| CAMBRIDGE
During 1956-57 Dr. Wheeler J. North spent a research year in the Zoology Department at Cambridge, working with (then) Dr. Carl Pantin on the responses to light of the sea anemone Metridium senile . This study took him also to the MBA's Laboratory at Plymouth. I was Pantin's assistant and we met and talked often . He was a fine scientist and a genial and easy -going colleague, full of curiosity and surprise, smiling at some of the English customs which he found so amazingly different from those of southern California where he had grown up. Towards the summer, he planned to spend a day in London and there purchase a black felt bowler hat, still at that time the hallmark of all financiers in the city, to show the folks back home (few American then wore hats, and then maybe a trilby). I explained he would need to go to the local post office first to buy a licence, without which it could not be worn. That afternoon, as we joined those taking their cups of tea in the tearoom, Wheeler asked "Do I really have to go to the post office for a licence? for he was of such good nature that he would never suspect anyone might pull his leg on a serious matter just for fun. He never forgot his Cambridge friends nor they him. I will hear in the coming days from Trinity College, whereDr. Pantin was a Fellow, if Wheeler had an affiliation of some kind, as it would have allowed him to meet fellow academics outside the Department. Sincerely, |
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