DenMag L&F issue

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Stuff, and the Stuff of Life [first unused draft]

How would you feel if you were digging through a large crate for, say, a “major award” and didn’t find anything (not even a lamp shaped like a leg)?

Then you find out later it was what you only thought was packing material, the little white peanuts, or straw, or blocks of foam, that actually had value. Ow.

If DNA can be compared to the leg lamp, then Jeff Thompson, assistant professor of biology, is working to get people to take a look at the stuff Ralphie and his dad would just toss aside. Instead of “excelsior,” the stuff is called “histone,” and histones may not only play a role in building DNA, but as proteins themselves, actually interact with this building block of life to build and repair chromosomes. Once thought a mere structural prop in the nucleus of the cell, histones play a significant and active role in the life of the cell over time.

It turns out that “chromatin,” the material those squiggly X’s and Y’s called chromosomes are made of in our cells, needs ongoing maintenance just like your roofing shingles or garden wall. Histones direct DNA and other proteins how to fold themselves together into chromatin, like a travel consultant teaching you how to get one more sweater into a tiny piece of overhead luggage, but in this case the luggage is actually built by how the material is folded together. This molecular origami, like packing on a long trip, has to be done and redone, and each time becomes a new opportunity for improvement, or disaster.

Using the simple structures of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Thompson and student research assistants Ashley Albrecht ‘07, Arzu Arat, Lindsey Bostelman ‘05, and Andrew Keller ‘06 looked at how the impact of ultraviolet light, which damages strands of DNA (and is why you need to put on your sunscreen), gets repaired by processes tied back into those histones. Their work together was published in the journal aptly named “DNA Repair.”

As molecular biologists and genetic researchers successfully sequence genomes for plant and animal species, including humans, they’re realizing that the complexity of the genetic code in DNA still isn’t enough to build the entire living being. Just as a building has a blueprint, there also are reams of documents specifying materials, colors, and how many gallons per flush that are printed alongside the drawings. If DNA is the blueprint of life, histones work for the construction engineering department, working out details and repairing small errors as they creep in below the level of the architect’s interest.

This is current, exciting research in molecular biology, and students under Prof. Thompson’s guidance like Ariel Lee ‘08, Natasha Strande ’08, and Jon Mecoli ‘09 look forward to packing their bags for opportunities in other, larger labs, first for publication as undergraduates, and soon to pursue graduate work. Their first steps into unfolding the mysteries of cellular processes began here at Denison.

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*thanks to a note from Jeff Thompson –

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Stuff, and the Stuff of Life [take two]

If DNA is the blueprint of life, “histones” work for the construction engineering department, working out details and repairing small errors as they creep in below the level of the architect’s interest.

Biology professor Jeff Thompson is showing students how to work with histones, and manage their ability to repair damage that comes with the wear and tear of everyday life. This mundane maintenance process within the cell sounds unremarkable, until you realize that repair and rebuilding processes running out of control is better known as – cancer.

Histones not only play a role in building DNA strands, but they are proteins themselves, interacting with the building blocks of life to build and maintain the inheritable genetic blueprint of an organism. Once thought a mere structural prop in the nucleus of the cell, histones play a significant and active role in the life of the cell over time.

It turns out that “chromatin,” the material that makes up those squiggly X’s and Y’s called chromosomes in our cells, needs ongoing maintenance just like your roofing shingles or garden wall. Histones direct DNA and other proteins how to fold themselves together into chromatin, like a travel consultant teaching you how to get one more sweater into a tiny piece of overhead luggage, but in this case the luggage is actually built by how the material is folded together. This molecular origami, like packing on a long trip, has to be done and redone, and each time becomes a new opportunity for improvement, or disaster.

Using the simple structures of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Thompson and student research assistants Ashley Albrecht ’07, Arzu Arat ’08, Lindsey Bostelman ’05, and Andrew Keller ’06 looked at how the impact of ultraviolet light, which damages strands of DNA (and is why you need to put on your sunscreen), is repaired by processes tied back into those histones. Their work together was published in the journal aptly named DNA Repair.

As molecular biologists and genetic researchers successfully sequence genomes for plant and animal species, including humans, they’re realizing that the complexity of genetic code in DNA still isn’t enough to build the entire living being. Just as a building has a blueprint, there also are reams of documents specifying materials, colors, and how many gallons per flush that are printed alongside the drawings. That’s where histones and other proteins draw out the details that may fit into the broader strokes sketched by DNA.

This is current, exciting research in molecular biology, and students under Prof. Thompson’s guidance like Ariel Lee ‘08, Natasha Strande ’08, and Jon Mecoli ‘09 look forward to packing their bags for opportunities in other, larger labs, first for publication as undergraduates, and soon to pursue graduate work. Their first steps into unfolding the mysteries of cellular processes began here at Denison.

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Who Are You Callin’ a Dwarf Planet?

Astronomers are not known for their combative nature.

Long nights glued to the eyepiece of a telescope, or even longer days analyzing data from giant dish antennas, can leave them sleepless, but usually not feisty.

The gloves came off recently at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), when a panel announced a new definition of “planet” which left out Pluto, relegating the once ninth planet to the status of “dwarf planet.”

In a nutshell, the IAU definition sounds pretty straightforward, starting with orbiting a sun (remember, this is not just a definition for our neighborhood, the Solar System), and having enough gravity to become a sphere, but then they said a planet should “clear out its neighborhood.” This isn’t some cosmic block watch program, doing citizen arrests of graffiti artists, but a cosmological process where dust and sky junk is gathered by a regular orbit into tidy heaps, or better yet, moons.

Pluto has been known for some years to have a small moon, Charon, and the Hubble Space Telescope has added Nix and Hydra to Pluto’s realm. What makes Pluto unique by any standard is the vast, irregular orbit dipping down into Neptune’s neighborhood and looping off towards the Oort Cloud, taking some 250 years for a full lap of the Sun. Add in that the orbit is essentially unpredictable into the future, and you have a wild set of variables. A NASA mission called New Horizons launched last year will reach Pluto in 2015, but some worry the craft may be doomed by the amount of junk still floating aimlessly in the neighborhood, because it hasn’t been cleared.

Which brings us back to the IAU, which used this fact as grounds to, as some said, break the hearts of every child and adult who as a child had a map of the Solar System on their wall or mobile of the planets hanging from the ceiling. Even the canine Disney character, created in 1930 when Clyde Tombaugh discovered the “newest planet,” howled when the IAU declared that Pluto was no longer a planet.

Mike Mickelson, professor emeritus of astronomy at Denison, passed along a comment from a colleague saying “science does not advance by authoritative pronouncements.” Dr. Mickelson and others have passed around a petition asking the IAU to reverse their proclamation, and allow the regular processes of science to work out a definition through study, research, and publication of proposals. They point out that Jupiter does not qualify as a planet under the new definition, since the neighborhood of Jupiter looks like a salvage yard on a Monday, space clutter-wise.

All agree that there is a bright spot in this whole debate, overdramatized by some as the “Great Pluto War.” The new discussion is not so much about yellow dogs or ninth planets, but a chance for greater awareness of the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune which turns out to have a pretty large population, and a number of objects larger than Pluto, such as 2005’s discovery, Eris, which was last closest to the Sun in 1700. Sedna, with an orbital period of 12,000 years, may be as large or larger than Pluto as well.

For astronomers interested in the Kuiper Belt, or real estate investors with an outer planets portfolio, these are boom times during the “Great Pluto War.”

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Lost, and Found

Internet search engines often have a short line at the top of their “results page” telling you that the following information was recovered in something like “1.8 seconds” and there are “114,838” hits that match your search terms.

“Impressive,” rumbles Darth Vader.

Yes, a computer search for information has a force all its own, taking precision and accurary and moving with what seems beyond light speed swiftness through a dimply imagined ocean of bits, bytes, and file names.

On the other hand, if you type “lama” instead of “llama,” the sheaf of references dumped onto your screen will be utterly different, just as one misplaced punctuation mark will get you a “404 Not Found” or something entirely different.

You can be literally lost in the profusion of information, what some commentators call “datasmog.” The totality of information available on-line is amazing, and only manageable (so far) with tools that demand ruthless precision or return only what we know to look for, with the fringe benefit that you can hyperlink your way into unexpected fields of view, but related to the entry point you started with.

A crucial element of a more traditional library experience is the very fact that it is, in fact, limited. That limitation is comforting in many ways, even if the idea of something less than everything isn’t what modern life tends to value.

When you enter a collection, a campus library or museum archive, there is the strong sense of selection wrapped around you. Librarians and archivists know that the idea that every volume on the shelves was carefully picked and preserved is less than true; contingency and randomness leak in, but the presence of some overarching ideas and ideals is very real – the needs of undergraduate researchers, special areas of strength, a cultivated taste that has years more development than your own.

This may work against libraries in some ways, since we’re told by the culture in so many ways that our tastes and desires are absolute, but when confronted by a new challenge, there is an innate human desire to look to one side to see how an experienced hunter chases and catches the game, knowing that our ignorance might leave our bellies empty.

In the same way, we have a voice inside that wants at least a little direction, preferably from a wiser and more wily head. We know that book jackets and magazine covers, and now web pages, are carefully gamed and plotted to lure us to consume, and when a particular sort of content is needed, we need a trusted guide to take us to the moment of capture.

But there’s also a growing sense that a particular kind of guided serendipity is both fun, and useful. We want to find the thing that we didn’t know we were looking for, which can come through hyperlinks on webpages, no doubt about it; that isn’t quite going to work when we’re unsure of what we’re looking for in the first place. There’s a kind of affinity of things and objects cultivated by Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress systems, walking the stacks and thumbing the indexes, which doesn’t happen in quite the same way on-line.

The 2007 winner of “America’s Got Talent” got into ventriloquism by going to the library for a book that wasn’t there for a skill he was learning, but a book on ventriloquism was, so he signed it out. Asked after his win what the original book was about, he admitted “I don’t remember.”

Looking up some information on Frances Slocum, a girl abducted and adopted before the American Revolution by Native Americans out of Pennsylvania to my native Indiana, I found a number of books describing the amazing life of Mississinewa, as she became known. One of the books pointed me to the 70 volume set of Thwaites’ transcriptions and translations of the “Jesuit Relations,” letters of the 17th century from the frontier of the New World to missionary supervisors back in France and Italy. Flipping through those weighty, leather-bound books faster than I realistically could have scanned on-line (where the do, also, usefully reside), I found notes about ball games played for the entertainment of their black robe visitors, which pointed me to further works a few shelves over about seasonal practices of the Great Lakes Indian tribes, which led me to my first look at the ancient Newark Earthworks, sprawling across the valleys just east of Denison.

This was a decade before I first laid eyes on the mounds themselves, but the chain of connection that made me aware of them is still alive and vital in my mind a couple decades further on. Meanwhile, I struggle to reconstruct the chain of links that got me to an interesting article just yesterday. Was I reading that on the CNN website? No, wait, there was this thing in the newspaper’s on-line version that . . .

The very speed and subtlety of how one makes links with virtual information can undermine our ability to process and internalize what we’re learning, or maybe just consuming. As an informational consumer, I wonder how many “empty calories” I’m stuffing my mental diet with, never building up much lasting muscle or sinew, just buzzing off the intake and hungry soon for more.

I don’t know what I don’t know. That’s as true a statement as any of us can ever make. What I do know is that there are some ways of finding what I don’t know that I’m more sure to know later; that libraries and printed volumes aren’t the best way for me to check what the percentage of Americans who never read a book in a year is (just went on-line, that would be 1 in 4, he moaned), but if I want to drawn into my awareness how people learn to read and value it as adults, I’ll want to turn from the Wikipedia entry on Piaget and go to the stacks.

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Indiana Jones Denied Tenure

If Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. were to go up for tenure at Denison as a professor of archaeology, his colleagues would doubtless have a number of hard questions for him about field methodology, use of sources, and publications.

The board of trustees, though, would likely want to know: “What did you do with the Ark of the Covenant?” Because it could lie hidden somewhere on our campus . . .

If you saw the movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” you may well recall that along with inappropriate relationships with students and daughters of colleagues, Indy rarely ended up with the “artifact” he was after in the first place (nor do you ever see him on his hands and knees for hours, in the sun, scraping off soil layers). The end of the first tale, set in 1936, saw US government agents assure Professor Jones (someone must have given him a position) that the ancient Biblical golden box, lost in the fall of Jerusalem, was in secure hands, studied by “top men.”

The “top men” were probably named Larry, Darryl, and Darryl, as the closing sequence shows the Ark of the Covenant being nailed into a crate and wheeled off into a vast government storage facility. But as it disappears into the towering aisles, a tantalizing clue is visible: an accession number for the National Archives, # 9906753.

Just a few years later, a major portion of the National Archives were brought to Denison University for safekeeping, fearing the possibilities of Nazi Germany raiding Washington DC itself from the sea, or at least bombarding the nation’s capital by ship and inflicting a blow on our country’s morale. The location where the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution were hidden has never been officially revealed, but is generally considered to have been Fort Knox, Kentucky.

The rest of our national heritage, including items like the George Washington papers, the Northwest Ordinance, and Henry Ford’s grocery lists, came to Granville and went up the hill to the basement of Swasey Chapel, where crates and boxes were piled high and packed tight.

Could anything from those days have been left behind? Heather Lyle, university archivist, doubts it. “We don’t retain any items from those days other than the records of our arrangement with the federal government,” she says.

What if someone had crept in and stolen a particular item from the trove? Were there armed guards? “There were soldiers and officers in training on campus all during the World War II period, but no armed guards that we’re aware of.”

The number on the crate containing the “lost ark” is not in our record-keeping system, either. But isn’t that what you’d expect? What if some on campus during those dark days thought the Ark too valuable to let return to the thoughtless hands of civil officials? Might it still be here, carefully hidden?

And imagine the latest sequel: “Indiana Jones and the College on the Hill,” with love interest Jennifer Garner, and wacky sidekick Steve Carell.

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Mindprints

Henry David Thoreau walked along a Cape Cod beach, picked up an ancient flint arrowhead in the dunes, and thought: mindprint.

Looking at the pattern of flake scars on the surface of the stone tool, the notched base where sinew once bound it to a shaft, and Thoreau saw the traces of a mind, left as distinctively as the whorls of a fingerprint.

We might call an object of material culture an “artifact” following archaeological or sociological usage, but “mindprint” is useful for turning our attention to the person, the human influence made visible long after the life has ended.

An artifact is a thing, an object, an item that can be lost -- a mindprint has a life and story and vitality of its own, one that can be recovered and found, even time and again.

Look through these mindprints, and trace out for yourself the path of a life, the remnant of an idea not quite forgotten. Think with the minds that shaped this stuff, and feel them squeeze out some new realizations from your own brain.

Then look at some of your own stuff, in drawers and on shelves or stored in bins, and ask “What kind of mindprints am I leaving behind me as I go?”

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A Turn of the Page

Somewhere between an image in a book and a sealed case in a museum is the everyday reality of most important documents.

The parchment Declaration of Independence that nestles into a high-tech frame at the National Archives is a very different experience from reading the text of Jefferson’s words and a list of signers on page 27 of the class text. Out into the hills and hollows of the thirteen colonies, how did Americans in late 1776 and early 1777 first encounter those startling words?

Their experience would be similar to the one enjoyed by many Denison students last fall thanks to the work of The Remnant Trust, a public educational foundation that provides books and manuscripts which can be touched and handled. Important works on human rights and liberty are the special focus of this collection, based in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and the selections brought to Denison included an early printing of the Declaration, a Latin manuscript of the Magna Carta from 1350, and the first publication of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in book form.

When President Dale Knobel gave a lecture on the role Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” played in the early republic, and how that impact was echoed in the slow, steady spread of Lincoln’s formulations across American understanding of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” listeners could pass around the room – carefully! – versions that were exactly what the first audiences received on their release.

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Dr. Holmes, not Sherlock

Oliver Wendell Holmes is a famous US Supreme Court Justice, who was an honored Civil War officer in his youth and hired Alger Hiss as one of his last law clerks in the early 1930’s. But he was OWH, Junior.

His father was once the famous member of the family, writing a poem while a medical student at Harvard which led to saving the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor (where it sails to this day), and continuing both in medicine as a faculty member of the new Harvard Medical School, and as an essayist known as “the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”

His satiric and insightful pieces helped turn “The Atlantic Monthly” into an American institution, and made Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.) an early media celebrity. His fame was so great that a young doctor in London, idle while waiting for patients, named his literary detective “Sherlock Holmes” as a tribute; so great, he had fan letters from distant exotic places like . . . Mt. Vernon, Ohio. His response was momentous enough to warrant framing, which preserved the letter long past the survival of his reputation.

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A Vision, Swimming Into View

When some fellow says to the disgruntled Alfalfa, after George Bailey steals his girl in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the fateful words “Did you know there’s a pool under that floor?” – we know it’s only a matter of time before the pool is revealed, with the only question being who will fall in (answer: everyone).

Even without a gym floor hiding it, pools have a way of hiding in plain sight. They’re wide open, but the water is deceptively . . . translucent. You can almost, but not quite, see the lines and the drains and the bodies in motion. Take out all that water, though, and there is something shocking about the sloping, slanted void that gapes within the edge.

It isn’t the pool that you see, but the surface. Take away the surface, and there’s something quite different going on. The tiles are geometric and discrete, and you step away, not towards.

For years people heard that Cleveland Hall once had a pool, which was now . . . that’s where the stories get various, and interesting. A hidden room, a coal bin, a nuclear power plant, a myth. During the first stages of renovation, the myth idea is clearly ruled out – there was a pool, it had been sealed over and walled off, and now . . .

Well, now it will be filled with pea gravel and make up the solid foundation of the newer, larger building. Somehow the idea of a pool once below us will likely continue to intrigue, and provoke.

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No Propellers

Somehow a beanie has become a joke, like a red foam nose or glasses with a plastic mustache dangling. Why?

Yarmulkes and skullcaps are still worn for special purposes as distinctive head covering, and ball caps for seed corn or sports teams are acceptable wear indoors today where grandma or mom would have slapped our hats off a generation ago. None of this has helped the humble beanie get respect.

When Don Howland stepped on campus in 1948, he got a freshman beanie. That’s how the seniors knew who to sneer at, or help. Some of the class of ’52 may have long before tossed or lost their freshman beanie, but Don kept his as a memory of campus life, and that well-tended headgear now has a proud place in Burton Morgan Hall in Alumni Affairs.

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A Center That Really Is

If you ride the elevator up to the fourth floor in the Samson Talbot Hall of Biological Science, even the button reminds you: “Haubrich Student Resource Center – Rm. 409.”

Step into the glass-walled room nearly filled with a broad conference table, and you see all the signs of student labor and leisure cluttered together across the chairs and tabletop. You tend to see first, though, the lynx (stuffed) that is eyeing you quite quizzically.

Or hungrily.

To one side is a white-board with diagrams of chemical compounds, echoed by a tall model of a DNA double helix. That’s in good company with a copy of “The Double Helix” laying on a corner of the table near boxes of books that range from collections of B.C. comics to a copy of “On Food and Cooking” blurbed by Bobby Flay.

Students are often working in teams on projects in this room, which has truly become a center in Talbot, where many such designed spaces end up on the periphery of student awareness. The eclectic nature of the objects in the cases and on the shelves, or piled invitingly for browsing, has doubtless helped to lure students into this space; that eclectic nature is also at the root of the dedication, marked by a plaque to Robert R. Haubrich and his 26 years of teaching at the college “by the generosity of former students.”

A bracket fungus, grey with preservative and age, reaches back beyond even Bob’s era of teaching, signed “Class in Lower Cryptogams – 1907” with names like Orcutt, Mather, Ashmore, and Wickenden. Enlivening the history of science, and provoking curiosity in science itself is the Haubrich legacy, anchored by a brass monkey contemplating a human skull in the pose of Rodin’s “Thinker.”

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Lost & Found – Mindprints – DenMag edit2 08

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Gadgets for Gnosis [144 wds.]

Not so very long ago, boys built crystal set radios from kits ordered off the back of pulp magazines, girls drew architectural renderings with colored pencils bought at the art store off of courthouse square, and philosophy professors built . . . logic machines, from home-brew motherboards out of wires and switches.

Professor Maylan Hepp's Syllogisiac 406 Logic Machine looks like an artifact from centuries ago in this day of solid state electronics and silicon chips and flash memory of 5G in your shirt pocket. Well, the last century, anyhow. Logic problems in philosophy, for those who got beyond “Socrates was a man, all men have hair; therefore, Socrates had hair,” can get incredibly complicated. Before algorithms powered your handheld gaming device, this was one way to test out sets of propositions – and like that crystal radio set, Dr. Hepp built it himself.

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What’s a Syllogisiac? [157 wds.]

If you were a student of Professor Maylan Hepp in the 1950’s, you didn’t have “The Sims” on your laptop, a calculator in your cell phone, or even a mainframe computer to run problems of symbolic logic. You would learn how sets and symbols and propositions would operate by Dr. Hepp’s guidance through the switches and lights of his own, home built Syllogisiac 406 Logic Machine.

The properties of propositional and predicate logic allow mathematicians and philosophers to manipulate variables in ways that can be done swiftly and easily on modern computer programs. Just 50 years ago, these means were still only visible in sci-fi movies (and were still bigger than Robbie the Robot). To mechanically run through a series of permutations without a room full of blackboards and a box of chalk, Hepp’s Syllogisiac was the only way at Denison to manipulate such problems until the arrival of the first computer systems in the late 1960’s.

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Mindprints [untouched – 210 wds.]

Henry David Thoreau walked along a Cape Cod beach, picked up an ancient flint arrowhead in the dunes, and thought: mindprint.

Looking at the pattern of flake scars on the surface of the stone tool, the notched base where sinew once bound it to a shaft, and Thoreau saw the traces of a mind, left as distinctively as the whorls of a fingerprint.

We might call an object of material culture an “artifact” following archaeological or sociological usage, but “mindprint” is useful for turning our attention to the person, the human influence made visible long after the life has ended.

An artifact is a thing, an object, an item that can be lost -- a mindprint has a life and story and vitality of its own, one that can be recovered and found, even time and again.

Look through these mindprints, and trace out for yourself the path of a life, the remnant of an idea not quite forgotten. Think with the minds that shaped this stuff, and feel them squeeze out some new realizations from your own brain.

Then look at some of your own stuff, in drawers and on shelves or stored in bins, and ask “What kind of mindprints am I leaving behind me as I go?”

* * *

A Turn of the Page [edited to 146 wds.]

You can talk about the Magna Carta of 1215 from a political science text on the birth of civil rights, and you can go to the National Archives in Washington or a couple of cathedrals in England to see the original sheepskin manuscripts.

Somewhere between an image in a book or a sealed case in a museum is the everyday reality of most important documents.

Thanks to the work of The Remnant Trust, a public educational foundation based in Jeffersonville, Indiana that provides books and manuscripts which can be touched and handled, members of the Denison community had the chance to literally pick up and consider a Latin manuscript of the Magna Carta from 1350. It was a version like this one that brought the meaning of human rights and liberty into the daily workings of the English legal system, the basis for American democracy today.

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Dr. Holmes, not Sherlock [edited to 180 wds.]

Oliver Wendell Holmes is a famous US Supreme Court Justice, an honored Civil War officer when young and had Alger Hiss as a law clerk when an elder statesman. But he was OWH, Junior.

His father, OWH, Sr., was once the famous member of the family, writing a poem while a medical student at Harvard which led to saving the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor (so preserved to this day), and continuing both in medicine as a faculty member of the new Harvard Medical School, and as an essayist known as “the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”

His satiric and insightful pieces helped turn “The Atlantic Monthly” into an American institution, and made Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.) an early media celebrity. His fame was so great that a young doctor in London, idle while waiting for patients, named his literary detective “Sherlock Holmes” as a tribute; so great, he had fan letters from distant exotic places like . . . Mt. Vernon, Ohio. His response was momentous enough to warrant framing, which preserved the letter long past fame’s survival.

* * *

A Vision, Swimming Into View [edited down to 160 wds.]

Pools have a way of hiding in plain sight. They’re wide open, but the water is deceptively . . . translucent. You can almost, but not quite, see the submerged lines and bodies in motion. Take out all that water, though, and there’s something shocking about the sloping, slanted void. It isn’t the pool that you normally look at, but the surface. Take away the surface, and there’s something quite different going on.

For years people heard that Cleveland Hall once had a pool, which was now . . . that’s where the stories get various, and interesting. A hidden room, a coal bin, a nuclear power plant, a myth. During the first stages of renovation, the myth idea is clearly ruled out – there was a pool, it had been sealed over and walled off, and now . . .

Well, now it will be filled with pea gravel and make up the solid foundation of the newer, larger building.

* * *

No Propellers [didn’t change – 137 wds.]

Somehow a beanie has become a joke, like a red foam nose or glasses with a plastic mustache dangling. Why?

Yarmulkes and skullcaps are still worn for special purposes as distinctive head covering, and ball caps for seed corn or sports teams are acceptable wear indoors today where grandma or mom would have slapped our hats off a generation ago. None of this has helped the humble beanie get respect.

When Don Howland stepped on campus in 1948, he got a freshman beanie. That’s how the seniors knew who to sneer at, or help. Some of the class of ’52 may have long before tossed or lost their freshman beanie, but Don kept his as a memory of campus life, and that well-tended headgear now has a proud place in Burton Morgan Hall in Alumni Affairs.

* * *

A Center That Really Is [will change when I know what your picture is! – now 293 wds.]

If you ride the elevator up to the fourth floor in the Samson Talbot Hall of Biological Science, even the button reminds you: “Haubrich Student Resource Center – Rm. 409.”

Step into the glass-walled room nearly filled with a broad conference table, and you see all the signs of student labor and leisure cluttered together across the chairs and tabletop. You tend to see first, though, the lynx (stuffed) that is eyeing you quite quizzically.

Or hungrily.

To one side is a white-board with diagrams of chemical compounds, echoed by a tall model of a DNA double helix. That’s in good company with a copy of “The Double Helix” laying on a corner of the table near boxes of books that range from collections of B.C. comics to a copy of “On Food and Cooking” blurbed by Bobby Flay.

Students are often working in teams on projects in this room, which has truly become a center in Talbot, where many such designed spaces end up on the periphery of student awareness. The eclectic nature of the objects in the cases and on the shelves, or piled invitingly for browsing, has doubtless helped to lure students into this space; that eclectic nature is also at the root of the dedication, marked by a plaque to Robert R. Haubrich and his 26 years of teaching at the college “by the generosity of former students.”

A bracket fungus, grey with preservative and age, reaches back beyond even Bob’s era of teaching, signed “Class in Lower Cryptogams – 1907” with names like Orcutt, Mather, Ashmore, and Wickenden. Enlivening the history of science, and provoking curiosity in science itself is the Haubrich legacy, anchored by a brass monkey contemplating a human skull in the pose of Rodin’s “Thinker.”

* * *