Water Resources
and Issues
So that was what you might call poverty. Now, when I say "poverty," it was
a genteel kind of poverty. We just were land poor and didn't have any money.
Otherwise, it was a rich family life.
In my junior year something happened which had a major effect on me. Abel
Wolman moved from the Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, where
he had been teaching-he was also head of the Maryland State Department of
Health-to the
Campus. The School of Hygiene and Public Health
is associated with the medical school campus over on Broadway in east
Baltimore.
Professor [John] Gregory had been professor of sanitary engineering. He left
and Abel came to the
campus as the professor of sanitary
engineering. And I got the job as his student assistant. I can't remember
whether I asked for it or whether they just figured it was a natural. They
assigned me to be his student assistant under the NYA program, and my job for
a whole year, working 40 hours a month, was to unpack his library, catalogue
it, and put it on the shelves. Abel had an office on the second floor in Latrobe
Hall, and he had an adjacent room which was his library. The ceilings must
have been-they seemed like they must have been-12 or 14, feet high. The
walls were lined with shelves all the way to the top. There were two rolling
ladders on tracks, one on each side, that you could climb up to get to the top
ones. So I spent that whole year in my spare time unpacking books and
cataloging them and putting them on shelves. But it certainly gave me an
insight on Abel, because I was always there late in the evening and whenever
else I could
time to work, because engineering students had a full course
schedule at Hopkins. Frequently I got the chance to talk to him and ask him
about things. He really had such a tremendous volume of publications some of
which seemed to me to be very esoteric.
He had all the reports of various sanitary districts, the ones in this country,
such as the Miami Conservancy and the Muskingum and all of the others, plus
he had a wealth of foreign publications. The ones that stick in my memory are
the annual reports of the West Riding of Yorkshire and the East Riding of
Yorkshire. These were the reports that told about what they were doing in the
public health and sanitation field in England. And new reports were coming in
all the time.
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