across the room to her couch and, hearing her last remark, answered with great dignity, “I am the shah.” By this time, there was no stopping her: “Who made you the shah?” With even greater dignity, the shah replied softly and honestly, “My father conquered his enemies and gave me the country.” Not a bad answer. In any case, we accepted the challenge to see if we could design a workable graduate educational institution in far-off Iran. Grethe and I—along with five or six faculty members—made a trip to the country, where we met all the appropriate ministers and got some sense of the red tape of doing anything in a monarchy. Our group visited twice and enjoyed considerable sightseeing in the process—Isfahan in central Iran, Persepolis in the south. Finally, a site was chosen in the north on the shore of the Caspian Sea. The project was well under way, with buildings in construction, when the mullahs overthrew the shah, and the rest of the story awaits unknown events in the decades to come. Before we left the project, I had met the minister of court. He appeared to be a refined man with the shah’s confidence. He was most gracious to our group. When

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we left, I told him as a matter of routine courtesy that I would be pleased to help him or his family if they ever had any problems in the United States. A few years after—while I was still at Harvard—someone knocked on our door at Irving Street, and a handsome young man introduced himself as a nephew of the minister. He repeated that I had told his uncle that I would try to help the family in the U.S. if I could. “Could you arrange for me to be admitted to Harvard Law School?” he asked. I explained that I could advise him on the best way to apply but that I had no power to have him admitted. He understood, gave me a small and elegant Persian mat, and we wished each other well. Though I never found out if he went to Harvard or any other law school, he appeared later in my life as part of another story. The Power and the Conflicts of the Church

During this time at Harvard, I continued to have a powerful involvement with the LDS Church. A full ward (parish) was meeting at a beautiful chapel in Longfellow Park off Brattle Street, including a second branch for unmarried members—mostly students in the Boston area—just as I had been nineteen years earlier. Our family maintained a steady involvement in a church that runs under local lay leadership. I have already mentioned Grethe’s role in Mormon women’s issues. Our children attended church with us and I think found it a strong and honest anchor in the confusing culture of young people in their schools. The role models the church provided and the many students—a few Mormons but many non-Mormons—who floated through our home all had positive influences. After I had been back in Boston for a year or two, the president of the stake (the collection of congregations in eastern Massachusetts) asked me to serve on his high council, a quasi-board of advisors. I told him I would be pleased to do that if he was comfortable with my feelings about the position of the church in denying the priesthood to men of color. For all intents, in refusing the priesthood to blacks, the church had relegated them to an inferior position. The church had never expressed an official rationale for its stance, although some people offered a number of degrading explanations from time to time. It was my strong feeling that the matter had more to do with historic inertia than doctrine. I felt the issue of excluding blacks from the priesthood had become frozen—geographically, you might say—and would be corrected in a short time. The pain to many members and others outside the church was ever present and great. My statement to the stake president was that I would not be part of the protest picket line but would continue to hold my own beliefs, speak up honestly to any

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who raised the question, and do what little I could to hasten the day of correction. He accepted that position, and I served with him for two or three years. “Chase, I would like you to consider taking on the responsibility of president for the unmarried branch here in Cambridge.” It was Dick Bushman talking, my former Harvard colleague, now a respected early American historian. He was the person who, as a Harvard freshman, had described the heavenly spirits itching to get into their skins, i.e., their earthly bodies. It would be a very large responsibility, and it came at a bad time. At Harvard I was new to the position of development and alumni vice president, learning the ropes of fund-raising and making plans for a major universitywide campaign. The process of “calling” in the LDS Church is bilateral, with a responsible official contacting the intended to take the job. That person is then obliged to study, pray, and consult with family in coming to a decision. I did all this, feeling that I was not in a position to take the job, when our thirteen-year-old daughter spoke up with a tear in her eye, “Daddy, if people like you are not willing to be branch president, who else should they ask?” That seemed like enough of an answer, and I took the position. My two counselors (assistants) were a PhD candidate in chemistry and a law student, both at Harvard. We had a wonderful time, full of honest interplay of reason and faith. But the issue of the ban on black priesthood continued to trouble us. It was particularly acute because of the high number of returned missionaries in our branch. Many of them had served in nations populated with people of color—particularly in South America—before returning to study at schools like Harvard and MIT. Apart from a bias that could not be defended on the basis of logic, reason, or basic Christian humanity, these missionaries returned to Cambridge convinced that there was no way to ascertain the actual lineage of most of the Brazilians they were trying to teach. Some converts joined the church with the great faith that the priesthood would soon change. Others understandably could not make that leap. As the leadership group of our branch, we decided to write a letter to President Kimball to express our concern and share some possible suggestions. We sent our letter on May 19, 1978. I received the following reply on May 30, 1978: Dear Brother Peterson: I thank you very much for your delightful letter of May 19 and for the suggestions you have offered. Please accept my sincere thanks and best wishes. Faithfully yours, Spencer W. Kimball A few years later, Leonard Arrington published his final book, entitled Adventures of a C hurch Historian. Arrington was the leading LDS historian and the

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primary force in opening up church archives to professional scholars. He wrote a chapter on the events surrounding the black priesthood issue: Kimball had received many letters from devoted church members asking for a change in the policy. One that he allowed me to see was from my friend Chase Peterson, vice president of Harvard University (later president of the University of Utah). A beautiful, sincere, well-expressed letter, it was, as I learned later, carefully considered by Kimball, as were many others.1 Was there not a place in organizations—civic like Harvard, political like the constitutionally guided government of the United States of America, or religious like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—where an essential and vital place for something called loyal, supportive, and constructively critical devotion existed? That was the substance and purpose of our letter. President Kimball received it in just that spirit. Need every member write such a letter or subscribe to such a creed? No. To ask for or demand unanimity would be the first violation of free agency. A church as vital and earthly and spiritually outreaching as the LDS Church needs all kinds of people. I believe that my parents, my family, and I—and uncounted others—are all part of that multithreaded cloth prepared to shelter like a tent while nourishing over a dinner table the congregation of God’s children, some like and many unlike ourselves. The subject of what is a revelation is beyond the reach of these pages. Suffice it to say that an outsider could conclude that this revelation was a convenient human step to catch up with the times. All I know is that President Kimball was a man of enormous human compassion, especially for the underdog. He had spent many years serving Native Americans. In 1978 he is reported to have focused sharply on the priesthood issue: asking questions, seeking information from African congregations, and praying repeatedly by the hour alone in the LDS Temple in Salt Lake, adjacent to his office. Finally, in early June, he felt he had received an answer to his prayers. He called a meeting in the temple of his counselors and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. He asked that he might lead them in prayer as they knelt as a group. When they arose, he asked each of them to express the answer he had received. Whatever the neurological, intellectual, psychological, or ecclesiastic spiritual process, these men who had come to the issue from a broad range of cultural experience and understanding of racial matters became of one mind, and the church moved on with no protest or misgivings. President Kimball had said of revelation

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that it does not come to a man lying on a couch but only in response to the most earnest study and supplication. If you believe in a God—and particularly a caring God—it is not hard to imagine that He might have said to Himself, “Why has it taken those people of mine so long to seek enlightenment?” Whatever the case, the time was right. The monumental work and success of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had moved our country to an appreciation for a broader base of racial understanding and equality. Finally, I was pleased to receive a second letter from President Kimball dated June  28, 1978. On June  8, he had announced that by revelation he had been instructed to declare that henceforth all worthy males would be eligible to receive the priesthood. With his characteristic brevity, he wrote, Dear Brother Peterson: Since I wrote my last letter to you and thanked you for your great interest, you know what has happened, and I assume that you are as pleased with the move as I am. . . . With our affection and kindest wishes, faithfully yours, Spencer W. Kimball “It’s How You Hold Your Body”

The next Cambridge years were good ones for all the family. They were years of exploration as well. My teenage son, Stuart, decided he wanted to improve his basketball skills. He asked Tom Sanders, who had been a star with the Celtics and was now the Harvard basketball coach, if he would help him get into an outdoor hard-court basketball league over the summer. He was successful. We drove to outdoor courts in greater Boston weekly. A memorable one was in Roxbury, a largely black community. Tempers had been running high that year over court-ordered school busing. There must have been a couple of hundred spectators in the bleachers. Except for Stu and me, it appeared that everyone else was black—members of both teams and the entire audience. The game progressed, and Stuart played well. At one point, he had a brief scuffle with an opposing player, and some words were exchanged. As soon as the game was over, we hopped into the car. I turned to Stuart and asked him what his opponent had said, and what he had replied. With a street maturity beyond my own, he looked at me and said, “Dad, you don’t want to know. And anyway it isn’t what you say; it’s how you hold your body.” A decade earlier, at about five or six, Stuart had been less prosaic but equally succinct. We were traveling to Vermont when he and his younger brother, Edward, got into a noisy shoving argument in the backseat of the car. It was nothing unusual

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or serious, but it continued for too long. Finally, Stuart, who seemed to be the prime perpetrator, was emphatically told to stop. They didn’t. I pulled the car off to the side of the road, and Grethe and I ordered Stu to walk for a while until he could regain his composure and stop the commotion. He undoubtedly felt unfairly punished and his little brother unjustly exonerated. But the sentence stood. As he slowly got out of the car, he turned to Grethe, summoning up an impression he must have had of Shady Hill School parents, seeking words to even the score: “Mother, you’re an old hag wearing orthopedic shoes!” To this day, no one in the family knows the exact origin of that curse, but none of us could hold back our laughter, which only made Stu madder. He calmed down in a few minutes after a block of walking and got back in the car. The family was none the worse for having heard the cruelest indictment he could think of, and we have never let him forget it. Small memories are as lasting as any. There was a tiny hot-dog stand at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Boylston Street called The Tasty that will always have a place in my heart. First of all, the stand didn’t serve “hot dogs,” only “frankfurters.” After sitting down at one of the ten stools at the bar, I was invariably greeted by name and asked if I wanted “the usual.” Yes, I did. It was a grilled frankfurter with mustard, catsup, and relish, no onions, and a glass of “city beer,” i.e., tap water. George Avis ran the shop and somehow knew the preferences of most of his customers, more aptly called clients. Erika entered Harvard as a freshman in 1977 but declared that she was “going away to college,” even if it was only two blocks. She kept her word by washing her clothes at the Laundromat and not having a meal with us until Thanksgiving. It was a good experience. The Phone Rang Again

It wasn’t from Harvard this time, but to Harvard from Utah. David Gardner was the incumbent president of the University of Utah. He was known to be strong, able, and effective. His vice president was John Dixon, a doctor who wanted to return to research in his last professional years. Dixon called me. Would I be interested in returning to Utah as a vice president to take on the responsibility of the health-sciences and hospital programs at the university? Dixon came to Boston; we visited and dined at the Parker House. Grethe and I talked again about relocation. It seemed the right time. If we did not leave Harvard then, we would be committed for the duration of a planned capital campaign. At that point, we would be old enough that permanent life in Boston and giving up

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any hope of reviving real ties to medicine would be likely. After eleven years—five as admissions dean and six as development and alumni vice president—I had done about as much as I could at and for dear old Harvard. To this day, I blush at the memory of our thoughts while making that decision and the question contained within them. We asked each other all so innocently, “Could there really be any life after Harvard?” There has been. Abundant life. But it was not easy to leave. Twenty-five years later, it was a heartwarming surprise to receive the Harvard Medal, awarded at commencement by the Alumni Association for what was described as a “lifetime contribution to Harvard.” But on that day in 1978, we merely bought a last nostalgic ice cream cone at Brigham’s in Harvard Square with trademark jimmies sprinkled over the top. We drove down Brattle Street. We sang old Harvard songs with moist eyes. And we headed west.

1. Elmer George Peterson, 1904. Chase Peterson collection.

2. Phebe Nebeker Peterson. Chase Peterson collection.

3. Chase Peterson at three. Chase Peterson collection.

4. (top) One of the first national summer schools held at Utah Agricultural College, about 1920. Attendees included historian Frederick Jackson Turner (back row, third from the left). E. G. Peterson is the fifth from the left in the back row. Chase Peterson collection. 5. (bottom) E. G. and Phebe Peterson on holiday in Berlin, meeting with LDS missionaries in 1936 (front row, fourth and fifth from the right). The Petersons attended the Berlin Summer Olympic Games during this visit. Chase Peterson collection.

6. (above) Chase Peterson (third row, far left) at the Porcellian Club, Harvard College, in 1950. Chase Peterson collection. 7. (left) Graduation photo of Chase Peterson, Harvard College, class of 1952. Chase Peterson collection.

8. Wedding photo of Chase and Grethe Peterson in 1956. Chase Peterson collection.

9. Chase and Grethe with their three children about 1968; left to right: Stuart, Erika, and Edward. Chase Peterson collection.

10. Left to right: Chase Peterson, President Derek Bok, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Henry Rosovsky, and Dean of Admissions Fred Jewett at Harvard College about 1973. Chase Peterson collection.

11. Chase Peterson at a Barney Clark press conference in 1983. Photo courtesy of the Deseret News.

12. (top) Chase Peterson with University of Utah students on campus about 1984. Chase Peterson collection. 13. (bottom) Chase Peterson in the University of Utah president’s office about 1985. Chase Peterson collection.

14. Left to right: Chase and Grethe Peterson, John Naisbitt, Donna Marriott, and J. Willard Marriott Jr. during the University of Utah capital campaign in 1987. Chase Peterson collection.

15. Left to right: Jon and Karen Huntsman and Chase and Grethe Peterson at the dedication of the Huntsman Special Events Center on the University of Utah campus in 1989. Photo courtesy of Jon Huntsman.

16. Left to right: Chase Peterson, Grace Tanner, Grethe Peterson, and Obert C. Tanner in 1985. Chase Peterson collection.

17. Chase and Grethe Peterson at the dedication of the Chase N. Peterson Heritage Center on the University of Utah campus in 2000. Chase Peterson collection.

18. Chase and Grethe Peterson at their Park City home about 2005. Chase Peterson collection.

19. Aerial view of the University of Utah campus about 1980. Photo courtesy of Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library University of Utah.

pa rt 4

Back to the West, a Second Sunset

10 Utah Medical Sciences: Max, Brigham, and a Favoring Culture

Any worries Grethe and I had about the existence of life after Harvard melted steadily away as we drove west in the summer of 1978. The prospect of reengaging medicine at the University of Utah in a state and culture we knew and respected was fresh and attractive. The homecoming was seamless. We found and bought a home near the campus. Stuart and Edward came with us. At last Erika was fully able to “go away to college” when we left her in Cambridge. The boys fit into senior and junior high schools easily, and they discovered the advantages and disadvantages of being part of a majority religious scene. There was so much for me to learn about health education and provision of care that there was no more time to sit back than there had been when we had moved east eleven years earlier. I quickly discovered, or rediscovered, that there was a unique culture at the University of Utah, particularly in the health-science department—and perhaps in the state itself. The university offered largely unfettered opportunity to restless young faculty members from throughout the nation who saw in the open valleys and mountains of Utah a place where they could test themselves without the restraints imposed by more settled places. Ambitious people—often mavericks held back by practices at other institutions—found comfort and support at the University of Utah, even though the state politics have recently become decidedly conservative. That openness to innovation was an exciting discovery. We sensed an opportunity to write our own future, particularly at a time when the world of health science and care was exploding. That explosion impacted bench and clinical science and started after World War II with the establishment of the National Institutes of

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Health (NIH). There was also a shift in the nature of health delivery and the role that a medical-school faculty would play in it. As for the Petersons, the move was easy and the welcome gracious from old friends, as well as a fresh batch of new ones within the university community. Working with President Gardner, the man who had hired me, was an additional pleasure. He was bright, skilled in university administration, and not prone to hold the reins too tightly; most importantly, he was someone with whom an honest and open conversation could deal with any problem or opportunity. The University of Utah Medical School

Like visiting Stanford when I needed to learn about academic fund-raising, I went to see Max Wintrobe, now in semiretirement, about academic medicine. Wintrobe, deservedly, is the University of Utah School of Medicine in the minds and memories of many and will certainly be acknowledged forever as the intellectual founder of the modern institution. In the mid-1940s, Wintrobe had established himself as a leading hematologist, textbook author, and junior professor at Johns Hopkins, where it was said he felt that he had hit a glass ceiling of anti-Semitism at that otherwise-great medical center. A copy of his text, Clinical Hematology, still rests on my bookshelf within arm’s reach. It is quite likely that both Max Wintrobe and Brigham Young—along with their admirers—would be startled to see their names in the same sentence. Yet they shared a toughness that they brought to Utah, and each was the central figure in the flowering of their respective callings. Each of them fled bigotry and was able to see promise in Utah. For Wintrobe the University of Utah, while limited in its capacity to support medical education and research financially, nevertheless was a place with unlimited opportunity—a new Zion as it were—open to a Jew or anyone else smart and hardworking enough to take advantage of possibilities. As chief of the Department of Internal Medicine, he brought with him a critical mass of respected young medical investigators. Even more importantly, he brought a personal level of excellence that was infectious and launched Utah toward the upper ranks of medical schools and centers. As for Brigham Young, he fled more than academic bigotry. He and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints fled physical harm from mobs in Missouri and Illinois. He had no prospects of finding a new Eden but settled for a barren basin adjacent to a lake as salty as the Dead Sea from biblical history. With the confidence of faith and the capacity for sacrifice and hard work, the Mormons

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pioneered an entire region and created a society that truly caused “the desert to bloom as a rose.” If Wintrobe had any reason to worry about anti-Semitism, it is not strange that he found a home in Utah. In 1916 Utah elected the second Jewish governor in the United States, Simon Bamberger. Governor Bamberger was widely admired. In the waning months of his term, he called the Utah Legislature into special session to ratify the national women’s suffrage amendment. Like Wintrobe, Joe Rosenblatt, a leading member of Utah’s business, political, and cultural community, found the same freedom from the anti-Semitism his father and grandparents had experienced in Russia to excel in business and civic life. I had been Rosenblatt’s physician in Salt Lake and learned of the decision his father, Nathan, and Nathan’s parents had made when their son faced conscription into the czar’s army in Russia in the late nineteenth century. The family sensed there was a palpable risk that a young Jewish boy in the czar’s army would be killed by Cossacks if not by opposing armies. Like another version of the Irish “Danny Boy,” Nathan and his parents said good-bye when Nathan left for America, knowing they would almost certainly never see each other again. Nathan stopped briefly in New York, then in Denver, where he learned of the Mormons in Utah who had suffered much of the same discrimination based on race or religion as his family had in Russia. He moved on to Utah with the feeling that maybe one oppressed group might understand another. At about the same time, the Abravanel family moved from Spain to Greece to escape Jewish persecution before coming to America. A  son, Maurice, later dropped into Utah to pick up a fledgling symphony that had started during the WPA days of the Depression. Within a decade, he had made the Utah Symphony into a great orchestra, almost world class in some opinions. Abravanel led the symphony for more than three decades while becoming a valued member of the Utah community as well as a faculty member with the Boston Symphony at its summer home at Tanglewood in the Berkshires. Brigham Young had much of the same clarity of thought, loftiness of expectation, resilience, and determination when he arrived on the west slope of the Wasatch Mountains one hundred years before Wintrobe, Rosenblatt, and Abravanel. In their times, their communities each loved and respected them, and in the case of Young and Wintrobe, might have feared them a bit while they took advantage of all the freedom the place and the times provided. Wintrobe, Rosenblatt, Abravanel, and Young found freedom not only from religious bigotry but from the restriction of being told what couldn’t be done. These four giants were typical of a culture that clearly attracted the maverick and

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the restless and provided fertile soil for facing problems with a fresh and optimistic attitude. It is likely that the relative isolation of Utah also provided an unusual degree of freedom to innovate, an intellectual Plymouth Rock, if you will, two thousand miles west of Boston. Then and still. On a smaller scale, two other children of pioneers—Phebe Nebeker and E.  G.  Peterson—had possessed the same broad and optimistic view of problems and turned them into opportunity. At the University of Utah, Max Wintrobe had a large degree of freedom, a bench space for his laboratory, patients, and time to pursue his science and teaching. He received the very first grant awarded by the NIH just as the institute was beginning to bloom in postwar America. In fact, the grant-awarding system was so new that the NIH asked Wintrobe to return a portion of his funding to allow it to set up a review and allocation system for grants to follow. As a result, Wintrobe’s grant shifted from grant number one to number two, but it was still the first grant in the nation to an institution. On the side, Wintrobe continued to author a respected textbook in hematology, which is still widely used. Federal funding of university-based scientific research was to become the heart of a scientific medical revolution and established the United States as the unchallenged world leader in biomedical research. The growing role of federal funding started the University of Utah down the road to becoming one of the strong branch campuses of what I like to call the University of the United States. Wintrobe possessed a personal and intellectual toughness that instantly influenced the University of Utah and continues to this day. With rising academic standards came a bruising teaching style that was characteristic of many medicaldepartment chairs in that era. It produced a generation of well-educated students, some of whom I am told still suffer from an occasional nightmare recalling the pressure of presenting a case to meet Wintrobe’s stern standards. Wintrobe’s toughness had its roots in the midphase of medical science and education where he found himself. A decade earlier, there had been little science to know in medicine. Effective therapy was scant. In fact, Brigham Young and Max Wintrobe were both medical iconoclasts. Brigham Young remembered that his brother had died from taking an unproven medicine and had little use for the medical care of the times. Wintrobe had little patience for unproven practices in general. Evolution

By the mid-twentieth century, medical science was awakening. In the 1940s, we had only sulfa, penicillin, and erythromycin for infections, the low-salt Duke diet for hypertension, and a scattering of other medicines. A smart chief of medicine in the

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1950s—just before medical science exploded—could in fact know just about everything that related to his field. Students of such chiefs faced a challenging opportunity. When I returned to Utah, medical schools were seeking to evolve to cope with new circumstances in delivering medical care as well as understanding the underlying science. Teaching was ill supported by the state legislature. Faculty members found themselves subsidizing a large portion of the cost of teaching from grants associated with their research and fees from patient care. Before this time, the University of Utah medical faculty had accepted patients only on referral from community doctors. As you can imagine, there was a considerable gulf between these community doctors and the ivory tower inhabited by faculty physicians. Yet the university hospital that served as the teaching and clinical-research hub also had to run on a break-even or profitable basis or risk having to seek ever-larger legislative appropriations for working capital. Such appropriations inevitably ran the risk of being subtracted from money allocated to the whole university as its share of state taxes. Managed health systems—HMOs—were just beginning to enroll large numbers of the patient population nationwide. The referrals from these organizations were limited to community hospitals that had joined their systems. University Hospital was in danger of exclusion from much of that patient base. In the 1970s and ’80s, there was a rush nationally to sell university hospitals to for-profit hospital chains on the assumption that smarter management and expense control would result from greater corporate size and experience and protect the sponsoring university from the risk of red ink. Yet it seemed doubtful that a university hospital’s twin missions of teaching and research could hold their own in the bottom-line operation of a for-profit system. In this climate, we set out to bring the University of Utah hospital and faculty into a new era. It was no small task. But the hospital administration soon met the challenge of getting its budget into the black without sacrificing its academic role. Dealing with the faculty was more complicated. The challenge was to provide a larger incentive so that faculty members who were interested and skilled in patient care would join and stay with our academic program. Up until then, promotion and retention had been heavily—almost singularly—dependent on research. We would not remain an academic medical center if we changed that very much. We needed to see if a parallel track could offer collegial respect for superb clinicians who were also outstanding in teaching and patient care but less interested in research. We needed these clinicians to care for the number of patients that would maintain a profitable hospital and in turn sustain a base for teaching and research.

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When I discussed these matters with Wintrobe, he was gracious but found it quite foreign to imagine complementary emphasis on faculty clinical care. “Our faculty are chosen for skill in medical research and promoted for their record in such. We will see some patients on referral, but it is up to someone or something else to fill the hospital” was his attitude. But we could not hire “Hessian mercenary” physicians to run our hospital and expect them to maintain their pride as secondclass university citizens. This notion certainly did not fit the world that Wintrobe had so wonderfully brought to the university. The challenge was to preserve and expand academic excellence while somehow accommodating a new imperative. It worked out. We were able to get faculty and university support for a parallel clinical track using patient care and teaching performance as the major criteria for job retention and promotion. That track did not need to include tenure, thereby preserving the university’s unique commitment to the importance of research. Physicians with outstanding clinical experience did not need tenure, for their skills would transfer easily to a private setting if they chose to leave the university. We were able to develop a cadre of clinical faculty who earned the respect of their colleagues. They provided some of our best teaching, often had an interest in clinical research, kept our hospital financially viable, and offered a valued patient referral service to a large area of western America. We were even approached by the Swedish government to see if we would accept its patients for heart transplants. The Swedes calculated that we could do it as well or better than they could at a lower cost, even including transportation. I suppose such offers now go to India at an even lower cost. Polygamy, Genetics, and Epidemiology

A Mormon pioneer arrived in Utah with his family in 1847. He died in his eighties. His sons died in their sixties. His grandsons died in their fifties and forties. They all apparently died from coronary-artery heart disease. If the premature heart disease was hereditary, why did it become progressively more severe through several generations? The university set out to study hundreds of the descendents of that original pioneer family. It was clear that they carried a hereditary defect in cholesterol metabolism that was at the crossroads of nature and nurture, influenced by both genetic inheritance and lifestyle habits, especially diet and exercise. A member of our faculty, Dr. Roger Williams, set up a cardiovascular genetics-research program to study families such as this one.

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The conclusion was that the pioneer grandfather lived a Spartan life, working his farm for fourteen-hour days or more, eating produce from his garden, and walking or riding his horse wherever he went. In other words, his diet and lifestyle compensated for his genetic abnormality in cholesterol metabolism. When he passed his genes to his children and they began to live a life with less exercise and more fat calories, the defect in metabolism emerged. By the time the next generations reached maturity, they were well on their way to premature heart disease and died in their forties. Williams was able to reverse much of the disease process by prescribing a return to the exercise and diet habits of the original pioneer and, when necessary, added cholesterol-management medication. Such genetic studies could be done in Utah very efficiently. For ecclesiastic purposes, the LDS Church promoted research into family lineage. Thousands of families had records of their ancestors going back hundreds of years. These kinship records provided a rich source of genetic information on the past and for the future. But would living family members be comfortable making their histories public? Mark Skulnick joined our faculty in the departments of biology and what came to be called informatics in the 1970s. He had been educated at Berkeley and Stanford in genetics, economics, and statistics and was a research fellow and later professor at the University of Parma. His early research involved constructing and analyzing the genetic background of the population of Parma Valley, Italy. He found out quickly that the University of Utah and the state as a whole had an intellectual and social interest in genetics and a willingness to cooperate with a research program. Skulnick described going to a family reunion in a Salt Lake City park and speaking to one or two hundred people (!) on the importance of genetic research, pointing out that it was important for them and others. To his delight, he found—almost instantly—hundreds of sleeves rolled up, ready to give a blood sample. This allowed the study of large kinships, clinically and biochemically, to correlate with the genealogy. Skulnick was quick to smile at the success of an outsider like himself, able to speak to a reunion of an extended LDS family in Utah and walk away with a hundred tubes of blood. The existence of polygamy in the first two or three generations of early Mormon families proved an additional boon to genetic research, for when a man’s offspring came from more than one wife, the genetic pathway of father versus mother was instantly distinguishable. These kinship records had the potential to be a unique strength for the University of Utah’s new work in genetics. However, there was a red flag. The Nazis had used genealogical information to identify the Jewish population in Europe with

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the Holocaust as a result. Could our studies ever have an unintended consequence? Could the records be misused? The LDS Church wanted to cooperate but needed a guarantee that there would be no misuse. Apart from the horror of the Holocaust, there loomed the threat of new microdiscrimination based on a person’s genetic profile in obtaining health insurance, employment, and even marriage. It took some time and imaginative computer programming to satisfy both the LDS Church and the university and also assure the donors of records that personal anonymity could be protected while studying kinships. This effort has uniquely supported genetic research for thirty years and spun off successful companies. When tied to laboratory biochemical and genetic research, the access to kinship records available through the members of the LDS Church has grown to be an international resource. Wintrobe himself had pioneered early studies of hereditary muscular dystrophies called hemochromatosis, a genetically transmitted iron-storage disease, and so it was a logical next step for the university to enter the new world of broadbased genetic microbiology. We had a small group of doctors and wanted to expand into a full department. A number of able professors were on board, but they needed and wanted department status. For two years, we sought to recruit a chair, looking at only the very best candidates, but in the end, we were never able to consummate an employment contract with a leader of the quality we expected. Finally, two of our best geneticists, the Rays—as Ray White and Ray Gesteland were affectionately called—recruited from MIT and Harvard, came to a decision. They volunteered to be co-chairs of a new department long enough to get it launched. Neither of them was eager to spend time on administration, which would take time away from their splendid personal research. But they saw the potential of genetics at Utah and didn’t want to wait any longer. Therein began a wonderful story. A  local philanthropist, Tom Dee, stepped up and endowed the first chair in genetics. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute was already funding a small number of Hughes fellows on our faculty and set the stage for a next large step in the decade to come. Roger Williams didn’t live to enjoy all the fruits of his early work. En route to make a presentation at a European research meeting, he died in an airplane crash off the coast of Canada. Of some comfort is the knowledge that he knew uniquely that he had passed his indestructible genes to his bright offspring. The work Ray White, Ray Gesteland, and Mark Skulnick pioneered—with others in related departments—has been commercialized successfully in a company

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in Research Park called Myriad Genetics. One of its first successful products is a clinical test for early detection of a gene associated with hereditary breast cancer. Nursing

It is understandable that the overdue emergence of feminism also played out within the walls of our College of Nursing. It had been a traditional college promoting the image of starched uniforms and subordination to doctors when men were doctors and nurses were women. Not so after the 1960s. The nursing dean in that era was a strong-willed woman who felt the need to separate the two professions so that nursing could achieve appropriate autonomy. There was nothing wrong with that attitude, but there was no way to separate it from proper medical and nursing care of the sick. The issue had become heated before I arrived to the point where our nursing students were not being taught within University Hospital. Instead, they were assigned to a number of community hospitals. When we—like other centers—opened up admission of qualified women to medical school and qualified men to nursing school, gender separation softened. The gap between nurse and physician began to close. Nurses took more responsibility for using their skills to benefit patients. The best doctors had always known how to tap the nurses’ intimate knowledge about patients to provide the best overall treatment and worked even more efficiently with highly trained nurses. A healthy symbiosis that benefited both the profession and the patient steadily emerged and became acknowledged more widely and openly. The education of nurse practitioners and midwives soon followed, and they have filled an important niche in patient care. “Why Are Men the Only People Who Can Pray Around Here?”

About the time I was settling into my role of vice president for health sciences at the university, the growing threat of nuclear war had assumed alarming proportions. Addressing the threat to the biologic foundation of humankind posed a special challenge to medical professionals. In Utah we had some experience with atomic-bomb testing in nearby Nevada because our citizens happened to be downwind. Whole herds of sheep died from radioactivity in the weeks after such testing, and many ewes suffered miscarriages. It took years after the event for sheep ranchers finally to be able to prove the connection between their losses and the testing. What risk was there to humans? Epidemiologic studies at the university by Professor  J. Lynn Lyon provided early evidence that the risk was considerable,

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especially in fallout containing radioactive iodine that moved from grazing grasses to cows to milk to children’s thyroids. As happens so often, the government did not cooperate in providing the data it had, often hiding behind national security. In  this context, it is easy to understand the growing concern of knowledgeable physicians when told by the federal government that all citizens needed was a shovel to dig a shallow pit and a door slab of wood to cover it to provide a few days’ protection from radioactive fallout, allowing citizens to resume normal living after an atomic attack. An organization called Physicians for Social Responsibility, which I had worked with in Boston, took up the challenge to educate the citizenry to the full medical hazards of a nuclear war. We decided to schedule a workshop on the University of Utah campus. It was a pleasure to bring in outside experts, including my old chief of medicine from Yale, Paul Beeson, now retired in Washington state. With the support of many civic leaders, we looked to radio, television, newspapers, and civic organizations to advertise the workshop. The goal was not to advance pacifism by suggesting that we unilaterally dispose of our nuclear stockpiles, nor did the workshop have any political agenda. We wondered how many people would come. Two to three thousand did and stayed for the two days of the program. I chaired the first session and had arranged for a thoughtful and articulate member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the LDS Church, Neal Maxwell, to give an opening prayer and by his presence provide an informal endorsement by the church. His prayer was eloquent and appropriate. After he had finished and sat down, a voice rang out from the semidarkness of the upper rows of seats in the auditorium. “Why are men the only people who can pray around here?” I called back, “Come down here right now; we need all the prayers we can get.” A young woman came down, prayed well, and the meeting proceeded. The first order of business was getting rid of any complacency about the medical effects of nuclear war.1 In the context of later failures in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, the assurances and instructions that came from a representative from the state office of emergency care (FEMA) take on ominous significance. At the start of the meeting, a FEMA representative told us outright that in the event of a nuclear attack, we would be notified to evacuate Salt Lake City. Those who lived in the southern half of the city (at that time, 250,000 people!) were to drive on I-80 to Tooele in the west desert. Those in the northern half were to drive north on I-15 to Box Elder County. We were then supposed to wait there to receive further instructions.

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I am quite sure that my memory of his advice is accurate. The image of unnumbered multitude of cars inevitably breaking down on the turnpike, precipitating a multi-thousand-car traffic jam, is not easy to forget. Furthermore, what lag might there be between discovering an attack, confirming it, and getting information to the public? It is difficult to know for sure what good the workshop did. Nevertheless, it may have helped the state successfully lobby a few months later against placing mobile nuclear-launching platforms, called MXs, on railroad cars in the west Utah and Nevada desert, designed to move daily to avoid direct hits from Russian missiles. Alerting the community to the insufficiency of FEMA planning seems more important now even than it did then in light of the lapses of Katrina flood planning in 2005 and the same naïve instruction for everyone to drive a single turnpike to safety, resulting in predictable breakdowns and traffic jams. Coopetition

The center for pediatric care in Utah was the Primary Children’s Hospital. It was owned by Intermountain Healthcare (IHC), an organization that had been set up a decade or two earlier to absorb—cost free—the hospitals owned and run by the LDS Church. While many churches had historically been involved in health care, the complexity of continuing had become overwhelming. IHC had done an excellent job of assuming the major role in hospital care in the intermountain region. It had, in fact, become the major rival to University Hospital in providing patient care. There were enough patients to go around, but rivalry and jealousy between these two major health-care players were inevitable. I had become a member of the voluntary community board of IHC soon after I returned to Utah. Scott Parker was the founding CEO of IHC, and he became a good friend. We both acknowledged that we had some conflict of interest because of our primary responsibilities. However, the issue was always out in the open, and we felt we could improve health care in Utah. A year or two after I joined the board, IHC decided that the old Primary Children’s Hospital was outdated. Plans were drawn for a new hospital building. The University of Utah pediatric faculty constituted the majority—if not all—of the staff of Primary Children’s, and our own pediatric services in University Hospital were minimal. Our faculty benefited from the patient base the hospital provided, and the hospital gained a staff that was the highest quality for both patient care and research. The original hospital was located about two miles from the medical school, which hindered easy movement back and forth.

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IHC wanted to construct the new hospital on the site of the old one. It seemed to me that this was a golden opportunity to build the new pediatric hospital immediately adjacent to our medical school to combine patient care, research, and teaching while benefiting everyone. We had space available adjacent to University Hospital; parking, roads, and utilities were all in place. I proposed that the university provide IHC with a long-term, renewable lease for land on which to build the new pediatric hospital. Coopetition is a word I learned from Ray Noorda, the founder of Novell computer company, a pioneer in coordinating disparate software systems. Coopetition suggested simultaneous cooperation and competition, each in its appropriate realm. However, it proved to be as difficult to accommodate as it was to spell. Except for Scott Parker and a few others, most of the IHC board and staff were resistant to the idea. They felt the university would “swallow up IHC.” When I took the proposal to the university and its hospital, many people there were equally worried that IHC would somehow “swallow up the university.” Yet close physical alignment—with managerial autonomy for IHC and even more efficient university faculty medical staffing—had the promise of providing the university, IHC, and Utah children with a top-ranking pediatric hospital. However, the IHC Board discussed the proposal at length and voted it down. Every few months Scott Parker and I raised the proposal again, providing new evidence and arguments for bilateral institutional safeguards, economy of scale and location, and mutual contribution to excellence in patient care, teaching, and research. “What was best for the children” became the motto. I cannot remember how long it took—more than a year certainly—to get a vote of tentative approval from the IHC board. We then presented the proposal to the university board and statewide Board of Regents to establish a working committee to formulate the details. The committee met and seemed to come up with impediments as often as they cleared the way. The final meeting of a joint working committee lingers in my mind because of an unintended, one-way, colorful exchange between two committee members, one representing each side. The university member, exasperated with the lack of progress, went to the men’s room with a colleague. There he spit out a string of expletives against a particular IHC member for what he thought was plain stubbornness, listing a rich menu of human frailties to go with it. The IHC committee member happened to be in one of the stalls—unseen but listening. They were both friends of mine, and I learned later that my IHC friend silently boiled with understandable outrage but full attention. The two came back to the meeting: one not knowing he had been overheard, the other in the beginning stages of contrition.

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The exchange apparently was a sobering experience. Within a short time, impasses were surmounted and an agreement reached. The story doesn’t end there. We took the agreement to our lawyer, the Utah attorney general. We asked him to review the proposal for any issues of antitrust since IHC and the University of Utah were the major players on the Utah health scene. A few helpful suggestions were made, and we adopted all of them. I resigned from the IHC board to eliminate that possible concern. The regents, legislature, and governor all signed on, and we had a ground breaking. Within a few months, we were abruptly served with an antitrust violation and asked for pounds and pounds of documents detailing our respective patient loads. The matter got bigger and bigger. The U.S.  attorney general’s office got involved. I met with the Utah attorney general and reviewed our previous requests for antitrust advice, pointing out that we had accepted every suggestion his office had given us. He agreed that the issue was overblown and promised that his office would back off and he would go to Washington to get the federal office to do the same. When he tried to do so, the federal office ignored his suggestion and, in fact, took control of the case. We went through another year or two of study and investigation. It cost more than five million dollars to respond to all the legal requests we received. When the case was settled, no antitrust violations were found, but we had to agree that in the future, we would “do nothing wrong.” Having tried to live that way in the past, we were quite willing to promise to do no wrong in the future as well. The new hospital has been a great success for patients, for IHC, for our faculty, and for research. IHC gave me an embossed brick to celebrate, and I learned that as a last resort—if well scripted—a one-way restroom conversation in vivid Anglo-Saxon English has the power to break up an impasse. Somewhat comparable language had seemed to help my father decades earlier in a box factory and on a golf course. Seventy Pounds of Diamonds

The shah of Iran was deposed in January of 1979. The events of the shah’s departure and exile from Iran were widely covered in the news. Reports attached special interest to what was to become of the presumed great wealth of the shah and his family. Stories described vast fortunes in Swiss banks and said that the traditional privacy of these accounts might be breached because of the great notoriety of the Iranian revolution. The phone rang at my home on Arlington Drive in Salt Lake. The caller was the same young Iranian man who had come to my door years earlier with an interest in Harvard Law School.

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“Dr. Peterson, do you remember me?” “Yes I do.” “My uncle [the former minister of court] asked me to contact you. He said that you impressed him as someone the family could trust. As you may have heard, there is fear that our family assets may be in danger of confiscation if they stay in Swiss banks. My uncle wanted me to ask if you would serve as trustee for these assets in the event he transferred them to a Utah bank.” I listened with interest; I had no experience in transcontinental financial transactions, but I realized the implications of his story. The young man went on to describe the way—in the name of his family—he would transfer the assets to a bank I chose in my name as trustee. He said he would call me the next day to see if I thought I could assist his family. That call came through on schedule. In addition to the two or three billion dollars, he asked if I could provide safekeeping for some precious antique Persian rugs. “How many of them might there be?” I asked. He answered, “A pile about ten feet high.” Yes, I could find safe storage for them. Then he asked if I could also safeguard diamonds the family had accumulated over the years—about seventy pounds of them. After hanging up, I calculated how many karats there were in a pound of diamonds. It was a sizable amount. He said he would call again to notify me of the date of transfer. What was I to think? The story was preposterous. Why would the Iranian family choose me to be its trustee? Of course, my ego might tempt me to think that my honesty and integrity were exemplary. For decades there had been close ties between Utah and Iranians, who were drawn to the state for education and perhaps due to a similar geography. Apart from my own brief experience in Iran, a member of the royal family had been educated in Utah a decade or two before, and many others had followed. Before I dismissed the idea, I decided to call a man I had met at Chase Manhattan Bank while working on Harvard business with David Rockefeller. I remembered that the bank had served the shah in the past. The man I called was a special assistant to Mr. Rockefeller. He heard me out. I asked him if this was nonsense. He paused, then said he knew the family, and advised me not to dismiss the matter hastily. I met with a major bank president locally, and he took the proposal seriously and was prepared to accept the funds. We set up a special account with a private code access with me as trustee. It helped that the local bank president had once met the shah. The next call was supposed to prepare me for the transaction the following day via the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, but nothing happened. The day after,

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I received a second call, apologizing for the delay and asking me to call a number in Switzerland to get instructions about the way to accept the assets. I made the call, spoke to someone, and received a number of instructions along with the promise that the funds would arrive within the next two days. The final call came a day later: “Dr. Peterson, I am so embarrassed by the delay and the trouble we have caused you. The shipment should arrive as promised by my Swiss agent within the week. The delay has embarrassed me personally. I have recently purchased a home in suburban Boston and had planned to make the down payment from funds we are transferring to your trust. Could you possibly advance fifty thousand dollars? I will be able to repay you just as soon as the funds arrive.” I don’t remember how long I paused before answering—long enough to sigh and smile. I said, “I will certainly try to help you. I should be able to transfer the money to you the same day it arrives in the account I have prepared to receive it.” Not surprisingly, the money, the rugs, and the diamonds never came. The story still tickles my memory. Had a worldly wise executive in the Chase banking empire not advised against ignoring the request, I suppose I would not have pursued the matter as far as I did. It also turned out to be part egotism to give it any credence. Yet luckily I was not harmed. The situation provided an experience—real or faux—that stretched across oceans and continents. It left me with a fantasy notch in my holster belt, as it were, proof that I could handle myself in a large world and that ultimately clear thinking was enough to protect me as I swam with the sharks. I am quite sure the young man was not speaking for anyone in his family and certainly not for the shah. He may not even have been the nephew of the ex-minister of court. I remember the story still with some twisted fondness for an exposure to Middle Eastern vagaries and a forewarning of the Nigerian computer e‑mail scams that blossomed in the late 1990s. “Will I Still Love You?”

Back to medicine. Clinical research is generally a lonely process. An  idea takes shape. A hypothesis is developed to test the idea. If preliminary studies suggest merit to the hypothesis, the safety to patients is reviewed, and support for the cost of the research is sought from NIH or other funding agencies. A review committee of peers evaluates the proposal in competition with other projects in the same scientific area. The importance of the idea, the budget required for funding the work, and the ethical propriety of the project are all subject to review.

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In the case of new medical devices, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) undertakes a separate review to ensure that the device will accomplish what it is designed to do reliably and safely. Thereafter, the experiment is planned and the work begins. Normally the project proceeds in the private isolation of a laboratory. At the conclusion of the experiment, the results are reviewed and reported in the medical literature, be they positive, mixed, or negative. Willem Kolff was a Dutchman who loved to repeat a simple phrase from William of Orange. To paraphrase, when faced with the prospects of overwhelming odds and defeat, I will redouble my effort. This stern dictum served Kolff well when he struggled and succeeded in building the world’s first artificial kidney in German-occupied Holland. After World War II, Kolff came to the Cleveland Clinic to refine and continue his work. His project prospered to the point that he felt that his laboratory and grants were too large to be accommodated within the clinic. His kidney-dialysis patients numbered into the hundreds. Finally, he decided to come to the University of Utah to join both the medicine and bioengineering faculties. He was another Utah maverick, cut from the same cloth as Max Wintrobe. His interest in artificial organs was broad at first but soon focused on the heart. Months and years passed as he tried different materials and designs. By the early 1980s, Kolff and his staff had implanted more than a hundred artificial hearts in sheep and cows, whose size and physiology compared closely to humans. Different models of artificial hearts pumped in the absence of the animals’ original ones for progressively longer periods of time. Kolff was never passive or easily accommodated within any academic system. He was a true individual. I once suggested that attempting to deal with Dr. Kolff was like managing an avalanche. But his brilliance and energy were well worth it. In the spring of 1982, Kolff ’s results satisfied the FDA, and approval was granted for the implantation of an artificial heart in a human. The criteria for selection of the first patient were clear. The person had to be near death, without the prospect of help from any known therapy. At the same time, the patient had to be healthy enough to survive the implantation process and have some chance of recovery. Understandably the surgeon and research team wanted to find just the right person: sick enough to qualify, healthy enough to favor recovery. Rumors about the upcoming experimental surgery and implantation quite naturally began to circulate around the medical school. What patient would be chosen, and when would the surgery take place? I had no direct involvement in the project until my interest was piqued when I heard that the chief surgeon, Dr.  William DeVries—while doing a routine operation—received a phone call

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from South America. He took the call with a sterile towel covering the phone. The caller was a cardiac surgeon who had a patient who might qualify for the first heart implantation. DeVries finished the surgery, dressed, and went down to the hospital cafeteria for lunch. One of the food servers leaned over and asked him, “Are you going to take that patient from Bolivia?” The hospital appeared to be wired for the event, and growing media inquiry only confirmed that we should prepare for something more than just another lab experiment. I spoke with the vice president for research, Jim Brophy. We decided to call a meeting of all the individuals who would participate in the first implantation. This list started with DeVries and his associates, Dr. Don Olsen and the research team who would handle the external pump, the nursing service, security, public relations, hospital administration, and janitorial services, among others. The list was long. Between twenty and thirty people showed up for the meeting. We sat in a circle, and I asked each group to realize that we had to be ready for monitoring— likely intense—by the press and other media. Would the assembled groups tell us what they thought would be their responsibility during and after surgery, whether they felt prepared to do that job, and their opinion—after hearing what others had to say—about the readiness of the other groups? The surgeons spoke first, followed by the research team; each group was confident that its members were fully prepared and ready for any emergency. Then the chief nurse, Linda Gianelli, spoke; her responsibility was the surgical intensivecare ward. She said, “No, we are not prepared. We don’t know how to run the pump.” The men of the surgical and research teams spoke up quickly, perhaps with some condescension, “Oh, don’t worry; we will take care of the pump.” Linda’s quick response was “like hell you will; you may be off the floor or in the john when the pump malfunctions, and my nurses will be responsible and unable to respond. I don’t want that patient in my care unless we can manage the pump in an emergency.” The other groups made their reports, and by the time they were all finished, the die was cast. We had to be prepared for unusual public scrutiny of what likely could not be conducted as a routine medical experiment in the quiet of some sequestered laboratory. I suggested—and we all agreed—that the nurses should be trained before we took a patient and we should meet again in a month to see where we stood on that issue and others that had been raised. Three or four months later, on a snowy day on the second of December, 1982, Dr. Barney Clark was flown down from Seattle, where he had practiced dentistry

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until he’d developed irreversible heart failure from a deterioration of his heart muscle called cardiomyopathy. He had visited earlier—even before the FDA approval—on the recommendation of his cardiologist in Seattle. He and his wife were alert, knew what the experiment would involve, and were aware that he might not survive. DeVries had planned the surgery for the following day but moved it forward to that evening when Clark’s clinical state began to worsen. In our earlier planning meeting, we had anticipated that the media interest might be enormous and we would face leaking of inaccurate information if we failed to give accurate, honest, and regular briefings. In fact, more than a hundred print, radio, and television reporters showed up and set up camp—120, as I remember! They came from newspapers—from Der Stern in Germany to the New York Times—and from all the national TV networks. Without knowing exactly how we could shield ourselves from this onslaught, which was even larger than we had expected, we decided that we had to provide correct and timely information if we were to head off wild journalism. Our public-relations staff and the rest of the assembled teams asked me to conduct the first news conferences to free the physicians to care for the patient. My credentials for this novel job appeared to be my medical degree and my ability to speak for the university. Memories of making presentations to Dr. David Seegal might have helped. That first news conference turned into daily and sometimes even twice-daily reports to the assembled media. Clark’s status was rocky from the start, with his kidney and pulmonary systems already compromised by months of severe heart failure. The pump had its problems but ultimately worked as it had in the hundredodd cows and sheep before him. The rest is history. A flurry of issues was immediately raised by the media and by ethicists, cardiologists, medical economists, theologians, and everyone’s nextdoor neighbors. This is not the place to discuss them. A full analysis is contained in a monograph, After Barney Clark: Reflections on the Utah Artificial Heart Program, published by the University of Texas Press a year after Clark’s demise and edited by Margery W. Shaw. Put simply, would Clark’s life be worthwhile if he was tethered to the external pump for the rest of his days? If the procedure was successful and the artificial heart became entirely implantable, could society afford to give every person one before his or her natural heart gave out? Should research even be allowed on such a device when—like a genie out of the lamp or the opening of Pandora’s box—it could be difficult to limit its use in the face of public demand if it proved effective? Would its availability bankrupt medical care?

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Imagine the tangled discussion about those issues. If a scientific invention ran the risk of becoming so popular that its use could bankrupt the health-care system, when should work on it be stopped? In the third grade, when some schoolboy or girl had an idea? In a high-school science class? The conclusion I came to was that the human mind can never be stopped, and we owners of such minds had better learn how to live with our miracles, rather than trying to ban this thinking in its infancy. I was particularly concerned about our decision to be open and frank about the day-by-day progress of the patient and the experiment to a degree never before experienced in medical research. Would our colleagues accuse us of grandstanding and overhyping the event on our campus? I also had a personal concern, having come to know and respect Dr. Arnold Relman, the editor of ἀe New England Journal of Medicine from my days in Boston. Dr. Relman was a strong advocate of peer review and publication of all medical research before results were released to the mainstream press and the public. His concern was based on the obligation of the profession to protect the public from ill-founded and unproved scientific theories. It is a valid and important point. Did our decision to respond to public and media interest violate that process? In some ways, it did, but given a level of interest that could not be told to go home and wait for publication sometime in the next year, was not the public at risk for getting even more inaccurate information from side-door media probing? I exchanged letters with Relman a few months later, and he was gracious enough to express his concern and also his conclusion that we had done about as well as we could, given the unusual circumstances and worldwide fascination. Dr. Larry Altman, distinguished medical writer for the New York Times, stayed in Salt Lake City for the full 112 days of Clark’s postoperative life and was generous in support of what he called our precedent-breaking and -making decision to report the daily progress of a medical experiment. Our concern for media snooping was confirmed when we learned that one of the foreign magazines had paid a janitor for the waste material from Clark’s bedside, hoping to find something photogenic, however unsanitary. Another magazine had offered one of the surgical team fifteen thousand dollars if he could provide a picture of Barney Clark with his doctors and the pump. The doctors refused to be photographed. “Dr. Peterson, how do you explain the enormous public interest in Dr. Clark and the artificial heart?” Susan Stamberg of National Public Radio was on the telephone. I was certainly surprised at the magnitude and was not sure myself of the reason. It seemed to have something to do with historic and literary ideas about what the heart was. I suggested that for millennia we have used phrases like “the

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heart of the matter,” and “I love you with all my heart,” and “my heart says yes, but my mind says no,” and “Do you have the heart for the . . . ?” and “Cupid’s bow and heart,” and “hearts and valentines” . . . the list is endless and seems to come from all cultures. In New Guinea cannibal society, the heart is reserved for the chief warrior. Until Clark no one in the history of humankind had ever lived, had thoughts, or spoken without a natural heart. Stamberg was intrigued by the poetic question, “Could love survive without a natural heart?” Later I learned from Clark’s wife, Una Loy, that on the evening before surgery, her husband had had the same question. She reported that Clark had said, “I wonder if I will still love you when I lose my heart.” He answered the question a few days post-op when—still reduced to whispering around a tracheotomy tube—he gestured to his wife and mouthed the words, “I love you.” The scalpel had met its match. Love required a functional pump, but its home was elsewhere. Barney Clark lived for 112 days before he died of massive multiorgan failure, consistent with his long-standing, presurgical, severe, congestive heart failure. Work continues internationally on a number of fully implantable artificial hearts together with clinically successful, implantable heart-assist devices. A few months after Clark’s death, university president David Gardner accepted the presidency of the University of California system. After a national search for a new president, the Board of Regents voted to ask me to take the job. As with earlier decisions, the factors foremost in our collective mind and spirit were whether Grethe and I had the skills, energy, and interest to do the job. Could I mobilize the support of the necessary faculty, community, governmental, and alumni components of the university? Would I find pleasure, challenge, and satisfaction in the job? Grethe and I never arrived at absolutely clear answers to those questions, but on balance, we figured we were ready to give the job our best effort.

11 University of Utah: “Why Did ἀ ey Make You President?”

One Sunday the university football coach asked me to interview a prospective recruit. I enjoyed interchanges with any student and was pleased to do so. I suppose the coach hoped the recruit might be impressed that he had visited the president. I remembered that Donna Shalala, while chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, spoke of her pleasure at trying her hand at throwing passes to willing prospects during football practice! The interview was quite dull. I tried my best to engage the young man in one subject after another with little success. I was about to conclude that he either did not have much imagination or was extremely shy. I started to get up, saying something like I hoped he had enjoyed his visit and wished him well in his choice of colleges. He looked me directly in the eye and asked, “Why did they make you president?” What a great question! “I get to work with smart faculty and young people who are smart and want to get smarter. Together we get to talk about important issues and why things happen. We get to develop new ideas—solve problems—and we get to invent new things. More than anything else, we get to understand a little better what makes you and me and the world tick. “It’s also a great pleasure to see young people like you grow up wiser and better. And sometimes we get to cheer from the sidelines when one of you does something really well in a class or a lab or on a football field. It also keeps my colleagues and me lively because every fall a new bunch of students show up, and they are always young, and it stretches the president and the faculty to try to keep up with them. Can you think of a better job than that?

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“There is always something new, something old worth preserving and passing on, and the chance of living on in the lives of people who share all the opportunities there are in life. A president also gets to work—just like the faculty does—on projects that can make a difference and last forever. Most people are so rushed that they don’t get to have a long view of things. The president also has the privilege— and every student has the same privilege—to learn how to work with people and understand those who grew up differently. You end up learning a lot from such people and receiving considerable satisfaction in the process. “Those processes have come to be memory, discovery, and nurturing. A university is a repository of the history of thought and discovery and plays a major role in preserving and transmitting it. A university, thus, is the cauldron for new ideas and discovery. And finally, a university is a place where people learn how to understand one another and communicate clearly.” I can’t be sure I said all of those things that Sunday morning, but I did say many of them, and they are the things I wanted to tell him and believe deeply. Worried about the young man’s plane departure, I started to say good-bye again when he asked, “What’s a Mormon?” It was another good topic to open up the vista of cultural education in a university, the advantages of learning about people who have different beliefs and the way someone reacts to them. If I had been deciding whether or not to go to Harvard years before in Boston, I might have asked, “What’s a Yankee?” He left and did make his plane. He chose to come to the University of Utah and turned out to be a good student and splendid athlete. A few years later, his little brother followed his example, although without running the gauntlet of an interview with the president. Some time later, I came across a book by Parker Palmer describing what he called a “learning circle.” Palmer tapped this circle when he wanted candid observations from people he knew and trusted. It apparently is an old Quaker tradition. Palmer had applied or been asked to be the president of a small eastern college but could not make up his mind. Question after question came to him from his circle until finally one person asked him directly and sternly, “Just why do you want to be a college president?” In an outburst of charming honesty, he blurted out, “I guess I want to get my name in the paper.” Considerable chuckling followed—including his own. Palmer felt that the question cleared away the froth and feathers and he had better have an answer that promised more staying power. So why did I take the job? Well, I’ll rest my case with Obert Tanner. He was a fulltime, lifelong professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and the founder of the O. C. Tanner Company, which became one of the leading recognition-jewelry

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companies in the world. He described a university as the “finest creation of society.” He really believed that and maintained a full schedule of teaching all through the years he was growing his successful business. Being generous of heart and mind and twenty years my senior, he became a big brother to me on my return from Boston. An alumnus who had taken Tanner’s freshman course in philosophy thirty or forty years earlier told me something simple and profound about Professor Tanner and the university. The student had an alert mind, and by November, he was beginning to question some of the material Tanner was presenting. He screwed up his courage and approached the professor after the class was breaking up. He proposed—with considerable timidity—a contrary view of the issue Tanner had raised that morning in class. With an excitement and joy he had never forgotten, the now-fifty-year-old alumnus recalled the moment. Tanner stopped walking, looked the freshman student directly in the eye, threw up his arms, and exclaimed, “Finally! That’s what I’ve been waiting for!” His view of the university is further illustrated by one of his major philanthropic actions. In the spring of 1978, during the last month or so of my stay at Harvard, I received a call from Sterling McMurrin, Tanner’s fellow professor of philosophy. McMurrin asked me if I would ask Harvard President Bok if he would be interested in being a trustee of a new lectureship that Obert Tanner was in the process of funding from the profits of his now-successful recognition-jewelry company. I was skeptical. Bok was a busy man, and his calendar was overflowing. Why should he be interested or willing to take on another trusteeship that—it turned out—involved an annual meeting to direct? I cannot remember what I said to McMurrin, or what Bok said when I passed the inquiry on to him. But five years later, after assuming the presidency of the University of Utah, I found myself chairing the meetings of the trustees of the lectureship—now in full operation—with Derek Bok a member in attendance. What had transpired? It turned out that Tanner had generously funded annual lectureships called the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at seven universities. The presidents of these institutions—Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, California (later housed at Berkeley), Clare Hall at Cambridge, Brasenose College at Oxford, and the founding host, Utah—had agreed to serve as trustees. Later, Yale and Princeton were added. The lectures had acquired central importance in the intellectual life of these institutions. The universities were chosen for their excellence, of course, and specifically because Tanner had studied at or had some contact with each of them. Yet I was still puzzled why busy presidents would be willing to

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take two or three days annually to oversee the lectureship. What was the force of Tanner’s magic? Sometime later, Don Kennedy, a Harvard classmate of mine, told me that when he assumed the presidency of Stanford, he called Bok and asked, “What is this Tanner lectureship thing? Do I have to go to another annual meeting?” Bok’s answer was, “No, you don’t have to go, but if you don’t, you will miss one of the most enjoyable meetings on your calendar for the year and also miss getting to know one of the most interesting men—Obert Tanner—you are apt to meet for some time.” The genius of Tanner’s plan in enlisting nine busy presidents eventually became clear. The annual meetings rotated to a campus of one of the participating institutions for two years and, on the third year, were scheduled at some noncampus beautiful corner of the Earth. The meetings covered the intellectual and financial status of the lectureship efficiently and then provided an afternoon and evening for the nine presidents to discuss things of interest to them, chaired by the host president. These meetings happened away from the press and offered a time when busy educational leaders could let their hair down and share the real experiences and problems and opportunities of their institutions—intellectual or mundane, lofty or practical. One president asked how his colleagues dealt with their food-service employees’ union! Another proposed that they discuss “how do we get out of our jobs when it is time to leave?” Generally more lofty topics were presented. A comfortable collegiality soon developed, and the presidential attendance was nearly 100 percent. Don Kennedy never missed a meeting. Lord Ashby, the vice chancellor of Clare Hall at Cambridge, was one of the founding trustees. Tanner had a Rolls Royce sedan he used occasionally, mostly as a plaything. After a trustee meeting at Utah, Lord Ashby and Sterling McMurrin decided to drive to southern Utah to see the scenic wonders of its national parks. Tanner offered to lend them his Rolls. Lord Ashby, an intellectual Englishman/ Australian, said he’d never driven a Rolls Royce and was pleased with the prospect of driving an English icon through the beauty of scenic Utah. En route their speed rose to something over the legal limit, and a Utah highway patrolman soon appeared in the rearview mirror, lights flashing. When he read Lord Ashby’s license, he said with his southern Utah accent, “Lord’s a funny first name.” When Ashby explained that “lord” was a title, all the patrolman could say was, “That’s still a funny way to call yourself.” Good old American egalitarianism. “What’s your real name?” Ashby, charmed by the moment, said “Eric” and then— noting the patrolman’s interest in the Rolls Royce—asked if he’d like to drive the car for a few miles. He did and tore up the ticket.

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So why is all this important? The university mission and that of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values is to transmit existing knowledge and generate new knowledge; nourish the humanities, arts, and sciences and the professions in good times; and serve as preservers of culture—like a modern jar of Dead Sea parchments—in dark times. The presidents and chancellors took that responsibility and the contribution the Tanner lectures made both seriously and collegially. Matters of Freedom and Balance

I was chagrined to hear from one member of the University of Utah’s Board of Regents Presidential Selection Committee about the actual vote of the regents who selected me. There were fifteen voting members, and the other finalist was president of an eastern public university. The final vote was eight to seven in my favor; apparently a number of regents had voted for the other candidate partly because he was not a Mormon. It was a historical fact that, like me, every one of the presidents since the founding of the university in 1850 had been an LDS Church member, including my immediate predecessor, David Gardner. The argument apparently was that while both Gardner and I were satisfactory, it was about time that the university broke out of the tradition suggesting that only a Mormon was acceptable. My informant even reported that the vote that had selected Gardner was the same eight-to-seven margin, with a similar voting philosophy. I can vouch for the honest reputation of the person who shared that scenario with me, but I never saw any written records of the proceedings of the selection committee, if any were kept, so the observation remains interesting hearsay. I remember talking with one of the Mormon regents who supposedly argued for a non-Mormon president, and he confirmed such a discussion. He added gracefully that he was pleased with my election, even if he had voted against me, and his frankness made it even easier for the two of us to work together. When I announced my intention to retire from the presidency after serving eight years, I remember hearing that one faculty member asked openly in a senate meeting if a statute of the university or state of Utah would have to be changed to allow the appointment of a non-LDS president! Obviously, there was no such statute. My successor, and later his successor, were both non-Mormon, which has cleared up that notion. In any case, the roles of a university and its president deserve most of the highflying attention they receive. A phone call that I received in the first month or two of my new job in 1983 makes some of the challenging aspects of that role clear.

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“President Peterson, I wanted to call you about a problem I have just learned about at the university. I know it is not your fault, and you may not even know about it. Apparently a gay-lesbian conference is planned for the campus. What are you going to do about it?” I paused for a long moment, knowing that this was the tip of an iceberg that I needed to navigate carefully. I thanked him for his call and suggested we consider what options I had: “While it is illegal to engage in homosexual or heterosexual acts on the front lawn of the campus, it is not illegal for consenting adults to practice either in the privacy of their quarters. I could find out the names of the students involved in the conference and have them expelled from the university. However, they would likely sue me in court and certainly win. Alternatively, I could find out if any of the faculty are serving as advisors for the group and similarly fire them, voiding their tenure. If I did, they also would sue and win restitution because of their faculty contracts. I suppose I could send out a notice to the entire university community asking that nobody attend the conference.” Before I could think of any more options, I heard a chuckle in my ear, and my caller said that maybe the best thing was to do nothing. I paused for a deliberate moment and then said, “You know, maybe that is the best response.” An important social issue had the open forum it warranted with no further fuss or feathers. The University of Utah has had a splendid record of academic freedom dating back to the early part of the twentieth century, when the issue reached a boiling point over the teaching and study of evolution. It was resolved through an investigation by the American Association of University Professors, which strengthened the adherence to faculty freedom of teaching and study. I have more to say later about academic freedom, its importance, and its cost. If I was to be president, it boiled down to belief in and commitment to promoting the productive tension on campus of old and new knowledge, faith and reason. This tension is especially critical in a settled society. When pioneers sought to tame the wilderness, their first goal was to become settled. This is a modest paradox in itself, for pioneers are defined as restless people looking for the opportunity to create a new society, often with freedom from past oppression. Perhaps this paradox expresses itself in the sad propensity of restless, freedom-seeking people to impose a fresh orthodoxy on their new settlements, whether they are in Puritan New England or, more harshly, the Russian gulag. Put simply, settled society has the potential for efficiency at the risk of stagnation, smugness, and the tyranny of the majority. The exploring, creative society has the potential for discovering new knowledge at the risk of anarchy. At its best, the .

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university can nurture that productive tension to preserve the good and discover the better, each needing the other. “You Don’t Care about the Arts”

Enough theory. In a sense, the presidency of a public university is a particularly undoable job. Such a president reports to almost everybody: the Board of Regents, the legislature, the faculty, the students, the governor, the alumni, and the community at large—really communities at large. No major initiative will succeed without the understanding and support of each of these constituencies. Yet a president has little actual power. There is no patronage to lubricate harmony. There are no stock options for outstanding performance. Tenure properly exists to block capricious firing of faculty. At a public university especially, the range of salary is largely limited to small percentages awarded by deans or department chairs. A case in point I will not soon forget was the excellent music-faculty person who came to see me with the simple pointed complaint and decision: “You do not value the arts. I am leaving to accept a position where they are valued.” Budget pressures for salary equality within departments and state tax receipts were all under the cloud of the lingering recession of the early 1980s. She left, we were the worse for her decision, and I was discouraged. Actually the president’s job is very doable in one powerful way. It provides a bully pulpit if it can be exercised and directed widely. It offers a daily opportunity to exercise power of persuasion not only with the faculty, staff, and students but also with the multiplicity of constituents from alumni and the community to the governor and the state legislature, from the media to the federal government. A president needs to decide what balance to exercise within this complicated fray. My predecessor, David Gardner, one of the nicest and smartest men I ever worked with, was probably more aloof than I. He, for example, made rare visits to the legislature, but when he did, they became moments of special importance. I chose intuitively to engage the community and legislature regularly, which might have made my efforts more commonplace but diminished the potential for misunderstanding, remoteness, and suspicion of the ivory tower. As best I could tell, for legislators who might be wary of me or the faculty, visits to the legislature and community were opportunities to report clearly and simply on what a university was and why a good one worked to their advantage. The occasion required the same skill David Seegal had pounded into me thirty years before in the wards of the Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Welfare Island in

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New York: “Tell your listener what he or she needs to know and do it simply. Don’t waste time trying to impress the listener with everything you know or how smart you think you are and use language appropriate to the situation. Finally, seek to find commonality in mostly well-meaning people.” It was an especially rewarding challenge to make the case for traditional liberal arts to a legislator whose education might have stopped with high school. No education limited to learning a trade will meet the needs of our alumni in the twenty-first century. Rather, the basic skills of communicating orally and with the pen and computer, an understanding of cultures other than your own, knowledge of basic math, science, and history—these skills are the lasting basis for personal and professional success, and I think most of the citizenry got it. Furthermore, enrichment by exposure to the arts and humanities, by whatever name, adds to the whole life experience. A passenger sitting next to me on an airplane flight one day identified himself as the CEO of an engineering firm in California. I naturally asked him if he hired graduates from our university. He said he did and that they were good. “Is there anything that would improve their value to you?” “Well, as a matter of fact, they too often do not write and communicate at a level to match their engineering skills.” I responded with mock disbelief. “I didn’t think you had to be able to communicate if you were an engineer!” His answer, which reinforced my own conviction, was “quite the contrary. If you do not have communication and reasoning skills, you will rarely rise from the lower levels of the profession.” My inner eye still twinkles at one successful exercise of unspoken communication. Walking home from my office one Friday evening, I passed the Sigma Nu fraternity house. Some members, as was their habit, were sitting on a second-floor porch overlooking the street. “Hi, President Peterson. Would you like to come up for a chat?” “I’d be pleased.” One of them welcomed me at the front door and guided me upstairs and through a bedroom and window opening onto the porch. Our conversation was full of pleasantries until I remembered that they might help me solve a small problem. I said, “You might be aware that there is often a pile of broken glass by the naval ROTC anchor on Monday mornings.” This anchor was located kitty-corner across from the Sigma Nu house and directly opposite the Pi Phi sorority house. “The anchor is apparently an attractive target for bottle tossing. The resultant broken glass is a mess and a danger that requires cleaning up every Monday morning. We are quite sure it comes from bottles thrown by the girls from the Pi Phi house,

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but we cannot be positive and have ordered twenty-five thousand dollars worth of infrared detection equipment to see if we can get clear evidence. As you know, the university budget is tight. If you fellows have any advice on ways we can save the cost of the infrared equipment, I’d be grateful.” We moved on to other topics, and in a few minutes, I wished them well and climbed back through the window, went down the stairs, and headed off to supper at home a couple of blocks away. The next Tuesday a short letter appeared on my desk from the Sigma Nu fraternity. “President Peterson, we enjoyed your visit last Friday. You might be interested to know that we have decided to order our drinks in plastic bottles.” It was a victory without a loser. I valued invitations for unstructured conversation like the one the Sigma Nus offered that afternoon and worried about becoming remote in a largely commuter university. I had heard that Father Ted Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame, conducted so-called open office hours for anyone in the university community— faculty, students, or staff—or interested outsiders. It seemed worth a try. I kept my calendar open every Wednesday afternoon for people to make an appointment, first come, first served. I cannot remember much about the topics. There were always a few cantankerous complainers, some earnest folks, and a number of good suggestions and early warnings of problems that deserved attention. In sum my visitors were just people with all the virtues and weaknesses of the rest of us. It reminded me that I used to try to glean some nonmedical information from each patient I examined, certainly to learn something I didn’t know but equally to honor his or her life experience, which is about all that is unique in most of us. I suppose I also used the time to plant an idea or two that I hoped might take root if the soil was prepared. Gathering a Team

Being a president of anything means trying to surround yourself with the very best people, people, as they say, who are smarter and more experienced in their particular areas than you are and will tell you the unpleasant truth as well as work as a team to advance a common idea. Such people by their natures are apt to have the skill to relate to and represent different portions of the university universe. An example of the importance of speaking the unpleasant truth is the wry comment from Louis  B. Mayer of Hollywood’s Metro Goldwyn Mayer studio: “I demand that my employees tell me the truth, even if it costs them their job.” I was able to find wonderful people to take the major posts in the so-called central administration. Irv Altman was a transplanted East Coast psychologist

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who saw Utah once and never left. I suppose you could call him a social psychologist. One of his interesting projects after he joined the faculty was examining the arrangement of the rooms in the houses belonging to the former LDS splinter group that still practiced polygamy in the Arizona/Utah border town of Colorado City. He did a superb job as the academic vice president, particularly a few years later when we had to cut our budget by 6 percent to accommodate a reduction of available tax support. Exercising great diplomacy and wide consultation, he led a successful effort to survive the cutback. Tony Morgan had served a number of presidents with astute budget management and became the most informed man on campus about university relationships, financial or academic. Walt Gnemi had worked with President Gardner and managed the general administration of campus affairs with impeccable honesty and dogged skill. Ted Capener took responsibility for public relations and outreach activities beyond the campus; athletics and the public radio and television stations were other major items in his portfolio. He came from a rich career in radio journalism. Jim Brophy, vice president for research, was a physicist, experienced in research and a man with whom I had worked closely on the artificial-heart project. Mike Mattsson was the director of development, a man I had met when he was considering an offer to go to Harvard Medical School as its chief development officer just when I was debating leaving Harvard for Utah five years earlier. He was the ideal development officer: smart, unencumbered with extravagant ego, organized, well known and appreciated in a wide circle of the community, and able to hire and inspire excellent colleagues. He and I thought it was time to elevate the position to that status of vice president. He turned out to be worth his weight in gold, almost literally, as the vice president for development. That was the initial team: honest, able, and—as we came to appreciate— collegial, a pleasure to engage each week. Some years later, I sought to create the post of provost as a way to provide better academic coordination and at the same time free me to spend more time on the larger agenda facing the university. Jim Clayton was an obvious candidate to fill that slot. He had been the dean of the graduate schools and therefore had a broad view of the entire academic menu of the university. He was also a distinguished historian. Like everyone else in the inner circle of associates, he was prepared to voice objections without either of us being offended. I cannot identify the person most prepared to tell me when an idea I had was wrong or willing to hear the same about their ideas from me. However, I do remember one charming occasion. One day I thought I had a fine idea about

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something or other and asked Ted Capener to talk it over with me. As I warmed up and the minutes passed, my enthusiasm grew greater and greater. Finally Ted said, “Do I understand, Chase, that you wish to convince me of the merit of your idea? Or would you also like to hear my opinion?” I had to laugh. I was so in love with whatever idea I had that it was clear I was looking for allies, not advisors. That process turned out to be liberating, for with these colleagues, I had the license to dream up a wide range of good and bad ideas and could count on people I trusted to poke holes in the ones that were impractical or ill considered. If my associates had felt that they merely had to support me, I could not have dared to range very far with innovation, and neither could they. The hardest job to fill was the position I had left, the vice president with responsibility for the medical, nursing, pharmacy, and health colleges, together with the University Hospital operation. A national search found an inventive and restless surgeon from Virginia who had relocated to the University of Wisconsin and become interested in medical administration and public medical policy. Don Detmer joined our administration about half a year into my new job and proved to be just the leaven with high standards that the university needed. After a job well done here, he returned to the University of Virginia and has since been a leader in national public-policy education, including yearly part-time work with Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge. And, oh yes, I needed a capable executive secretary. Carol Webster turned out to be just the right person, able to shield my calendar when necessary and alert me when there was someone or something that needed immediate attention. Our new relationship survived a unique test during my first month when she stopped me on the way out of the office to a downtown meeting. “Dr. Peterson, could you wait a moment while I consult my ‘How to Be a Secretary’ manual to find out what I say when my boss has not zipped up his fly?” That incident added to my confidence that I could take her into any battle with me, knowing I had an honest colleague at my side who would protect me even at the risk of embarrassment. Another moment that required diplomacy occurred a few years later when our family moved into a lovely house that bordered the campus, donated to the university to serve as the residence of the president by my friend Joe Rosenblatt. As lovely as it was, it needed some repair and refurnishing. The year of our move had a particularly tight budget, and we certainly did not want to be guilty of lavish spending while setting up a new home. The move was proceeding well with the skilled assistance of the Department of Buildings and Grounds. There was, however, an ornate bronze faucet in a guest washroom adjacent to the living room that no longer worked. No repair parts

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could be found. The university staff were quick to tell us not to worry; they would replace it in no time. Grethe was even quicker to tell them that she did not want an overly elegant replacement and certainly not an expensive one. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Peterson, we’ll do a good job,” was the reply. The faucet was replaced, and it was elegant. Grethe found out that the single spigot had cost $450—quite a price at that time for our state-funded collegiate residence. She thanked the building and grounds people but told them in clear terms that she wanted the faucet removed and a modest replacement found. The next day a local newspaper reporter called her and, in a somewhat cloying tone, said something about the residential move we had undertaken being a heavy task. After an exchange of pleasantries, she asked, “Oh, Mrs. Peterson, I learned that you have just installed a $450 faucet. Is that correct?” Grethe was pleased to respond, “Yes, a $450 faucet was installed yesterday, and it was removed earlier today.” People who live in academic glass houses should expect onlookers. Off we went, presuming to manage/administer/run something called a university that was woefully underfunded in light of its level of excellence and importance in the state and region, and also expected to teach, do research, and uplift the community and state artistically and economically, as well as maintain a handful of semiprofessional arts organizations and sports teams with academic honor and community appreciation. The job is as complicated as that sentence is long. Funding

“We promise those who join this effort . . . an experience of pride and satisfaction and an investment in immortality that will never be outlived or forgotten.” These were my brave words as we set out to seek private funding for the university. For centuries a general assumption had existed that the cost of operating public universities was the responsibility of the state taxpayers and the legislatures that represented them. Legislatures were naturally cautious about new categories of spending, particularly during federal cutbacks in funds to assist the poor and unsupported that emerged from the rhetoric of the early Reagan years. State universities had always received intermittent private support, perhaps money for a new dorm or a renovated stadium. Nevertheless, people still believed it was the responsibility of the taxpayer to fund a public university. Since rich or poor, all the state citizens were taxpayers to some degree, why should more be asked of them? Most of the major public universities in the previous decade had begun to seek significant private support. Utah had done so only for a specific project or two. We set out to do more.

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My time as a Harvard fund-raiser made the job seem natural and logical. What would the faculty and alumni think about a serious public campaign to raise larger, regular amounts of money? The faculty enlisted quickly, albeit not fully aware initially of the work involved. What about the potential donors? At first there was spotty encouragement, but it was accompanied with only limited understanding of the importance of private giving. A whole new mind-set had to be generated. Mike Mattsson began to organize a university office to facilitate serious fund-raising, and Grethe and I set out to meet selected community alumni and leaders. These meetings had to be personal and graduated as we asked people to consider taking on a larger responsibility for the university. We had dinners in the president’s residence to explore attitudes and opportunities with five to ten people at a time. In addition to those small parties, we initiated a program that we borrowed—again from Father Hesburgh of Notre Dame—where we invited alumni and potential “adopted” alumni to campus in larger groups. The intent was simply to update these people on the present role of the university and the value of strengthening one or many of its parts with stronger faculty, better libraries and laboratories, scholarship support for the best students, and underwriting for new initiatives. These guests attended a dinner on a Thursday evening at the president’s home, where they met and heard from outstanding faculty and students whose presence spoke volumes about the university’s excellence. The next day, Friday, they attended a range of classes of special interest to them. Tickets that evening or the next morning for a concert, a play, or an athletic event were available, and a concluding lunch took place Saturday, where the guests reported on what they had seen and felt. It took two years of these activities to get a sense of the pulse of the invited alumni and community leaders. Did they see merit and the opportunity for personal satisfaction through participating in a general drive for private funds for the university? The response was encouraging. Now we needed private leadership to head the effort and the courage to announce our plans and set a dollar goal. To do so and fail would kill the project for much of a generation and be a personal blow to the image of the university, not to mention my personal reputation. However, failure to set a goal would deny us the momentum that a drive of this sort could provide. We were not going to make such a major push just to sustain the present level of generous, but modest, giving that had characterized public universities until then. Who could be our volunteer leader? The person had to be well known, financially substantial, and willing to give a personal gift that was large enough to set a standard for others, whatever their assets. He or she also had to be willing, on

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special occasions, to join me and other university personnel in asking for major gifts from others. In other words, this leadership would demand time and energy, and we would fail if we asked someone to take the job without clarifying the responsibilities. The first name that came to mind was Bill Marriott, an alumnus, CEO of the Marriott Corporation, and the son of its founder, J.  Willard Marriott, who had participated a generation before in a specific project to provide private money to supplement state tax funds to build the modern university library that bears the family name. Marriott was a very busy man, committed to engage personally with every nook and corner of the vast Marriott enterprise; his church; politics in a supportive role, especially given the corporation’s headquarters in the national capitol; and family. I discussed the matter with the inner core of alumni supporters, and we all agreed that Marriott was the right person to ask. At that point, a man who had become a dear friend, Elder Marvin J. Ashton, an apostle in the LDS Church and member of the Board of Regents, spoke up and asked, “Would it be all right if I sat in when you ask Marriott to take the chairmanship?” That may sound trivial, but it was a huge endorsement by Elder Ashton. His presence provided an affirmative voice for the University of Utah. We met. Marriott brought one of his sons with him. After hearing our pitch and considerable conversation, he turned to his son and asked what he thought. The son said quietly, but firmly, “Dad, you ought to be true to your school.” Marriott accepted, and with his family gave the money necessary to match state funds for a new building devoted to dance, which had been especially important to his mother, who was now saddled with arthritis. His leadership and presence moved others to be equally generous, each in his or her own way. The names of even all the major donors and leaders cannot be listed here, for surely a generous person would be missed, but in addition to the Marriotts, two stand out who perhaps speak for the rest. Spence Eccles led the Eccles family in personal and foundation giving, which continues to this day. Spence and his family foundation have generously enriched every part of the university from broadcasting to genetics to athletics. Jon and Karen Huntsman are the other standouts with the enormous gift of the Huntsman Cancer Institute and hospital, as well as supporting athletics and other aspects of the university. The total given to the university since 1985 is now likely approaching two billion dollars. The names of generous donors are recorded in the annals of the campaign. The university received a special advantage from the campaign with what became a permanent commitment by so many contributors to a lifelong relationship.

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Our promise to those who joined ranks with the university in this remarkable effort was that simple statement that I believe has now been fulfilled: “We promise those who join this effort an experience of pride and satisfaction and an investment in immortality that will never be outlived or forgotten.” Politics and Taxes

The increase in private funding was enormously helpful, but we still needed state tax support. The 1980s brought a stubborn recession in Utah and a consequent downturn in tax revenue. By the mid-1980s, the state faced a major tax shortfall for essential services. Norm Bangerter was the Republican governor, and his party quickly planned draconian cuts in all state services, including public and higher education. The governor and I met a number of times to see how to avoid harming the university. To his great credit, Bangerter proposed a tax increase of 6 percent to get us through the recession crisis. Neither he nor his party was fond of any tax, let alone an increase. If his proposal was to get public support, there had to be a clear perception that all state programs were sharing equally in the pinch. We agreed that this had to include the university. As painful as it would be, we agreed that the university would somehow cut its budget to match the proposed tax increase; the cut and the tax raise would each handle half of the shortfall. In numerous meetings with the faculty, staff, and students, the proposal was met with understanding and generous support. Vice president Altman conducted the bulk of the discussions in an admirable fashion, and we set out to decide what we could cut and the principles that would guide the process. We agreed to focus our support on excellence and essentiality, meaning that the better parts of the university deserved to be protected, together with basic essentials, the “freshman English course,” as it were. During the same time, Michigan had suffered recessionary loss of tax revenue as well, theirs from a downturn in the auto industry. Jim Duderstadt was the president of the University of Michigan and graciously met with me to share the process they had set up in Ann Arbor to make similar cuts to the ones we faced. He was convinced that the budget examination and the cuts that followed were, in fact, healthy and left the university stronger than before—stronger, but not without pain. I returned to Utah confident that we could survive such a process—emphasis on process—although I was less sanguine about escaping without serious harm. It helped that the governor agreed to our suggestion to put some of the money we saved in a reserve fund to offset future cost-of-living pressures to the university.

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No sooner had we set these goals and agreed upon a method than we were faced with a tax revolt. Opponents to any tax increase arose in numbers and proposed a referendum to roll it back at the upcoming November election. The battle was joined—if not initiated—by talk-radio hosts who found fertile ground in the referendum for rabid on-the-air conversations, not to mention higher listener ratings. One particular fellow zeroed in on the university and higher education in general as privileged tax consumers whose faculty, he claimed, was highly paid and worked fewer hours than regular citizens. You can imagine that faculty teaching and research hours would make juicy bait for a rabble-rouser. Some people chose to define workloads narrowly as hours spent in the classroom with no credit for preparation, reading papers and grading tests, research scholarship, and community outreach. The university was singled out as a privileged enclave living high off the tax dollars of people who worked harder and longer. Most of the advice I received said to maintain a low profile and let the politicians battle it out. In the late spring, the polls showed that about 65 percent of the voters favored repeal of the tax increase with the final vote to take place in November. The talk-show accusations grew so inaccurate and resistant to correction that I finally felt that silence suggested the errors were correct. We met with our critics; they often agreed with the facts we provided about faculty productivity, and the next day went back to repeating the same inaccuracies as facts. A number of community leaders rose to defend the university, and together we decided that silence from the president’s office created particular misunderstanding. I decided to attend Rotary and PTA meetings, and any other place that would let me speak. One engagement particularly sticks in my memory. The talk was scheduled in eastern Utah at a luncheon of civic leaders. My preteen grandson was staying with us and expressed an interest in going with me. Fine, I thought, it might be a good lesson in civics. The trip was about two hundred miles by car, but before I got there, I was guilty of driving a little too fast and was pulled over by a highway patrolman. The flashing lights and uniform of the officer got the full attention of my grandson. Fortunately the patrolman asked where I was going so fast, which allowed me to tell him about the tax-repeal issue and the position of the university. He smiled and said, “Well, I guess we law-enforcement officers are in the same tub with you. Thank you for taking the fight to the citizens. Now drive a little slower.” Avoiding a ticket may or may not have been a good civics lesson for my grandson, but I appreciated the camaraderie and courtesy of the officer. In November the tax-repeal vote failed by a 65 percent–35 percent margin, and I think the state gained a useful lesson in the role of higher education, albeit at the

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risk of traffic tickets. Governor Bangerter was almost defeated for reelection over this issue but survived in the end and has been a hero of mine ever since. “Your Logic Is Right, but Your Conclusion Is Wrong.”

The need for funds was never ending. Enrollments at the Utah institutions of higher education were rising, but as the school with the highest admission standards, our numbers grew more slowly. The legislators mouthed their support of excellence but, in the end, assigned available tax dollars to support enrollment increases. The argument was easy to make and hard to rebut. This left us with relative declining support per student and no easy counterargument to support our needs; in an equalitarian culture, popular appeal is always hard to offset with a plea for excellence. In addition to funds coming from private sources, there seemed to be another opportunity for unique and critical support. When the federal government funds the direct costs of doing research, the sponsoring institution may calculate the fixed or indirect costs, e.g., building upkeep, heat and lights, staff, laboratory construction, and special equipment—often very expensive—among others. Every research university in the country does its own cost accounting to come up with a figure that represents the percentage of the costs that the university has to cover. That percentage is subject to audit verification by the federal government. For years the Utah Legislature had reclaimed 90 percent of the overhead funds that accompanied research projects. The logic was understandable in part. The overhead paid the institutional costs of the research, and a small part of that was state tax money that covered the maintenance costs of our facilities. But we made the argument that the university could not be competitive in applying for grants if it did not have the funds to support the science infrastructure the project required beyond maintenance. For example, if a lab and equipment were needed to accommodate a new project, that could not be classified as a direct cost. I learned that the University of California system obtained annual, direct, state funding of sizable proportions just to support research. This put California faculty in an advantaged position in national competition to seek grants. So we made the argument that the legislature should leave the indirect funding with the institution whose faculty grants had generated it in the first place. The alternative was to appropriate state funds directly to support research. The political problem was that the University of Utah and Utah State University were the only institutions that did any significant research. The legislature had been using the research-related funds of the two universities to supplement the general budget.

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Year by year we made our case, and year by year we were able to shave off 10 to 15 percent of the indirect research funds that the state had been claiming. The economic development that accrued to the state from the research work of the two universities was, of course, part of the argument. The debate was especially vigorous with an old friend of mine, a senior and respected state senator who could not get past the argument that the state had the right to recover the indirect expenses. He was partially correct in a general sense— when it came to heat and lights—but he ignored the special, expensive needs of research quarters. However, he was not prepared or able to collect the legislative votes to appropriate state funds necessary to support research that allowed the Utah universities to compete with their national peers. After four to five years of steady effort, the percentage finally got to zero. We committed on our part that the funds would support only related research. The retained overhead now provides an engine for a growing research effort. The university’s total research funding in 1984 was roughly $25 million and by 2007 it had grown to $350 million. This growth could not have happened without the retained indirect funding that allowed the university to provide the equipment and laboratories that made our grant proposals competitive with national rivals. The additional tax revenue coming to Utah from this growth in research has more than compensated the state for its wisdom in leaving the indirect research funds with the university. An equal or larger benefit comes from the number of research ideas that have spawned local high-tech companies. At the time I am writing, it has been announced that the University of Utah has just surpassed MIT for the greatest number of companies sprung from research conducted at the institution. A few years ago the Nobel Prize committee called an eminent geneticist on our faculty, Mario Capecchi, to give him the first Nobel Prize ever awarded in the state of Utah. He could not have stayed with the University of Utah had it not been for its overall research strength supported by overhead funds. A “Go-to-Hell Card”

Ted Bell was a fine professor of education. During the 1980s, he took time off to serve as the secretary of education in the Reagan cabinet and received a routine letter granting a leave of absence. When he returned to the Utah faculty a few years later, we happened to be walking together on the campus when he spoke about his experience in Washington. He patted his back pocket, commented that it had contained his “go-to-hell card,” and told me what that was.

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He claimed he had kept in his pocket—actually or figuratively—a personal letter from me that confirmed an unlimited leave of absence to take the Washington job. He felt the letter gave him the security to act on his best principles without the fear that—if the going got tough—he might not be able to return to his position in Utah. His faculty job was guaranteed and indestructible, and the letter was a passport to act according to his judgment. His home—an academic one—had come with him to Washington, as did mine as a Harvard undergraduate. The Life and Times of New Ideas

Genius, productivity, and potential are hard things to measure and even harder to predict. The British Petroleum Company (BP) had an annual fund of five million dollars in the late twentieth century to support ideas that had promise but were off the beaten path. At a meeting one day in London, I had a chance to ask the manager of that project how he could identify real promise from sloppy science, the one, great, unrecognized idea from the hundreds of others that were only fantasy. He replied that it was hard and certainly not something he could measure objectively. He said he finally settled for visiting with a promising scientist in the lab for a week to observe, talk with associates, and measure specific bench skills as a basis to best estimate the importance of the proposal. This fund became tangible when I learned that one scientist BP had invested in was Dudley Herschbach, a Harvard chemist whom I had known as a faculty member and had asked to work on the Harvard Admissions Committee during the 1960s. One of his ideas could not gain support from peer review conducted by the National Science Foundation or other funding agencies. He faced the classic dilemma where a truly novel idea had no peers. After some years of BP funding, the chemist received the Nobel Prize for his work. BP had recognized and provided early funding until peers could see data that confirmed more clearly the project’s potential. It is not an easy task to predict the winning and losing proposals from the science nursery; many ideas take time to mature. The award of the Nobel Prize in medicine to our professor Mario Capecchi recognized his identification and isolation of single genes in experimental mice. Dr. Capecchi had asked me to try to raise private funds in the early years of his research, and I was unsuccessful, but he graciously credits the University of Utah with the steadfast support that allowed him time to pursue his work to its logical conclusion and verification. Part of this support was his tenure and the patient environment it provided for the maturation of long-term projects.

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The Fruits of Capitalism and the Rays

Howard Hughes bought pieces of Hollywood and was never less colorful and eccentric than a movie star. In a sense, he may have become what he acquired. And he was also a genius. Inheriting a modest financial empire from his father, he expanded it into one of the great fortunes of post–World War II America. He was eccentric, perhaps to the point of obsessive compulsion and paranoia. He cultivated a close, trusted group of men around him, and by the time he died, he was essentially in their hands. I never met the man but would have liked to. In his will, he requested that all the profits of Hughes Aircraft, a company that had grown prosperous during World War II, be dedicated to support a medicalresearch institute that became known as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute or HHMI. The institute developed a prestigious board of managers and scientific advisors and began to identify and support great science on a small number of university campuses. The University of Utah shared in this funding, allowing us to bring a handful of top-notch scientists, whom we otherwise could not have afforded, to our campus to work hand in hand with existing university faculty. Our department of genetics had an especially close relationship with HHMI, which paid the salaries and research expenses of a number of our leading geneticists. From my first year as health-science vice president, I had seen a number of outstanding investigators join our faculty whom we could only support because they met the high HHMI standards. Soon after I became president of the university, HHMI decided to sell Hughes Aircraft to give the institute enough money to expand its operation. The institute decided to build its own laboratories on a small number of campuses to house the existing HHMI fellows and allow faculty expansion. The Rays were promptly in my office—Ray White and Ray Gesteland—the two exceptional geneticists who had come a decade earlier from MIT and Harvard. Based on our ongoing relationship with HHMI and solid work under our belts in the emerging Human Genome Project, we figured we had every reason to apply for funds to build an HHMI laboratory on campus. Hughes would provide most of the money, but we had to come up with a relatively small amount of matching funds for construction. We were reviewed and qualified for a site visit. By then George Thorn, professor of medicine at Harvard and a former teacher of mine, was medical advisor to the Hughes Board of Directors, together with George Cahill, a major board member and also from Harvard. Don Fredrickson, recent head of the NIH, was

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chair. These men and three or four others all flew into the Salt Lake City Delta hub from different airports on nonstop flights—that efficiency was not lost on them—arriving at about ten in the morning. They planned to fly—again on Delta nonstop—to San Francisco that afternoon, so we had them for about three hours to make our pitch. We needed to provide about five million dollars to complement the twenty million they would contribute for starters if we were chosen. Armed from earlier discussion with Spencer Eccles of the George and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation and our internal tally of available funds to support research, we met our minority share of the deal by lunch and had the visitors on their way to California. Both parties signed during the next week. The project not only brought a state-of-the-art research building to the university but a commitment from HHMI to provide full salary for a growing number of Hughes investigators, who became members of our faculty. As a measure of the quality of faculty members we were able to attract under this arrangement, we have never had to take over paying a salary to any failing Hughes investigator. When Mario Capecchi was beginning to blossom with his “gene-knockout” research, the distinguished university where he had originally trained attempted to recruit him back. The offer was a considerably larger salary than we could provide in our biology department. We successfully transferred his appointment to the Hughes operation, now proudly called the Eccles Institute of Human Genetics— Howard Hughes Medical Institute. At the institute, we had a small degree of freedom to match a portion of the offer Capecchi had received from the rival university, and he was happily able to move his lab there and work on a stable base. The Nobel Prize came to him twenty years later. The twenty-or-more years that Capecchi put into his work provides a powerful reason why faculty tenure at a research university is so important. Some ideas do take a long time to grow and mature. Without the assurance of long-term support, it is doubtful if many investigators would have the courage—and be successful— to pursue an idea that requires decades to complete, whether in science or the humanities. How many important issues lie unresolved in Congress because of a mind-set that can only focus on today’s problem? Camp and Naismith

In 1879 Walter Camp altered the rules of English rugby and created the modern game of football. In 1891 James Naismith drew up rules for an indoor game called basketball. Within a few decades, the two games had established themselves as

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integral parts of college and university life. Say “Notre Dame,” and some people think football and Knute Rockne. Say “UCLA,” and some people think basketball and John Wooden. Europe has city soccer/football clubs. Oxford and Cambridge have rowing crews. The United States has widely successful professional football and basketball leagues, but nowhere else have universities become so identified with major sports teams as in America. Why? The opportunity to witness and experience vicariously the exercise of any human skill is gratifying, be it with the violin, the brush, or the pen. Sports provide another type of expression. The phenomenon of fans must also play a major role. Stadia and arenas grew larger by the decade to accommodate growing crowds. A fan is singular, but the full impact of fans is definitely plural. Gathering with like-minded, even likeclothed, spectators provides a connection that may counter some of the community fragmentation that characterizes the twentieth century, a benign rediscovery of the tribe, if you will. In today’s urban America, a pregame picnic in a parking lot—named for the automotive tailgate that serves as a food counter—has replaced the bucolic outings of our grandparents’ day for many. Someone once asked Harvard President Derek Bok what part of the morning paper he read first each day. With a lawyerly and academic smile, he answered, “Why, the sports page of course.” When asked why, he said, “My life is full of ambiguity, shades of gray, and partial victories. On the sports page, there is a score and a winner and thus a short moment of simple clarity, after which I can take on the real world again.” Sports provide exposure to singular skills that are not only physical but also reflect courage, bravery, and considerable intelligence as they grow more complex. Consider the courage of the gymnast on the balance beam about to do a back flip. Consider the composure of a quarterback, a split second from a bruising tackle, passing on third down in the last period of a tie game. Consider the lonely challenge posed by a basketball foul shot under similar circumstances. For whatever reasons, the University of Utah—like all major universities in America—has such teams, players, and fans. Of particular note is the potentially divisive nature of the cultural scene in Utah between Mormon and non-Mormon. There are few occasions when people from different walks of life or perspectives can sit side by side and cheer with a common voice that quite match a sports stadium or arena. After taking the job of president, I wondered what the proper role of athletics on our campus should be. Certainly it was not to “win at any cost,” nor was it to ignore the power of community that sports gatherings provide, nor the multiplicity

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of skills and talents that a committed athlete strives to attain. Where did athletics fit into the broad commitments that a university makes explicitly and generally to its community? The philosopher William James, whose home in Cambridge we bought and lived in fifteen years earlier, spoke of athletics as “the moral equivalent of war,” a call for courage and heroism “under fire,” and a test of measuring up to high expectations. In the Porcellian Club at Harvard was a governor of Maine whom I came to admire. He had grown up in a world of expectation and manners that included athletics, and he seemed at peace with it. In spite of a body only minimally suited for sports, he—like his father and, I believe, his grandfather before him—had gone out for the varsity football team. If I remember correctly, he was an undersized, 180-pound, five-foot, ten-inch offensive guard. In his senior year, Harvard was well ahead in a game, and the coach appeared to be looking down the bench to be sure everyone got to play. As my friend told it—with some kind of reverse Brahmin/Yankee pride—his eyes caught the coach’s, and he jumped up to grab his helmet to get in the game, only to have the coach say to this last player on the bench with a tired drawl, “No, no, Tudor, not you.” What did Tudor get from sports? Who knows, maybe another kind of apical human experience on display. Maybe it was his “Yale” game to keep practicing although he was never likely to play in the game. I later got to know a young man when he came through Harvard Business School after graduating from the University of Utah. He could match Tudor’s story. He said with quiet certainty that the two most important experiences he’d had prior to coming to Harvard had been his three years on the Utah football team as a third-string quarterback who never got into a game, and his two years as a Mormon missionary in Denmark who never was responsible for a conversion. Not once did I sense that either he or Tudor was a masochist, and they were certainly not dullards. They experienced something of soul, spirit, mind, and body far greater than the indiscriminate shouting of “we’re number one!” will ever express. So there I was, a president of a university that had semiprofessional football and basketball teams, along with a host of others. I asked our revered athletic director, Arnie Ferrin, if there were teams we could play the way Harvard played Yale—with vigor and modest skill but without the hype and risk of professionalizing the experience. There were no Ivies in the Rockies. What was there? A rich tradition of athletic rivalries existed among several of the universities. In particular a unique one with cultural and religious overtones involved the University of Utah and Brigham Young University. A  Utah–Utah State rivalry had also grown over many decades.

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Historically Utah had dominated BYU in football from 1922 until l965, losing only once. BYU gained the upper hand in 1972 through 1992, losing only twice. These lopsided eras became painful for the owner of the losing streak, and I suppose a source of somewhat vulgar vicarious superiority for the constant winner. The reversal in the early 1970s to BYU superiority coincided with a number of factors. Utah, for some combination of reasons, had allowed its football program to slump. Symbolically the marching band that played before, during, and after games had fallen into disrepair. Of little actual importance—but considerable emblematic value—their uniforms had become ragtag, and their numbers dropped. There was little ceremony to a Saturday-afternoon football game for the dwindling crowds that gathered. For a university that was heavily commuter with only a small residential enrollment, the occasion of a gathering was not something to dismiss lightly. BYU, on the other hand, had set out to build a stronger program in the 1960s under President Wilkinson. Michigan State University under President John Hannah’s administration may have done much the same. A state university had the challenge of competing with other state institutions for tax support. It became accepted lore that Michigan State University’s athletic success helped to promote the notion of parity with the University of Michigan within the state legislature. In any case, the football prowess of BYU started to ascend in the 1970s just as the fortunes of the University of Utah began to sag. A brilliant BYU coach named LaVell Edwards developed a system that featured passing quarterbacks, a few skilled receivers, and beefy offensive linemen to protect the quarterback, which allowed them to compete successfully with more complete teams. The reversal of fortunes was truly painful to the University of Utah faithful. It was more than just athletics. The religious factor raised its contentious head as well. With the LDS Church as conspicuous as it was in the culture of the state, the decline became a double sour pill for Utah fans, Mormon and non-Mormon. For its part, it is not surprising that—as with Notre Dame—the religious nature of the institution spilled over into the athletic program. “Was God not well served and pleased when his school won?” became the soft mantra at South Bend. So was a Utah victory some refutation of God’s will? Whether delivered in jest or not, the idea was certainly nettling for University of Utah supporters. The short forty miles between the two schools lent further heat to the rivalry. Finally, matters became so intense that you had to wonder if it would spill over and taint the many positive academic exchanges the two schools had. Harvard and Yale, Duke and North Carolina, Michigan and Ohio State, Stanford and California Berkeley, and Texas and Oklahoma had their rivalries, but none of them had the confusing athletic relationships that ensnarled BYU and Utah.

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Something needed to be done to gain parity on the contentious football field. Furthermore, the pleasure of winning our share of games was never lost on the community. We set out to repair our broken football program and were convinced that we could do it with honor and honesty within academic bounds. The work was slow and piecemeal. Supporters came forward to help; spontaneous funding of new uniforms for the marching band by alumni Sally and Ken Burbridge was both practical and symbolic. Better and better coaches were found and supported under the wise guidance of Ted Capener, the vice president for community affairs, and, after the retirement of our athletic director, we hired Chris Hill. We expanded and modernized our stadium, located harmoniously near the heart of the campus. In seeking to raise the funds to expand the stadium, I remember sending a letter to a loyal foundation that had enormous requests for its funding. The foundation may have naturally felt some anguish in considering a gift of up to ten million dollars for athletics when there were so many other hungry mouths in the world. My letter said simply, “Please do not consider this request as one for athletics; it is for a significant civic ceremony, a moment when the disparate elements of our sometimes-divided community can come together to watch human skills on display and the maturation of young students into something larger than they would become otherwise.” We received the generous contribution we sought, coincidentally from the same Eccles foundation that had made the HHMI laboratory and so much else possible on campus. Chris Hill, the athletic director, had come to Utah to play basketball in the 1960s, stayed on as an assistant coach for a time with our varsity team, and later coached in a local high school. He ultimately returned to the university to earn his doctorate in educational administration. He’d had a Catholic upbringing in New Jersey, and he turned out to be a paragon of honesty, high standards, hard work, and enthusiasm and was a perfect match for what we needed. Good football coaches followed. A healthy parity between the two teams has been regained and should last for some time. Basketball was another matter. It had fallen into low esteem but to a lesser degree than football. We needed a new coach and found Rick Majerus in the Midwest. He came with a coarse midwestern tongue and a hundred or more pounds of extra weight. I won’t go into the details of his career, except to say he was a brilliant coach, demanded a lot of his players, and was almost incapable of being managed himself. In that regard, he reminded me of Pim Kolff, our pioneer scientist in the development of the artificial kidney and later the artificial heart. I described both of them as being as easy to manage as an avalanche, something—in the case of Majerus—I happily left to Chris Hill.

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Early in his career with us, Coach Majerus asked me to join him in presenting the end-of-season honors to the team members. The spring weather was warm, and Majerus had worn a trademark sweater well into the evening when he said, “It’s hot. I am going to take off my sweater. You men take off your jackets. You broads can take off your jackets as well if you need to.” Here I was—the president of the university— on the podium with a man who in the mid-1980s had just called the women in the audience “broads.” I was angry and embarrassed for the university, grabbed the microphone with intentional force, and said, “Rick, that word is ‘women!’ ” Without skipping a beat, Majerus replied, “What an honor it is to share the microphone with a man who is on the cutting edge of feminism.” It was hard to stay mad at the fellow. He developed athletic skill and often character in boys from both the ghetto and the suburbs. He could also be harsh with some of his players. In the early ’90s, he took his team to the finals of the NCAA championship, where we led Kentucky until the last ten minutes. The basketball team recruited Mike Doleac from Portland. He was six feet, ten inches tall and growing but not yet high on the recruiting radar screen. Majerus asked me to meet the candidate’s father, who had heard of Majerus’s reputation for developing young players. In the course of the conversation, the father told me that a rival coach had warned him that at Utah Mike would be pressured to join the Mormon Church! I smiled and assured him that the student body was diverse, as was the basketball team. After a greatly successful college career at the University of Utah and a profitable decade of professional basketball, Doleac donated a significant sum to renovate the campus Catholic Newman Center. He has since returned to the university to earn a master’s degree in physics and plans to teach science in secondary schools. Out of almost nowhere, a graduate student named Greg Marsden trained himself in the skills of women’s gymnastics. Over a span of thirty years, he developed a program that attracted scholar athletes who rose to compete at the highest national level. During that period, his squad won a number of national titles and was among the top three teams year after year. Perhaps the greatest surprise was his ability to develop a sport that combined aesthetic beauty with trained physical strength and skill to the point where the community became involved visually and competitively. Crowds of ten to twelve thousand were common, often filling the Huntsman Center. It was a pleasure to see whole families attending, especially those with young daughters and granddaughters who were witnessing the greatness that female athletes could achieve.

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Enough on athletics. We achieved parity with conference rivals in football and maintained it in basketball—especially with the women—allowing our community to enjoy games played by responsible undergraduates where the victory is unknown when the game starts. I think William James and presidents Charles Eliot (Harvard) and Teddy Roosevelt (U.S.A.) would be pleased. Shanties and Free Speech

On a university campus and in its classrooms, the principle of free speech should be a perpetual topic. An important issue that touched on that principle uniquely surfaced during the last few years of my presidency. What could an American university do to exert pressure on the government of South Africa about the odious practice of apartheid? My office at Harvard, adjacent to the president’s office in Massachusetts Hall, had been occupied in an earlier decade for most of a week over a related issue in South Africa. Could the investment policy of the University of Utah’s institutional endowment—however small—play a symbolic part in the struggle to end apartheid? Some argued that the role of a university was to train minds and not become involved in politics. To be involved institutionally, some said, risked the neutral forum of a university uniquely suited to debate all points of view. That attitude, I suppose, might have rationalized German universities from taking a stand against the rise of Hitler. Yet if students were well educated, they should be in a better position individually to oppose totalitarianism. Was that not the function of the university? That was the way the debate went. Alternatively, platforms provided single voices with an audience. Was not a university a platform to serve this purpose? While the matter was under discussion with the Board of Regents, some University of Utah students—in concert with a national antiapartheid action plan— erected some structures on the campus that were designed to remind people of the deplorable conditions of the black population living in segregated ghettos called townships outside major cities of South Africa. They called the structures a shanty town. The students slept in the shanties sometimes, even on the coldest nights, before preparing themselves to go to class the next morning. As you might imagine, the reaction to the shanties was mixed. Some thought they were an insult to the beauty and peace of the campus; others no doubt felt they were a good way to bring a world problem to life. Some students and people in the community began to complain about the invasion of the campus; others, about the desecration of a place of learning; and some, just about the inconvenience of

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having to walk through and around the shanty village between classes. These folks soon asked the president to “do something with the untidy mess.” Frankly I could never arrive at a clear view of the proper role of a university versus the role of individuals within and educated by that university. Nevertheless, I saw considerable value in the symbolic presence of the shanties to trigger healthy discussions about an issue that was important, though occurring thousands of miles away. Fostering discussion seemed especially critical because the state was relatively insular in relation to issues like these. Therefore, I made no effort to remove the shanties and rebutted the complaints about their ugliness with the assertion that ideas are often untidy. The shanties lived on through the school year. Finally, I was told that their presence would sooner or later gain some sort of legal right—“adverse possession,” I think it’s called—and put the university and state in danger of losing legal control of that piece of the campus. The shanties had been in place for something like eleven months and had acted as a useful burr to raise consciousness. Since this seemed a reasonable amount of time, I asked the students involved to please remove them. This, of course, was exactly what some of them had been waiting for. Perhaps they were even wishing for some dramatic razing of the structures with a bulldozer. We did not do any bulldozing, but we were taken to court. The question asked in court was that if the shanties were not actual speech, how should such expression be managed and protected, especially on a university campus? We had rules and regulations when it came to actual speech, but none that dealt with this physical, tangible extension of it. Since we had no rules or regulations in that area, the judge determined that our action in seeking removal might be arbitrary and therefore unjustified. He turned to me and, in the kindest tone of voice, asked that we not remove this expression of free speech unless we had some rules and regulations to support our actions. We accepted his judgment and set up a distinguished committee—former Governor Rampton, faculty community representatives, and students—to compose a set of rules and regulations that governed the exercise of free speech in the form of structures. The committee members took their responsibility seriously, as they should have, and in a few months had a proposal in writing for the judge to review. He did, found it appropriate, and approved the reasonableness of applying these regulations to the issue and removing the shanties. If I ever look for evidence that I was once president of the university, I suppose the manual for the rules and regulation of physical expressions of free speech might serve as well as anything else. I think it was a good experience for everyone.

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The students had their day—in fact, eleven months—and provided a stage for an important debate. And I think that the university helped many people to understand free speech and the larger role of education. Don’t read this as some declaration of bravery about what we did. We were hardly strident, but we did send letters to companies doing business in South Africa, whose stock we held—albeit in small amounts—urging them to throw their weight against apartheid. We did gain some satisfaction in engaging in calm debate and took pride in the decision of some of our students to speak with a clearer voice than a number of their elders. And we now had a manual for what could be called the management of shanties. Guns to Plowshares and Books

Fort  Douglas had housed the federal troops sent to the Utah Territory in 1857 to “keep watch over the Mormons.” I wrote earlier that my great-grandfather, Ira Nebeker, was assigned in turn to keep watch over the federal troops. Some national politicians claimed that the Mormons intended to secede from the Union and take with them polygamy and other unsavory practices. In fact, the Mormon migration in 1847 had left the Union by going west to what became Utah. Ironically, the Mexican War had resulted in the federal government annexing the territory. Emotions ran so strong nationally that more than 20 percent of the pre–Civil War federal army was sent to Utah and ended up in a fort named for Senator Douglas of Lincoln-Douglas debate fame. It stood on the east bench of the valley, adjacent to the present university campus. Cool heads prevailed, and after a few years, the tension eased between the United States army and the Mormon enclave. The federal government and Fort Douglas became an accepted part of the landscape of the eastern part of the city. In fact, a small portion of the land was ceded to the university and became part of the campus in the mid-twentieth century. The University of Utah is largely a commuter school with only a small residential student population. The value of twenty-four-hour education was a strong memory of my years at Harvard and had been improved by a residential experience. How might more of our students access such experiences? We did not have the money— and neither did our students—for a house system like the one Harvard had. The University of Virginia came to mind. They had renovated a cluster of nineteenth-century houses to serve as residences for students. The buildings were located on the Lawn, which was a central portion of the campus. The university made it an honor for selected upperclassmen and women to live on the Lawn.

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If the army no longer needed all the land of Fort Douglas, a semicircle of former officers’ houses, probably fifteen or so, could be converted to student residences. To make a long story shorter, we sought to obtain the houses and adjacent land for the university. Some army people naturally opposed ceding the land and houses, but we did our best to preserve sufficient portions of the fort to support necessary army-reserve training. However, we had trouble getting over the final hurdle in Congress to obtain the land. Jake Garn was the senior senator from Utah and a former mayor of Salt Lake City. His influence might tip the scale to transfer those houses. I called him on one of his visits home and asked if I could talk to him about this issue. We met at six the next morning at a local tennis club while he was en route to his 8:00 a.m. flight back to Washington. As the first tennis balls began to fly over the nets, we sat on the first row of the bleachers and talked about Fort Douglas. Garn saw the value of the new proposal for students and the university, and within a few months, we were able to transfer the title. The award of the 2002 Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City helped us immeasurably. The bid came with funds to build residential quarters for the Olympic athletes on the old Fort Douglas property. Those quarters, together with the renovation of the officers’ houses, constituted the beginnings of the residential opportunity we had envisaged for so long. A Bump in the Road

The sensitivities of private giving are legion, often unpredictable. Sometimes generous people can even be hurt or embarrassed. I mentioned earlier the adamant instructions of Admiral/Professor Samuel Eliot Morison in refusing to return a large iron cross an unknown donor had given to Harvard sometime in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Morison claimed that to return the cross would be a moral violation of the responsibility that came with the gift. Jim Sorenson had a particular genius in probing the corridors of hospitals to find out what doctors needed to make their efforts more effective and efficient. It might be a small catheter, a mask, or tubing—any instrument to achieve a therapeutic goal. He had started out as a pharmaceutical representative, talking to doctors, and before long his inventive mind began to see how he could manufacture devices to help those same doctors. When his business grew into a major manufacturer, Abbott Laboratories purchased it. The stock he received in the sale rose steadily, as did his continuing ability to identify therapeutic roadblocks and build solutions to overcome them.

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Because he was a Utah citizen and his success had come from the ideas he had solicited in the corridors of local hospitals, it seemed logical to approach him with the suggestion of a major gift that would justify adding his name to the medical school. A decade earlier, while at Harvard, I had spoken to Abraham Pritzker, a founder of the Hyatt Hotel chain. Pritzker gave seven million dollars to the University of Chicago, surely an ancient and honorable institution, and was honored with naming the medical school. It became the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. The gift occurred in the mid-1970s, and the school and the community seemed pleased by it, the name of the medical school, and the prospects of a long-term relationship with the Pritzker family. Jack Gallivan was the retired publisher of the Salt Lake Tribune, a distinguished Utah citizen, and the chair of our medical school advisory committee. He and I talked about approaching Sorenson for a substantial gift compatible with his genius and his company’s association with medical inventiveness. Since a decade had passed since the Pritzker gift, we suggested fifteen million dollars as an appropriate donation to accompany naming the medical school. It would be the largest gift the university had received up to that time. We consulted confidentially with the Board of Regents, medical-school department chairs, and a small group of other civic and legislative leaders, and they all agreed that the gift and naming were appropriate. Support within the administration was unanimous except for Mike Mattsson, vice president for development, who felt the amount was too small to justify the name of perhaps our most prestigious school. Mattsson may have been correct, but at the time, his argument could be countered with the idea that the naming was only the first step in a long-term relationship. A proposed gift is a delicate matter to consolidate. It is not feasible to take a public vote of students, faculty, the legislature, or the community at large for fear of embarrassing the prospective donor if even a small number of objections surface. Therefore, after the consultations I have mentioned, we put the proposal in writing, checked it with legal counsel, and scheduled a public announcement. It was early in the summer during the late 1980s, and I soon left for a meeting of the Tanner lecture Board of Directors in England. The next week I got a phone call from Cec Samuelson, the vice president for the health sciences, including the medical school. “Chase, Joe Rosenblatt has publicly announced that he is opposed to the name of the medical school and is organizing public resistance,” he told me. “What should we do?” It was Joe who had given his home to be the president’s residence and years earlier had been my medical patient. He was also a good friend.

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I could not think of much we could do. We had the signed approval of the Board of Regents and the university trustees, together with the leadership of the medical department and the legislature. We were committed, and to back down would jeopardize the good faith of the university. To make a long story short, but no less painful, Rosenblatt was successful in creating the image that “the school should not be for sale.” Utah had little experience with that sort of fund-raising, and it was easy to cast it in the light of selling. I did the best I could to make the case. The fact that Sorenson had made his fortune recently denied it the aura of old money, which often lent respectability and dampened jealousies. Rosenblatt organized some dinners and meetings to increase the opposition, and he succeeded. He had been a dear friend of the recently deceased Max Wintrobe, which may have contributed to a poignant argument that if the medical school was to be named for anyone, it should be Wintrobe, who deservedly had been its modern academic founder. While that argument is occasionally heard, I have always felt that an academic founder of a school would be most honored by naming and endowing a building or school that might house his or her project in a fashion that insured its permanence and excellence, rather than simply giving it his or her name. I felt honor bound to stand by the commitment of the university and even considered resigning on that principle. Newspaper editorials were written against the school’s name and suggested that Sorenson should just give the money. The controversy was an unfair embarrassment to him because he had done nothing more than accept our offer, which had then been signed and sealed by all appropriate university and state officials. Many well-intentioned people had advice for Sorenson and the university, but none could shield him from the unfair notoriety. He finally called and told me he was going to withdraw his gift offer and cancel the agreement from his end. It was gracious of him to do this, and it relieved the university from the pressure of having to renege. When pressed about taking the high road and just giving the gift with no school name, he answered with complete candor: “It is just not in me to back down to pressure.” I thanked him for his honesty and respected him for it to the day he died. Since then dozens of medical schools—public and private—have honored donors with naming a school. The university does not cease to be part of the name of the institution, e.g., the Weill Cornell Medical College, the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and many other examples. My reputation was a bit bruised by the experience, and as I said, I considered resigning. In the end, I did not resign because, I suppose, I was stubborn and also wanted to finish some other projects then near completion.

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The outcome has probably been better for everyone. Sorenson was seen at the time as more of an entrepreneur than a philanthropist—that aspect of his life was expressed by his family in the decades after his death with the generous funding of a number of other important projects at the university and in the community. He and I remained good friends throughout and after the fracas. In the last month of his life, he called me to discuss other projects he could fund at the university that were undertaken after his death. Ironically, a year or two later, while I was still president, we were successful in receiving a substantial gift from the David Eccles family foundations through the great effort of Spencer Eccles, a grandson of David’s, who now headed the family. This gift went to the School of Business, as appropriate to David’s financial achievement, and culminated in naming the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business.

12 “They Will Only Laugh at You”: Cold Fusion

“President Peterson: Reviewing the university’s Department of Chemistry has been a pleasure. The department is strong and healthy with an able corps of young faculty, clearly poised to deliver national visibility.” Such is my memory of the words of Richard Bernstein, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCLA. Of all the stories I have shared, this encounter introduced events and issues that evolved into some of the most interesting and challenging I ever experienced. Every five years, each department of the university conducts an external review. It is a thorough process, chaired by a distinguished peer from an outside university, assisted by two or three other experts. The preliminary report goes to the department, and a copy is sent to the dean of the graduate school. The dean evaluates the review and sends a summary to both the department chair and university president. I had never received a face-to-face report, but in this instance, Professor Bernstein asked for an appointment. I agreed, and we met. “President Peterson, there is one additional matter you should know about that I am reluctant to put in the written report. You have what could be an extremely important project under way in the department that will be hard to keep confidential,” Bernstein confided. He went on to describe work done by Professor and Department Chair Stanley Pons, together with Research Professor Martin Fleischmann, focusing on “the generation of heat from an unknown process or processes that appears to be too great to be a result of a chemical reaction.” Knowing a dusty bit of chemistry and physics, and impressed that someone of Professor Bernstein’s stature would make a special effort to request a personal

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appointment, I took him seriously. I called in my vice president for research, Jim Brophy, a physicist, and asked him, “Jim, what can you tell me about some heat-producing process that two professors in the chemistry department are working on?” That “process,” as most remember, came to be called “cold fusion.” Fusion because it appeared to produce more heat than a chemical reaction could generate and might be explained by a similar process to what occurred at high temperatures and pressures when atomic nuclei underwent fusion and released huge amounts of energy. It was described as cold because the process took place at room temperature. Within a week, Brophy told me what the world would hear some months later. Martin Fleischmann was an internationally respected and honored electrochemist—a field that I came to understand existed at the interface between traditional chemistry and physics. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, the British equivalent of our National Academy of Sciences, and had received the international Olin Palladium Medal in 1985, the top honor in his field of electrochemistry. Note the word “palladium”; it becomes increasingly significant. In 1988 he had received the Bruno Breyer Medal from the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. After a long and distinguished academic career, he had retired from the University of Southampton and accepted a part-time appointment at the University of Utah as a research professor to work with Professor Pons. Like Fleischmann, Pons was also an electrochemist. He had studied at Southampton, where he received his PhD and had known Fleischmann. Thereafter he had been on the faculty at a number of Canadian universities before coming to the University of Utah. His fellow faculty members had recently nominated him to the important post of chair of the department, one that obviously carries with it the respect of his colleagues and the dean of science. How I wish I could have had direct access to the minds and hearts of Pons and Fleischmann during this period and been privy to the pouring out of their passions as well as all the reasoning behind their decisions over the next months. But as well as being highly professional, both were very private people. Still, I will do my best to record this complex and still-relevant period in the history of the University of Utah and its impact on the faculty and president. The work Professor Bernstein considered unusually important involved electrolysis of heavy water to promote the transport of a large number of deuterium ions from the molecule of heavy water into the submicroscopic lattice structure of the metal palladium. The investigators claimed that this process released more heat than could be explained by any known chemical reaction.

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The electrolysis involved passing an electric current through an electrolyte. The hydrogen isotope in heavy water is deuterium, replacing the hydrogen in common water. It is written as D2O as opposed to H2O. Electrolysis separates the two elements, sending oxygen to one pole and hydrogen or deuterium to the other pole of the electrolytic apparatus. Fleischmann and Pons’s experiment was motivated by Fleischmann’s fortyyear experience with palladium’s unusual properties. He had earlier written about experiments demonstrating that the behavior of hydrogen ions dissolved in metals might only be understood within the theory of quantum electrodynamics, whose fundamental study had earned Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga the 1965 Nobel Prize. Ironically, Schwinger becomes important later in the story. The now-famous Fleischmann/Pons experiment acquired the acronym LENR because it was believed to be a low-energy nuclear reaction. The experiment has stimulated an increased appreciation that nuclear physics, chemistry, and solid-state physics all reveal new aspects of our world. It is of such theories that scientific revolutions are made. The Road to New Science

Since World War II, the funding of science had shifted almost entirely from private laboratories to the federal government. Private labs at established companies like General Electric and Bell had largely given way to multiple federal agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Departments of Energy and Defense, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. This shift moved the decision making and funding of research from a mostly private corporate context to a quasi-public one. While the new process was designed for scientific peers to review proposals, these peers undoubtedly found themselves influenced by their colleagues, existing norms, and the power of institutional consensus. Congress specifically, as well as scientific associations within and outside the government, grew to have an interest and say in the awarding of research support. Still, peer review was probably the best possible process to assist in funding good science and weeding out academic cronyism. Considering Professor Fleischmann’s stellar international reputation in the field of electrochemistry, and imagining the potential importance of the discovery of even a low-grade source of energy generated by the supply of heavy water in the oceans, Jim Brophy and I took his findings very seriously. I remember confirming the concentration of heavy water in seawater. It turned out to be roughly one part per six thousand. There were also established and not

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prohibitively expensive ways to extract it. In fact, a chemistry-supply company could provide heavy water. Clearly, there was an abundant source to support the process. If Fleischmann and Pons were right, if their findings could be confirmed, and if they could be utilized commercially, something groundbreaking was in the offing. Despite these admittedly large ifs, the importance of the findings could not be overestimated. I asked Brophy to follow the experiment closely and keep me up to speed. He later told me that he had given a description of the concept to the university Technology Transfer Office for routine recording and dating, as was standard with all potentially important faculty research. The nature of science research, academic freedom, and intellectual orthodoxies—not to mention human courage and frailty—all played a part in the story that evolved, a story that is now more than twenty years old. There were heroes and villains enough to cast a melodrama. Was it the courageous story of the pursuit of nature’s secrets, as proponents declared? Was it sloppy or fraudulent science, as some critics claimed? Was it a story of stubborn allegiance to intellectual inertia on the one hand, or intellectual creativity on the other? The heroes and villains are interchangeable, depending on where you stand. I have waited for the dust and mud to settle before writing this “progress report.” Up to now the most thorough study is Charles Beaudette’s book, Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed, published in 2000 by Oak Grove Press. As we say in medicine, “How is the patient doing?” My report, of course, will not be the last chapter in the story, for there is likely never a final chapter in science. But I invite you to join me in this journey that splashed angry mud on the early wet days and now forges ahead more easily in breaking sunshine. In December of 1988, I met Fleischmann and Pons for the first time when they came to see me with Jim Brophy. Fleischmann was senior in age, an Englishman endowed with a dry, but rich, deliberate speech. Pons was younger, no less incisive, and clearly experienced in the world of academic chemistry. They seemed to be comfortable working together on something they had studied over a number of years and were determined to pursue to its logical end. Would that they had shared their intuitions with me—especially in regard to the sudden entrance of a surprise visitor. It turned out that Steven Jones, another scientist who was a professor of physics at nearby Brigham Young University, might have had some interest—peripheral or central—in the study that Pons and Fleischmann had been pursuing for the previous decade. But the stark fact of the matter is that my knowledge of the interaction among the three individuals was limited and circumscribed. Not only were Pons and Fleischmann professional and

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private, but my opportunity to gain firsthand insight into Jones was limited to one two-hour meeting with the three men and others. There is still much for me and the reader to learn about that aspect of an intriguing story. This is what Pons and Fleischmann told me. They had recently visited Professor Jones at BYU. He was known for work measuring radioactivity from volcanoes and the esoteric phenomenon of muon-catalyzed fusion. Fleischmann and Pons thought these measurement skills and the instrumentation that went with them might be useful in their own project. Yet they were equivocal—suspicious even—of this physicist. Starting in August of 1988, Jones had been a referee on the research proposal that Fleischmann and Pons had submitted to the Department of Energy. They had privately supported their research for a number of years, but when they needed more funding than they could provide, they sought a federal grant. Policy for government grants dictates that reviewing scientists with possible conflicts of interest should declare that. While difficult to enforce, this policy is usually observed. Fleischmann and Pons learned that Jones had been a panelist for their research proposal but had not reported that he was working in a related area, as he later claimed, although these claims are still unclear. Previous meetings among Pons, Fleischmann, and Jones had proven unsuccessful in arranging cooperative work in nuclear measurement. I was asked to attend a second meeting, along with the president of BYU, his provost, and a public-relations officer. At this meeting, Pons and Fleischmann emphasized to the assembled group and especially Jones that they needed to have a period of at least six to twelve months to extend their research and better understand the process they had observed before publishing any reports. For whatever reason, Jones felt a pressing obligation to professionally present work of his own, possibly touching on certain aspects of the material that Pons and Fleischmann were studying. Jones had not measured heat production and later retracted much of what he did publish about possible nuclear processes. Regardless, the only real result of their conversations was that they had not found a way to work together, nor did a compromise to simultaneously publish reports on what they each had done prove possible. This deadlock created urgency in Pons and Fleischmann to go public on their own. Like most research universities, Utah routinely submitted appropriate patent claims for all original faculty work and had developed a general formula for ownership of rights generated by faculty. Roughly a third of any compensation from royalties, sales, and stock ownership accrued to the faculty investigator, a third went to the academic department of the investigator, and a third to the university.

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Should there be any commercial value in what Fleischmann and Pons were developing, the amount could be significant. But the possible contribution to the energy needs of the planet had the most prominence. These academic/commercial collaborations had proven highly successful in bringing new ideas into development. To illustrate this point, let me share the story of a pioneering patent obtained by the University of Wisconsin. One spring members of Wisconsin’s faculty had been asked to investigate why milk cows were dying. The culprit turned out to be a fungus growing on the sweet-clover forage grass during a particularly wet season. The faculty investigators found that a chemical the fungus produced had anticlotting properties. It was causing the cows to bleed to death internally. The investigators found a way to kill the fungus and stopped the cow mortality. One of the investigators alertly posed a question: If the chemical they had isolated could kill an otherwise-healthy cow by inducing internal hemorrhaging, could an even larger dose per pound kill rats? The investigators introduced such a chemical in 1948, and it still sells as an effective rat poison. Subsequently, someone wondered if a smaller dose might prevent the development of dangerous clots in humans that form as thrombi in veins or vegetative clots within the heart. This substance was refined and has served for decades as an effective blood thinning, anticlotting medicine called warfarin, named using the initials of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and commercially known as Coumadin. The work has saved thousands of lives and earned significant financial support for research at the University of Wisconsin. Such patent arrangements have proven beneficial to the public, as the federal government farsightedly realized in its 1980 Bayh-Dole amendment to the earlier Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act, assigning patent rights to investigators developing a product or idea during federally sponsored research. In promoting such largess, Congress correctly saw that technology transfer and commercialization would proceed with greater urgency if the investigator had some self-interest. On March  13, 1989, Fleischmann and Pons submitted a paper to the peerreviewed Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry and one week later, on March 22, received acceptance for its publication. Their attempts to continue to study the phenomenon in the isolation of their private laboratory had been snarled by the confusing mix-up with Jones—a confusion that culminated in them submitting their work to the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry sooner than they wished. Still, their paper was subjected to peer review and accepted by the leading journal in the field of electrochemistry. The fact of peer review turns out to be important.

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The Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry also approved a public press conference to precede by a few days the release of the paper. A press conference was an exceptional, but not unprecedented, practice when consequential matters were involved. Such public press conferences, for instance, had occurred with genomeproject announcements and progress reports on hot fusion and superconductivity research. The University of Utah lawyers filed routine patent applications, but they were initially denied based on the consensus of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that what was called cold fusion “could not exist.” Thus, the legal status of the original submission may still be up in the air. Fleischmann and Pons asked Vice President Brophy—as he records in his oral history—to schedule a public announcement with the help of the university Office of Public Affairs and Pons’s personal attorney, Gary Triggs. Events revealed that Fleischmann and Pons had been working in relative secrecy for a number of years before I learned of their work from Professor Bernstein. Sometime before their project came to light, a remarkable accident had occurred in their lab. One of their palladium-electrolysis cells had been left running over a weekend. When Fleischmann and Pons returned to the lab early Monday morning, they found the room in disarray. The electrolysis setup had largely vaporized, including a portion of the palladium rod, whose melting point was 1,554° Celsius. There was a hole in the lab countertop it had occupied but no evidence of an explosion. Beneath the countertop was a hole in the cement floor some eight inches wide and three or four inches deep. A third research associate named Kevin Ashley was with Fleischmann and Pons when they discovered the disruption and told a number of others later that the two were not upset. In fact, they looked as if “they had swallowed a canary.” Some form of hydrogen from the electrolysis might theoretically have caused a chemical explosion but not the destruction of the lab countertop and the cement floor beneath without fracturing it. No windows were blown out. There was no other explosive or corrosive material in the lab. Ashley was consistent in his account of the lab accident in interviews with two authors—first Gary Taubes, and later Charles Beaudette. The story was included in each of their books, which took opposing viewpoints of the Pons/Fleischmann claims: Taubes, scornful; Beaudette, supportive. A  passing reference to the laboratory accident—without interpretation—was also included in the Fleischmann/Pons paper. Ashley also confirmed his memory of that Monday-morning discovery—including the width and depth of the hole in the concrete floor of the laboratory—some twenty years later when I reached him by telephone in Ohio.

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Could there be anything other than intense heat to explain the weekend event that the witnesses had come upon? The melting or vaporizing point of concrete is in the range of 1,800 to 2,500° Celsius. Fleischmann reportedly said (for reasons never clear) that the University of Utah had required the two investigators to go public when they did. When I subsequently asked for clarification from the relevant university office, people there clearly stated that their policy was to honor all faculty requests with respect to publication and announcement, not initiate them. The announcement came on a spring day: March  23, 1989. Jim Brophy and I walked over to our campus’s nearby Eyring Chemistry Building, named for the same Henry Eyring I’d known in my college days in Boston. At least fifty others— mostly chemists, but also physicists and community guests—were gathered in the auditorium. Brophy opened the meeting with a few remarks and called on me for a brief introduction. In my prediction of a long period of debate about the material Fleischmann and Pons were presenting, I appear to have been more prescient than I imagined at the time. Here are the remarks I presented that day: We are here today to consider the implications of a scientific experiment. . . . First, what is an experiment? An  experiment is an informed probing of the unknown under controlled circumstances. Does it always give clear and full answers? No. Science grows like rings on a tree, each larger, but shaped by the inner rings from which it grew. The full story of the research Professor Pons and Professor Fleischmann will announce today will not be known for months or years, as others confirm, challenge, and enlarge their ideas and their data. The breakthrough they will report today comes from the work of trained minds working at an old problem from new perspectives. This particular study examines a traditional problem in physical science from the chemist’s point of view, specifically from that of electrochemists. This university prides itself—whether in creative writing or dance or chemistry or genetics or artificial organs—on a long tradition of intellectual freedom and a willingness to try new ways to solve old problems. This announcement today is an expression of that ancient and honorable process called “the university,” where trained faculty and dedicated students work side by side in processes of teaching and research. Its products are educated minds and new knowledge. Those minds and that knowledge flow to the benefit of the people of the world generally, and to the cultural

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and economic well-being of the state of Utah specifically. It has been an honor to observe such processes. Fleischmann and Pons then presented their findings, which—if confirmed by others—would significantly presage an interesting, but undefined, new area of science and a source of possibly nonpolluting energy. I remember the quiet, modest, and dignified tone of the press conference. The Response

Within days a great furor arose. Some said that the claim simply was impossible because it contradicted the laws of nuclear physics. Others attempted to replicate the experiment and could not. A few reported success. Within a week, the question arose about what the state of Utah should do—if anything—to support such potentially important findings. Ian Cumming, a member of the state Board of Regents and a successful business developer, was the first to raise the matter of financial support for further research. The then-governor of Utah, Norman Bangerter, promptly asked the legislature to appropriate five million dollars to support the cold-fusion research. The legislature asked that I testify on the matter. I testified that I was not in a position to “believe or not believe” in cold fusion. Nevertheless, I clearly favored the support of such highly regarded scientists in a matter of this potential importance. If the claim was confirmed, and it could advance to the level of commercial development, the world would change for the better. The university, the state of Utah, the nation, and the entire world stood to benefit. Yes, I said, I was emphatic that the work was worth five million dollars of preliminary support. Following my testimony and others, the legislature made the appropriation. On April 26, 1989, the U.S. Congressional Committee on Science, Space, and Technology convened hearings on the matter. In his opening remarks, the chairman, Robert A. Roe, averred that “this announcement [by Pons and Fleischmann] preceded the traditional submission to a scientific journal where the article would be reviewed by other researchers in the field.”1 In fact, the article had been subject to peer review. This misstatement of professional sequence just days after the announcement took on a life of its own. The impression that a prepublication peer review had not taken place may have arisen from the article being published in a nonphysics journal. Still, the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry was widely acknowledged to be the leading publication in the field of electrochemistry. Therein, perhaps,

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began the controversy over “disciplinary ownership” of the findings, whether they belonged to chemistry or physics. The congressional hearings then considered the appropriateness of funding for further study of the Fleischmann/Pons claims. I was asked to testify and emphatically supported funding in the manner of other important projects such as the superconductivity project and hot-fusion research as well as the Human Genome Project in which University of Utah scientists had played an important role during the previous decade. A knowledgeable Washington economic consultant, Ira Magaziner, also testified on the need to avoid the possible loss of another technology development of the sort that the nation had experienced with earlier innovations. Other arguments were presented that the phenomenon could not have been accurately measured because it violated the known laws of nuclear physics. The hearings ended without a consensus, and ultimately no program funding was forthcoming. The next weeks grew increasingly noisy and soon painful. The covers of many of the national weeklies showed the tabletop apparatus that seemed so simple but symbolized so much. There was an early confirmation from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Texas A&M. The Italian Atomic Energy Laboratory reported production of tritium, a signature of a nuclear process. Some other reports, though, were negative. Then there were one or two retractions of early confirmation reports. As it turned out, the preliminary report that Fleischmann and Pons had produced provided less information than what was required to replicate their work. This may have occurred because the Utah processes were in flux, or because Fleischmann, as he later said, was concerned about British atomic-energy laws, which he felt severely controlled public reporting on anything relating to atomic weaponry. Moreover, there was much still unexplored and undiscovered by Pons and Fleischmann about the process. The heart of the criticism derived from certain canons of nuclear physics, positing that if the claimed excess heat came from a nuclear process, byproducts should have been readily measurable and even lethal to the investigators. The tritium reported from the Italian Atomic Energy Laboratory was the only confirmation initially of nuclear products. In any event, within a few weeks, there was growing condemnation of the Fleischmann/Pons claims because of the paucity of nuclear evidence and the failure of a majority of labs to produce excessive heat. For some time, it was impossible for Fleischmann and Pons—and other labs that had recorded at least one episode of excess heat—to be certain of all the conditions required to produce a scientifically acceptable positive result. The major

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“event” had occurred over a weekend with no one in the lab. In the meantime, what had been a clamor grew to the level of disbelief and even charges of fraud. It was only months later that scientists at cooperating laboratories—particularly Michael McKubre at the Stanford Research Institute—found that heat production occurred only at a specific atomic ratio, or when 90 percent of the available sites in the palladium had been achieved or saturated, which required days and sometimes weeks to reach. Meanwhile the Department of Energy (DOE) empanelled a group of scientists to investigate the matter. They met in Utah, but no experiments were examined. Beaudette has documented their proceedings in Excess Heat. The DOE’s preliminary conclusions were negative, opposed to setting aside any special funding, and discouraged efforts to obtain routine funding. Nevertheless, Professor Norman Ramsey, a Harvard Nobel physicist and cochair of the panel, refused to sign the report until it included his statement that, as Eugene Mallove quotes in his Fire from Ice, . . . it is difficult convincingly to resolve all cold fusion claims, since, for example, any good experiment that fails to find cold fusion can be discounted as merely not working for unknown reasons. Likewise the failure of a theory to account for cold fusion can be discounted on the grounds that the correct explanation and theory has not been provided. Consequently, with the many contradictory existing claims, it is not possible at this time to state categorically that all the claims for cold fusion have been either convincingly either [sic] proved or disproved.2 Unbeknownst to most people, both inside and outside of the scientific community, including myself, a meeting of fifty scientists was called in Washington on October  16–18, 1989. The meeting convened under the joint auspices of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). Mallove goes on to say, For two-and-a-half days, a motley crew of skeptics and proponents . . . wrestled with the thorny question of cold fusion. Attending were notables Nathan Lewis, Steve Jones, Stanley Pons, Martin Fleischmann, Hugo Rossi, John Bockris, and John Appleby. Two scientific luminaries who hadn’t really wet their feet in cold fusion were also there, physicist Edward Teller [so-called father of the hydrogen bomb] and Paul Chu of the University of Houston, who had achieved fame for his superconductivity work.3

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Mallove continues, Behind closed doors, however, some extraordinary evidence for fusion surfaced. There were discussions of persisting cases of excess energy from cells, heat bursts, neutron bursts, and tritium found where it definitely should not be. Teller went so far as to suggest that the widespread exotic effects could be due to a “yet undiscovered neutral particle.” The elusive particle acquired the name “meshuganon” from the Yiddish word meshuga, meaning “crazy.”4

The suggestion may have been wickedly antic and playful or serious. Then Mallove says, After the meeting, cochairmen Paul Chu and John Appleby issued a provocative statement to the press: “Based on the information that we have, these effects cannot be explained as the result of artifacts, equipment, or human errors. However, the predictability and reproducibility of the occurrence of these effects and possible correlations among the various effects, which are common for accepted established scientific facts, are still lacking. Given the potential significance of the problem, further research is definitely desirable to improve the reproducibility of the effects and to unravel the mystery of the observations.” Appleby said, “We are happy our results are showing there is something strange going on, and we have found that other people have confirmed those results, and those of Fleischmann and Pons. Carefully performed new experiments show that anomalous heating . . . appears to be real in many cases.” Edward Teller told the press that he favored more research to determine whether the mysterious effects “are due to sophisticated difficulties in the experiments or whether a new phenomenon is involved.” . . . He recommended that “in recognition of the high class work that yielded surprising results, that the effort be supported to obtain clarification.” . . . Dr. Chu told the press, “Everyone who participated agreed more work should be done. . . . We proposed, and all agreed, that the skeptics and strong believers should work on the same experiments.”5 Despite this encouragement for further work, within only ten days, the DOE panel prepared its final report, which discouraged special funding to explore cold fusion. This final report also cast doubt—ignoring the statement of Ramsey, the

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cochair, on the initial impossibility of knowing for sure whether cold fusion was valid. When the other cochair of the DOE study was asked by reporter Jo-Ann Jacobsen-Wells of the Deseret News what he knew of the EPRI-NSF meeting, he said dismissively, “That was a very minor group of people who had been getting positive results for some time.”6 By contrast, Professor Ramsey said he “dearly wanted to see the results of the EPRI-NSF meeting.”7 Unfortunately, the EPRI-NSF report was never published, and one can only speculate as to why it wasn’t. However, as of June 2011, it is still available on the Internet at http://​www​.lenr-​canr​.org/​acrobat/​EPRInsfepriwor​.pdf. I am not qualified scientifically to follow the more than one hundred pages of conference reports and discussion. But the tone of respect and desire to follow all data points and questions raised in the discussion are truly impressive. At this point, the press—apparently unaware of the study made by the Washington, D.C., group—grew increasingly harsh. One can only conclude that if a wide disclosure of the findings of the Washington group had occurred—both to the scientific community and the public—the road to scientific, deliberate research undistorted by science/politics would have muted much of the criticism, which accelerated to the point of ridicule launched at Fleischmann and Pons. More importantly, the pace of research would have accelerated. A Matter of Ownership

Let me repeat that no president, dean, or department chair at any research university can arbitrarily influence the publication or suppression of something against a faculty member’s will, whether that something is a chemical process, a better can opener, a concerto, a play, a piece of writing, or anything else. Neither can a faculty member’s right to publish or circulate something be prevented. Such action violates academic freedom in its most basic sense, and in practical terms, the university contained no teeth to enforce such behavior. I repeat this point because I heard the rumor a month or two after the DOE meetings that the university had required a public announcement to protect Fleischmann and Pons’s intellectual property. Pons later confirmed to me and Jim Brophy that he and Fleischmann had felt that their only recourse was to act independently of Jones at the time when they did to clarify and preserve the authorship of their work. The point that needs to be stressed—from the perspective of two decades—is that there is historical importance in how and when the cold-fusion announcement was made. But the much greater importance rests in whether or not the claims proved to be significant science. Who is qualified to review a statement

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that contradicts current tenets of nuclear physics? Must the heat measurements be abandoned if people do not understand the process that produced them? Data versus theory became a major issue in the controversy. Furthermore, these questions get to the heart of academic freedom: the right of trained faculty to pursue matters of interest, be they right or wrong. The test of that freedom occurs, usually, when their findings live in the realm of the unpopular, not the comfortable. Game changes do not come easily. Academic freedom is intended to allow exploration without the risk of career-fatal criticism. The history of physics is full of challenges to accepted theory by new data and experimentation. In the text Introduction to Modern Physics, Cornell Professor F.  K.  Richtmyer relates the trenchant words from Andrew  D. White’s A  History of the Warfare of Science with ἀ eology in Christendom regarding the thirteenthcentury British philosopher, scientist, and Franciscan monk Roger Bacon. He taught that in order to learn the secrets of nature we must first observe. He believed in mathematics and in deductive science, but he clearly realized that only as these were based on observed phenomena and tested by experiment could useful knowledge result. “In an age when experimenting was sure to cost a man his reputation and was likely to cost him his life, he insisted on experimenting and braved all risks;” with the result that he spent 24 of the last 37 years of his life in prison—one of the many “martyrs of science. [italics in original]8 The abuse that Fleischmann and Pons suffered was no doubt painful for them and interrupted their lives, but they were not jailed or hanged. Richtmyer says of Leonardo da Vinci, “his belief in the value of experiment is worthy of the twentieth century: ‘Experience,’ he writes ‘never deceives; it is only our judgment which deceives us.’ Or, again: ‘Before making this case a general rule, test it by experiment two or three times and see if the experiment produces the same effect.’ ”9 Then Richtmyer goes on to tell us of Galileo: . . . the authority of Aristotle had continued to be accepted. To test the point, Galileo apparently tried the famous experiment of dropping bodies of unequal weight from the leaning tower of Pisa and found that they all fell with practically equal velocities. . . . Galileo and a few of his friends were convinced of Aristotle’s error; [however,] . . . the majority maintained, in spite of all experiments and arguments to the contrary, that Aristotle must be right.10

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Academic freedom and primacy of observation require any university to be a diligent steward of the potential value of any acknowledged intellectual property. The public can misunderstand this stewardship. In the case of cold fusion, the announcement opened the door for critics to ridicule the university as having a “preoccupation with dreams of glory and money.” Criticism, Ridicule, and Institutional Reputation

Intellectual and academic convictions provided only a partial antidote to the strident external criticism of the Fleischmann/Pons findings. Regrettably, this criticism strengthened vocal concerns on campus that the controversy and ridicule could do serious academic harm to the University of Utah generally. My concerns were as deep as anyone’s, but I received some respite and a significant morale boost from Professor David Grant, a distinguished chemist on Utah’s faculty. Grant visited his grant-liaison officer in Washington at the National Science Foundation a month after the Pons-Fleischmann press conference, when the criticism was growing hot. The officer asked, “David, when are you guys at Utah going to stop that cockamamie cold-fusion stuff?” A lesser person than David Grant might have been dismayed, wondering if his funding would suffer. Grant reported that he poked his finger into the chest of his liaison officer, replying, “Are you asking me to tell colleagues that they are not free to pursue a project of interest to them?” “Oh no, Dave. I was only kidding.” Was he? Not everyone on the university faculty had the chutzpah of David Grant. A  dozen or so of the nonchemistry science faculty asked to meet me a month or two after the announcement. It was a blunt, outspoken meeting in the same conference room adjacent to my office where Richard Bernstein had first told me what Fleischmann and Pons were doing. I am quite sure all the participants felt they were sincere in the concerns they voiced. We were all feeling the pain of public ridicule. There was standing room only where we met. Ultimately, one of the most outspoken of those attending blurted, “President Peterson, you must stop this work.” After a measured pause, my reaction was simple: “I never thought that on this campus I would hear one faculty person telling another that he or she must stop research that is breaking no laws.” I suspect the gathered faculty might have agreed with me but felt themselves both victims of the national criticism and campus

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spokespersons for the need to wash the university clean of the presumed stain of the event. As I fell asleep that night, I recalled an ancient Harvard saw that suggested that faculty were “free to do whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t get their names in the paper or scare the horses.” The University of Utah faculty member who spoke out in the meeting may have been honestly worried that his horses might flee, that current or future grants and reputations could be at risk. Though my conscience was clear, succeeding days brought considerable personal pain, pain shared by many others affected by the events and suffering from anguish that an intellectual or theoretical wand could not fully alleviate. A university president’s wife is not unaffected by institutional controversy. Imagine what must have spun through my wife’s mind when she innocently unfolded a copy of the New York Times and encountered the editorial page. The words leapt at her with the declaration that her husband should resign his presidency for his role in the embarrassing “pseudoscientific circus” called cold fusion. It hurt a bit, but we could take it. The same paper’s editorial page had called Utah’s unavoidable, full-and-open reporting of its artificial heart project six years earlier “grandstanding.” In the science section of the same issue, the New York Times distinguished medical writer, Dr. Larry Altman, had credited the university with clarity and responsibility for the manner in which it reported that heart research. And, as is common knowledge, artificial heart pumps and heart-assist devices continue to enjoy growing development and modest use. There is legitimacy in any university’s desire and obligation to stop fraudulent research. Generally universities are sponsoring agents with the principal investigators in applying for and conducting funded research. On one occasion—a few years prior to the cold-fusion controversy—a minor paper published by one of the junior faculty members at Utah’s medical school had been challenged. There is a standard protocol for investigation. Our university followed the rules carefully and found that the author had indeed falsified data. In response the university published a retraction of the paper, repaid the NIH for the investigator’s research funds, and placed the author on probation. He left the university soon after. “They Will Only Laugh at You”

During the month before the public announcement by Fleischmann and Pons, I  had called Professor Hans Bethe. He was a distinguished physicist at Cornell

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and a Nobel laureate for his work on the nuclear processes within the sun. He happened, parenthetically, to be the father-in-law of the sister of my son-in-law. Perhaps for this familial reason, he took my call. I explained what Fleischmann and Pons planned to report. I asked if he, by any chance, had the time and energy to come to Utah and review their findings. He said he was too busy and perhaps too old to make the trip. Then he said in the clearest of terms, as a man whose career had focused on understanding nuclear processes at the temperature and pressure of the sun, “I advise you not to announce such a thing. They will only laugh at you.” At that moment, I did not see what laughing had to do with such a matter—an announcement by two distinguished faculty chemists. Ultimately, Bethe’s prediction was largely accurate. I later discussed the research-related role of a university president with my friend David Gardner, a respected mentor and my predecessor as university president. He told me his choice would have been to play no public role in the matter, leaving it purely in the hands of the scientists. He might have been right. Doing that certainly would have shielded me from personal criticism. Would it have kept Utah’s flagship university less connected to a story of “just two scientists”? I doubt it. At the time, however, I did not think I had the option of simply being an onlooker. Professor Bernstein had handed the matter to me and strongly advised me to scrutinize it. Fleischmann and Pons had asked me to join and help arrange a meeting with Professor Jones, the BYU president, and the provost. After the announcement, the Utah governor and legislature had asked for my testimony about state funding for further research. It is doubtful if funding would have been provided had I declined to testify or if the university was unwilling to assume responsibility. Finally, Congress had asked me to testify at a hearing in Washington to consider the topic and exceptional funding approved earlier for superconductivity, the Genome project, hot fusion, and much of NASA’s work. An impressive number of scientists and even some university presidents had supported such projects, not as representatives of their institutions, but rather as advocates for the importance of the project. Finally, who more than a university’s president is in a position to support the importance of academic freedom when it is aggressively challenged? Yes, I was a university president. But, before and perhaps beyond that, I was a physician—bound to ensure no harm. And before and beyond that, I was the son of a university president, perhaps thus carrying an inbred sense of campus responsibility. A wise psychiatrist once either admired or accused me of being the sort of person who would feel obliged to paddle a stream to be certain it successfully made its way to the ocean. Mea culpa!

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Examining the mind-set of medical practitioners may also help explain my choice in the role that I played. A doctor is committed to participating in the equation of diagnosis, healing, and care. This is quite different from the detached stance afforded most professions. The Fleischmann/Pons Effect, Twenty Years Later

The current status of the Fleischmann/Pons effect, or the FPE as it has come to be known, can be summarized as follows: As of 2009, more than a hundred respected scientists from dozens of distinguished domestic and foreign labs—such as the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, the Stanford Research Institute, the Italian Atomic Energy Laboratory, the Bhabba Atomic Research Centre (India’s first and primary nuclear-research facility), even Russian, Japanese, and, most recently, privately funded Israeli labs—now regularly report experiments producing excess heat. The ability to duplicate their experiments has improved as metallurgy has advanced. Before he died—in a lecture given on December  7, 1990, in Japan—Julian Schwinger, who shared the 1965  Nobel Prize in physics with Feynman and Tomonaga, urged “open-minded research—not suppression.” And in view of the physicochemical nature of the subject, he added that he “would have thrown all the resources of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research into the study and development of cold fusion.”11 In addition to the original electrolytic process that Fleischmann and Pons used to load the palladium, there are now reports of success with gas loading. A few other labs have reported transmutation—the emergence of elements not present before the palladium loading—which indicates a nuclear process. Others have reported the specific production of tritium, a product of nuclear fusion. Thus, in each year of the last twenty, objective data from a growing number of respected laboratories worldwide have seemed to confirm the FPE. My guess is that many critics will never acknowledge the corpus of supporting data until a fresh generation steps forward to extend the science or it becomes possible to ramp up the generation of energy from the FPE to heat houses or power vehicles. In 1963 J. B. S. Haldane wryly suggested that new theories often undergo four stages in the process of acceptance: 1. 2. 3. 4.

This is worthless nonsense. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view. This is true, but quite unimportant. I always said so.12

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In 2009—during the very week of the twentieth anniversary of the Fleischmann/Pons announcement—Robert  L. Park updated his earlier strident criticism of cold fusion with a backhanded acknowledgement (stage 3 on Haldane’s list), saying, Incredibly, the American Chemical Society was meeting in Salt Lake City this week and there were many papers on cold fusion, or as their authors prefer LENR (low-energy nuclear reactions). These people, at least some of them, look in ever greater detail where others have not bothered to look. They say they find great mysteries, and perhaps they do. Is it important? I doubt it. But I think it’s science.13 In the same month as the American Chemical Society meeting, an unrelated, but thorough, report by the CBS program 60 Minutes reexamined cold fusion. Sensing the polar controversy, the reporters found a respected physicist who had no published opinion on the matter, Robert Duncan, vice chancellor for research at the University of Missouri. They asked his assessment. Duncan had earned his undergraduate degree at MIT, and during a rich and varied career, had been a visiting member of the faculty at Cal Tech and a supervisor at Los Alamos National Laboratories before coming to the University of Missouri. Duncan initially reported that he tended to be skeptical of the Fleischmann and Pons claims. CBS then requested that he take the time to study the morerecent published reports and visit laboratories reporting regular excess-heat production—including a trip to a privately funded facility in Israel that was working on commercialization of the process. Duncan did so over a number of months. In his summary, Duncan concluded that good science done by skilled scientists has resulted in a high, but not 100 percent, record of replication and that the scientific basis for the phenomenon of cold fusion is yet to be understood. This report paralleled presentations at the 14th International Conference on Cold Fusion that had convened a few months earlier. With the Naval Research Laboratory, the Stanford Research Institute, dozens of university and national laboratories here and abroad, and a handful of commercial enterprises continuing to conduct active research, it is unlikely that the genie can be put back into the bottle. A Perfect Storm

Since discovery announcements are an ancient and accepted part of science, one naturally wonders how Fleischmann and Pons could have made their

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announcement without prompting the violent reaction they received. It had all the characteristics of an unavoidable perfect storm. In an interview Fleischmann gave in 1996 to Christopher P. Tinsley, a contributing editor of Infinite Energy magazine, the scientist came to the same conclusion, saying, “I think the press conference was a mistake. But it was inevitable.” Tinsley asked, “Can you, looking back, see any alternative to what happened?” “No.” Fleischmann responded. “. . . I think it was inevitable—and it would happen again, and in other fields it will certainly happen again.”14 My question: What, in the events of cold fusion, was too hot to handle from the beginning? Certainly Fleischmann and Pons had the right to claim primacy for their potentially important findings. The history of science is replete with controversy over early claims of primacy. The discoveries of insulin by Frederick Banting and Charles Best in Canada and the double helix of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick are two well-known examples. One hopes that, in the case of cold fusion, history will untangle who did what and when and, in the process, clarify the role of Jones. While the initial Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry paper took the form of a preliminary note, the potential importance of the findings was too enormous to be accorded a wait-and-see reception by critics. What was at stake if Fleischmann and Pons were right? By comparison the suggestion of movement by tectonic plates to explain the contours of South America and Africa and species isolation contradicted existing science but posed no threat to related lines of research and development. The geologic-science establishment was therefore content to scoff at the validity of the observation, but there was no rush to censure it for much of a century until irrefutable evidence slowly emerged and confirmed the theory. A case more comparable to Fleishmann and Pons’s is a study on the African American family written by my personal friend, Professor, and later Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The study prompted strong criticism for even considering negative aspects of the sociology of the postslavery black family. Moynihan dryly commented after weeks of public outcry that the subject perhaps deserved a period of “benign neglect.” The implications of the Fleischmann/Pons experiment were probably simply too large and challenging to receive such a refreshing, calm break. Fleischmann and Pons often said that they wished they had had six to eighteen months or more to shore up their claims and uncover the reason(s) the experiment produced inconsistent results. No one initially knew all the elements the process required to produce excess heat. The first full paper on the experiment was

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published in 1990. Thus, the instructions for replication in the initial 1989 article likely gave a misleading impression of simplicity, igniting disbelief and suspicion. Effort in time and money that many laboratories spent to replicate the phenomenon without success in the first week or two after the announcement must have added more skeptical wood to the fire. In that light, it was probably easy for frustrated investigators to cry “sloppy science” or “fraud” given the huge implications of the claim. Because the level of excess heat generated was larger than what was possible from a chemical process, it challenged some canons of nuclear physics and even politics. While gesturing to his bookshelf of nuclear texts, one scientist said, “If cold fusion is correct, all of this is wrong.” One critic even phoned me to beg that the claim be withdrawn “so as to avoid a dangerous upset of the oil geopolitics of the Middle East.” Another physicist scoffed at the possibility of a nuclear reaction with the simple observation that “the laws of nuclear physics are complete and closed,” a scornful comment that reminded me of Professor Irving at Harvard Medical School in the early 1920s. After designing a “better forceps” for child delivery, he supposedly declared, “The field of obstetrics is now closed.” Science discovered estrogen a few years later! Turf wars inevitably erupt whenever science is potentially groundbreaking. Calorimetry—the measurement of heat—is a specialty of electrochemists. Vice Chancellor Duncan, the physicist 60 Minutes consulted, was experienced in the field. The accurate demonstration of excess heat was itself sufficient to establish the importance of the claims, regardless of the process. Furthermore, many physicists claimed that if nuclear effects were involved, the territory belonged to physics, not chemistry, resulting in little respect from mainline physicists. Chemists work in a world of the electronic shells of atoms and molecules; physicists work in the world of the nucleus and subnuclear (called subatomic) particles. Perhaps overshadowing all else, serious consideration of cold fusion suffered because its announcement just happened to be ill timed. In the two years preceding the findings, Congress had begun to express growing skepticism about the large annual fund requests from the hot-fusion research community. Congress had provided such funds to bolster attempts to mimic the conditions of heat and pressure of the sun, where spontaneous fusion provides the heat and energy for everything we call life on Earth. A major goal of hot-fusion research was to produce sustainable nuclear fusion that produced more energy than it consumed. That continues to be important and desirable research while not yet achieving its goal. So it is not surprising that many reputable scientists may have felt obliged to refute the cold-fusion claim and state that it must surely be a mistake before it

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harmed their hot-fusion and related nuclear science funding. Imagine what steps your criticism of cold fusion would take if you were involved in—or sympathetic to—hot-fusion research. Imagine the credibility you’d lend to those who claimed cold fusion could not be real unless Fleischmann and Pons were dead from nuclear radiation. Under such circumstances, it’s not hard to imagine scientific orthodoxy marshaling its forces against cold fusion before its study either siphoned research funds or did harm to “legitimate science.” Trivial, but telling, intellectual snobbery, scientific provincialism, and group think also soon surfaced and are worth sharing. Smallness-of-mind anecdotes can be—at the same time—frustrating and amusing. I’ve experienced my share. A longtime Cambridge/Brattle Street friend, who’d had a dinner party about a week after the Fleischmann and Pons announcement, called me with a twinkle in her voice: “Chase, you may be amused to learn that one of my guests, an MIT physicist, commented, ‘I think there may be something to that claim of cold fusion . . . except that I can’t believe an idea that large could come from a place like Utah.’ ” Fleischmann and Pons might have smiled at their relegation to a new homeland. Yet another commentator noted, “I generally doubt scientific statements that come from either the Vatican or Salt Lake City.” One presumes that is because of the dominant religion of each location. Beyond the obvious bigotry and confusion between religion and science, the flippant comment is egregiously ignorant of the histories of both Fleischmann and Pons: the threats to the Fleischmann family by the Nazis in Czechoslovakia and the persecution and later exodus of the Protestant Pons family from northern Italy to find safety in North Carolina. As for group think, it is widely acknowledged that “out-of-the-box” ideas are less likely, by definition, to come from “within the box” because of the force that consensus exerts. Fleischmann and Pons’s muddy relationship with BYU’s Professor Jones added spice, but no clarity, to the events leading up to the announcement. It is unfortunate that two labs so near each other could not have cooperated and taken the needed six-to-eighteen months to understand better the source of the excess heat that Pons and Fleischmann had recorded and the work that Jones apparently had done with nuclear forces. Time may tell if Jones had, in fact, been measuring a different form of the same phenomenon. There were other disrupting forces and events that were unfortunate but not altogether illogical in the whole cold-fusion drama. In the first months after the announcement, colleagues asked Fleischmann and Pons to share their raw heat measurements. Many of these requests came from scientists originally supporting the claims of cold fusion. Fleischmann and Pons refused to do it. Fleischmann later

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wrote—in a letter I came across in the university archives—that he’d chosen to deny colleagues access to the information to finesse the possible reports of failure to produce excess heat in the last few cells operating before the announcement. He felt the measurements would only pour gasoline on the fires of critics. He was probably right, but silence cost him and Pons the support of many of their colleagues. Cheves Walling, a leading chemist at the university, was among those who— after initially supporting Fleischmann and Pons—publically stated that their data might be false, even fraudulent, because of their refusal to share them. Ironically, under pressure from the committee set up to oversee the money the state had appropriated, the Fleischmann/Pons data were shared months later with an independent Utah State University physicist, Professor Wilford Hansen. After careful analysis, Hansen reported an even larger amount of heat in a number of experiment cells. The clouds gathering above the Fleischmann/Pons announcement didn’t disperse. Doubt raged; critics were not shy. The global, collective criticism of the scientists’ claims burdened and embarrassed many of the Utah faculty, threatening, some felt, their own professional reputations—guilt by association, as it were. I heard of faculty members flipping over their Utah name tags when attending national professional meetings! Imagine the pain I felt as a university president when I heard that some faculty hid their affiliation and acted ashamed. Each year Utah awards a commencement prize to a science faculty member for excellence in research. The person chosen in 1989 or ’90 came to my office and— without rancor but with deep conviction—said that he could not accept the award because of the university’s involvement in the “cold-fusion scandal.” I urged him to claim his own excellence, but he declined the award. A Strong Lobby

In 2000 the Tanner lecture trust sponsored a special convocation on the “Nature of Time” in Cambridge, England. I attended the meetings as a trustee and, while there, enjoyed several easy conversations with Professor Malcolm Longair, a physicist and director of the hallowed Cavendish Labs. On the closing day, emboldened, I asked him, “How long before cold-fusion study reenters the mainstream of science?” Longair smiled gently and cryptically spoke with Scottish understatement, “Nuclear physics has a very strong lobby.” Was he saying that the Fleischmann/Pons effect would never be considered true unless confirmed by the leaders of the physics community? Or was he

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implying that—whether true or false—the claim stood little chance in the political battleground of scientific-research funding? From the beginning, the argument for further study of the Fleischmann and Pons work rested with Nobel laureate Ramsey’s call for continued investigation of even one careful measurement that promised so much. The experts at the Washington conference of October 1989, endorsed Ramsey’s conclusion.15 Reports made over twenty years have repeated the call. During the nearly three-month saga of the Barney Clark artificial-heart implantation in Salt Lake City, I got to know NBC’s science writer Robert Bazell. Seven years later, he came to see me again to discuss the university’s reaction to criticism of the Fleischmann/Pons findings. He asked if Utah had become hypersensitive— even paranoid—about the criticism. “Are you guilty of xenophobia?” he inquired. Did he mean Utah was distrustful of the outer world . . . or isolated from it? I recoiled then, but on quieter reflection, I think he may have been right. The University of Utah and the state—being more insular—may well have been less secure and more sensitive to outside criticism than more established institutions and regions. Certainly it was especially difficult just to shrug off the noise and criticism that swirled around us. Happily I am convinced that time is eventually on the side of truth and clarity. Mistakes Were Made

There were at least three unfortunate misjudgments or mistakes relating to the cold-fusion drama that added to the turmoil. The first was our naïvely being unprepared for the magnitude and degree of public and professional criticism. Utah might, I believe, have better anticipated and prepared for the public interrogation and criticism. Fleischmann and Pons were gentlemen throughout. Still, Pons particularly could have been tougher and more prepared for the onslaught. Pons, under the misguided advice of his longtime friend and lawyer Gary Triggs, threatened a lawsuit against a university physics colleague, Professor Michael Solomon, who had agreed to look for nuclear products in the Fleischmann/Pons electrolytic cells. He reported negative results. Pons disagreed with his analysis and threatened to sue. The lawsuit put me in an awkward situation—humorous as well, if anyone could retain a sense of humor after all cold fusion had put us through collectively. With litigation in the air, both members of the controversy came to me to ask if the university would provide financial coverage for legal counsel if the issue went to court.

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Scientific rebuttal, of course, belongs in professional journals. Fortunately the matter faded without court involvement. A number of other legal threats also evaporated, but they left a stain for a while. I understand Pons grew to distrust his legal counsel and eventually discharged him. The last noteworthy misstep was mine. While seeking funds from legislative and private sources to support the research to clarify the accuracy of the coldfusion claims, I found that funds to support university research had come in the past from rental fees generated by Utah’s affiliated Research Park. So I asked Vice President Brophy if it would be proper to use such funds. Brophy confirmed that it would and promptly arranged for a transfer to the cold-fusion account. Two snags resulted. The first was that two or three members of our governing board—Utah’s institutional council—were required to approve such transfers. Similar transfers had traditionally been done in a pro-forma fashion, as was done in this instance. However, the council members later expressed surprise that they had not been informed that the money was to support cold-fusion research. It was a small point, but nerves were clearly edgy. The second snag was an outright mistake on my part. When someone asked about the source of the cold-fusion funds, I said they were anonymous. They were not, of course. It would seem I naïvely, impatiently, and perhaps even in subconscious cowardice wished to avoid further acrimonious debate. This impatience embarrassed me, and, for a short time, the mistake poured a little more gasoline on the fire. It seemed that the first brief report by Fleischmann and Pons—as well as comments made later by Fleischmann—inadvertently gave the impression that the research and its procedures were easy. This gave cold-fusion critics and those who failed at replicating the experiment an excuse to become cynical or demand research be abandoned. Could We Withstand Being Laughed At?

In addition to the criticism of individuals, there was speculation that the University of Utah would also be damaged by the controversy. That clearly has not occurred. Instead, the University of Utah and even the state remain respected for providing welcoming environments that encourage fresh thinkers like Maxwell Wintrobe in medicine, Willem Kolff in artificial organs, Mario Capecchi in genetics, or Maurice Abravanel, conductor of the Utah Symphony. Each found an environment that offered original minds freedom to do research and take independent action. One objective measurement of the standing of the University of Utah and its research faculty, before and since the Fleischmann/Pons announcement, is the

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institution’s total of sponsored research funding. It has risen steadily at a time of crimped national funding for research. Total Research Funding for the University of Utah 1989—$104,324,000 1989—cold-fusion announcement 2010—$450,614,999 Reports I’ve recently received from many university department heads and upper-administration personnel all confirm that faculty recruitment is certainly as strong—and probably stronger—than it was before 1989. Institutional embarrassment is, of course, hard to assess, and embarrassment by association is even more amorphous. On an unobtrusive level, there may still be a lingering sensitivity. As I’ve already mentioned, universities such as Princeton, Harvard, MIT, or Cal Tech undoubtedly would have had a stronger sense of themselves than an “inland upstart like Utah.” Personal Reputation

On a personal note, in 1990—the year after the announcement on cold fusion— I  was named chair of the congressional science-advisory committee called the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). In that position, I followed William Perry, former secretary of defense, and was succeeded by Joshua Lederberg, Nobel laureate and president of Rockefeller University. In the same period, the National Association of State Universities and LandGrant Colleges, or NASULGC, elected me as its chair. I am the only Utahan I know of to have occupied that post. That is the same organization that took my father to Washington yearly as an executive-committee member and me with him once when I was twelve. Those appointments suggest that there was no embarrassment or censure felt by my national peers, who were not naïve about the rituals and images of education, research, and academic politics. As  I said at the time of the 1989 announcement and continue to believe, “What we now term the Fleischmann/Pons effect, or low-energy nuclear reaction, deserves serious study. There is not yet a full understanding of its theoretical basis. The university, its faculty, and I believe in the importance of diligent research and study on a matter of such potential importance to science and possibly humanity.” Cold-fusion’s basic scientific claims have now been widely confirmed as new and interesting science. Within this new scientific niche may lie merely a curiosity

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or a significant contribution to one of the greatest problems the Earth faces. Any challenge to a paradigm is painful in its evolution. I cannot resist tweaking the occasional smugness of the New York Times editorial board for its criticism of the study of cold fusion. Six decades earlier—with considerable condescension—this same revered editorial board mocked the claims of Robert Goddard that a rocket he was working on might fly to the moon. The Times comment was “that Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College [again, not MIT, Princeton, or Cal Tech] and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react—to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”16 The University of Utah’s own Mario Capecchi’s winning tussle with accepted science is illustrated by two intriguing framed letters on his wall. He spoke of them when he received the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2007. The first letter, from the NIH, rejected his research proposal in the 1970s to study how he might be able to knock out a single gene to study its singular function. The letter rejected his application based on its “impracticability.” A  second letter, written on the same letterhead a decade or so later, is mounted beside the first. It contains one simple sentence: “We were wrong.” The Timeless Conflict Inherent in the Challenge of New Science

A few months into the controversy, I learned of a book by Michael Polanyi that details his own experience of the tension between orthodoxy in science and challenges to it. In a chapter entitled “The Potential Theory of Adsorption,” the respected scientist describes being caught in the crossfire between scientific order and the claims of a new idea. Polanyi was widely ridiculed for more than twenty years for having made an observation in 1914 that violated the then-current science theories. Had he not been able to present subsequent research sustaining his reputation, he believes his professional career could not have survived. By the late 1930s, finally, he received acceptance of what he’d proposed. His conclusions are worth noting: I am making, therefore, no complaint about the suppression of my theory for reasons which must have seemed well founded at the time, though they have now been proved false. It is perhaps more difficult to understand why more than fifteen years passed after the presentation of my paper in

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1932, in which the original objections had been proved unfounded, before the rediscovery and gradual rehabilitation of the theory set in. I suppose so much confusion was left over from the previous period that it took some time for scientists to take cognizance of the new situation, and that meanwhile my own work, which had been so long discredited, remained suspect. If the problem had been more important, this period of latency would no doubt have been shorter. The dangers of suppressing or disregarding evidence that runs counter to orthodox views about the nature of things are, of course, notorious, and they have often proved disastrous. Science guards against these dangers, up to a point, by allowing some measure of dissent from its orthodoxy. But scientific opinion has to consider and decide, at its own ultimate risk, how far it can allow such tolerance to go, if it is not to admit for publication so much nonsense that scientific journals are rendered worthless thereby. Discipline must remain severe and is in fact severe. . . . Even so, the opposition to my theory would have cut off any hope I had of a scientific career . . . had I not done other scientific work that brought me recognition which outweighed the discredit brought upon me by my theory of adsorption [italics in original].17 Let me be clear: I am not asking that the tension between established science and new theories be otherwise. I’m merely attempting both to frame and spotlight the grave risks that characterize dissent. This centuries-old tension often promotes a productive debate. Obscuring this tension—as happens too often in our times— dilutes the intellectual honesty of science. How should one judge the words of Bertrand Russell? The triumphs of science are due to the substitution of observation and inference for authority. Every attempt to revive authority in intellectual matters is a retrograde step. And it is part of the scientific attitude that the pronouncements of science do not claim to be certain, but only the most probable on the basis of present evidence. One of the great benefits that science confers upon those who understand its spirit is that it enables them to live without the delusive support of subjective authority.18 Such statements, while emphasizing inference, obscure the fact that the authority of current scientific opinion is indispensable to the discipline of scientific institutions; that authority’s support is invaluable, even though, ironically, its dangers

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are an unceasing menace to scientific progress. I have seen no evidence that this authority is exercised without claims of certainty for its own teachings. The unreasonable unwillingness to reconsider a rejected proposal is revealed by a recent response by an otherwise-respected nuclear physicist from Texas. When asked his current view of cold fusion, he crisply responded that the issue had been closed years before when the theory was proved to be error. The questioner then asked, “But have you read any of the more than one hundred articles that have confirmed the phenomenon?” The Texan’s response was simple: “Of course not; I do not have time to waste on matters that have been closed.” Personal Conclusions

Intellectual and academic freedom are essential elements of experimentation, observation, data collection, and, ultimately, human welfare and progress. Observation and data collection are essential in the generation and confirmation of theories. The usefulness of data rests on their ultimate replication and confirmation by other skilled investigators. While immediate verification is ideal, more often additional experimentation and time are necessary to understand the conditions required for reliable replication. Hence, one novel observation is rarely the end in probing a mystery of nature. The period of uncertainty surrounding a new observation calls for modesty and restraint from both the proponent and the skeptic. The tenets of established science are a means of avoiding chaos, promoting order, and acting as a road map for new discovery. In the process, these scientific tenets risk engendering intellectual myopia unless they simultaneously encourage a healthy culture of skepticism for the known as well as the unknown. Intellectual property deserves no less attention and stewardship. This stewardship serves the interest of the individual scientist and institution while promoting the advancement of humanity at large. This aim is exactly the intent of the BayhDole Act in the 1980s, which was designed to promote timely transfer of bench science to industrial development. The Fleischmann/Pons announcement—coupled, as it was, with the uncertain research of BYU’s Stephen Jones—created suspicion that resulted in confusion. The passage of twenty years appears to have answered many of the questions about the primacy of the discovery of cold-fusion’s production of excessive heat. With respect to any parallel work Jones did on the issue of nuclear measurements, it is best to reserve judgment. As Professor Tanner said years ago to his questioning and courageous freshman student, “Finally! That’s what I’ve been waiting for.” Science and wisdom await all questions.

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What Will the Future Be?

What will be the significance of the excess heat generated by the Fleischmann/ Pons effect—LENR? Will it be a wedge in a new chapter of science, or merely an oddity? Will it produce energy in a manner and magnitude, ideally as decentralized energy, that is useful to civilization? As I write, many lines of development are being pursued. But we do not know the answer . . . yet. There’s that wonderful, honest, and optimistic word: yet. Will the lesson of cold fusion have taught us to live more wisely between the useful, comfortable, but uncertain clarity of established truth and the disorder posed by the challenge of as-yet-unverified new truth? The jury, as they say, is still out. Finally, the process we at Utah experienced is a direct expression of a special, sometimes fragile freedom—academic freedom. And though this is a freedom that has never sailed on smooth water, I cannot imagine not paddling for it or helping to steer it to a safe harbor.

13 “What Am I Now?”: Medicine, Teaching, Practice, and Sick Myself

Back Home on Campus

No matter what I thought then or now, the controversy in 1990 on the University of Utah campus over the Fleischmann/Pons claims continued in a manner that interfered, at least to some extent, with what we were trying to accomplish as a university. And in a sense, I became something of a lightning rod for those who felt themselves individually embarrassed by the public attention that came to the university generally. One of my most lasting memories of that time is coming home to lunch and listening to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor while lying on the couch. The concerto has a haunting, somber tone. Deep bass notes in the first movement roll up into the midrange like a subterranean cry. For some reason, it was comforting, maybe because it suggested the unreachable and unexplainable. I remember wondering what Mozart felt when he wrote it. However, pain has little to do with duty. Some people thrive on controversy. I do not mind it if the cause is important enough to outweigh collateral damage to vital elements of an institution or society. One of the most frustrating aspects of my role in the Fleischmann/Pons affair was that as a nonscientist, I felt I was in no position to make a useful response. It is finally time to record—as I have done here—my observations on the controversy as it played out. The media for the most part bought the “embarrassment angle” and were generally unwilling to follow any lead other than to call outside “experts,” who steadily refuted or ignored the growing number of positive reports of the generation of excess heat from dozens of laboratories around the world.

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The prolonged to-do, even hysteria, over the cold-fusion controversy and the criticism that accompanied it seemed to trigger a fear in some people on campus that the negative cloud could impact not just Pons or Fleischmann but the faculty generally. That perception might have been related to the public notoriety over the artificial-heart surgery six years earlier. As the health-science vice president at that time, I played a public role with the media. The university was mostly praised but also criticized by some people for its open response to the unprecedented media interest in an event that had the world’s attention. A relative who was visiting Australia even called me to report that a stranger had stopped him on the street to inquire about Barney Clark when the person learned he was from Salt Lake City! The Pons/Fleischmann work challenged academic freedom as well as basic canons of nuclear physics on a campus dedicated to both educational and research principles. That a cost might result is not a great surprise. There was pain. Pons likely felt hounded and ultimately left the campus for France, where he and Fleischmann soon reestablished their work for a time in a lab supported by the Toyota family. But the university continued to be sensitive, a distraction that risked becoming unproductive. The University of Utah Faculty Senate about this time passed a resolution of “no confidence” about my leadership, or at least that is the way some perceived it. The resolution specifically expressed displeasure with the way I was handling the continuing cold-fusion controversy. My first reaction was disappointment at the failure of the resolution to address the university’s historical commitment to academic freedom. Like so many other sources, the senate resolution was guilty of reporting that the Pons/Fleischmann article had not been peer reviewed and the university had required them to go public with their claims when they did. As  I have already explained, both assertions were entirely wrong. A third charge in the senate vote was that I had to return Jim Sorenson’s fifteen-million-dollar gift to the medical school as part of naming the University of Utah James Sorenson School of Medicine. That dispute had become loud and painful to Sorenson, the university, and me. However, Sorenson himself, not the university, had withdrawn his offer under pressure from the press and community, not me or the university. The fourth issue in the senate vote was my “secret funding” of the cold-fusion study that had been set up with an initial grant of five million dollars from the Utah Legislature. As I have explained already, it was an occasional practice to allocate funds from rental income in Research Park to support promising research. However, when asked where the money had come from, I announced that it was an anonymous source, and when the word got out—as I should have expected—that

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it was for cold fusion, it prompted an uproar at the apparent deception. I should have been open in reporting the source of funding; I probably simply wanted to avoid more controversy. Although I had violated no law or regulation, I understand and accept that criticism. The final senate concern was about a plan the university had been developing for most of a year to establish the post of university provost to bring more efficiency and oversight into academic matters. An experienced consultant from the California university system had recommended the idea, but it never worked out well, through no fault of the appointee, Jim Clayton, who was familiar with university management systems and had been a successful dean of the graduate school. In creating the new position, the former academic vice president post was dropped, and some faculty members felt that the new arrangement did not provide effective communication between the faculty and the administration. It’s hard to know if it would have. The president who followed me solved the problem by appointing two senior vice presidents, one for the medical area and the other for the rest of the campus. In some ways, those senior vice presidents served the function of senior provosts and successfully shared the growing burden on the president. The senate vote asked that the Board of Regents “review the performance of the president.” Some members of the senate later told me the recommendation was merely designed to be a study and review, but the tone on a range of topics was sufficiently critical that some people interpreted it as a vote of no confidence. While the Faculty Senate conclusions were not binding in any way, the local newspapers took them for a good ride. I certainly interpreted them as strident questioning of my skill and propriety as president. Only two years earlier, I had undergone a routine evaluation conducted for the Board of Regents by a panel of three presidential peers from Ohio State University, University of Nevada, and Oregon State University. After the Faculty Senate’s statement, rereading the conclusions of that peer review gave me a little perspective. Over three full days, the panel interviewed faculty, students, staff, and members of the university’s governing boards. Here is their conclusion: “The Evaluation Team was unanimous in stating that the University of Utah has one of the most outstanding presidents in the nation—a man of vision, intellect, and total dedication. Above all, it has a leader who cares and cares deeply about people and the excellence of a university which can bring out the best in them.” I mentioned earlier that during this period I had been elected president of NASULGC, the National Association of State University and Land-Grant Colleges, as well as asked to serve on the Knight Commission to make a national study of

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intercollegiate athletic reform. I was also chosen chair of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). Win a few, lose a few, I guess. But win or lose, it was more important that the university maintain stability and reasonable unity. As I noted in the previous chapter, clear evidence indicates that the university was not harmed by the events surrounding the cold-fusion debate, either on or off campus. But at the time, many were shaken. My life singularly and with Grethe has been full of the unexpected opening of one door after another onto an unplanned and wonderful opportunity. We will be forever grateful for such interesting and challenging lives. Could now be a time to experience a unique spell of turmoil? And if so, would such turmoil be invigorating or merely pose a counterproductive self-conscious and self-serving distraction and burden for the university as it sought to fulfill its many missions? In any event, I had planned to retire in the next three years when I reached sixty-five. Grethe and I came to feel that it might be better for the university and us to conclude that—in contrast to the many doors that had unexpectedly opened in the past—now was the time to accept a door closing, triggered intentionally or not by the senate action. Furthermore, we were both healthy, and I had an inkling that there just might be another door to open . . . or in the case of my medical background . . . reopen into medical care and teaching. So after a week or so of noise, I called a news conference and announced that I was planning to retire after finishing the spring semester of 1990 and the full 1990–91 academic year. I expected that would calm the campus waters and give the Board of Regents proper time to conduct a search and select my successor. Grethe and I deeply loved the university and all that higher education offered dedicated faculty, young people, the state, the nation, and the world during a time that demanded wise stewardship. I believe that final year confirmed the correctness of our decision—one that Grethe and I jointly embraced, as we had always done at past critical moments. I also have a hunch that subconsciously I remembered my father’s decision to retire a year or two early, after twenty-nine years, from the presidency of Utah Agricultural College; both of our actions connected with some controversy. The last year turned out to be both a productive and happy one. Much of the angst died down. And I am quite sure that the university did not lose, and may have strengthened, its commitment to provide a safe haven to new ideas, even unpopular ones. I accepted the honor of a sabbatical leave that the Board of Regents offered for the year after I resigned, time I used to retrain myself in medicine. The timing

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gave me enough years thereafter to feel I could use my old and new skills to practice and teach medicine. If I had left the presidency two years later, I am not sure I would have had the nerve or confidence to remake myself as a doctor or seen the sense of it. It turned out that I had always been first and fundamentally a doctor—whether for a human patient or institutional organism. The privilege of being able to renew and invigorate that identity through practicing and teaching medicine has given wholeness and completeness to everything else I have ventured to do. Back to Medicine

I read every page of the thick textbook, Cecil Review of General Internal Medicine. That was a bit compulsive, but I wanted the confidence that came from knowing I had at least encountered every new medical term and been exposed to every new topic. Refresher courses and attendance at weekly Grand Rounds at the university Department of Internal Medicine provided more learning. Exams qualified me for hospital admission privileges. Now how should I exercise my medical skills? Dr.  Marian Bishop, the chair of the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Utah, knew I was preparing to reenter medicine. She opened a door by telling me, “Chase, the medical students have successfully petitioned the School of Medicine to offer a class/clerkship in the third year for family practice. Would you be willing to develop a syllabus for that class and direct it?” Such a clerkship would cover much of internal medicine and that part of general-practice care I had provided on Cape Cod for a month each summer when I was dean of admissions at Harvard College, and then later at an emergency room one long weekend a month in the small town of Gardner, Massachusetts. Those medical experiences suggested that I could handle the broad expectations of a general medical practice. Still, I had to ask if the totality of medical teaching and practice had passed me by. It was a serious responsibility to care for general-practice/internal-medicine patients and another equally daunting task to teach medical students. Could I do either or both? A few colleagues told me diplomatically that too much had changed in medicine in the years since I had left full-time practice for me to be able to catch up. Bacterial infection was now a major cause of stomach ulcers. A  failure to sleep restoratively was often caused by an intermittent obstruction of the airways—sleep apnea—and could be treated. There were twenty-odd new antibiotics and antihypertensive pills. The list of new drugs and procedures was substantial.

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Nevertheless, I felt I was still a doctor and had been ever since leaving Harvard Medical School. That is, I was quite certain that I had continued to think like a doctor and had not lost the framework on which to hang new facts. My presentations to the Utah Legislature were attempts to recapture the discipline that I had started to learn from presenting medical cases to Dr. Seegal that summer on Welfare Island: don’t waste time trying to show how smart you are; use language appropriate to the issue; seek an honest commonality between speaker and audience; and listen carefully. My year of review and testing satisfied me that my medical framework was intact and I could access the new facts. I accepted Dr. Bishop’s offer. The teaching and patient care in the Wasatch Clinic on the university campus became a joy. Anonymous written feedback from the students has provided objective evidence that I have not lost my fastball. In addition, medical practice became comfortable, especially with the confidence that came from knowing that I could quickly access, as needed, any information I did not have. A Couple of Cases

I arrived at my office at the University Family Clinic a few minutes early one day, and the nurse asked me if I could see a patient who had come in without an appointment. “Of course,” I answered. “Bill [not his name], what brings you here?” Bill was someone I knew on the university faculty. “I don’t know, Chase; I feel awful. I guess I just suddenly got the flu.” All the usual questions followed. “Have you had any fever, sweats? Any cough, shortness of breath? Any sore throat, headache, chest or belly pain? Rash, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting? Swelling or pain of any joints? Dizziness?” The answer to all these and other questions was no. “Chase, I canceled my class this morning for the first time in ten years.” “Well, take off your shirt, and I’ll examine you.” His blood pressure, pulse, and breathing were normal. Temperature was normal. Neck was supple and throat clear; there were no sweats or rashes. His chest sounds were clear with no sign of fluid, inflammation, obstruction, or consolidation. No abnormality of heart rhythm or evidence of murmurs or rubs. Abdomen soft, joints normal, mental state alert. There was absolutely nothing abnormal in the examination. What did I conclude? That Bill had the flu; that he should go home, take it easy, and call me the next day if he was not doing better?

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However, there were two vitally important things he had said and I had happened to hear, things that I easily might have missed if I had been distracted or inattentive. What were they? Put yourself in my shoes and think for a moment. I have asked medical students the same question many times since. Some get it; some don’t at first. You don’t have to have gone to medical school to hear what I needed to hear. He had said, “I suddenly got the flu.” You don’t suddenly get the flu. Rather, we are more apt to say, “I have been feeling rotten this morning,” or “since yesterday,” or “this afternoon.” Not at a specific moment. The second thing came from something he had heard his body tell him and he—almost as an aside—had shared with me: “I canceled my class this morning for the first time in ten years.” Surely he’d had the flu sometime during that period and had been willing to lecture anyway with a mild headache, tickling cough, or drippy nose. This time he had listened to his body say something was unusual without knowing exactly what it was. Fortunately he had shared that perception with me. Professor Walter B. Cannon would be pleased that his book, ἀ e Wisdom of the Body, was still relevant nearly a century after he penned the concept of selfregulation and self-adjustment of the body. He called it homeostasis, and the term has endured; it means that the body has mechanisms to report and restore many imbalances and often alert someone to serious conditions. My patient “heard his body” and shared that “wisdom” with his doctor. So instead of sending him home to rest, I took a cardiogram, which I would not have bothered to do for a run-of-the-mill flu patient. There was clear evidence of a large anterior infarction, a heart attack. Perhaps 3–5 percent of heart attacks present initially in such a manner with no chest, arm, or back pain, loss of blood pressure, or abnormality of pulse; they are so-called silent heart attacks. I called an ambulance, put an intravenous line into his forearm, and went with him to the University Hospital Emergency Room a mile away. Within twenty minutes, he was in profound shock, his blood pressure in the range of sixty. Medicines administered through the IV addressed the shock; other medicines thereafter helped dissolve the obstructing clot in his coronary artery. He survived the acute injury, and in a few months, underwent successful cardiac artery-bypass surgery. In six months, he was back to full exercise. Had I not paid attention to his remarks about the sudden flu and cancellation of the class, he would have left my office, started to drive home, fainted in the car when his blood pressure fell, driven off the road, probably hit a tree, and been found dead at the wheel. Hearing a few simple words was central to saving a life.

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If I had arrived at the clinic that morning distracted by some personal upset, I worry that I might not have heard those two comments. Nor had anything taught in medical school in Boston or Salt Lake City, or in reading during my year of refreshment, made me hear them. Wilted Lettuce

Patsy (not her name) was born with cerebral palsy that ultimately crippled one arm and impaired her speech. She claimed that her family had considered her retarded sixty years before. They pretty much put her “down in the basement.” Ultimately, they admitted her to the state institution for the mentally disabled. But by twenty-five, she was organizing patients to demand their rights and better treatment, and in a few more years, she wrangled her discharge from the institution, married for a time, and thereafter pretty much lived independently with Social Security support. In the process, she had learned how to fight for her rights and irritated many of the doctors and nurses at the clinic where I worked! I inherited her as a patient and found her a feisty champion on the bumpy road of survival. I backed up her fight for better housing and care; smiled at her explosive outbursts at the insensitive treatment she felt some gave her; and laughed at and with her for her victories over life and the never-ending appearance of yet another roadblock to be conquered. Some in the clinic must have wondered why I liked her so much because many thought she was a nuisance. Patsy became a heroine of mine, and her regular observation that “Dr. Peterson, I love you. You’re not like those other lazy people,” was enough to make most days for me, even though I knew that she was, in part, conning me. Maybe she was like the wilted head of lettuce that my father used to bring home from the grocery store to my mother’s mild chiding—if he didn’t buy it, it was likely that no one would. I learned recently that Patsy had died in her late seventies in her nursing home. I had meant to visit her socially that month and feel an emptiness to learn that I will not touch her twisted, palsied hand again or be recharged by her bravery. Her gift of affection and unique courage was palpable. Patsy’s case is an example of a teaching point I regularly share with students. I suggest that as well as listening carefully, they should learn something nonmedical from each patient they see. Why? Any professional’s life is both busy and apt to be narrowing. Every patient has had some experience that is novel and enriching to anyone willing to listen. Beyond that, the willingness of a physician to learn something from the patient is not only informative generally and sometimes, in fact, useful for diagnosing and treating disease, but it is an honest expression of

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personal interest. If the physician is interested in learning something from the patient, perhaps the patient will be more apt to learn and follow some difficult instructions about treatment from the physician. Recently a former student of mine met my son. On learning that I was his father, the man told him to tell me that I had “ruined his practice!” Then he smiled and said that he had not forgotten my suggestion to learn something nonmedical from each patient. He has found it so interesting and broadening that he often risks falling behind in his schedule. Egophony

The patient was the father-in-law of one of our faculty members. He lived in India, where he was a professor. He had come to America for a short time to visit his son and daughter-in-law and a new grandchild. He came to the clinic with a cough that had bothered him for some time. His story was unremarkable, except for a small weight loss and a bit of fatigue, which he associated with the long travel. His exam was normal, except for what I heard in his chest with my stethoscope. When  I listened, I heard something I had not heard in decades. It was the sound of a bleating goat. The term was egophony, triggered by my request for him to say “ee-ee-ee.” The sound came out as a deep, nasal “bah-bah-bah,” as if spoken by a goat with his nose pinched. The exact sound is hard to describe. It is an unusual sound in medicine and occurs when an open bronchus (air passage) transmits sound from a consolidated portion of lung, often partially filled with fluid. It is usually associated with pleurisy, and in preantibiotic days, with tuberculosis that had caused cavitations in the lung. Old-time doctors prided themselves on catching the egophony because the conversion of the “eee” sound to a “bah” sound presumed the diagnosis of tuberculosis even before examining sputum microscopically and taking an X-ray and culture. I heard the sound and, with considerable satisfaction, told the student who was working with me what to listen for and what we might see on an X-ray. There it was—consolidation and a fluid level—a case of possible, if not probable, tuberculosis, especially in light of his residence in India. Tuberculosis has become rare in America, except for patients who suffer from a weakened immune-antibody status, such as those with HIV/AIDS. Hearing the egophony was just plain, professionally fun. The man’s disease was confirmed, he started therapy, and he returned to India in a few months on the way to recovery.

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A Doctor Gets Sick

Fourteen years ago, I happened to notice that over the previous eighteen months my serum-protein level—while still within normal limits—had been rising a bit every six months. I had taken the test to monitor my liver, which had the potential to become inflamed from the regular use of a cholesterol-lowering medication. The medication is called a statin and provides wonderful control of otherwiseelevated levels of blood cholesterol. Because I had the good fortune of being a doctor as well as a patient, I was curious enough to investigate why the serum-protein reading that was part of the liver-function panel of tests had been rising over the previous twelve months. It turned out I had signs of the early stages of a bone-marrow cancer called multiple myeloma: “multiple” because it was generally widely distributed throughout the bone marrow; “mye-” because it involved the blood-producing elements of the marrow; and “–oma” because it had the characteristic of a tumor. Multiple myeloma is a nasty cancer, at the time generally fatal in two to four years. It came to me as I journeyed the full circle from a medical student to a practitioner to an academician to a retrained medical teacher/practitioner and, finally, a patient. There seemed to be something honest and complete in that full circle, maybe even fair according to some crude moral arithmetic. Why should I not be the patient after all the other adventures I’d had? That symmetry displaced some of the horror evoked by the word “cancer” with curiosity about the pathophysiology of the process. I was exceedingly fortunate to have uncovered the diagnosis before the disease had become harmful. Such a cancer arose from a species of white blood cells in the marrow called plasma cells. Their normal function is producing the antibodies with which we fight off infection and which thereafter help us to avoid getting many infectious diseases a second time. The immunity triggered by shots against measles and other diseases come from those same plasma cells. Normal plasma cells are some of our best friends. The cancer generally is discovered only after the abnormal tumor cells cause one or more of five disturbances: damage to the kidneys or heart from the deposit of a sludge in the form of an abnormal protein produced by the tumor; bone destruction and fracture from the tumor cells invading the bone; anemia when the myeloma cells displace red blood-cell production; severe elevation of the serumcalcium level from bone dissolved by the cancer cells; and susceptibility to infection from a loss of normal protective plasma cells and other defenses.

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I was asymptomatic, so with the advice of the wonderful Dr.  Saundra Buys from our Huntsman Cancer Institute, we decided simply to watch the cancer and begin treatment only if it became full blown. There was no known cure in any case. Within two years, the cancer exploded, measured by a rapid rise in the amount of abnormal protein that the tumor produced and its evidence in aspirates of cells from the bone marrow. Traditional therapy consisted of melphalan, a derivative from World War I mustard gas, augmented by prednisone, a form of cortisone. That reduced the level of cancer-cell production for two years, and then, as expected, the cancer cells stopped responding to the medication. In the meantime, six months or so before the melphalan quit working, Grethe and I had been the fortuitous hosts to Dr. David Nathan. David was an old friend from Winthrop House at Harvard College. He had been a class ahead of me and, as I remember, a guard on the college subvarsity football team, where he exhibited more ferocity than skill. He regularly smelled of the chemicals of a biochemistry student but was otherwise a source of good humor and Yiddish jokes. He preceded me at Harvard Medical School and went on to become a distinguished hematologist and chief at Children’s Hospital Boston. David was in town to conduct a site visit of an NIH-funded research project at our medical school and gave me a call. After pleasantries, dinner at our house led to my disclosure of my myeloma. He erupted spontaneously, “Chase, you have to see Dr. Ken Anderson at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.” Anderson was perhaps the leading researcher in this cancer and turned out to have a modesty and generosity of spirit that made my first visit feel like the renewal of an old friendship. In 1999—when the melphalan stopped working—Dr. Anderson suggested that I consider a stem-cell transplant. Basically my normal white and red cells would be extracted from my bloodstream—“harvested” was the term. Then the cells would be stored while my body underwent a massive course of chemotherapy and X-radiation designed to kill off all or almost all of my remaining bone-marrow cells, both normal and cancerous. Anderson would then infuse the normal cells that had been harvested back into my bloodstream, and after one to three months, they would begin to reproduce the normal marrow cells. The value of the procedure was somewhat limited by the inevitable presence of some preexisting cancer cells, which would limit the effectiveness of the reinfused cells, and the chance of major infection and even death from lack of resistance to infection while my bone marrow was recovering. The term stem cell describes the existence of a portion of my bone-marrow cells that have the capacity to grow into a variety of normal cells. The process was probably the only treatment that might give me the chance at another year or two

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of life; done repeatedly over a number of years, it has proven to delay the progress of the disease in some patients. Enter Dr. Judah Folkman, another friend who’d been a year behind me at medical school. Judah was the chief of surgery at the Children’s Hospital Boston when he asked himself why a cancer he was removing from the abdomen of a child was bloodier than the surrounding tissue. The question was not unlike my question to myself, “Why would a patient say he suddenly got the flu?” A cancer is a neoplasm, meaning that it is a new growth. As such, it arises in the body without its own blood supply and, in its early development, has to rely on the limited oxygen and nutrients that can diffuse into the new cancer cells from surrounding normal blood vessels. That perfusion should only travel through a few millimeters of tissue, and then—in the absence of a new blood supply—the cancer should begin to starve and cease growing. Since malignant cancers do not stop growing, Judah formulated the hypothesis that the cancer must possess the capacity to produce some chemical that attracts the growth of new blood vessels. He called it angiogenesis, meaning the growth, “genesis,” of new blood vessels, “angio.” If there was such a molecule, might there be a way to produce another chemical to block its effect? He termed the process “antiangiogenesis” and set out to see if he could find or synthesize that molecule. Thalidomide was the pill that caused a terrible human tragedy in the 1960s until it was taken off the market. In Europe, South America, and Australia especially, pregnant women used it as a sleeping pill and treatment for the nausea of pregnancy. Tragically, it also turned out to stop the growth of the arms and legs of the unborn fetus. It took a number of years for an Australian doctor to uncover the connection between the deformed newborns and their mother’s use of thalidomide. Judah thought that thalidomide might be able to stop the growth of fetal extremities, in part, from an antiangiogenic effect. Simultaneously he and Dr.  Anderson suggested I try it to fight my myeloma. I did. In one month, my immune globulin levels were down to normal. Was I cured? Not likely. Anderson and I asked each other what I should do. “Since cancer is a bad thing, I suppose you ought to continue the thalidomide,” he said with handsome simplicity. But he also wanted my answer as much as we both wanted a scientific answer. I suggested that since we could monitor the status of the kidneys, bones, and white and red cells, along with my resistance to infection, why not simply watch and see whether the level of the bogus immune-globulin protein produced by the cancer cells returned to a potentially harmful level? Since neither of us knew the

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answer, as a physician/patient team, we agreed to try that approach while watching the markers carefully. Over the next eight to ten months, the bogus immune-globulin protein slowly rose to possibly harmful levels. So it seemed prudent to try the thalidomide again. After one month of low-dose thalidomide therapy, down again it fell to normal levels. Since then I have cycled through thalidomide treatment twelve to fifteen times over ten years. The results have continued to be positive, although the response has been less dramatic year by year. One advantage of the cyclic therapy lies in the lower total dose of thalidomide it allows me to take to control my cancer, which may mitigate a side effect possibly caused by the thalidomide: mild neuropathy, a troublesome, but not fatal, malfunction of the peripheral nerves that could cause me to lose balance and muscle tone in my legs. I was very fortunate because not all myeloma patients respond as well as I have to thalidomide. Fortunately taking it as a trial for a month at a time has caused minimal side effects and—if it proves unsuccessful—does not prevent any other therapy, such as the marrow transplant, from being used within a month. The lower and intermittent dosage has allowed me to avoid most of the permanent side effects of thalidomide and probably prolonged its usefulness against the myeloma tumor cells. The time will likely come when my cancer cells mutate to the extent that new ones are resistant to one chemical after another. Fortunately, over the past ten years, a number of new medicines have been tested and approved to treat myeloma. There is the possibility that I can live to use each new type of therapy. Three or four years after I started my cycled use of thalidomide, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) wanted to produce a documentary on the paradox of the beneficial use of a drug that had been so tragically harmful to newborns. They needed a poster child, and Dr. Anderson suggested me. I met the BBC team in Boston, talked with them on camera, and then satisfied their request to demonstrate some visual evidence of my healthiness. My namesake teenage grandson was set up to play tennis against me on camera with the understanding that he would make me look good. He did. I am told the documentary still runs on some late nights in England, and more than one insomniac friend has reported he saw me on a London-hotel television while recovering from jet lag. Judah Folkman’s pursuit of an antiangiogenic factor has produced a standard therapy involving local application into the eyeball to stop the noncancerous, but excessive, proliferation of blood vessels in the retina from one form of macular degeneration. Work on direct application to cancer continues.

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Tragically, while on a recent trip to the West Coast for a meeting of an ophthalmology association, Folkman died in the Denver airport from an acute heart attack. A few months earlier, he had called me to say that the Nobel Prize committee had asked him to submit a dozen letters to supplement its investigation of his conceptual work in antiangiogenesis. He asked, “Would you write one of the letters?” I wondered what I could contribute as a nonscientist. His response says much about the man: “Chase, the ultimate measure of anything we discover in medicine is the contribution it makes to the health and well-being of the patient. The patient is the end point. As a patient, you are that end point and qualified to describe the response you have had to thalidomide.” “Dad, Is This What You Were Talking About?”

The prospect of one’s death is sobering, of course. But it can also be empowering, maybe even liberating. If you have time, you can do the necessary planning for death: legal matters, relationships, last experiences, and so on. When I no longer was getting any response from melphalan and before I tried thalidomide, Grethe and I called the family together at Christmas to discuss what planning we needed to do and specifically what my wishes were about terminal care. I remember feeling quietly heroic and at peace about the finite quality of something like death. After Christmas I got a head cold with coughing, a drippy nose, and a slight fever. My lighthearted son, Edward, came up to me and asked if my cold obliged the family to honor my “end-of-life” instructions! No, I informed him, I was not ready to die from a head cold. Later, when I was doing well with my myeloma, I found I had to go through another planning process, one for living, which I found actually more difficult than the earlier one for dying. The end of life had a finality that was oddly comforting. Once the thalidomide started working, I was not sure when I would die. I was brought face to face with the fact that, yes, I would die of something, and at seventy it would come sooner, rather than later, from one cause or another. Initially the inevitability and possible nearness of dying provided clarifying tangibility. If I was spared for some years, planning for living into my seventies or beyond had a cloudy indefiniteness that left me in uncharted waters. The nature of the process was unpredictable, both for duration and malaise. With the earlier prospects of near death, I suspect I was also able to wallow occasionally in the unbridled egotism of planning for my funeral. I could imagine

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a few mourners who would miss “dear old Chase,” especially, of course, Grethe. At one point, I suggested that she might choose to express the “undoubted majesty and drama of her mourning” by throwing herself beside my lifeless body—in the purported style of our Nordic ancestors—onto a burning Viking ship hauled into the football stadium as a funeral pyre! I could never get her to commit to such high drama, however. The idea does bring back a dream I had years earlier when our children were young. It spoke to my wife’s common sense and toughness about death. In the dream, Grethe was sitting with our three children while someone was eulogizing me at my funeral. The speaker evoked an old Mormon manner of speech, seeking to comfort the audience about my welfare in the hereafter: “Brother Peterson has been called to a higher duty in Heaven . . .” Before he could say much more, my wonderfully honest and outspoken wife stood up, walked to the podium, gently pushed the well-intentioned speaker aside, and said, “I know you mean well, but I want you to know that there can be no higher responsibility in heaven than his duty right here with me and our children. We will miss him terribly.” She then sat down, and I awoke with wondrous love for the straight-talking woman I had married. Prague, Doom, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Two or three years into my adventure with active myeloma, Grethe and I traveled to Prague, where we were to oversee a lecture at Charles University under the sponsorship of the Tanner lecture trust. Soon after I arrived, I came down with mild bronchitis, which turned into a touch of bronchial pneumonia. My reduced resistance to infection because of the myeloma likely played a role. We consulted the hotel doctor, and I seemed to do well for a day or two but then worsened, mostly because I became dehydrated. The modern Prague hospital was completely full, so I was sent to an ancient, ex-Nazi, ex-Communist hospital at the outskirts of town. All  I needed was some intravenous hydration and antibiotics. I occupied a single room that could not have been more than six feet wide and only long enough for a single bed. There was no nurse to monitor my care, and no one spoke English, nor did I speak Czech. My hydration was overly vigorous and prompted me to vomit every time I moved my body or head from what is called hydrops, a flooding edema of the balance center in the inner ear. On the second day, Grethe insisted I be transferred to a room or ward where I would get some nursing attention. The new quarters turned out to be a cardiac critical-care ward, where I witnessed what seemed like one patient after another going through cardiac arrest.

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Lights were on continuously, a situation that had the potential to knock out the usual circadian, twenty-four-hour rhythm of light and darkness that regulates many normal body processes. Finally, after four days, I stopped vomiting and got my first meal. It would have been a challenge for even Andy Warhol to paint the grotesque grandeur of it. It consisted of a bowl of tepid water with globules of fat floating on top and a single naked hotdog on the bottom. The sight was so outrageous that there had to be some beauty in it. When we sensed that the worst of the bronchitis and dehydration was over, Grethe got me out of the hospital to our hotel, and the next day we flew home to the United States. I slowly began to regain my strength and started to feel that the two of us were tough customers, Grethe perhaps more than I since she had been alert through everything. On the second day home, however—without warning—I almost fainted when I stood up. I tried again and had the same reaction. I had apparently lost my sympathetic nervous system tone. That is the reflex that prevents excessive blood from pooling in the lower legs on standing. This pooling leaves too little blood to pump to the brain. I got a blood-pressure cuff and confirmed the hypotension on standing. I tried elastic stockings to squeeze the blood in my legs up to my abdomen and then used a girdlelike bellyband to squeeze blood to my head. Nothing worked at first, but over two to three days, I gradually was able to stand and walk, at first for just a few seconds but then progressively longer periods. In a week, I was back to normal. I concluded that the shock of the Prague experience—perhaps intensified by the loss of the rhythm of daylight and darkness due to the continuous twenty-fourhour light in the intensive-care ward—might have knocked out my sympathetic nervous system. Fortunately I could retrain it. Astronauts who are deprived of the effects of gravity for long periods sometimes suffer a similar loss of sympathetic tone until reentry into normal gravity restimulates it. There was some comfort in knowing that and being able to handle the problem. A week or two later, I flew to Wyoming for a board meeting of a local power company. The meeting went well during the morning, and we adjourned to a nearby ranch for a cookout for the afternoon. Blue sky and white clouds surrounded me when suddenly—again with no warning—I was overwhelmed by a sense of doom. Doom? What was that? It was and is beyond description. Life suddenly became intolerable. There was no body pain, no headache, and no sweating or

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other symptoms. It was just doom. I suppose some might describe it as a type of severe anxiety. I cannot come up with other words to explain it. Life suddenly and without reason seemed to be unbearable. What could I say to my host or colleagues? What could they do? Nothing. I had to do the best I could on my own. The beautiful clouds helped, as did the blue sky. I prayed, and I meditated. It must have taken an hour for the feeling to pass. I got through the night, flew home the next morning, and told Grethe about the interesting, but frightening, experience, suggesting how “brave and wise” I had been. The rest of that day passed uneventfully, only for me to awaken the next morning with the same sense of doom, again as psychically painful as anything I had ever experienced. I called a psychiatrist colleague. He prescribed some Xanax, a mild, shortacting sedative and mood-altering compound. It helped; the doom eased and allowed my physician and me to try to figure out what was going on. I really could not. As a teetotaler, I do remember thinking how logical it would have been for me to drink whatever amount of gin or vodka it took to dampen the anxiety and the sense of doom. It seems likely that I was suffering from some variety of what we have come to call post-traumatic stress disorder, occasioned by the psychic and physiologic trauma of the Prague experience. The loss of my day/night inner clock occasioned by the constant lighting of the intensive-care ward may have played a central role. The fainting spells on standing were a physical expression of the syndrome, providing considerable proof that the mental expression of what I was going through with the feelings of doom was more than just mental. It was a physical expression of a mental reaction. In the next week or two, the spells cleared with the help of long-acting psychotropic medication. The syndrome I experienced after Prague, followed by the fainting and recurring sense of doom, were stiff tests of my courage. At the same time, they were an expression of interesting psychophysiology. The syndrome had one final chapter. Just as I thought I was better, I began to suffer from dreams with the same quality and intensity as the earlier feeling of doom. One reflected existential doom, I suppose. In the dream, I had come back to New Haven some years after I had been a resident in the Yale teaching hospital. I tracked down the photographs on the wall of each year’s medical residents and found my year. However, I was not in the picture! There was not even a space where I might have been with my fellow residents. It appeared that I had not existed. In the dream state, I simply was not there. It was as empty and despairing an emotion as I have ever felt—dreaming or awake.

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A few nights later, I dreamt I was a medical resident at the Massachusetts General Hospital. It was late afternoon, and I had completed my work. I felt I deserved a restful walk in a Boston park. After a pleasant walk, I decided it was time to return to the hospital for evening rounds. I tried to get back, only to get lost in the underground labyrinth of the subway system. That was doubly frightening because I needed to be at the hospital for evening rounds. Upon awakening and realizing that the dream was part of a pattern, I decided to see what one small pill of Xanax—dissolved under my tongue for quick absorption—might do to this inappropriate brain function. I fell back to sleep quickly and found myself in the very same dream, only now in the Massachusetts General Hospital, happily taking care of my patient responsibilities! I was astounded. A few atoms of Xanax had entered my bloodstream from my mouth and settled in some portion of my brain so that the doom-affected neurons were bypassed or altered and replaced with comfortable thoughts. A molecule of Xanax, or a million of them, could take an existing thought and not merely dull but transform it from a sense of doom to calm and genuine pleasure. The whole experience—from Prague to Wyoming to home—was the most painful thing I have ever endured by a considerable margin. It reminded me of an event I saw when I was a medical resident working with students on the first floor at Yale. To our amazement, we saw a man fall past our window from an upper floor to the basement, his pajamas and bedsheets fluttering. It turned out that he was a patient on the second floor in the throes of acute alcohol withdrawal, which can produce an intense mental disorder called delirium tremens. These patients can hallucinate with such force that their sense of reality is totally displaced. In spite of falling almost two floors, the patient survived. When he was out of his delirium, he told me, “I jumped because I saw a snarling tiger coming at me through the door from the hall.” Considering his state of mind, it was perfectly logical to jump through a window, rather than be attacked and torn to bits by a tiger. My short-lived bout with hopelessness allowed me some understanding about why my patient forty-odd years earlier had felt that jumping out of a twostory window was the best option he had. Why Me? Why Not George?

The doom experience brought my brother George vividly to mind. Fifty years earlier, he probably had begun to suffer as a preteenager with recurrent anxiety that may have been something like what I experienced briefly. In any case, why had my disability lasted six months and his a lifetime?

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There are some obvious answers. He was born ten years before me. There was little understanding of such matters in those days. My disorder occurred more than sixty years later in a mind tempered by a successful life and a time of medical advancement. The ignorance in his time accounted for little understanding and less treatment for the torment I learned he experienced over decades. As I noted earlier, he served in the U.S. Army in World War II, and I remember hearing that he was repeatedly demoted from corporal back to private for some small indiscretion or another. Returning home after the war, he consulted the local veterans’ hospital in the hope of getting some relief from what was called anxiety and panic. The doctors’ answer was to perform a prefrontal lobotomy with ultrasound wave energy! No improvement or change resulted, except he endured moderately severe headaches from time to time. While our parents and the environment of our upbringing were ostensibly the same, when George was an infant, Mother and Dad—at the ages of twenty-five and thirty-three—had just taken on the presidency of a struggling college. The pressure of that challenge must have been “in the air” at home. By the time I was an infant, our parents were confident and established in an admired and rewarding enterprise. I earlier mentioned George’s childhood response to our father’s interest in germs was once to walk down the Main Street of Logan licking store doorknobs. People described the event as cute. It surely was rebellion of some magnitude against a microbiologist father. Years later, the college made a bronze bust of our father, and I arranged to get a copy for each of his four children. It was quite startling for me to watch George’s reaction when he first saw the reproduction that would share his home. He grimaced and said, “I always trembled when I saw those eyes”—eyes that had always brought me comfort. There is, of course, much more to be said and discovered about such mental disorders. His affected him early in life and left him handicapped in almost all else he attempted to do, whether in school or seeking employment. The distraction that accompanied chronic anxiety likely prompted him to fail to close a gate on our grandfather’s ranch, allowing cows to wander out and requiring hours or days to recover. He moved from modest job to job as an adult, never fully successful. The syndrome I suffered after my stay in Prague was apparently enough to trigger my own brief neural expression of something that might have been similar

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to George’s chronic pattern. The short-lived experience enriched my life in the few months it took for me to recover. His lasted decades and never resulted in full recovery. Whatever it was George and I had singularly or in common, I feel quite certain that we were both successful. I may have done well by the world’s measure, but he, in stark contrast, was courageous in his raw survival day after day, decade after decade, against unquenchable demons. If there is any reward for enduring great challenges, surely my brother, now deceased, is a giant somewhere, the stronger for his heroic courage and strength in resisting drug or alcohol addiction or selfabusive behavior that might have given him temporary, but costly, relief; he successfully raised two able children and sustained a lifelong marriage. His wife, Catherine, was the essential element in his survival, providing a continuous outpouring of support, comfort, and understanding that none of the rest of us could match, not even his doctors. And to their credit, our parents never gave up on him. Teaching: What and How Long?

After my myeloma cancer appeared and before thalidomide seemed to control it, I decided to stop seeing patients and went into half-time retirement, teaching and working on a variety of other projects within the university. I was emboldened to stay active at the university by the example of two MIT presidents I knew, who, on different occasions, continued to work part time at the Institute after retiring from the president’s office. While avoiding involvement in the current administration, of course, they were useful for institutional memory, light teaching, a number of university projects, and the ability to build or sustain bridges to the community. More teaching should not be too hard if I could share with clarity and honesty some updated portion of my own experience and the largess I had received so generously from my teachers over the last fifty years. Oliver Cope, Bill Castle, David Seegal, Paul Beeson, and fifty others—all had shared ideas that were as fresh today as they had been in past decades. And I might be able to add something of my own. Teaching medical students continues to be absolutely refreshing and enriching to this day. In regular anonymous written evaluations, most students express their appreciation for a perspective I can focus on a medical topic that supplements what they get from the otherwise-smart, young faculty. A few do say I talk too much, and I continue to work on that.

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Unexpected Hurdles

“Dr.  Peterson, I think I can trust you. Can  I ask you about a problem that is troubling me?” “Certainly, I will try and answer you.” The male student went on to say, “I have begun to examine female patients, and I am distressed by the erotic thoughts that the experience stirs in me. I am unmarried and inexperienced in such matters. How can I be a doctor if that is my response to the female body?” He was very serious. He had grown up in a small western town and recently returned from a monastic, Mormon, two-year mission. I took a deep breath and asked silently for the wisdom to respond in a useful way to this sincere and delicate concern. “First of all, we should both be grateful for the erotic impulse. Without that imprint in our brains, it is unlikely that we—or many of our ancestors back to the beginning of human history—would have made it to Earth. Moreover, I can almost promise you that your concern will not cause a problem.” I shared with the student the image I mentioned earlier of the airline pilot dealing with airsickness in bad weather. “Compare yourself to a pilot. During a bumpy flight, the passenger may get airsick, but the pilot does not. Why? The pilot is focused on the demands of flying: the multiple instruments to manage and the physics of aerodynamics. The passengers have no distractions and are left to feel only the unsteady course of the plane. “When you are concentrating on the pathophysiology your patient is exhibiting, you, like the pilot, will be focused, and extraneous thoughts will simply not be distracting. I hope we can have lunch in a year and confirm my prediction. “Also do not be too hard on yourself for a minor human failing if it does pop up occasionally. Let me share an experience I had years ago when I was in full-time practice. A colleague physician came into my office, half blushing and half stammering. ‘What am I going to do? I just finished examining a shapely young lady. When I was listening to her lungs, I asked her to “take a deep breast,” not breath.’ ” Freud’s “slip” lives. My colleague survived, and he became a bit more humble than he might have been otherwise. The student has done well, and erotic thoughts have not handicapped his effective examination of female patients. “What If I Cannot Relate to the Patient?”

Another group of students I was teaching had been working with actor patients to learn how to take a medical history of a patient’s problem. One case involved a

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young man with acute bronchitis, bordering on bronchopneumonia. The examining student was highly intelligent and sensitive. As we taught our students to do, when he had finished taking the basic history, he asked if “there is anything else you want to tell me.” The actor patient said, with intentional nervousness, “My boyfriend said I should get an AIDS test.” The student reported he was stunned. He said, “I don’t know how to deal with homosexuality. How can I be a doctor if I cannot relate to all my patients?” He was deeply serious. He felt he was not homophobic but that his experience had not prepared him to know how to exercise the dispassion and empathy required for proper care. The group and I spent the next fifteen minutes discussing his concern and the general issue of how a doctor can deal with patients, all of whom have small and large differences from their physician. We let him know that we all understood his anxiety. We suggested that his concern for building a bridge to a homosexual patient was no different than what is required for all patients. When we met again after a week, the student had come to believe that he could find larger common ground to relate to such a patient, and perhaps all patients, to displace the barrier of a singular difference. He has become a distinguished physician and more than once has mentioned his “ah-ha!” moment. “How Can I Know Everything?”

Before each group of third-year medical students leaves for a one-month clerkship with a physician in practice, we take considerable time to sharpen the questions the experience should prompt for them. If they are considering practicing as a generalist—whether in internal medicine or family medicine—will they be expected to know all of medicine, and how can they possibly satisfy such an expectation? At this time, I usually share a few stories from the first week I worked that summer on Cape Cod. For example, a family brought in their four- or five-year-old daughter who had tripped and fallen onto the edge of a coffee table. She’d cut her lip, and it was bleeding briskly. I was an internist and endocrinologist. Nevertheless, I told myself that this was no great problem. I knew how to stop the bleeding and put in a few sutures to close the wound, but . . . a wound on the lip margin, called the vermillion border, had more significance than a cut on the leg. A poorly treated wound had the potential to leave the patient with a twisted smile. What were my options? I was quite certain I knew how to treat her but not completely. Should I send her 150 miles to Boston to the Children’s Hospital and incur considerable extra

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cost and the loss of a day of the family’s vacation, or should I just not worry and do my best? Neither seemed like good options. I called a friend of mine who was a plastic surgeon at Children’s Hospital Boston and luckily found him in. He gave me a few minor suggestions but overall confirmed the correctness of what I planned to do. I stitched the wound, took a Polaroid picture of her, and asked her to send me another one in a couple of months. The healing turned out fine. Over the next several years during my summer medical month on Cape Cod, I must have had to treat another two or three similar cuts. Each person received the same photograph and the same request for a follow-up snapshot. I began to feel that I had become one of the great vermillion-border surgeons in Massachusetts. I really was, not because I knew everything to do at first, but because I chose to access the experience of others. One Saturday a few years later, during my long weekend once a month in the Gardner, Massachusetts, hospital emergency room, a family brought in their preteen son who was complaining of a pain in his testicle. He had been playing soccer. I found nothing abnormal during the examination and concluded that he likely had suffered a mild blow during the game and should be okay with a little ice and an anti-inflammatory pill, but . . . there is a rare condition where the testicle becomes twisted on the vascular stalk that supports it in the scrotum. In a matter of hours or a day, the testicle can die from losing its blood supply. I remembered reading about the condition late one night twenty years earlier as a third-year medical student. There was something about untwisting the testicle to restore the blood supply. The kinking was generally clockwise, or was it counterclockwise? Was that looking up at the testicle, or down on it? The point was that the testicular lump seemed to be normal, but I could not risk him losing it. As I relate the story to the students who are about to go on their clerkship, I enjoy telling them that I made a phone call deliberately in front of the parents and boy. I reached the head of urology at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, now Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Hartwell Harrison was an occasional tennis partner. He and David Riesman had proposed my name for the University of Virginia presidential search. I described the case and my question. Out of the corner of my eye, I noted the initial nervousness of the family. They may have sensed that they were in the care of a doctor who did not know “everything about everything,” at least about tender testicles. They were almost edging toward the door so they could come back when another doctor would be on duty, someone who did know everything about everything, instead of this Peterson fellow, whoever he was.

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However, within less than a minute, it dawned on them that whoever I was, I was bringing care from the Harvard Medical School to their son in the largely forgotten, ex-mill town of Gardner. The words “Harvard Medical School” had powerful therapeutic value in those parts . . . and perhaps everywhere else, according to some nostalgic graduates. Hartwell suggested a few things to look for and generally confirmed that the boy and I were on safe grounds. The boy was sent home after receiving the best care that New England could provide, not because of what I knew but what I could bring. He was fine when the parents called to report the next morning. The students got the point. If they did by chance know everything about everything that day, by the next day or week, they would not know everything about some new discovery. Their challenge was to commit to provide a conduit to the patient for all that was needed and not pretend or bluff that they knew it all instantly. How Would I Know?

As interesting and challenging as contact with students was, when and how would I know when I was hanging on too long? This question led to a crisis of confidence in my postpresidential efforts. Can I continue to enjoy the satisfaction that comes from student contact and still know when it is time to quit? The question brought to mind the kindly, retired high-school principal I mentioned earlier. He often came into the store in Logan where I worked one summer as a teenager just to chat. He remains in my memory for his brash assertion, “You know, Chase, the older I get, the more I realize that there is very little that I don’t know quite a bit about!” That was quaint but actually quite true. It helped me deal with knowing how long I should continue to teach and participate generally in the university and the community. The retired principal had suggested something much larger and quite real. Brain Overload or Ideational Epilepsy

Neurologic research has established that the brain continues to form connections called synapses until we die. It also creates new cells. When as a teenager the point caught my attention it was only an idle interest. Now it was full in my face. Consider whether an older person—specifically a teacher with captive students—can control the impulse after saying or thinking, “That reminds me.” Because so many more ideas and experiences are connected in the older person’s

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brain with the current conversation, how can he or she avoid a constant outpouring of them, even if they are not of equal interest or importance to the student? Some of the ideas contain the wisdom of the ages, some not so much, and some not at all. A good teacher is asked to share learning, wisdom, and experience, but how does he or she discipline the epilepticlike outpouring of unuseful ideas and experiences? How do you select from a memory bank that has grown enormous since childhood, through college, and since? I have found comfort in challenging each idea or memory that comes to mind after entering a classroom or interacting with a group by writing down or visualizing the letters T and U. Before speaking or expressing the idea or experience that has come to mind, I ask myself whether it is “timely” for the discussion, teaching, or social conversation. If it passes the timely test, the second question I ask is whether it is “useful.” If the thought passes both tests, which take only a second to self-administer, it is possible that it may be worth sharing. If it fails either the T or the U test, it deserves to be shelved. Is the method foolproof? No, but it is as good a safeguard as anything else to avoid running over at the mouth or rendering yourself mute and no longer qualified to teach or communicate effectively for fear of uncontrolled memory outbursts. No one is to blame for a large storehouse of thought or experience—one person’s is surely richer than another’s—but perhaps the effects of ideational epilepsy can be controlled to allow the enriched memory of age to be interesting and useful. I have also continued to pray in the decades since that pivotal sophomore prayer over my handicap of stuttering to help me monitor my late-life teaching. I began to do that (with my eyes open) while driving down I-80 the twenty miles from my home in Park City to the medical school: “Dear Lord, please help me know when I am productive and providing useful teaching, and when it is time to retire.” The answers have been regular and supportive, but I never enter a classroom without thinking a portion of that prayer. That experience prompts another question: “If prayer is real, how often should/ can I pray?” If prayer has had the occasional power I’ve felt, isn’t that a reason for frequent prayer, even conversational ones with God? If dribbling a basketball endlessly increases that skill, can’t continuous prayer promote positive general remodeling of the brain? Good thoughts breed new good pathways of producing them. Sloppy or despairing thoughts are proven to do the opposite. Who knows, perhaps the essence of prayer may be related to neurological remodeling. Some investigators have suggested that humans have a faith gene. In any case, I have acquired a habit of praying in the form of a conversation with God. It strikes me as a good idea as long as it doesn’t replace the obligation to

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exercise hard objective thinking. One aids the other. Ironically, prayer can replace blind obedience with working advice, or as a scientist would put it, a working hypothesis. Some will call my prayer meditation, and I am happy to accept that definition. In the case of teaching, anonymous student evaluations and common sense support spiritual intuition and the T and U test. They each can blow the whistle. My attitude is part clarity, part perspective, part gratitude for all I have been given, and part hopefulness. If simple recall triggers spontaneous flooding of the brain with rushes of connected ideas and memories, does not inspirational music do much the same, specifically with notes and more generally with the power of the musical experience? Dr. Oliver Sacks, a gifted neurologist and writer, has suggested that many— perhaps most—humans and societies are prewired to somehow react to music, within and apart from consciousness; he uses the term “musicophilia.” As a child of eight or less in Logan, I was exposed 4–6 times a year to traveling musicians in a program called Civic Music. In pretelevision days, the singers were mostly Metropolitan Opera quality—Jan Peerce and Marian Anderson, for example. My mother took me to these concerts. While I often fell asleep on her shoulder before a concert was over, I suspect that a musical seed was planted and grew unconsciously over the next decades. In grade school, I also took piano lessons from Mr.  Folgerberg, best remembered for the comic books he had lying around while I waited for him to finish the previous lesson. I never made much progress. The first movement—the slow one—of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and something by Grieg are about all I can remember. Soon after returning to Utah in my early fifties, I joined the Utah Symphony Board of Directors and still serve as an active member and patron thirty years later. Fine music, expertly presented, has become as much a part of my life as anything I can think of. I cannot imagine retiring to some town where a quality symphony is not within reach. It has become as nourishing as the tuna sandwiches and tomato soup my two sisters fed me while our parents toured Europe one summer. Just last month Grethe and I heard the Utah Symphony play Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 6, preceded by Beethoven’s first piano concerto and Haydn’s Symphony No. 1. When I got home after the concert, I felt the urge—almost the necessity—to connect words to the experience. Beyond my self-discovery, the words were addressed to the conductor and the CEO of the Utah Symphony: The [Utah] Symphony tonight was a landmark event for me. I would like to share what I mean in appreciation for what you have worked so hard to

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achieve. My exposure to music was modest as a child, but I think something became planted in my brain. When  I returned to Utah, Maurice Abravanel and the Utah Symphony began to renourish the earlier seedling. Something new happened tonight. At the intermission, Ardean Watts [the retired assistant conductor] and I had a chance for a brief exchange. Ardean was glowing: “Chase, we are really hearing the symphony playing on a truly higher standard. Oh, the many little things. A surprising moment of excellence, the entrance of an instrument at just the right moment with a perfect tone, the whole orchestra playing as one . . .” I appreciated his comments. That was my reaction, although I didn’t have the ear to indentify the nuances. Then after intermission, Shostakovich exploded. I had moved to a back row of the loge to stretch restless legs. Thierry Fischer, the maestro, and the orchestra suddenly captured me. I was in the music, and the music in me: slow moments, crescendo moments, Tad’s clarinet, and the percussion of that dear fellow in the back with the drums, and of course the strings . . . and the “other instrument,” Thierry, weaving and begging and commanding the music that came out of the eighty-three-plus [musicians] in front of him. It was as if I had never before heard Shostakovich. He ceased to be “modern or Russian or unfamiliar”; he and it were just a power force of musical beauty. And it was neuromuscular as well; my legs lost their restlessness. I am quite sure that it was more than distraction; it was a reharmonizing over eighty years of mind, body, and spirit. I guess the piece had three movements, but it could have gone all night. It was an expression of the excellence of the human spirit channeled through music. It can happen with a great speech on rare occasions; it does happen with the birth of a beautiful baby. It happens often with our western sunsets over the Great Salt Lake. Each has its peculiar greatness. Tonight from eight to ten thirty, it happened in Abravanel Hall, and it possessed my soul and I guess my mind and body as tangibly as anything else I own. I send this letter to you as an expression of gratitude and appreciation as the synthesizing and harmonizing agents who give life to an orchestra ready to respond and reach higher. Thank you; it won’t be lost. William James and Spiritual Pragmatism

Professor William James, whose home we purchased from his grandson and lived in while in Cambridge, described his philosophy of pragmatism. When exploring

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an idea over time, he suggested “living with the idea” to see if it met the test of appropriateness and time. Did it grow to feel right? Did it work? The church of my family has become my church, and it works for me with no loss of personal responsibility. Reason and faith each have the responsibility to challenge the other in this context. Major decisions require the assent of both. The painful debate over the right of gay partners to marry or enter a civil union is an apt example of the tension inherent in religious codes, prayer, and personal beliefs. Reason and tolerance for difference lie at the heart of the gay issue for me. I ache with the pain the debate causes individuals and families inside and outside the church, especially as a result of the strong stand against homosexual marriage the LDS Church took on a recent gay-marriage initiative in California. I believe the church will wrestle with that problem for the next decade while moving to include more “in the tent,” much as it did with the issue of granting the priesthood to people of black heritage. And change will come with the support of its members’ prayers and goodwill, confirmed by the revelatory process. Churches move slowly, in part I suspect because of a legitimate concern for the many human experiences and threads woven within their fabric. If we believe God has inspired and endowed a church, should it be any surprise that divine inspiration has a cadence consistent with the human nature that defines our condition? In reaction to the opposition to the California gay-marriage proposition and one or two harsh public statements issued by singular church officials, there has been a distinct move to emphasize that compassion is our first responsibility because we do not know just what the roots of homosexuality are. It is interesting to note that the total membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1978—the year of the revelation to extend the priesthood to all worthy male members—stood at roughly four million. The most recent estimate in 2008, thirty years later, is more than thirteen million. Surely these numbers confirm that the broadening of the church did not diminish the power that would-be converts saw in it. When I shared the news of the revelation with a dear black colleague who worked with me in the admissions office at Harvard, there was a long pause, after which he said, “Your church is now the most powerful organization on the Earth.” I doubt that either of us knew what he meant by the most powerful, but I think his observation was sincere. So is each decision of the LDS Church always right? When the loyal and erudite B. H. Roberts wrote the officially approved, definitive A Comprehensive History of the Church in the early twentieth century, he wrestled with the tension that all historians face. How do you record acts of faith in the context of historical

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facts and reason? His conclusions boiled down to the following trenchant lines, expressed with the flavor of the times he lived in: . . . God will be glorified in his work, no matter what may befall individuals, or groups of individuals. This the writer freely confesses has been the purpose of his work—not the vindication of men before the bar of history, but the justification of the ways of God to man; and to prove that God is true, though all men have to be condemned as weaklings or even liars. Let not this remark, however, be regarded as implying too great a censure upon the leading men of the New Dispensation. While many of them fell into grievous sins, and all of them at times plainly manifested errors of judgment and limitations of their conceptions of the greatness and grandeur of the work in which they were engaged, yet doubtless they were the best men to be had for the work, since they were chosen either directly of God, or else by a divinely appointed authority, and in either case called of God, and ordained to bring forth the work.1  Were these early-twentieth-century remarks of Roberts, a distinguished historian, disloyal to his church? Were the observations made later in the twentieth century by a distinguished chemist, Henry Eyring, which I quoted earlier, disloyal? They both acknowledged human frailty and mistakes in the pursuit of divine intentions. I would like to suggest that the greatest loyalty there is—albeit sometimes painful— is to the body of my organized church that preaches and provides unfettered access to the heavens themselves as an earthly community of men and women striving earnestly to achieve the Christian life. They and I stumble at times—I frequently— but we persist in seeking to understand what God means. Because the LDS Church is staffed and run entirely at the local and regional level by lay members, it is common practice to ask individuals to do something that may first appear overwhelming but allows them to grow from the experience. The concept of lay leadership is a brilliant organizational boost to personal commitment. And my love continues to go out to the members and leaders of my church, who may not concern themselves with every issue others wrestle with but are present day in and out to keep the institution alive and vital, available when faith needs enrichment. But at the end of the day, there must remain an honest uncertainty. The physicist Richard Feynman said it this way: “It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is hope for the continuous motion of human

“What Am I Now?”  •  271

beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.”2 Albert  O. Hirschman in his book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, analyzes the different—but in a sense complementary—contributions made to an organization by those who choose to support it while having misgivings about a particular aspect or pronouncement. He describes the possible loss to the organization from those who choose to exit, drawing some attention to their concern by doing so but also absolving themselves of any influence on or responsibility for the future of the organization. On the other hand, he describes those who sustain their involvement and provide continuous voice for the work of the organization. He is speaking specifically of business organizations, but what he says is equally relevant to religious ones. I have consciously chosen to stay and sustain my voice. That is easy to say, but it is very challenging to speak out about something I love at the risk of being unproductively strident. The opposite risk is not saying enough and becoming merely a coward or drifter caught in a social/cultural stream. The letter from our church community to President Spencer Kimball on admitting blacks to the priesthood and his answers are an example of an effort that can never be quantified. The letters were sent and received as an honest expression of the decision to stay and have voice, rather than exit over an important issue. To its credit, the LDS Church has a record of moving relatively quickly—when compared to many other religious institutions—on issues of social integration, family planning/birth control, therapeutic abortion for rape, incest, maternal health, prevention of sexual abuse by those in positions of respect, black priesthood, and general civil rights. Its action has happened over decades, as compared to centuries or millennia—if at all—for many other organized religions, a reflection of what might be called the phenomenon of revelational updating and renewal. A Wordsmith Can’t Find His Word

Over the years, I had the pleasure to get to know former CBS News president Fred Friendly quite well. I served on his television panels on ethical subjects and asked him to give the university commencement address one year when I was president. Sometime after I had left the presidency and begun my internal debate about when to retire fully, Fred called to say he was coming to Utah to speak at a testimonial dinner for Arch Madsen. He and Arch had created Radio Free Europe during the Second World War, and Arch was now retiring as head of the Bonneville Broadcasting Corporation, headquartered in Salt Lake City.

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Grethe and I sat with Fred and his wife, Ruth, at the dinner. When he rose to present his tribute to his friend Arch, he said softly, “You may know that I have spent my life with words.” He had been the news director for Edward R. Morrow and was generally considered an early pioneer in broadcast journalism. He continued, “A few months ago I had a small stroke, and since then I have had some trouble finding the word I want. But my wife, Ruth, is here with me, and she generally knows what I am trying to say, so you may notice me pause for a moment and look down to her for the word I am searching for.” That’s exactly what he did. Would it be fair to say that Fred understood that each stage of our lives is associated with certain skills and shortcomings? He was not willing to let the partial loss of one of his strengths—the easy access to a broad vocabulary—block him from exercising his commitment to honor his friend. That is what this postpresidency period in the practice and teaching of medicine says to me. Some of my skills have undoubtedly dulled a bit. Others have sharpened, and still others are newly created each year. The sum amounts to enough—like Fred Friendly’s talk at a friend’s farewell dinner—to provide a useful perspective on medicine to new students and try daily to share the gifts Dr. Seegal and so many others gave me during my medical training. Death and Dying

Now back to this final business of dying. I do not think I have much fear of it. Of course, I do not want to separate myself from Grethe, children, grandchildren, and important issues as long as I can be useful and grow in understanding and love. Thalidomide and other drugs will probably sooner or later lose their effectiveness to control the cancer. I have defined for my family when it will be time to stop artificial support of my bodily functions. The immediate last days are to be handled with Mahler, Mozart, and morphine and the love of family and friends. For now— just like my mother’s chronic osteomyelitic leg was “her old friend”—myeloma is mine. Therein lies the challenge. Repeated exposure to the unexpected and its consequence—opportunity—has enriched my life. Generally there always seemed to be a way to experience those opportunities if I worked hard and was forthright in acknowledging what I did not know and prepared to learn what I needed to know. Such experiences often involved paddling against popular currents. In Boston I was viewed as a conservative, in Utah a liberal, though I am the same person in both the East and West. As the psychiatrist observed, I likely paddled some

“What Am I Now?”  •  273

rivers unnecessarily in a quixotic exercise of assuming unnecessary responsibility for the water to get to the ocean. Mostly my choices and their consequences have been the true joy of my human experience. I rarely thought that I had full control over choosing the challenges I addressed. Rather, they seemed to come with their own timing and imperative. When you stop to think of it, do any of us have much control over the events that touch us beyond our response to them?

14 The Matter of Home

We all leave our families and our homes sooner or later, if not while our parents are living, then after they have died. Thus, separation is a natural and inevitable part of life and growing up. What is the consequence of the separation? Some undoubtedly leave with a sense of loss; others experience release from shackles. Some leave home on a bridge of affection able to more than span the physical distance, a bridge that promises to ensure easy travel home and back . . . home and back . . . physically and emotionally as circumstances provide. With less good fortune, some must escape their homes, victims of actual abuse or the equally or greater impact of the absence of love. These people must find some way to move beyond scars and generate a fresh reservoir of love. I had the good fortune that my family and home became a passport to the larger human family, a passport of mind, heart, and spirit. In the act of leaving, I had the opportunity to take with me all that there was and still is of the love, courage, optimism, and yes, faith, of home. However my home-based passport may be worn by age, experience, infirmity, and physical distances, it released or admitted me to repeated new experiences and welcomed me back both physically and in memory for restoration and renewal at the home I never really left. Like some sort of automotive hybrid, home was the gasoline motor, able to power me out with a recharged battery that could always bring me back. How could I be homesick if my home never left me—as the testaments declare—“in all my going out and my coming in”? I mentioned earlier that Professor Ted Bell, when on leave as secretary of education in the Reagan cabinet, felt that the letter I provided, guaranteeing his

The Matter of Home   •  275 professorial status at the university, gave him added courage to act on only his best intentions when navigating the shoals of Washington politics. He had the security to know he could always go home again. When Did It Start?

Could it all have begun in kindergarten? I still remember telling my teacher a week or two into the school year that “I am going home now for just a minute. I’ll be right back.” It helped that the kindergarten was on the campus near my home. Anyway,  I remember I felt I had the freedom to leave a kindergarten a few blocks away from home or, a decade later, travel to Middlesex School and Harvard College a few thousand miles away and end up forty-five years later at the closure of a giant circle back home, a hundred miles from that first kindergarten. Home had traveled with me all that time. Robert Frost said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. . . . something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”1 I might add, “Home can come with you, wherever you are.” The Home Grows and Grows

Our children and their spouses and children have grown at a breathtaking pace. Erika and Shipley have five children. She was asked to report about her postcollege life for a Harvard College class reunion. In the context of all that her family and classmates were now free to do, she calmly described her focus on childbearing as “counterrevolutionary.” Her five children will do their part to change and improve the world: Geddes recently graduated from Haverford College; Chase is about to graduate from Reed College; Leah is in her first year of an academic/professional theater program at UCLA; Joseph is about to complete secondary school in Park City; and the caboose, Nicola, with bits of the best of her four siblings, is in the sixth grade in Salt Lake City. When asked about their separate potential, our wonderful daughter simply reports their futures are limitless. Her marriage to Shipley Munson—when he graduated from Harvard and she completed her junior year—took place in the beautiful Memorial Church at Harvard with Peter Gomes, the Harvard chaplain, assisted by the LDS stake president. Apart from the joy of the ceremony, the day remains memorable for me because of a moment during the wedding reception. Erika, after tossing her bouquet to her bridesmaids from the balcony of the Harvard Club in Boston, asked me to step forward and catch something. It was her credit card, her declaration of the

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move from daughter to wife. She graduated the next spring, and—in competition with her classmates—her essay was chosen for the undergraduate address at commencement. Her paper addressed the contrast, which she considered productive, of living as a married student in a second-story walk-up apartment in nearby bluecollar Somerville after three years of Harvard dorms in sedate Cambridge. Stuart and Kathy have four children from eight to seventeen each pursuing his or her own dreams. The eldest, John, a scholar and leader, will enter college in a year; the next, Sam, jumps from sport to debate to scholarship with social ease; Annie is growing up energetic, beautiful, and strong; and the trailer Lucy, like Nicola, has bits of the best of her sister and brothers. Edward and his first wife bore a beautiful child, Charlie, who, after a month or two, began to show the symptoms of an uncommon genetic disorder—WerdnigHoffman disease. It causes a progressive general paralysis. The gradual nature of the disease was both a reason for gratitude and a relentless reminder of life’s foreshortening. Charlie died peacefully during the week of his first birthday. Our grief was palpable, and for the parents, it was compounded by the fact that a second child would have one-in-four chances of inheriting the disease. His parents took the risk. Prenatal genetic tests at ten weeks were normal, as was the rest of the pregnancy. Charlie’s sister, Isabelle, has been with us for fourteen years, free from the genetic defect and full of wonderful qualities. A few years after Isabelle’s birth, her parents found their marriage breaking up, something we learned is not unusual with parents who suffer the loss of a child. Perhaps they grieved differently. Happily both of them have remarried, each to a person who is probably better suited. The two families have taken pains not to let the divorce harm Isabelle. They have chosen to live three blocks apart and share her throughout the week. Isabelle and Candace, Edward’s fine new wife, were talking one day about the term “stepmother.” They agreed that the name carries negative baggage, for example, Cinderella’s and Snow White’s evil stepmothers. They decided that “bonus mother” is a better name: what positivity, uncomplicated affection, and absence of comparisons it offers. Candace and Edward also have two additional boys: Tyler, five, and Elijah, one. The twelve living grandchildren and Charlie each shine with grit, confidence, generosity, courage, and multiple abilities beyond the unreasonable expectations of grandparents. Apart from this rather traditional Christmas-card family report, it is worth noting that all of the fathers of these three families have lived professional lives

The Matter of Home   •  277 far different from any Grethe and I experienced. Among the three of them, they have worked at ten to fifteen jobs over twenty to twenty-five years. Each man is able, skilled, honest, and hardworking. Their companies have folded, merged, or reorganized time and time again, and they have generally come out the better. When I returned to Utah after an absence of eleven years, Obert Tanner, who, as I noted earlier, established the Tanner Lectures on Human Values on nine university campuses, became a kind of big brother to me and certainly a fast friend. The company he founded while a full professor at the University of Utah focused on the need for recognizing the contribution of employees in companies, especially large ones where anonymity is all too prevalent. Tanner’s company provided rings, pins, and other gifts, as well as software formats, to help company officials plan appreciation moments for their deserving employees. On the wall of the office is one of Tanner’s sayings to describe the company’s philosophy: “I sometimes reflect that the essence of the O. C. Tanner Company’s work, expressed in symbolic terms, is putting a drop of oil on the bearings of the free enterprise system. It helps companies run a little more smoothly, with a little less friction, cultivating a more friendly environment where people work.” Grethe and I came across two words akin to a drop of oil that have served a somewhat similar purpose in our marriage. How often do marriages have unnecessary small, but sour, moments when one partner wants to do something quite trivial but personally important when that thing is not fully appreciated by the partner? Such moments are rare for us, but they still too often trigger a level of disagreement that the triviality of the subject does not warrant: a sudden movie, a trip to the hairdresser, an unplanned stop at a seafood restaurant . . . The two words that have helped us are “marriage mulligan.” In golf a mulligan is a free shot that does not count against the person’s total score. So, too, with the marriage mulligan. Each partner is permitted his or her choice of something, no matter how trivial, with no further discussion! We are allowed to use only one mulligan a week, and if unused, they cannot be accumulated. The availability of the mulligan turns out to reduce the need for it. The partner is reassured with the knowledge that if he or she really wants some relatively trivial thing, no long discussion will follow. In addition to the marriage mulligan, we have only two other family guidelines: prohibitions against failing to put a tool back after borrowing it and straying away from a hiking group in the mountains of Utah, or elsewhere, carrying the risk of becoming lost or hurt. A firm, but not vindictive, single spank is the punishment prescribed for either indiscretion; I can’t remember if it has ever been invoked.

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The Final Western Sunset

Occasionally my father loved to distort the Shakespearean line, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, roughhew them how we will.”2 He moved the comma to fit the rough and tumble of the Oregon sawmill and the unsettled West he had experienced and savored. His version was, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends rough, hew them how we will.” It seems that challenges have as often chosen me as I have chosen them, making my response all the more engaging and fresh. After my father died, I came across a copy of this note he had written to an old friend, which endows the rough features of his youth with a larger beauty and softness: The sun is now sinking somewhat low and I, as all of us I suppose, welcome increasingly the twilight and then what we call the night, what Whitman calls the huge and thoughtful night. In the meantime, my friendships now grow upon me, and I am thankful to all those who crossed my trail. Many of them, knowingly or otherwise, said something or did something for me to help me along. I remember, out of my myriad memories, you saying, fifty years ago I suppose, that the place to look for the beauty of the sunset was not at the blazing orb going down behind the west mountain but along the south and even the east, where often you could see the more delicate shades and an even greater splendor. Frequently I have thought of you at sunset as I looked to the south and the east. It was just a chance remark of yours I suppose, but it strangely lodged in my mind forever. And so we go. I have had a rare experience and opportunity, and as the evening comes on, I become more and more a lover of the good earth and of all those who struggle as best they can somehow to comprehend or try to comprehend a little at least of the great meaning of it all. Such shadows continue to lengthen on my life, marriage, and family. Opportunities and problems, yoked together in an ageless harness, race ahead at an accelerating and sometimes confusing rate. There is comfort in the observation of Edwin Land, father of the Polaroid camera that ushered in the age of instant imaging. He reminded us that the only inexhaustible natural resource on Earth is the mind of humankind. The new marriage of Grethe and Chase in 1956 was our yoke of new love. With that yoke and a used Pontiac car, together we raced down our own road, first to

The Matter of Home   •  279 New Haven and then to unimagined points. Together we still manage to remain mostly excited by opportunities, sobered by problems, and comforted by the inexhaustible resources of minds and faith—ours and others’. Finally—as my father seemed to be at peace with small imperfections—I often feel I should acknowledge my fallible humanity. I presume that nothing useful would result from embarrassing my family and friends—not to mention myself— by recording or apologizing for all the childish, adolescent, and even mature lapses which have been part of my life—at least those that did not rise to the level that calls for an apology or some form of restitution. I have had my share, mostly capable of being rationalized as part of growing up, something I am still doing. My father freed me from the burden of feeling that I had to match some unrealistic level of perfection cast by his shadow. Let me be certain that I do the same, at least to family and friends. Having said that, I can almost hear their chuckle: “Dad, don’t worry, we are not plagued by any memories you leave with us that can be confused with perfection.” Enough said.

Epilogue

I have come to a growing appreciation for the usefulness of living with what might be called conjugate principles. I first came across those two words on reading a small book written years ago by Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who is remembered as a president of Harvard early in the last century. Lowell described the meeting of Lee and Grant at Appomattox. They each had led their armies for years with only one purpose in mind: destruction of the other. Now Lee concluded that victory was no longer possible, handed his sword to Grant, and offered all his cannons and horses in surrender. Grant told Lee to tell his men to take their horses home; they might need them for spring planting. A similar capacity to exchange quickly principles of war for those of peace was also exercised a century later when President Truman created the Marshall Plan, named for his great general in war who became a great leader in peace. Thus, applying the usefulness of a principle depends not just on its truth but the time and circumstances of the particular thing for which it provides guidance. That obvious, but commonly ignored, insight provides refreshing clarity and a wider range of options to meet the challenge of both personal life and professional responsibilities. Here are a few pairs of conjugate principles, whose interplay stretches, enriches, guides, and sometimes confuses: Faith and reason Modesty and pride Caution and boldness Old and new knowledge

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Self-interest and the rights of others The norms of an individual culture and the cultures of others Tenderness and toughness Curiosity and contentment Justice and mercy It has been a pleasure to discover that a university is a particularly fertile place for considering the conjugate nature of dealing with such matters as old and new knowledge. The former gives life to our history and answers basic questions. The latter gives zest to the challenge of facing today’s issues and opportunities. Taken by themselves and to an extreme, the former risks stagnation, the latter, intellectual anarchy. Wrestled with together in a creative tension, they provide both boundaries and openness to heritage and discovery. Without an appreciation for my roots and convictions—old knowledge, if you will—I would have been rudderless, without a passport to engage other cultures or, once engaged, find enrichment in them. The voyage of marriage itself initiates repeated conflicts of principle, calling repeatedly on the couple to span the space between them that has been framed by conjugate principles often invested with different, rich, personal and cultural histories that predated their union. I suppose a list of conjugate principles could cover the entire human experience. In any case, living with the legitimacy of conflicting principles allowed me to remain loyal to and nourished by the richness of my Logan roots while, at the same time, using the confidence they provided to grow and be enriched from the cultures of Concord and points beyond. The gentle conflict between the cultures of Logan and Concord in my early years brings to mind the difficulty of the presumably well-meaning program to “civilize the Native Americans” after the white culture overwhelmed their homelands in the nineteenth century. I refer to attempts to force young Native Americans to leave the tribe, and later the reservation, to attend distant schools to learn—and hopefully succeed in—the ways of the white man. Such programs too often failed but might have worked better if pressure on the Native Americans to abandon their native ceremonies, songs, and language had not been part of them. You wonder what would have happened if the Native culture had been respected and promoted while children learned the language and culture of their new America. Good fortune allowed me to have both. Who is more proud to be simultaneously American and foreign than an Irish American? Yet over the course of history, resolution of cultural conflicts has more often come at a terrible price. I suppose slavery in all its places and times is the

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most strident example of cultural conflict whose horror is commonly rationalized with claims of innate superiority by the conquering race or army combined with a conveniently concocted assumption of inborn inferiority imposed on the captives. The Irish immigration to America provides an example of the ability of a dominant culture to define an immigrant as socially and economically inferior, symbolized by the frequent sign in the window of a Boston Yankee’s Beacon Hill home advertizing for a servant: “Irish need not apply.” Those moments in history illustrate that the ultimate accommodation requires both openness on the part of the dominant culture as well as courage and stubborn pride—even rediscovery— by the emerging one. In a small and gentler way, that was the character of my journey into the new worlds of Concord and Cambridge and what came after. It seemed to work, with no cost to the old or fear of the new. In reviewing a speech I gave years ago, I came across some insightful comments I had borrowed from an article by James Michael Sullivan in the New York Times. Irish aren’t “ethnic” any more. Study after study tells us that Irish-Americans are now mainstream, socially accepted, and the second-highest-wageearning nationality in this country. The wings of the WASP have carefully unfolded to shelter the Irish-American. Why, then, the resurgence of Irish-American societies, Gaelic language and sports programs, and the booming business of charter flights to the old sod? Why are the Irish, most of them comfortable in the American identity they suffered so long to secure, now seeking a return to what was once lost or readily abandoned? We Irish are, quite simply, acting our part in the American drama. This is no nostalgia in which Galway Bay romanticism replaces genuine feelings of belonging to a people and a heritage. No, this is a deeper longing that stretches back across generations of struggle, adaptation and ultimate conformity that every immigrant group has been forced into. Like adopted children in search of our natural parents, we seek the beginnings of ourselves. For the American Irishman, this search is being fulfilled less and less at the annual parades and St. Patrick’s dances, where we all pretend we’re the real thing. Irish eyes are now looking deeper and discovering—beyond the superficial—a soul. A few years ago I returned to Ireland with my family. . . . We had no real desire to kiss the Blarney Stone. . . . We wanted to see relatives and

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neighbors of relatives and birthplaces and earth. . . . Little by little I began to understand what I and my American family had lost. . . . In spite of some erosion, moral and familial stability has remained carefully nurtured in Ireland. That is bound to hold promise for IrishAmericans many of whom, having climbed the social ladder in the manner of any pure-bred Horatio Alger, have witnessed the shredding of their families and their morals, which had always been their hope and security. Can we ever go home again? Never completely. An  Irishman is too much a realist to either think it or want it. But one day soon I will take my children back home to Ireland so that the earth can reclaim them a little and they themselves will better understand who they are.1 The Irish were first rejected, then accepted and assimilated, and now seem to be seeking reidentification and rediscovery. Melt, then recrystalize. Thus, the rich American stew has lumps: chunks of Irish potatoes, German red cabbage, Chinese chestnuts, and African tubers. The genius of America, at its best, is not the supposed homogenization of the melting pot; it is that each element, each ethnicity has added flavor to the stew stock without entirely losing its own identity. I remember little or no conscious pain as I left the comfort of my home and culture and set out to experience a larger and accommodating world, a productive tension of conjugant cultures that each grew to vitalize and enrich the other. F. Scott Fitzgerald described the opposite situation. His character, Gatsby, sought to reject his home of birth to somehow find something greater. He failed, and prompted Fitzgerald to produce this notable insight: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”2 The journey has been different for me for reasons I will never fully understand. Dad acknowledged the hard life he—and before him his parents and grandparents—lived as immigrants in the new world of western pioneer America. I have mentioned his smile as he deliberately misquoted Shakespeare: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends rough, hew them how we will.” But he somehow never sought to diverge from the essence of such rough, but ultimately rich, beginnings. Both my parents passed that appreciation of their heritage to me. My mother’s oft-repeated phrase, “Chase, boy, always remember who you are,” was memorable in its own right and also led to the additional unspoken goal . . . “and who you can become.” It was up to me, not others, to define who and what I was. We can be brought back, as Gatsby, to our origins with regret, remorse, or chagrin. Or we can embrace them with gratitude for the sustained transgenerational nourish-

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ment they—with good or even modest fortune—provide, symbolized for me in the image of ἀ e Guardian Poplar that adorns this memoir. Back to the thesis of Abbott Lawrence Lowell. Imagine the civility and wisdom that would return to Congress if more time was spent in agreeing on the best synthesis and application of conjugate principles, rather than self-righteous—and it would appear almost endless—disagreement over the truth of principles. The parables of Christ, as Lowell noted, are bursting with such conjugate contradictions, yet they contain truths that have survived two millennia. Here is an example from St. Matthew’s Gospel: “Therefore I say unto you, take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink. . . . Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap. . . . Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.”3 Juxtapose these lines from Matthew just nineteen chapters later: “His lord said unto him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant, thou has been faithful over a few things; I will make thee ruler over many things. Enter thou into the joy of the lord.’ ”4 And these lines: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”5 Christ’s object, Lowell suggested, was to teach great moral principles, not define single-minded rigidity in their application. I discovered for myself what I can describe as conjugate principles of love and loneliness while writing a few lines last fall to my wife, Grethe. I would like to share them in closing. Postscript: An Ode to Grethe

Thoughts at 5:20 Saturday Morning Grethe is in Nevada with friends, seeking to understand more of the universe. I am alone in the condominium. Last evening I sat, alone, in the old beautiful Tabernacle on Temple Square. Alone with thousands of others, Riesman’s “lonely crowd.” Something called the Utah Symphony and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir gave me and the town Mahler’s second symphony, the Resurrection, and old friend Obert Tanner paid for it before he died as a yearly gift of music to the community. I awoke from a dream of losing a mythic woman to marriage to another. She had no specific identity except loss.

Epilogue  •  285

On fully awakening, I realized that I had Grethe. Therefore, I had lost nothing. But Grethe and I will lose each other sometime soon. Only God’s presence and Mahler’s impression stood between me and Grethe and loss. Lying, half-awake in bed, there was a loneliness so painful that from experience I knew I needed to rise from the false warmth of the bed, turn on a light, and face the day with full consciousness. I wondered about the Swiss psychiatrist Jung, who lived with and wrote down in his ἀ e Red Book the terror and redemption of his subconscious. Then I wondered about my own. My life has been one of glorious curiosity and passion and a few so-called achievements. What part of life is the primal horror of loneliness and its final expression, death? Is it held at bay with the busyness of daily three-by-five schedule cards? Or is it rejoicing? The stories I have chosen to record in a memoir may have the purpose, in part, of pushing back the evening of growing darkness while shining a small light on life as it is. Am I seeking to write my own resurrection? Can I? Or is the resurrection truly a gift, incapable of being written, only received with gratitude? What was I losing in my dream state? What can I gain from thought? From the love for Grethe and children and grandchildren and the family of man and woman? From the love of Grethe, for she is all woman. Is there a love that encapsulates us two, and we billion, in such a manner that there is only the loneliness of the all, the love of the all? Can I live through this life—and my own, and Mahler’s Resurrection— with a certainty that comes from beauty and humanity coarse and fine? Can I find and sustain inner peace nourished by the beauty that is there to surround me? Can Grethe and I survive being separated, survive with gratitude and motion? Will we have to be busy to survive, or can we, separately, be nourished by what this life has made of us?

286  •  Epilogue

My bed was warm this morning but lonely. The Earth is warm and lonely. Why did I give the beggar on Main Street after Mahler only the coins in my left pocket when I had a five-dollar bill in my right one? Why am I blessed with Erika, and Stuart, and Edward, and their mates and children and more, with the sharing last evening of Mahler and the symphony and the choir? Why am I lonely? To hide from loneliness is to hide from love and family and humanity, for loneliness defines my blessings. The poet Roethke said as much: “The dark has its own light.” A gratitude for loneliness and family and love and all that Phebe and E. G. somehow passed to me, and, with Grethe, I hope to pass again. I read later that the young man who was to become President Teddy Roosevelt said as much of his love for his wife, Edith: “Oh, sweetest of all sweet girls, last night I dreamed that I was with you, that our separation was but a dream; and when I waked up it was almost too hard to bear. Well, one must pay for everything; you have made the real happiness of my life; and so it is natural and right that I should constantly [be] more and more lonely without you.”6 I can’t wait to be Chase boy again, be fed from a scraped apple and pass it on to Charlie. That is the loneliness of gratitude . . . and the glory down to the final mortal moments graced with family, Mahler, and Mozart.

Notes

Preface

1. T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets, in ἀ e Complete Poems and Plays 1909– 1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1971), 145. Chapter 1

1. Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 147. 2. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, act 1, scene 2, lines 140–41. 3. Frederick Jackson Turner, July 9, 1924, as quoted in Mrs. E. G. Peterson, Remembering E. G. Peterson (Logan, UT: Old Main Society, 1974), 83. 4. Harold Bloom, ἀ e American Religion: ἀ e Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 79. 5. Ibid; Bloom has taken Whittier’s quote from William Mulder and A. Russell Mortenson, eds., Among the Mormons, 157–58. 6. Ibid., 82. 7. Ibid., 81. 8. Ibid., 83. 9. Josiah Quincy, Figures of the Past: From the Leaves of Old Journals (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1888), 476–78. 10. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: ἀ e Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh (London: Carlyle House Memorial Trust, n.d.), 217–18. Chapter 2



1. 2. 3. 4.

John Neubecker, “Diary.” In possession of author. William Clayton, “Come, Come, Ye Saints,” April 1846. Hyrum Nebeker, “Diary.” In possession of author. Almira Nebeker, “Diary.” In possession of author. Chapter 5

1. Thayer, “Up in the Mormon Land” (unpublished, “Club Catalogue,” Porcellian Club, Harvard University). 2. Owen Wister, “Dum Vivimus Vivamus,” (unpublished, “Club Catalogue,” Porcellian Club, Harvard University). 3. Henry Eyring, Reflections of a Scientist (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1983), 100. 4. Ibid., 18.

288  •  Notes Chapter 7

1. Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man,” in ἀ e Poetry of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 38. 2. Deut. 6:5, 11:20 (New American Bible). 3. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, act 1, scene 2, lines 140–41. Chapter 8

1. “David Evans: One of Harvard’s Hidden Treasures,” ἀ e Yard, spring 2005. 2. Ibid. 3. Yitzchok Adlerstein, “Harvard and Haredi Racism,” Cross-Currents, June 23, 2010. Available online at http://​www​.cross-​currents​.com/​archives/​2010/​06/​23/​harvard-​and-​ haredi-​racism/ (accessed October 23, 2011). 4. “Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.” Available online at http://​en​ .wikipedia​.org/​wiki/​Regents_​of_​the_​University_​of_​California_​v​._​Bakke (accessed October 23, 2011). 5. William Butler Yeats, available online at http://​www​.brainyquote​.com/​quotes/​ authors/​w/​william_​butler_​yeats_​3​.html (accessed October 23, 2011). Chapter 9

1. Leonard J. Arrington, Adventures of a Church Historian (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 183. Chapter 10

1. I also published an article about this issue in the Utah State Medical Association Bulletin that elaborates on my concerns. “Nuclear War and Doctors: Take the Handle Off the Pump,” Utah State Medical Association Bulletin 30, no. 10 (1982):4–5 Chapter 12

1. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Recent Developments in Fusion Energy Research, 101st Congress, 1st sess., April 26, 1989, 1. Available online at http://​newenergytimes​.com/​v2/​archives/​USCongress/​ 1989April26HouseHearingsColdFusion​.pdf (accessed October 15, 2011). 2. Eugene F. Mallove, Fire from Ice (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1991), 180. 3. Ibid., 182. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 182–83. 6. Ibid., 183. 7. Ibid., 184. 8. F. K. Richtmyer, Introduction to Modern Physics, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, Inc., 1934), 20. Richtmyer quotes from Andrew D. White, A History of the Warfare of Science with ἀ eology in Christendom,” 1:387. 9. Leonardo da Vinci, quoted by Richtmyer, 20–21.

Notes  •  289 10. F. K. Richtmyer, E. H. Kennard, and T. Lauritsen, Introduction to Modern Physics, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, Inc., 1955), 14. 11. Julian Schwinger, “Cold Fusion—Does It Have a Future?” (lecture presented at the Yoshiro Nishina Centennial Symposium, Tokyo, Japan, December 5–7, 1990). Available online at http://​www​.enr-​canr​.org/​acrobat/​SchwingerJcoldfusiona​.pdf (accessed October 19, 2011). 12. J. B. S. Haldane, available online at http://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​wiki/​J​._​B​._​S​._​Haldane (accessed October 12, 2011). 13. Robert L. Park, “Cold Fusion: Twenty Years Later, It’s Still Cold,” What’s New, March 27, 2009. Available online at http://​newenergytimes​.com/​v2/​reports/​ BobParkColdFusion​.shtml (accessed October 20, 2011). 14. Martin Fleischmann, interview by Christopher Tinsley, Infinite Energy, no. 11, November 1996. Available online at http://​newenergytimes​.com/​v2/​views/​Group1/​ FleischmannByTinsley​.shtml (accessed October 20, 2011). 15. Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and National Science Foundation (NSF), Proceedings: EPRI/NSF Workshop on Anamalous Effects in Deuterated Metals, October 16–18, 1989, Washington, D.C. Published August 1993. Available online at http://​ www​.lenr-​canr​.org/​acrobat/​EPRInsfepriwor​.pdf (accessed November 6, 2011). 16. “Topics of the Times,” New York Times, January 13, 1920. Available online at http://​ www​.popsci​.com/​military-​aviation-​amp-​space/​article/​2009-​07/​new-​york-​times-​ nasa-​youre-​right-​rockets-​do-​work-​space (accessed October 20, 2011). 17. Michael Polanyi, “The Potential Theory of Adsorption,” in Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 93–94. 18. Bertrand Russell, ἀ e Impact of Science on Society, 1952, quoted by Polanyi, Knowing and Being, 94. Chapter 13

1. B. H. Roberts, preface to A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Century I, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1930), 1:ix. 2. Richard Feynman, available online at http://​www​.brainyquote​.com/​quotes/​quotes/​r/​ richardpf151727​.html (accessed October 18, 2011). Chapter 14

1. Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man,” in ἀ e Poetry of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 38. 2. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 5, scene 2, lines 10–11. Epilogue

1. James Michael Sullivan, “Can’t I Take You Home Again, Kathleen?” New York Times, March 17, 1977. 2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, ἀ e Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 182. 3. Matt. 6:25–28 (New American Bible). 4. Ibid., 25:21. 5. Ibid., 25:29. 6. Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt (New York: Random House, Inc., 2010), 22.

Index

Abravanel, Maurice, 161

Bisbee, Ethan, 64

affirmative action, 118, 126

Bishop, Marian, 246

Altman, Irv, 187–88, 193

Blackmer, Don, 71

Altman, Larry, 177, 227

Black Muslims, 125

Anderson, Ken, 252, 253

Bloom, Harold, 18, 19

Appleby, John, 223

Blumgart, Herman, 92, 97

Army Medical Corps, 108–11

Bok, Derek, 142, 144, 200, Fig. 10

Arnold, Professor, 6

Bornholm Lutheran Church, Denmark,

Arrington, Leonard J., 38, 151–52

5–6

Ashby, Lord, 182

Boston City Hospital, 93

Ashley, Kevin, 218

Boston Library Society, 136

Ashton, Marvin J., 192

Brigham Young University, 201–2

Austin, Ed, 39

British Petroleum Company, 197 Brophy, Jim, 212, 215, 236

Bacon, Roger, 225

Burbridge, Sally and Ken, 203

Bakke case, 126

Bushman, Richard, 75, 151

Bamberger, Simon, 161

Buys, Saundra, 252

Bangerter, Norm, 193, 195 Bayer, Frau, 109

Cabot, Charlie, 84

Bayh-Dole Act, 217, 240

Cabot, Hugh, 82

Bazell, Robert, 235

Cabot, Paul, 85, 140, 143

Bear Lake, UT, 34, 35, 38–40; South Eden

Cahill, George, 198

homestead at, 40–44, 45 Beaudette, Charles, 218 Beeson, Paul, 104 Bell, Ted, 196–97, 274–75

Callister, Mr., 51 Cambridge, MA, 86–87, 133–35, 153–54. See also Harvard College; Harvard Medical School; Harvard University

Bender, Bill, 118

Cannon, Walter B., 248

Benet, Steven Vincent, 24

Capecchi, Mario, 196, 197, 199, 238

Bernstein, Richard, 212

Capener, Ted, 188, 189, 203

Bethe, Hans, 227–28

Carlyle, Thomas, 10, 21–22

Bible, 74, 108, 284

Castle, William B., 93–94

292  •  Index

Chase, Salmon P., 37

experiments on, 221–22, 223, 230;

Chase, Thomas, 37

embarrassment caused to University

Chau Chu-Chi, 72, 132

by criticism of, 226–27, 234, 235, 236,

Chu, Paul, 223

237, 242–43; failed attempt to cooper-

Churchill, Winston, 17

ate with Jones on, 215–16, 233; future

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

of, 241; National Science Foundation-

(LDS, Mormons): arrangement with to

Electric Power Research Institute

do genealogical and genetic research,

meeting on, 222–24; patent applica-

165–67; attractiveness in nineteenth-

tion for denied, 218; press conference

century Europe of, 28–29; exodus from

announcing, 218, 219–20; refusal

East to West of, 30, 31, 33, 38; issue of

of Fleischmann and Pons to share

gay marriage and, 269; membership

measurements, 233–34; remarkable

of, 269; Perpetual Emigration/Educa-

lab accident of, 218–19; response to

tion Fund of, 23; polygamy and, 37–38;

announcement of, 220–24; summary

record of moving relatively quickly on

of Fleischmann/Pons experiment,

social issues of, 271; regard of outsiders

213–14; three mistakes of, 235–36;

for, 18–20; revelation allowing all wor-

threatened hot fusion funding, 232–33

thy males to receive the priesthood,

Conant, James Bryant, 118, 119

152–53, 271; seen as threat, 30; support

Concord, MA, 61–68

for immigration and education of,

conjugate principles, 280–81, 284

22–23; tension between individual and

Cope, Oliver, 94–95

community in, 20–21; unification of

Cox, Bill, 76

faith and reason of, 25

Curley, James Michael, 71

Clark, Barney, xii, 175–76, 177–78 Clark, Tim, 77–78

Daniels, Elizabeth, 29–30

Clayton, Jim, 244

Daniels, John, 29

Clayton, William, 32–33

Daniels, Phebe, 29, 30

Clyde, Jerry, 49

Davidson, Charles, 91–92

cold fusion (Fleischmann/Pons effect;

Davis, Willie, 124–25

low-energy nuclear reaction): attempt

Dee, Tom, 166

to get state funding for research on,

Department of Energy, 222–23

220–21; bad timing for announcement

Detmer, Don, 189

of, 224, 231–32; bigoted commentary

DeVries, William, 174–75

about, 233; controversy about was

Dixon, John, 154

unavoidable, 231; controversy over

Doleac, Mike, 204

“disciplinary ownership” of, 220; cur-

Dowling, Brian, 124

rent status of, xii, 229–30, 234; Depart-

Duderstadt, Jim, 193

ment of Energy investigation of, 222;

Duncan, Robert, 230, 232

difficulty in reproducing original

Dunlop, John, 142

Index  •  293

Eccles, David, 3, 4, 211

Gardner, Archibald, 34–35

Eccles, Marriner, 3–4

Gardner, David, 154, 160, 178, 185, 228

Eccles, Spencer, 4, 199, 211

Gardner, Howard, 121

Eccles Institute of Human Genetics, 199

Gardner, MA, 137, 264–65

egophony, 250

Garn, Jake, 208

Eliot, Charles, 123, 205

Germany, 109–10

Eliot House, 138–39

Gesteland, Ray, 166, 198

Elliott, William Yandall, 138

Gianelli, Linda, 175

Ellison, Ralph, 119

GI bill, 119

Evans, David, 117–18

Gnemi, Walt, 188

Eyring, Henry, 85–86, 219, 270

Goddard, Robert, 238 Goldwater Memorial Hospital, 95–97,

faith, 73–74, 85–86, 266

186–87

FEMA, 168

Grant, David, 226

Ferrin, Arnie, 201

Grant, Heber J., 10

Feynman, Richard, 270–71

Grant, Ulysses S., 280

Fieser, Louis, 87–88 Finley, John, 136, 138–39

Haldane, J. B. S., 229

Fischer, Thierry, 268

Hansen, Wilford, 234

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 283

Harrison, Hartwell, 148

Fleischmann, Martin, 213, 214, 215, 231,

Harvard College: admissions process

233–34. See also cold fusion (Fleisch-

at, 127–29, 130, 139–40; athletics at,

mann/Pons effect; low-energy nuclear

123–25; efforts to increase minority

reaction)

applications to, 117–21, 126; faith and

Fleischmann/Pons effect. See cold fusion

curiosity at, 69; 1960s poll of faculty of

(Fleischmann/Pons effect; low-energy

what they most valued at, 71; student

nuclear reaction)

strike at, 129–32. See also under Peter-

Folkman, Judah, 253, 254–55

son, Chase Nebeker

Fort Douglas, UT, 34, 207, 208

Harvard Lampoon, 135

Fort Louisburg, Canada, 146–47

Harvard Medical School, 91–99

Fredrickson, Don, 198–99

Harvard University: fund-raising at,

Freund, Paul, 131 Friendly, Fred, 271–72 Frost, Robert, 275

142–45; honorary degree for shah of Iran from, 149 heart disease, premature, 164–65 Hesburgh, Father Ted, 187, 191

Galbraith, John Kenneth, 131

Hill, Chris, 203

Galilei, Galileo, 225

Hippocrates, 92

Gallivan, Jack, 209

Hirschman, Albert O., 271

Gardiner, William Tudor, 84, 201

homosexuality, 64–66, 184, 269

294  •  Index

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 198–99 Hughes, Howard, 198 Hulme, Charlotte, 29

low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR). See cold fusion (Fleischmann/Pons effect; low-energy nuclear reaction)

Hulme, John, 29

Loy, Una, 178

Hulme, William, 29, 30, 35, 37–38

Lyon, J. Lynn, 167–68

Humphries, Mrs. (teacher), 50 Hunn, Hiram, 127

Ma, Yo-Yo, 128–29

Huntsman, Jon and Karen, 192, Fig, 15

Madsen, Arch, 271–72 Mahler, Gustav, x, 272, 286

Intermountain Healthcare (IHC), 169–71

Magaziner, Ira, 221

Irish Americans, 282–83

Majerus, Rick, 203–4

Irving, Dr., 232 [first name??]

Mallove, Eugene, 222–23 Marriage of Figaro, ἀ e, 99

James, Billy, 133

Marriott, Bill, 192

James, Jack, 132–33

Marriott, Donna and J. Willard, Jr., Fig. 14

James, William, 132, 201, 205, 268–69

Marsden, Greg, 204

Jewett, Fred, Fig. 10

Massachusetts General Hospital, 94

Johnston’s army, 33–34

Mattsson, Mike, 188, 191, 209

Jones, Steven E., 215–16, 233, 240

Maughan, Seth, 53–54 Maxwell, Neal, 168

Kane, Thomas, 33–34, 94

Mayer, Louis B., 187

Kennedy, Don, 182

McKubre, Michael, 222

Kimball, Heber C., 29, 37

McMurrin, Sterling, 181

Kimball, J. Golden, 20

Merk, Frederick, 9

Kimball, Spencer W., 151–53, 271

Middlesex School, 56–57, 61–68

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 119, 153

Morgan, Tony, 188

Kolff, Willem, 174, 203

Morison, Samuel Eliot, 146, 208 Mormons. See Church of Jesus Christ of

Land, Edwin, 145, 278

Latter-day Saints (LDS, Mormons)

LaRose, Rose, 63

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 231

Lee, Robert E., 280

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, x, 114, 242,

Leonardo da Vinci, 225 Logan, UT, 47. See also Utah Agricultural

272, 286 multiple myeloma, xii, 251–55, 256

College (UAC); under Peterson, Chase

Munchausen syndrome, 104

Nebeker and Peterson, Elmer George

Munson, Chase (grandson), 275

Longair, Malcolm, 234

Munson, Geddes (grandson), 275

Lopez, Barry, v

Munson, Joseph (grandson), 275

Lowell, Abbott Lawrence, 120, 280, 284

Munson, Leah (grandson), 275

Index  •  295

Munson, Nicola (granddaughter), 275

Parker, Scott, 169, 170

Munson, Shipley (son-in-law), 275

Petersen, Anna Martine Andersen (great-

Myers, Harry, 78

grandmother), 5–6 Petersen, Hans (great-grandfather), 4–5

Naisbitt, John, Fig. 14 Nathan, David, 252 National Association of State Univer-

Peterson, Agnes Geddes (grandmother), 3–4, 5 Peterson, Ane Grethe Ballif (wife), xvi;

sities and Land-Grant Colleges

birth of first child of, 110; diplomacy

(NASULGC), 11, 237, 244

in reducing lavish spending on

National Institutes of Health (NIH), 159–60, 162

president’s house, 189–90; life before meeting Chase, 98; marries Chase,

National Science Foundation, 222–23, 226

74, Fig. 8; ode to, 284–85; photo of,

Nauvoo, IL, 29, 30

Fig. 8–9, 14–18; work on LDS journal

Nebeker, Delia Chase Lane (great-

for women of, 133–34

grandmother), 37–38 Nebeker, Hyrum (grandfather), 35–36, 40, 42 Nebeker, Ira (great-grandfather), 31–32, 33, 34 Nebeker, Phebe Almira Hulme (grandmother), 25–26, 35–36, 41, 42

Peterson, Anne (granddaughter), 276 Peterson, Augustus (grandfather), 4, 22 Peterson, Candace (daughter-in-law), 276 Peterson, Catherine Foster (sister-in-law), 45, 261 Peterson, Charlie (grandson), 276 Peterson, Chase Nebeker, Life: child-

Nebeker, Steve, 42

hood on UAC campus of, 9, 47–49,

Neubecker, Johan Martin, 30–31

Fig. 3; exposed to music as child, 267;

Neubecker, John, 30–31

exposed to X-rays as child, 49; travels

Neubecker, Laurena, 30–31

to Washington D. C. with father, 11–13;

New England Conservatory of Music, 28, 58

attends Yankees-Senators baseball

New York Times, 227, 238

game, 12–13; sees first black man, 11–12;

New York Yankees, 12–13

memories of father, 12, 13–15, 16–18, 21;

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 120

childhood illnesses of, 26–27; summers

Nobel Prize, 196, 197, 199, 238, 255

on the Nebeker ranch, 40–44; relationship with brother of, 44–45; at the

O. C. Tanner Company, 277

Whittier School, 49–50; memory of

Office of Technology Assessment, 237

the smell of a new book, 50; partici-

Olsen, Don, 175

pates in little theater, 52; helps campus

Osler, Sir William, 91

workers, 50–52; as ball boy, 53–54; summer jobs of, 16, 54–55; tennis as joy

Palmer, Parker, 180

and private passion of, 55–56; decides

Park, Robert L., 230

to go to Middlesex School, 56–57; years

296  •  Index Peterson, Chase Nebeker, Life (cont’d)

accepts position as dean of admissions

at Middlesex School of, 61–68; breaks

at Harvard College, 113–14; why he was

nose, 62–63; has “experience” with

chosen, 140; David Evans on, 117–18;

homosexuality, 64–66; wins scholar-

efforts to increase minority student

ship to Harvard, 68; has uncertainty

applications of, 117–21; chairs Faculty

about what was Harvard, 69–70; on

Committee on Athletics, 124–25;

student council, 70–71; Harvard class-

offered cash by fathers to admit sons,

mates and colleagues of, 71–72, stutter-

128; experiences during student strike,

ing of, 73–74; gains understanding of

129–32; purchases William James

faith, 73–74; on tennis team, 76; quest

house, 132–33; life in Cambridge of, 133,

for unity of faith and reason of, 85–86;

135–36; summers at Wellfleet medical

involved with Cambridge LDS com-

clinic of, 136, 263–64; summers at Gar-

munity, 75–76; elected to Porcellian

diner emergency room of, 137–38, 264–

Club, 77–79, Fig. 6; has great triumph

65; takes position of Vice President

at Elsie’s, 81; brought his home with

of Alumni Affairs and Development

him to Middlesex and Harvard, 82;

at Harvard University, 142, Fig. 10;

summer at Soda Springs, ID of, 82–83;

fundraising efforts of, 142–45; dreams

premed studies of, 86–88; graduates,

about his eulogy, 256; requested

88–89, Fig. 7; awarded Paul Revere

to return cross to Canada, 146–47;

Frothingham Prize, 88–89; accepted at

efforts to reach out to alumni of, 147;

Harvard Medical School, 91; reasons

interviewed for president of University

for choosing medicine of, 90, 101–2;

of Virginia, 148; trip to Iran by, 149;

first patient of, 93; gets first car, 93–94;

involvement with LDS Church and

in training program at Goldwater

strong feeling about refusing priest-

Memorial Hospital, 95–97; makes

hood to blacks of, 150–53; becomes

first patient presentation, 95; letter of

vice president of health services at

recommendation from Dr. Seegal for,

University of Utah, 154–55, 159–78,

96; receives award from Massachusetts

Fig. 11; helps organize workshop

Medical Society, 97; marries Grethe,

on medical hazards of nuclear war,

98–100, 278, Fig. 8; interns at Yale,

168–69; scam involving Iranian wealth

101, 102–8, 111; discovers value of a roll

and, 171–73; interview on National

of tape, 103–4; volunteers for low-

Public Radio about artificial heart

sodium diet, 105–6; in Army Medical

implant, 177–78; becomes president

Corps in Germany, 108–11; daughter

of University of Utah, 178, Fig. 12–13;

born, 110–11; first son born, 111; begins

interviews perspective football recruit,

practice at Salt Lake Clinic, 111–12,

179–80; details of presidential selection

113; second son born, 112; has hear-

process, 183; handles concern about

ing scare with newborn son, 112–13;

gay-lesbian conference, 184; chats with

Index  •  297

Sigma Nu members, 186–87; has open

on campus named for, 34, Fig. 17; gets

office hours, 187; central administra-

sick in Prague, 256; has post-traumatic

tors of, 187–90; private fund-raising

stress disorder, 46, 257–59; receives

by, 190–93, Fig. 14–16; works with gov-

Harvard Medal, 155; teaches and works

ernor to handle tax shortfall, 193–95;

half-time on campus, 261–63; letter

development of athletics under, 203–5;

to conductor of Utah Symphony of,

handling of shanty town on campus

267–68; updates family today, 275–77;

by, 205–7; involved with issue of nam-

photos of, Fig. 3, 6–18

ing medical school, 208–10; considers

Peterson, Chase Nebeker, Opinions and

resigning, 210; receives first informa-

Observations; on academic freedom,

tion on Fleischmann/Pons experi-

224–26; acknowledgement of fallibil-

ment, 212–13; introductory remarks to

ity by, 279; advice on erotic thoughts

Fleischmann-Pons press conference

while examining female patients,

by, 219–20, 237; testifies to legislature

262; on alcohol, 140–41; on clinical

about funding of cold fusion research,

research, 173–74; on conflict inherent

220–21; pressure on to stop cold

in new science, 238–40; on conjugate

fusion research, 226–28; has personal

principles, 280–81; on death and

pain from criticism of handling cold

dying, 272; on evaluating the timeli-

fusion issue, 227, 242; reasons for close

ness and usefulness of experiences,

involvement with cold fusion research,

266, 267; on gentle conflict of cultures

228–29; frustrated by not being able to

in Logan and Concord, 281–82; on

respond to critics of cold fusion affair,

ideational epilepsy, 265–66, 267; on

242; named chair of science-advisory

importance of liberal arts education,

committee for Office of Technol-

186; on intense human interaction in

ogy Assessment, 237; elected chair of

medicine, 101–2; on Irish Americans,

National Association of State Univer-

282–83; on LDS Church and issue of

sities and Land-Grant Colleges, 237;

homosexual marriage, 269–71; on

fails to correctly explain where cold

letters of recommendation, 121-22; on

fusion research funding came from,

marriage, 277; on need for students

243–44; peer reviews of, 244; Faculty

to learn something nonmedical from

Senate resolution of “no confidence”

each patient they see, 249–50; on need

in, 243–44; asked to serve on Knight

to access experience of others, 264–65;

Commission, 244–45; decides to retire,

on nurturing productive tension, 184–

245; returns to medicine, 246–50;

85; “An Ode to Grethe” by, 284–86; on

diagnosed with multiple myeloma,

patients coming with their culture,

251–52; treatment for myeloma, 252–54;

106–7; on the Porcellian Club, 83–85;

in TV documentary, 254; planning

on prayer, 266–67; on presidency of a

for death by, 255–56; Heritage Center

public university, 185; on pressure on

298  •  Index Peterson, Chase Nebeker (cont’d)

by, 48; experiences in Europe of, 10–11,

Native Americans to abandon their

Fig. 5; home remedies of, 26–27; leg

culture, 281; reaction to music of,

infection of, 25–26; photo of, Fig. 2, 5;

267–68; on relating to patients, 263; on

schooling of, 6, 27–28; ties to girlhood

the role of a university president, 228;

home of, 24;

on separation, 274–75; speculates that

Peterson, Sam (grandson), 276

Mormon heritage may have made him

Peterson, Stuart (son), 111, 153–54, 276

more approachable, 125–26

Peterson, Tyler (grandson), 276

Peterson, Edward (son), 112–13, 255, 276

Physicians for Social Responsibility, 168

Peterson, Elijah (grandson), 276

Pirsig, Robert, 43

Peterson, Elmer George (father): acts

Polanyi, Michael, 238–39

of kindness to students of, 14–15;

polygamy, 37–38, 165

attempted dismissal of, 15–16; boyhood

Pons, Stanley, 212, 213, 215, 224; threatens

experiences of, 13; college studies of,

lawsuit against University, 235–36. See

5–6; death of, 21; on importance of

also cold fusion (Fleischmann/Pons

the fireplace, 17; late thoughts of, 278;

effect; low-energy nuclear reaction)

liked golf, 13; love of the Earth of,

Porcellian Club, 77–79, 84–85, Fig. 6

16–17; photo of, Fig. 1, 4, 5; as president

post-traumatic stress disorder, 46, 257–59

of Utah Agricultural College, 6–10,

Powell, Lewis F., Jr., 126

14–16; receives Finley medal, 139;

prayer, 74, 168, 266–67

retires, 16–17; returns as interim UAC

Presley, Elvis, 109

president, 17; slight imperfections

Primary Children’s Hospital, 169

of, 13–14; starts summer school, 7–9,

Pritzker, Abraham, 209

Fig. 4; teaches adult Sunday school

Pusey, Nathan, 69, 113, 140, 141

class, 18; tours Europe, 10–11, Fig. 5; visits Ute Reservation, 147–48

Quincy, Josiah, 19–20

Peterson, Erika (daughter), 110, 154, 159, 275–76, Fig. 9

Ramsey, Norman, 222, 224, 235

Peterson, Esther, 98

Relman, Arnold, 177

Peterson, George (brother), 44–46, 259–61

Rich, Charles, 39

Peterson, Isabelle (daughter-in-law), 276

Richtmyer, F. K., 225

Peterson, John (grandson), 276

Riesman, David, 148, 264

Peterson, Kathy (daughter-in-law), 276

Robbins, Zeke, 71–72

Peterson, Lucy (granddaughter), 276

Roberts, B. H., 269–70

Peterson, Marian (sister), 61

Roe, Robert A., 220

Peterson, Martha (sister), 9, 20

Roosevelt, Theodore, 79, 123, 205, 286

Peterson, Phebe Nebeker (mother),

Rosenblatt, Joe, 161, 209–10

“always remember who you are,” 25,

Rosenblatt, Nathan, 161

283, death of, 46; disciplining of Chase

Rosovsky, Henry, Fig. 10

Index  •  299

Russell, Bertrand, 239 Rutter, Bill, 88

Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 181–83, 234 Taubes, Gary, 218

Sacks, Oliver, 267

Teller, Edward, 222–23

Salt Lake Clinic, 111–12, 113

thalidomide, xii–xiii, 253–54

Saltonstall, Leverett, 84

Thorn, George, 198

Samuelson, Cec, 209

Tinsley, Christopher P., 231

Sandzén, Birger, ii, 8, 284

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 8–9, 30, Fig. 4

Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), 121 Schweitzer, Albert, 25, 26, 76, 114

University of Utah: building of Howard

Schwinger, Julian, 229

Hughes Medical Institute on, 198–99;

science: conflict inherent in new, 238–40;

College of Nursing, 167; expansion

funding of, 214; issue of primacy in,

into Fort Douglas of, 34; history of

231; tensions between religion and, 86;

athletics at, 200–202; issue of overhead

turf wars in, 232, 234–35

funds, 195–96; movement of Children’s

Seegal, David, 95–97, 185–86

Hospital to, 169–71; patent claims filed

Shady Hill School, 134

for faculty work by, 216–17; photo of,

shah of Iran, 149, 171

Fig. 19; record of academic freedom

Shakespeare, William, 8, 52, 278, 283

and encouraging independent think-

Shipp, Ellis, 38

ing at, 184, 236; rise in research fund-

Shoshone Indians, 38–40

ing since cold fusion announcement

Shriver, Sam, 62

at, 237; sensitivity to criticisms of cold

silo fillers’ disease, 52

fusion research at, 226–27, 234, 235,

Skulnick, Mark, 165, 166

236, 237, 242–43; tradition of Mormon

Smith, George Albert Jr. and Ruth, 75

as president of, 183; unique culture of,

Smith, Joseph, 19–20

159; unsuccessful creation of provost

Soda Springs, ID, 82–83

position at, 244; workshop on medical

Solomon, Michael, 235

hazards of nuclear war at, 168–69. See

Sorenson, Jim, 208–9, 210, 211, 243

also cold fusion (Fleischmann/Pons

South Africa, 205, 207

effect; low-energy nuclear reaction);

Spale, Robert L., 40 Stamberg, Susan, 177–78

under Peterson, Chase Nebeker University of Utah School of Medicine:

Stanford University, 143

genetics research program at, 164–66;

Stegner, Wallace, 3

implantation of artificial heart at, 174–

Students for a Democratic Society, 132

76; issue of delivering medical care

Sullivan, James Michael, 282–83

and doing research at, 163–64; issue of naming, 208–10; study of premature

Tanner, Grace, Fig. 16 Tanner, Obert C., 180–83, 277, Fig. 16

heart disease at, 164–65 University of Virginia, 148, 207

300  •  Index

Utah: cooperation between hospitals in,

Watts, Ardean, 268

169–71; as haven for fleeing bigotry,

Webster, Carol, 189

160–62

Weeks, Edward, 136

Utah Agricultural College (UAC): band,

Wellfleet, MA, 136–37, 263–64

50–51; Chase grows up on, 47–54;

White, Andrew D., 225

influenza at, 7; smoking restriction on

White, Ray, 166, 198

campus of, 9. See also Peterson, Elmer

Whittier, John Greenleaf, 18–19

George

Whittier School, 49–50

Utah Symphony, 267–68

Widtsoe, John A., 6–7 Williams, Roger, 164, 166

Vanderbilt Hall, 91, 92, 100

Winchendon, MA, 137, 138

Vietnam War, 129–31, 135–36

Wintrobe, Max, 160, 161, 162, 164, 166, 210

von Stade, Skiddy, 77

Wister, Owen, 79, 80–81 Wright, Amos, 38–39

Walling, Cheves, 234 warfarin, 217 Washakie, 39–40

Young, Brigham, 34–35, 38, 160–61, 162