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

“Hello, Bobbie”, said a husky voice. “Who’s speaking?” I replied. “Frank”, said the voice convincingly. “Frank who?” I asked. “Frank”, he repeated. “Doan you know ole Frank’s voice, ole Frank Willard?” “For the love of Mike”, I said, “where are you?” “Here in telephone shentry box, Union Shtation. Say, Bobbie, you got any ’bjection my singin’ lil’ shong?” “No”, I said, “if your door is shut”. Then came, in a wailing voice of despair, pitched in a high key, “All I want is fifty million dollash”. Pause. Then, “Shay, Bobbie, I got interesting fren’ with me — going to bring him up — Joe Dollard, bigges’ safe-cracker ’n bank-robber all time. Scotland Yard after him five years. How I get to you?” I gave him directions and hung up as he commenced again, “Shay, Bobbie, you got any ’bjection my singin’…"

In about fifteen minutes they arrived. Mr. Dollard did not look like the pictures of bank-robbers in Mr. Hoover’s F.B.I. magazine. A man slightly gray, well past middle life, he looked more an old and trusted paying teller in a bank than a bank’s safe-opener. Willard had a bottle, and we all had a “lil’ drink”, as he said, out of three small laboratory beaker glasses. We talked awhile of old times, Mr. Dollard listening respectfully but slightly bored, and then, having business elsewhere, he excused himself in a very dignified manner and departed.

Frank told me that he had come to Baltimore at the request of Mr. Leonor F. Loree, then president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Mr. Loree wanted to employ him, disguised as a tramp, to test the efficiency and loyalty of his railroad detectives; he was to be the house guest of Mr. Loree, but had been on a jag for ten days, and could we take him in for the night as he was broke — while he sobered up for his visit? He talked quite normally, if permitted to sing the opening bar of his “lil’ song” at intervals. This seemed to relieve the strain of pretending sobriety, as a slight cough will relieve a long- endured tickling of the throat in a theater. So I took him along in my car to the house. Gertrude was out. Frank had evidently slept in his clothes and was apparently wearing the perspiration that he was born with, as Gertrude once said of a Spanish lady in Mexico who was entertaining her at tea. So I filled the bathtub full of hot water, and suggested a nice warm soak before dinner. Hearing nothing from him for half an hour, I tried the door, which opened disclosing Bacchus asleep in the tub. I woke him by turning on the cold water.

In the course of half an hour he appeared spick and span and in excellent humor. He began by reciting some of his recent adventures and showed not the slightest sign of his spree. We listened entranced, for he was a brilliant talker. Finally he slumped slightly in his chair and turning to Gertrude said, with a rather silly smile, “Mrs. Wood, would you have ’n’ objection to my singin’ a lil’ song?” “Why, no, Mr. Willard, I’d be delighted to have you”. Then he really relaxed and his voice came out strong and clear like that of a drunken sailor: “All — I — wan’ — is — fifty — million — dollash!” He paused, blinked once or twice, and resumed the conversation where he had left off, as if nothing had occurred.

Gertrude had telephoned for a thick steak and a bottle of Major Grey’s Indian chutney, and dinner was announced. There was a large dish of Hamburg black grapes between the candles on the table, and Willard, refusing all other nourishment, ate them slowly one by one as he talked, until, like the Walrus and Carpenter with the Looking-Glass oysters, he’d eaten every one. After dinner we listened enthralled to the story of his travels in Afghanistan, where he walked over the celebrated Khyber Pass into India. It was two o’clock before we even thought of bed. He passed out of our hands the next day and we never saw him again.

His end was very tragic. He contracted pneumonia in Chicago, locked himself up in a room in a cheap hotel, with a few bottles of self-prescribed “medicine”, and only shouted “No — keep out”, when the maid knocked at the door. He had been dead twenty-four hours when the door was unlocked from the outside.

* * *

In the autumn of 1896, the Woods returned to America with their two children growing out of babyhood and the German Kinderfrau whom they couldn’t bear to leave behind. They spent the winter at his mother’s house in Jamaica Plain, while Robert continued his independent research in the laboratories at M. I. T. Professor Charles Cross of the Physics Department had extended this courtesy and given him a laboratory. There he continued his work on vacuum-tube discharges. By the next spring (1897) successful negotiations were under way for an instructorship at the University of Wisconsin.