Reminiscences of M.C.
Reminiscences of M.C.
by
Evelyn M. Hurlburt
In 1953, when my three youngsters had outgrown the toddler stage, I was bored and began to update my bacteriology background with courses at the University of Maryland. I detoured one day from my commuting route and followed the sign at the corner of East-West Highway pointing to a junior college.
On the second floor of a stucco building with white pillars facing a railroad track, I met a lady in a white coat sitting on a lab stool. Her tiny figure was nearly obscured by students wedged on either side of her, their eyes fixed on the innermost structures of a huge earthworm. What a stroke of good fortune this was: I never imagined the impact that this lady, Dr. Bernice Pierson, was to have on my future.
In a few days Dr. Pierson phoned me to come to see her. I complied. There, I was handed a probe and a teasing needle and positioned in front of a partially dissected specimen in a black wax pan. I nudged a student over so that both of us could study the drawing in Thompson’s zoology manual. And before the afternoon was over, I was escorted downstairs to the late Dean Price’s office, where we agreed that I would assist in several zoology labs. By this simple gesture, I became a member of the biology faculty.
When George Morrison learned that my undergraduate major was chemistry, I was soon assisting also in chemistry labs, shuttling between the swinging doors on the first floor chemistry lab and barrels of formaldehyde-soaked specimens upstairs. I could never find anything on George Morrison’s desk, but he always knew where every scrap of paper was. His wry humor, barely audible between huge puffs on his favorite pipe, was a rare delight. There was an impressive array of glass reagent bottles on black-painted, wooden shelves along the back wall of the laboratory—always complete and arranged in alphabetical order.
Several colleagues may remember my loud protests when Dean Deyo, in planning the “new science building,” designed the greenhouse to extend off the bacteriology laboratory. This would provide a thoroughfare for wheeling bags of soil and fertilizer through the sterile area of my bacteriology lab! Dean Deyo relented. He also agreed to incorporate a planetarium into the design. My husband, Everett, introduced Dean Deyo to Armon Spitz, from whom the Dean purchased the original Spitz Planetarium, a landmark of our beloved Takoma Park Campus.
During my term as chairman of the Exploratory Committee, and, later, the Curriculum Committee, there were endless debates and exhausting frustrations in winning faculty and Board of Trustees’ approval for some innovative patterns in education. Long remembered are the arduous hours spent with LaVerne Miller in creative thinking and writing exercises and the firm support of Bob Wiley and Bob Menefee with their far-reaching visions of curriculum development.
My most satisfying moments at Montgomery College were the days spent in the microbiology classroom and laboratory with students. My rewards were simple: to watch a student adjust his microscope and exclaim, “I found my hanging drop!” or “Look at my beautiful Gram stain of E. coli!” Every day there were new learning experiences for me, not necessarily from books or courses in microbiology but primarily from the students I was privileged to teach over a period of twenty-two years at the Takoma Park Campus of Montgomery College.
Takoma Park Campus: Biology, 1956–1977; Professor Emerita.