Doctor Wood. Modern Wizard of the Laboratory: The Story of an American Small Boy Who Became the Most Daring and Original Experimental Physicist of Our Day-but Never Grew Up

Dr. Wood stopped talking, as if he’d given me that whole story, but according to some things I’d heard in Baltimore, he hadn’t told me the half of it. His hobby had started a small boomerang cult in Baltimore and added to the interest in Washington, where one or two statesmen had already attained high skill in throwing them. President Theodore Roosevelt, summer neighbor of the Woods out on Long Island, wrote, “I wish I could trespass on your kindness by getting you to bring over that collection of boomerangs. ..”. I learned in addition that Wood had been “false modest” in that phrase about “learning to duplicate”. According to Baltimoreans, he had learned to do things with a boomerang that neither Professor Walker from Cambridge University nor the wildest man from Borneo would have cared to risk. As, for instance, here’s one I’d heard, and taxed him with. The Johns Hopkins football team, as I’d heard it, never seriously pretended it could beat teams from universities of its own rank, but kept on having games in Baltimore, though attendance had dropped, since the home team nearly always got licked. So the athletic department thought up the bright idea of inviting Professor Wood to give a boomerang exhibition as an additional attraction with the next game. Wood accepted with a childish and innocent smile. There was a huge attendance, air conditions were perfect for miraculous stunts with the boomerang, and the exhibition was superb. The crowd applauded and was filled with joy… until (as I’d been told by Henry Mencken) our wild man of Baltimore stalked straight toward the low, uncovered grandstand, took his finest stance, and let fly a big boomerang (Mencken said war boomerang) point-blank at his audience. It rose and soared, as he had planned. He was so diabolically sure and expert that he intended it barely to skim over the heads of the topmost row and return to his feet. But an excited man in the top row stood up, with an umbrella. The boomerang took the umbrella as the wild man of Borneo takes the waterfowl, while women shrieked and students applauded, imagining that the whole thing, umbrella, stooge, and all, had been part of a cooked-up, William Tell apple act, by their favorite master of sensationalism both inside and outside the laboratory.

Dr. Wood heard me with pained indignation. He denied that it was a war boomerang — it couldn’t have been — and said it was absurd to imply that anybody had been in danger or terrorized. “You seem to take a sadistic delight”, he said, “in any apocryphal version of my conduct that makes me out a monster”.

“But you don’t deny, do you”, I asked, “that you threw a boomerang into the grandstand and that it hit an umbrella?” “No, of course not”, he answered impatiently, “but…” We were still barking at each other when we went in to dinner, and as Mrs. Wood was carving the roast he suddenly said, “How old were you when you began to remember?”

“Maybe between two and a half and three”, I said. “What of it? Isn’t that about the time most psychologists agree…

“No, you’re wrong”, he said. “If they agree, they’re wrong. I’m convinced it can and does sometimes go further back. I’ve done some experimenting with it, and…

We were interrupted by the not always long-suffering lady who had been engaged up to then in more polite conversation with the second generation at the other end of the table.

“Now please, Rob”, said she, “don’t repeat that old story about fuzzy-wuzzy. If you must tell him about it, tell him some other time. The family’s all heard it a thousand times”. “But, my dear”, said he, in a mild, mock-henpecked voice, “I wasn’t going to tell him that at all. We were talking about boomerangs”.

He subsided into the imitation of a hurt silence, and I said to Mrs. Wood, “Please, what on earth was fuzzy-wuzzy?” “We got sick of it”, she said, “and so did the baby. When our granddaughter Elizabeth was about a year and a half old, he began exploding gunpowder, cannon powder, in the hearth of the living room, with the baby in his lap, saying fuzzy-wuzzy to the baby… “.

“It didn’t explode”, said Dr. Wood. “Nobody ever tells anything right but me. It merely went off with a beautiful bright flame. But I wasn’t going to tell you about that. I was going to tell you about the experiments I tried on our daughter Margaret when she was a baby — with the boomerang”.

“Pray do”, I said. “I beg you to tell me about both. John Watson experimented on his babies with brass gongs, snakes, and rabbits, but I’ve never heard of anybody using gunpowder and boomerangs”.