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

“It was when I first began throwing them in Berlin”, he said, “when Margaret was about two years old. It occurred to me that the boomerang in flight might be an ideal phenomenon with which to test a theory I had conceived concerning earliest childhood memories. My theory was that the authentically ‘remembered events’ were those which had been kept alive by subsequent associative words, remarks, or events which tied in with the original event without reconstructing, describing, or duplicating it. It was important to select the ‘event to be remembered’ in such a way that the baby could be reminded of it in words that would not in any way reveal the event’s core or essence — otherwise the doubt would always arise that all she really remembered was being told about it later. Moreover, it must be an event not likely to be duplicated later, as there’d be no way of proving that the child really remembered any further back than the later duplication.

“For these reasons, the phenomenon of the boomerang in flight, whose essence was its return to the thrower, seemed ideal for the experiment. I took Margaret out to the back lot for a whole afternoon and threw my boomerangs. She watched their flight, saw them circling back to my feet, and toddled to help me retrieve the few which occasionally failed to return. I kept her near, and on several occasions it was necessary to snatch her from the path of the returning weapon. I never showed them to her again, but for the next month or more I kept asking her every day or two, ‘Do you remember papa’s throwing something?’

“For a while, if she said anything in reply, it was merely ‘yes,’ which proved nothing. But on one memorable day she added, 'Come back.'

“Then for a year or more, until she was perhaps three, I repeated the question at longer and longer intervals. As a mature woman now, she clearly remembers the actual boomerang flights that day in Berlin, and of seeing the thing circle around in the air, as her first actual childhood memory of anything… though her mother is still in the habit of saying, ‘No, you only remember your father’s telling about it.’ ”

“I still don’t believe it”, said Mrs. Wood cheerfully, “and I don’t suppose there’s any use now in trying to stop you from telling what you did to Elizabeth”.

Dr. Wood beamed, taking this for an invitation, and said to me, “You saw the enormous fireplace in the living-room there, with the old Dutch oven at the back. Well, when my granddaughter was about a year and a half, I stood a small bronze dog in front of this black cave and placed on its head a button of German cannon powder, of which I’d brought home a bagful from the war. It looks like a heavy button, you know, a thick black disk with a hole in the middle. With the baby in my lap I touched a match to it. It flared up with a vicious, bright-yellow flame, which burned for about five seconds.

“ ‘That’s the fuzzy-wuzzy,’ I said to the baby.

“I repeated this experiment every day for a week, always saying ‘fuzzy-wuzzy’ when the powder burned. Then I said ‘fuzzy-wuzzy’ or ‘Do you remember fuzzy-wuzzy?’ to the baby every day for a month or so until her mother took her away. I hopefully expected that her mother would say ‘fuzzy-wuzzy’ to her in the intervals of their absence. The reactions of baby Elizabeth, however, were different from those of Margaret who had always politely lisped ‘yes’ to my question. At every family reunion, the baby was as bored as these uncooperative adults of my family, and whenever I said, ‘Do you remember fuzzy-wuzzy?’ she always answered, ‘No!’ Sometimes she laughed slyly. So we hadn’t the remotest idea whether she remembered anything or not.

“The revelation came when she was nearly five years old.

I hadn’t uttered the hated words for a long time when one day at lunch she looked at me and whispered, ‘Fuzzy-wuzzy.’ “I said, ‘What?’

“This time she repeated, louder, ‘Fuzzy-wuzzy!’

“I turned to her mother and said, ‘What’s she talking about?’

“Her mother said, ‘I don’t know.’

“The little witch hesitated for a moment and then said in disgusted triumph, ‘You do know too! You put the dog in the fireplace and put fire on its head.’”

Little Elizabeth was evidently a chip off the old block, and wasn’t taking grandpa’s experiments lying down. The one they tell of her which I like best concerns the memory experiment with the hayride. While she was a tiny tot, she and a playmate named Nancy were taken for a ride on top of a load of hay. Then Dr. Wood began with his “do-you-remember’s”. She refused to be the guinea pig. She never answered anything but “no” or nothing, and it was he who gave up. When the haymaking began across the road on the following year, her mother asked her point-blank one day, “Do you remember riding on the haycart last summer?”

She glanced reproachfully at her grandfather, gave her mother a look of betrayed and outraged indignation, and replied,