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

I would I were Professor Wood
With wisdom in his bean.
He’s F.R.S. — and other things —
I don’t know what they mean.

I would I were like Mrs. Wood

With music in my heart,
And to the discords of my life
Could harmony impart.

I would I were like Margaret

(The spouse of Victor White)
Who paints and sketches all day long
And dances all the night.

I would I were her baby boy,

In blue and knitted hose
Who gurgles in his milk bottél
And wrinkles up his nose.

I would I were like Robert Wood

With keen, unerring eye,
Who drives at golf two hundred yards
And smites the baseball high.

But there’s another friendly Wood

I have not mentioned yet.
The Woodiest of all the Woods,
The name’s Elizabet.

I would not wish to be like her

Because, of course, you see,
The thing I really want’s to have
Elizabeth like me.

Except for the Victorian restraint and for the passage of the years during which Margaret’s children have grown up, Elizabeth has married and become mother of another little “Elizabeth”, etc., it remains a fair picture of the tribe. All the gracious comments are still true today. The Woods are indeed a gracious family — but that’s not the whole picture by a long shot. The Woods are also a fantastic family. This is not surprising, since the old New England stock from which they stem has brightened American history with many fantastic characters and families.

In truth the whole clan, when gathered together for family reunions or summer holidays, takes on some of the qualities of Sanger’s Circus, or of an imaginary play by Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward in collaboration. Robert, Jr., by the way, though extremely fond of beautiful young ladies, has remained a bachelor, is a business man in New York, and is generally to be found at the Harvard Club on his off evenings. A while back, he wrote a funny book entitled Hold 'em, Girls! It’s a Harvard man’s post-Emily-Post etiquette for young women invited to football games. The youngest imp in the household when it reunites is six-year-old Elizabeth Bogert, who has inherited more than her share of her grandfather’s prankishness and curiosity. When I first visited Dr. and Mrs. Wood in Baltimore, and while they were telling me about the second and third generation, none of whom I had yet met, Mrs. Wood said casually, “Elizabeth married a Dutchman”. I’d expected he’d be at least as Dutch as Hendrik Willem van Loon, but when I later met Ned Bogert, I discovered him to be Dutch — like the Kips and the Roosevelts. His people had been in New York ever since New Amsterdam was founded. The Woods are pure English stock — and pure New England stock — on both sides, since colonial times. They are fond of their son-in- law and treat him as a son, but “Elizabeth married a Dutchman”.

They are all full of violent opinions and prejudices, happily never the same ones, and if any opinion apart from family loyalty were ever shared by any two of them at the same time, the astonishment would be general. They engage frequently in debates which at times terrify the guest or stranger. Later he becomes even more bewildered. Robert, Jr., will denounce his father with the freedom and eloquence of an ex-artillery officer, or vice versa, and next morning they’ll be as affectionate as if they were “buddies” of the same generation. It’s the same with all the family. One night last summer at East Hampton, Mrs. Wood got into a hair-raising dispute with her son-in-law over the respective merits of certain Flemish and Italian paintings, and at the height of their difference exclaimed with outraged finality, “Well, that’s just what could be expected from a Dutchman!” Ned Bogert and I were tying some luggage on the back of a car next morning, when a heavy thundershower came up. I had on a leather coat, but Bogert had no raincoat or covering and was dressed for the city. Mrs. Wood rushed out, dragged him into the house, made him take off his wet jacket, felt his shirt to see whether he should take that off too, hung his jacket to dry before the morning log fire, and found him a raincoat. I stopped gratuitously worrying about the Woods’ family “quarrels”. The subjects on which they engage in Shavian denunciations and dialectics are seldom personal and never boring.