Sterling Dow at right, with Eugene Vanderpool in 1963-64
Water Bugs
by Alan L. Boegehold, 1955–1957, 1964–1965, 1974–1975,1980–1981
In June 1963, I visited the School for a week or so, and my housing was the basement apartment of West House, a couple of mostly bare rooms with cots, as I remember it. Sterling Dow, Hudson Professor at Harvard, had already situated himself in one of the rooms. As I arrived, his first words (practically) were: “Alan, there are some Japanese Water Bugs here, and I am concerned for my squeezes. They might eat them. I wonder if you and I could agree that if one of these bugs should appear, whoever of us sees it will swat it immediately, no matter how much noise the swat makes, and no matter deeply immersed in thought the other of us is.” The ‘Japanese Water Bugs’ were cockroaches, some a full two inches long, and the ‘squeezes’ were filter paper impressions of inscriptions that were vital to his studies, and which he had worked long and hard to make.
As it happened, we had no incidents during my week there, but Professor Dow stayed on, and when I saw him some months later in the United States, he had the following to report.
“ I had dined at The Barrels and was sitting on my cot, about to retire, having a last smoke on my pipe, when I saw on the floor in the middle of the room maybe five feet away a Japanese Water Bug. I picked up a shoe and threw it, and the shoe landed fully on the bug. I could see a leg sticking out from under. I then turned out the light and lay down and went to sleep. In the morning, I got up and went over to retrieve my shoe. I picked up the shoe, and there was not an atom of the squashed bug left.”
Professor Dow ended his account here. The rest I could supply from the look on his face: This clean old New Englander had slept blissfully while a sea of cockroaches had ebbed and flowed under his cot and over the floor and absorbed their sometime cousin.
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