When you live for a long time in the same place, you become sort of proprietary about it, like one does their house and land and mate and child. And when that place is the one you were born to, the feeling of right to ownership is just that much stronger. Your history and its history have been made in parallel time, and a knowledge and kinship result from the sensations of the place, that have become memories in time, that have produced a knowing. I came to know and thus, to possess, the "TCU hill" in this manner--the university buildings, the campus walks, the trees and flowers, the commercial strip, the surrounding neighborhoods, the churches and schools, the people of this place--and I feel rather smug about it. Smug, not in an arrogant, unkind way that smacks of an inflated superiority, but one that comes more from an intimate knowledge and pride and respect and love for what a place was and is.

There is one spot on the campus that is more clearly "mine" than any other: the site of the biology lab as it was until 1952. The Department of Biology-Geology (since split into two separate units) was then in not so lofty a home as it now occupies on the third floor of Winton-Scott Hall of Science. In fact, it was in a dark hole, the basement of old Clark Hall, a men's dormitory that was one of the buildings constructed on the Fort Worth campus from 1912-1914. That building was razed in 1959 and the new administration building, Sadler Hall, was built on the site. But, no matter what activity is now or will be located in the basement of Sadler Hall, that spot will remain in my memory as the old "bilogy lab," that was full of wonders and not a few terrors in my youth.

The entrance to the department was centrally located beneath the front portico of the dormitory and was accessed by short flights of steps down on either side. The first step down brought you under the portico, and descending further was like going down into a pharoah's tomb or an old storm cellar under the ground. You immediately sensed the closeness and smelled the musty-cool odor of the concrete walls, ceiling, and floor that, being perpetually out of the sun, retained the moisture of the years. The floor between the stairways slanted slightly downward toward a small, circular iron-grated drain in the middle that took the run-off of rainwater coming down the steps through the unprotected openings. Years later, when I first saw the Claude Raines' film version of The Phantom of the Opera, the sights and sounds of the underground sewer scenes momentarily triggered the memory of a frightened pigtailed little girl, not yet nine, cautiously descending out of the reassuring rain into the dripping darkness of only-heaven-knew-what horrors. The only reason I braved the trip at all by myself, was to reach my father's office at the south end of the basement, where for a time, I came after school to wait for my mother who was helping him in his oyster research.

Once inside the heavy front doors, another darkness prevailed. I recall that, on entering, there was a switch to turn on the overhead light in the entranceway, but I can't recall it ever being on, or of ever turning it on. Those were post-depression days and the period just prior to and during World War II, when every surplus of anything was sharply curtailed to contribute to the war effort. If no one was using the hall, the light was turned off. Passing through didn't count as "use" besides, there was only the one switch by the entry which could not be operated from the far side of the hall. The entrance area was made even more dim by the fact that there were no windows for natural lighting. Tall wooden exhibit cases stood as motionless masses in the gloom, their specimens of shells and fossils and skeletons barely visible against their black velvet display beds. "Skinny," the department's human skeleton, hung from her stand against one wall in the wide passageway that opened into the hall leading to Daddy's office. "Skinny" was actually a welcome sight as I traversed the darkness, not only because she was so familiar to me in that place, but also because I knew that now there was only one more obstacle to get past: the rattlesnake in John Forsyth's office.

Dr. Forsyth was a herpetology specialist on the biology faculty, and his office was the first of the three or four that were located in the south portion of the basement. He kept live specimens in cages in his office and the rattler was positioned on the floor near the door. When the door was open--I think it always was when I came by--the snake could see movement in the hall and react with its customary defense, the coil and the warning rattle. From John Forsyth's office to my father's was about thrity feet and I was almost at a dead run by the time I got across that thirty feet. It's an odd thing, but not extraordinary I think, that I transferred my fear of that snake to its keeper, and it was really after I had been a student in Dr. Forsyth's histology class, some twenty years later, that I came to wonder at how I could have been so intimidated by such a mild-mannered gentleman. I'm glad I had the chance to change that early impression.

But the lab was much more wonderful than terrible. There were all manner of fascinations, from live lizards, primarily the "horned frog," to the ancient fossilized ammonites. The largest ammonites--two to three feet in diameter--were displayed on the floor of the entrance area, along with the fossilized track of a dinosaur big enough for me to sit, curled up, inside. My geologist friend tells me only one of the ammonites remains today, on display in the Sid W. Richardson Buildings, and he doesn't know what happened to the dinosaur track.

In another area, large jars of preservation fluids held human fetuses, so discretely wired to clear glass panes that they appeared suspended, in vitro, so it seemed. These were the premier trophies of the lab to show to friends whose fathers worked in ordinary offices in the workaday world; hours could be spent pointing out the babies' tiny fingernails, little wrinkled ankles, curled toes, and their overall peaceful, slumbering appearance. They could have been horrible, no doubt, given other circumstances, but under the calm, sure instruction of the teacher-father, those unborn infants were just another aspect of the miracle of life, and to be held more in regard than disdain.

It seemed that the treasures of the lab were boundless: darting fish in bubbling aquaria, sparkling minerals, dried specimens of fish and crustaceans, exotic shells from faraway seas, black boxes of pinned, spread insects, and the world of strange planktonic forms that pulsed and crept and sped in the fluid on a microscope's slide--tiny creatures with strangely enchanting names that challenged pronunciation, like Biddulphia and Coccinodiscus, trocophores and rotifers, and the villain, Dermocystidium, whose invasion into oyster beds caused great concern in the coastal shellfish industry.

The people of the lab, the professors and students, were extensions of my family. There was the brooding, but kindly, Mr. Winton, so highly respected that no one called him Will, I think not even the gentle, soft-spoken Mrs. Winton, whom he called "Madama." And the dear, laughing Scotty, Dr. Gayle Scott, closest friend of my father, a brilliant geologist, whose career was cut tragically short by a deadly brain tumor. And the mischievous Frank Lozo, a young geology instructor, who was much more friend to me than distant adult. And there were the graduate students, Dan Jarvis and Lola Lollar (Huff), who would later become TCU faculty members, and those who would make medicine their life work--Bob Cook, Cortell Holsapple, Jr., Bob Magoffin, Spud Taylor, Wiley Alliston--and those who were geology majors, like that incomparable personality, Davey O'Brien. From my perspective now of forty-plus years, those were halcyon times, peopled with kings and princes and fine ladies, with a dragon here and there to make the noble more appreciated.

One by one and piece by piece the loved, familiar faces and objects and places disappear from my current view, and I feel an emptiness, a loss at their going. At the same time, I realize how much emptier I could have been, and how much greater a loss would have been mine, had I never known their presence and influence. I cherish them among my possessions.

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