After our return from Australia to Columbia in March 2000, Diane began her assignment of overseeing the construction of our Columbia house. Pon Chinn would have been happy to do the interior decorating, but that is a task that Diane wanted to perform. Her taste and mine were remarkably similar. While I was visiting the scientists with Searle or Monsanto Agriculture, she made the rounds of companies in St. Louis, exploring the options for light and plumbing fixtures, granite, marble, etc. She would narrow the choices to the top two, and at night, we would go back and make our decisions. We never found ourselves in disagreement. Our contractor suggested companies for specific materials. For example, we shopped at a recommended millwork company in Kansas City to select the patterns for our doors and baseboards.
In April 2000, Searle merged with Pharmacia, another pharmaceutical company, but, despite my worries, it had no effect on my contract or work with the scientists in St. Louis. They continued to be my biggest client. Losing them would make a big dent in my bottom line.
Although I would qualify
for Medicare health insurance in October, I couldn’t start Social Security for
another year. Diane was five years
younger than I was. She and I had our
health insurance through my company plan that required a minimum of two to be
enrolled in it. Therefore, I would need to
stay in that plan until she reached age 65.
Until that time, I would only enroll in the section of Medicare that
covered hospitalization costs, Part A.
Fortunately, I worked with a loyal group of scientists in St.
Louis, so I thought I would continue to have enough income to keep the company going. I also had a bevy of other clients, although the
total income from all of them did not come close to meeting my income from
Pharmacia.
One of these companies was Hoffman-LaRoche. They requested I develop a presentation about
the statistical methodology for the Interferon assay which I had developed with
Atia (a woman I really enjoyed working with).
A regulator in England had expressed some reservations about our
methods, and she wanted them addressed before approving the assay for use in
the EU. Roche set a date for Atia and me
to practice our presentation at home before taking it to London.
I prepared overhead projector
transparencies and booked a trip to Nutley, NJ so that Atia and I could show
the presentation to her boss. Diane went
with me and kept busy serving coffee to Atia’s boss and changing the transparencies
while I spoke. Her assistance impressed
the boss so much that it was easy for me to get approval for both of us to go
to London in August. I traded one business
ticket for two economy tickets, and we shared lodging. The Roche group stayed in a very nice hotel
near the US embassy. The regulator asked
many questions, but seemed to be satisfied by the end of the presentation,
which Diane again helped with. The Roche
people invited Diane and I to celebrate with them at a nice dinner.
Diane and I stayed in London for a few more
days. I had acquired enough Marriott points
to pay for our stay at the Grosvenor House Marriott near Hyde Park. We ate in the upper-level concierge lounge
with great views of London. It was an
easy walk to Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery and to view the changing
of the guards at Buckingham Palace. We
walked by a theatre that was selling tickets to The Buddy Holly Show. I had loved his songs since college days so we
bought tickets for the Saturday night show.
I had no idea how much the Brits loved him. Other attendees told us they had seen the
show several times. Many of us got up
and danced to the music in the aisles. It was great fun. Sunday, we walked through Hyde Park listening
to the speakers standing on their boxes.
The trip was a great business and personal success.
Hyde Park speaker
Roche asked Atia and I to make another trip
to England in October, not to London and not including Diane. At a NIBSC (National Institute for Biological
Standards and Control) conference, we presented a poster about the statistical
calculations used for the interferon assay.
There were no touristy opportunities this time. We stayed outside of London at the South
Mimms truck stop with a Howard Johnson’s type hotel. The coffee was terrible. I was glad to get back to the lake after that
trip.
We were strong backers of Mel Carnahan,
Missouri’s Governor. He was running for the US Senate against John Ashcroft. Diane knew members of the Carnahan family since
they were supporters of Planned Parenthood.
On October 16, Mel was tragically killed in an airplane crash, and it
was too late to remove or change his name on the November ballot. The acting governor, Roger Wilson, authorized
his wife Jean Carnahan to take the seat if he were elected. There were more votes cast for Mel Carnahan than
for John Ashcroft. He was beaten by a
dead man’s name on the ballot! Jean
served as our Senator for the next two years.
Many people remember the 2000 presidential election
as the one in which they heard a lot about the hanging chads on the back of the Florida punched card ballots. Others remember it
as the election decided by the US Supreme Court when, by a 5-4 vote, they
halted the ballot recounts in Florida, making George W. Bush President. It was also the first presidential election
since 1888 in which the loser, in this case Al Gore, won the popular vote but
lost the election by one electoral college vote. We felt robbed and that the
Supreme Court had exceeded its authority.
Diane was kept busy overseeing the final
stages of the construction of our Columbia house. We were fortunate that she could be there
often. She happened to arrive from the
lake when the men installing the oak flooring were getting ready to stain
it. Dimensions in Wood had built all of
our cabinetry and specified the formula to be used for staining the
flooring. When Diane showed up, they had
not added an important color in the mix, purple. She wouldn’t let them continue until they had
corrected the colors.
On a very cold day in December 2000, we
said goodbye to our lake house and drove to Columbia. Even though the moving van couldn’t unload
until the next day, we were able to spend the night in our new house. We had purchased a bedroom suite from the
House of Denmark in St. Louis that had already been delivered. No more TV trays for our bedside tables. The poor plants in the van had a cold, hard
night, but we tried our best to revive them when all our belongings were
unpacked. We were lucky that most of the
furniture we had purchased for the lake house fit beautifully into the Columbia
house, which we nicknamed Holly because of the street we lived on, Holly Hills Court. The built-in furniture in our offices was
designed for our computers and included filing cabinets. Frank Lloyd Wright would have been pleased.
Holly
There was privacy in the front of the house, but much daylight in the back with its plethora of floor-to-ceiling windows. There were skylights in most rooms. I loved the one in our master bathroom, especially when the moon was bright, and I needed to be up in the middle of the night. The living room had beams in a hexagonal pattern below a domed ceiling. Where the beams came together in the center, you could drop a plumb line to the floor and the wood was cut in a complementary hexagonal pattern. We started using the gas log in the fireplace right away. My office was on the back facing the woods, enabling me to watch birds in the trees while I was working. I loved when the rising morning sun woke me up, shining through our bedroom window. The view was different from that at the lake, but also similar in that it brought us close to nature. I loved both of them.
Beam me up
Floor
reflecting the hexagonal pattern of the beams
Luckily Diane was at the house when the
flooring workers started on the living room.
They hadn’t read the blueprint and started to extend the oak flooring from
the adjacent rooms instead of cutting the boards in the pattern shown above. Again, Diane saved the day.
Initially I kept busy with my usual clients:
ABC, Pharmacia, Hoffman-LaRoche, and the Dairy division of Monsanto. The Dairy division was the one which developed
the bST hormone to increase milk production in cows. They had hired an in-house statistician, but they
were ready to apply for regulatory approval and asked me to do some routine
verification and documentation of their many laboratory procedures.
Diane was enjoying her new life in
Columbia. She was still helping me with
SIS, but she was happiest when working on household tasks. She spent time finishing up the outside and
inside detail work, such as landscaping, outdoor lighting, garden preparation,
installation of window treatments, and so on.
She needed to stock her pantry and prepare three meals a day. She was eager to entertain and invite our
friends over for dinner.
Unlike at the lake, Columbia had strong
support for Democrats. Diane and I were
very active in politics and began attending the Friday noon Democratic luncheon
club called Muleskinners which met in the cafeteria of Stephens College. We attended fund-raising events for Democratic
candidates.
We enjoyed a variety of entertainment
venues: movies at Ragtag, the art theater on 10th Street; plays at
the Columbia Entertainment Company, a community theater group; and the Lyceum,
a summer theater in Arrow Rock. Monthly
hour-long, full-body massages with Lori Thweatt helped us maintain our mental
and physical health. We remembered all
the reasons we wanted to be back in Columbia and paid heed.
It had to be evident to everyone that Diane and I were a couple, perhaps even a lesbian couple, but it was not explicitly
mentioned. This was new to me in
Columbia, and I found that I had no problem with it. Diane was no longer representing her previous
employer, Planned Parenthood. After she
left her job, Columbia merged with Kansas City.
My only local client was ABC labs, and I never encountered my contract
supervisor. It was very liberating.
In April 2001, I attended an IBC
conference on biological assay development and validation in San Diego and took
a couple of their short courses. I kept
busy talking to other attendees and handing out business cards. Soon, I had several new clients, many from
the Cambridge, MA area.
I also started work on an academic
paper. Pharmaceutical companies have
very large libraries of chemical compounds they test to see if one might be useful
in developing a new drug. For many
years, I had observed how these compounds were tested and the results reported,
not always wisely. The assays were
conducted on compounds which were added to a medium in a range of
concentrations from low to high. There
were also two types of controls, negative and positive. The negative control should produce no response, or
0%, and the positive control the maximum possible response, or 100%. In an assay if a compound had a range of doses that produced a complete response pattern from 0 to 100%, a full curve resulted. It would be initially flat at the lowest
doses (the lower plateau), then rose until at the highest concentrations it flattened out into an upper plateau, indicating the highest possible
response had been reached. These curves almost had a straight line between the lower and upper plateaus. I used the term ‘bend point’ to describe the
concentrations at the end points of this straight line. The EC50, or the Effective Concentration at
50% response, was the concentration at the midpoint between the two plateaus.
In the figure below, the EC50 is 0.517 and
the bend points are 17.6% at 0.11 and 82.4% at 2.42.
The EC50 compound concentration indicates
its potency, that is, how much is required to obtain a desired response. I thought it would be beneficial to develop
better standards for accepting the accuracy of an EC50 value. I saw too many instances of values being
reported when they should not have been, for example, when the dose-response curves
were not even complete, the upper plateau never reached. My ultimate goal was to develop standards for reporting EC50 values and believed that they would be related to the number of compound concentrations producing results both below the lowest and above the highest bend point. I wanted to develop and report these
standards in papers I would submit to peer-reviewed journals, giving them
greater credibility.
The purpose of the first paper was to
provide formulas for the bend points.
This required solving two mathematical equations using differential
calculus. I found a mathematician in
Skokie to partner with and he agreed to be my co-author. He had access to some mathematical software
that was very useful in solving the equations.
On a lighter topic, Diane was happy that in
August there were two gatherings of the HOGS, the informal organization of
female executive directors of five Planned Parenthood affiliates in Missouri plus
the head of the statewide lobbying organization. HOGS is the acronym for the “Harried Old
Glitter Specialists.” Don’t ask me what that
means. Only they know. They all met in St. Louis and together toured
the Botanical Gardens. Then all but the
St. Louis exec came to Columbia, and Diane fed them at our new house.
HOGS August 2001 with Sara Steele paintings
in the background
Early on a Tuesday morning I was working in
Chesterfield at Pharmacia when I heard loud talk and commotion by the other
early arriving employees. What was going
on? It was Tuesday September 11, 2001
when at 7:46 am CDT the first plane hit the World Trade Center, soon to be
followed by another. A third plane hit
the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania. Even though the news was met with horror here
in Missouri, I soon found it had a much greater impact on our relatives living
in New York and New Jersey. They all
knew people who were either killed or injured by the blast and its aftermath.
Suspicion quickly fell onto al-Qaeda, and
the United States launched its War on Terror invading Afghanistan to depose the
Taliban. The US had requested that the
Afghan government expel al-Qaeda and turn its leader, Osama bin Laden over to our
government. It had not done so, leading
the US and NATO countries to invade the country in an unwinnable war that turned
out to last longer than any other war in which the US had fought. Diane and I were not happy about this turn of
events. The administration seemed not to
have thought through the process for leaving Afghanistan.
Later that year, Craig asked us to celebrate
New Year’s with him in Paris. Growing
up, he had been there several times with his mother and knew the city
well. He found a 2nd floor apartment in
the 15th arrondissement overlooking an elevated portion of the subway
system. The apartment had a large front
room with a kitchen, dining area and living room with a sleeper sofa that Craig
would use and a small bedroom for Diane and me.
There was a bathroom in the hallway between the living room and the
bedroom. Craig and I had a good laugh,
after our initial fright, one night when we bumped into each other in the dark
on the way to the bathroom. Each
morning, Craig would bring back orange juice, coffee and fresh croissants for
breakfast.
On
a night-time bus ride, we saw the Louvre, Arc de Triomphe, and Eiffel Tower all
brightly lit. Craig arranged visits to the
Musee d’Orsay, as well as the Rodin Museum and outdoor sculpture garden to see
The Thinker. Diane and I toured the Maritime
Museum. The three of us rode the two elevators
to the top of the Eiffel Tower. During
our visits to the two cathedrals, Notre Dame and Sacre Coeur in Montmartre, we
enjoyed the stained-glass windows, crypts, and historic structural
features. I enjoyed posing with a statue
of my namesake at Notre Dame, Jeanne d’Arc.
A boat ride on the Seine enabled us to better understand the layout of
the city.
Of course, we consumed excellent French
food with local wines. On Sunday morning
we visited the street market under the elevated tracks. The quantity and variety of hot prepared
foods for sale was something we didn’t see at our Saturday market in Columbia. On a foggy New Year’s Eve, we could hear the
noise from the numerous subway cars going by outside our windows, all headed
towards the celebration at the Eiffel Tower.
The fireworks were blurry through the fog. New Year’s Day, 2002, was the first day the
rainbow-hued bills of the euro became legal tender and were available in
ATMs. Diane and I were so thankful to
Craig for a wonderful trip to Paris, particularly as this turned out to be our
only visit there.
Looking out our apartment window with the
Eiffel Tower lit up for New Year’s Eve
Back home, Diane and I deepened our
involvement in the Columbia community in 2002.
Instead of purchasing tickets for individual plays, we purchased season
tickets at both the Stephens College Playhouse and the Columbia Entertainment
Company. We attended a variety of events
at the Missouri Theatre including the Missouri Symphony’s Hot Summer Nights
Festival. The building was in terrible
shape with paint peeling off the walls.
The Missouri Symphony Society decided to raise the money to renovate the
theater to its original 1928 appearance designed after an opera house in
Paris. We made a three-year pledge
toward the renovation.
In March 2002, Diane and I and our friends,
Mary and Christine, spent a weekend in New York City. We had plans to see three Broadway
plays. Since my parents had taken me to
see Ralph Bellamy in Sunrise in Campobello during a visit to see Earlene
in the late 1950s, I periodically scheduled visits to Broadway. In the early 1980s, Gwen and I had seen Lauren
Bacall in Woman of the Year and Lena Horne in The Lady and Her Music. Diane and I managed to attend all three plays
planned for this trip. Mary and
Christine made it to Sweet Smell of Success and The Graduate with
Kathleen Turner who briefly appeared in full frontal nudity. Diane worshipped Chef Mario Batali, so we ate
dinner at his flagship restaurant Babbo NYC.
Who do we see walk in the door?
My sister Earlene and her husband Vince.
What a coincidence!
The next day our friends wore themselves
out walking to our lodging from the Guggenheim, didn’t have the energy to go
see The Producer and gave us their tickets. I was able to contact my nephew Craig who
lived across the Hudson in Jersey City.
He and a friend met us at the theatre.
Even though we were in a nosebleed balcony, and Nathan Lane had just
been briefly replaced by Henry Goodman, we still enjoyed the satirical play and
music very much, like “Springtime for Hitler and Germany.” At night, we could see the tall pillars of
light where The World Trade Center had been.
In May, I presented a paper at an IBC
bioassay conference in San Francisco while Diane was sightseeing. Afterwards we visited our friends Yvonne and
Gordon Kimber across the bay in San Ramon before taking the BART to the
airport. At the conference, I saw many
of my new clients, but only picked up an additional one. They needed an accurate and validated method
to calculate the results of their study.
I knew I could program the method in SAS using matrix operations. However, by the time I visited them in Canada,
a new program manager was in charge and decided to hire the SAS Institute to write
the procedure and incorporate it directly into SAS. I lost a client but enjoyed the trip to
Canada. Oh well!
Gordon Kimber being kissed by Jeanne and
Diane
Traveling to and around Paris with Craig gave
us the experience and courage to consider more touring on our own in
Europe. It had always felt safe
traveling with Olivia, so we signed up for a Baltic Sea cruise in August 2002
that featured Meg Christian
and Chris Williamson reuniting for the first time since their Carnegie Hall
concert in 1982. Meg ceased giving live
performances in 1984 and joined an ashram.
Meg being introduced on the ship
The cruise started in Stockholm, Sweden,
but while we were in Scandinavia, Diane and I also wanted to visit Norway. Searching the internet, we found a Norwegian
travel company that provided hotel reservations and airline, train and ferry
tickets. My first conversation with a
Norwegian was on the train ride from the airport to downtown Oslo. I was sitting next to a woman who was
studying some academic-looking papers. I
asked her a question in English, she looked up, then down at her papers, sat them
aside, looked back up and freely talked with me during the entire ride. Every Norwegian we subsequently encountered
was open to having conversations with us and spoke very good English.
Our hotel was very near the harbor. Wanting to stay up during sunlight to avoid
jet lag, we booked a Shrimp Dinner boat ride around the Oslo fjord. Our native Oslo companions on the trip were
very friendly. That was very helpful
because we had no idea how to eat the food presented which consisted of a large
bowl of boiled shrimp, a plate of white bread slices, and butter. As unappetizing as it sounds, the way we were
told to eat it was to liberally slather butter on the bread, load it up with
shrimp, fold it in half and enjoy. And
we did, as evidenced by our second helping prepared the same way. The next day, we visited the Vigeland Sculpture Park with its more than 200
granite, bronze and wrought iron sculptures reflecting the human condition.
Vigeland Sculpture Park sculptures of a
monolith and two elderly women
After Oslo, our next destination was a
hotel on the Sognefjord fjord. A train
left from the Oslo central station and stopped at Myrdal so we could change to a
second train that took us on an extremely steep, scenic route downhill to the
fjord with the tracks often under a wooden snow cover. At Flam we boarded a ferry to the hotel which
was located on the tip of a fjord. While
there, we took tours during the day including visiting a couple of
glaciers. We walked to one that was at a
lower level that we could stand next to, and the other required a van ride to
an upper altitude. We were sitting at an
outdoor café looking at the glacier when we heard a loud, sharp “Crack,” and
saw a large chunk calving off. In the evening
at the hotel, we attended piano concerts featuring compositions by the
Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg.
We learned more about contemporary
Norwegian culture during our next ferry ride, from the hotel to Bergen. There were many children on board, returning
to school after the summer holidays. If
they were too loud and rambunctious, all the adults stopped talking, stared at
the children, and it got really quiet.
When the children finally noticed, they realized they were the reason
for the social criticism and calmed down.
Bergen is a large city on the North
Sea. Our hotel gave tours, and on one we
learned about the Hanseatic League that was founded to protect trading
interests. It included Bergen because of
its huge cod fishery.
From Bergen we flew to Stockholm, Sweden where
we joined our Olivia tour. As was
becoming our habit, the first thing we did was to join a tour on the water
through the surrounding islands where we viewed the local residents sunbathing. After touring Stockholm, we boarded the
Orient Lines’ Marco Polo and cruised to Helsinki, Finland, St. Petersburg,
Russia, Tallinn and Copenhagen where we went on shore excursions. I enjoyed talking to the tour guides in
Sweden and Finland, asking them how they felt about paying so many taxes. I had always heard about the burden of high taxes
and was surprised that I did not hear one of them complain, and these were not
high earners. They said that they were
receiving good services back from their governments. It opened my ideas to how much misinformation
I had heard in the past.
Temppeliaukio Church, known as the Rock Church, in Helsinki, Finland
St. Petersburg was getting ready for its
300th anniversary in 2003. They were
scraping off old paint, often with complete disregard for where the lead paint
was going, like into the canal water where we were riding for our water view of
the city. The Hermitage was looking good
as many of the paintings that had been sent to the US for restoration were on
display, but there was no environmental control to keep them in good
condition. We went from our ship by bus
to a concert hall for an evening of ethnic dancing. At intermission, we found that there were no toilet
seats or paper in the bathroom. On the
way back to our cruise ship, our bus was stopped by a train sitting across the road waiting for a bribe before moving to allow us to proceed. It was easy to spot the casual bribery that
went on. I never wanted to step foot in the
rot of Russia again.
The Hermitage Museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia
Olivia provided a historian who spoke Russian and gave
lectures about the cities we visited. Diane and I walked close enough to him during
our shore excursion that we heard him say there was a lot of Russian being spoken
on the streets of Tallinn. To increase
their influence, Russia had been exporting many ethnic Russians to live in
Estonia.
Tallinn, Estonia’s capital
Tivoli Garden in Copenhagen
I received a fax on our ship with an
offer to buy the lake house. It was much
lower than the asking price, but after being on the market for over two years
and our other interested party not being able to sell their house, I had to
take it. When we got to the hotel in
Copenhagen, I rounded their offer up a bit and faxed it back. They accepted my counter offer, and I tried
not to feel too bad about the loss of almost $150,000. We had really enjoyed living and entertaining
in that house for ten years. (Epilogue:
The house was eventually hit by lightning, destroyed and demolished.)
In October, Diane and I flew to
Chicago for a long weekend, staying at a hotel on Michigan Avenue. From there it was easy to visit the Field
Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Navy Pier. The architecture tour on the Chicago River was
fun and informative. I learned so much
about what it took to enable the great city of Chicago to survive and grow. Meanwhile, the US Congress was busily giving
George W Bush many extraordinary powers for what was called the Global War on
Terror, including the authority to invade Iraq.
Diane and I ended our second year back in Columbia, deepening our ties to the community we had adopted and learned to love, me a transplant from Kansas and Diane from New Jersey.
To make comments, email sis.writs@gmail.com or click here.