Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Murray to Gov. Al Rosellini, the word on the street, 21 November 1957

Restaurateur Vic and Gov. Al Rosellini were cousins.
Albert Rosellini, a Tacoma native who became a Seattle lawyer and Congressman, was elected Governor of Washington in 1956. A New Deal Democrat, he was the first Catholic and the first person of Italian descent elected governor west of the Mississippi. He won again in 1960, although Washington voters split the ticket to favor Richard Nixon over fellow Democrat and Catholic John F. Kennedy. In 1964, he lost to liberal Republican (remember those?) Dan Evans.

Rosellini had asked Murray, and likely other reporters as well, to let him know how his new administration was perceived. We had been traveling from shortly after his inauguration until October 1957, while Murray researched a book on the World Health Organization, so it was November before Murray checked in. 
 
 

Fred Haley was not appointed as a UW trustee, possibly because his support of civil rights and opposition to McCarthyism made him too controversial, but he was later a Trustee for the Evergreen State College and was instrumental in the establishment of UW-Tacoma.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Virus hunting in Brazil, 1957 -- Murray to Eddie and Alice Barnard


 April 21, 1957
Dakar, Senegal

Dear Eddie and Alice -- 

The plane from Recife arrived at the airport here smoothly enough after a seven hour crossing of the South Atlantic and it deposited me abruptly amid more than the usual confusion. 

It was three a.m. I was the only passenger disembarking here. The customs man was gone. My hotel reservation was a matter of mystery. I left my French back in M. Cousin's class, it seems; and my attempts to speak Spanish to a six-foot seven inch Negro in a red turban and white burnoose simply led to more misunderstanding. Finally after being told I was in the country illegally I was put in an airline bus driven by a man who looked like Joe Louis wearing a sheet and was driven for some distance through the moonlight until we came to a big concrete building rearing up from the sands. It was the hotel where I was supposed to have a reservation. They had never heard of me but they had a room for a Mr. Cornwall of Pan-American, and there I spent the night. Nice room too -- full of wicker furniture and Swedish furniture and flying beetles that sound like a 707 but do no harm. 

I woke this morning, Easter morning -- about eleven, opened the Venetian blinds and found myself staring down into the Atlantic Ocean, which I had not realized was so close. Actually, it is a small, circular bay, very sheltered, with a spread of tawny beach lined with striped umbrellas and white pads. And that is where I am at this moment. The sun is very hot, the water warm, the sky clear. There are no sea gulls. About a mile out the waves are breaking beautifully white over the points of the protecting capes. 

There is a volleyball game in progress behind me and I keep twisting around to watch it. Girls playing volleyball in bikinis is an act Minsky overlooked. The girls here look lean and rather aristocratic after the lush types in Brazil.

I don't know if I wrote to tell you that Rosa and Lane are going to Italy on the Italian ship "Anna C." It stops at Bahia-Salvador (in Brazil), Las Palmas in the Canaries, Lisbon, Barcelona, Cannes, and Genoa. They plan to go to Genoa although it is possible they will get off in Cannes and go over to see if the pictures of the cave paintings in the book you gave me are even better than the real thing. We get back together in Genoa around the end of May. It is improbably that a letter would reach me in Africa but Rosa and Lane are lonesome for mail and a letter to them at the American Consulate in Genoa, Italy, would bring them much pleasure. They will be there for a couple of days around the fourth and fifth of May. I had an interesting boat trip myself last week up the Amazon in a government launch. We went four hours up the broad, yellow-brown stream, past shores that were walls of dull green on the shady side and bright green where the sun in the palm fronds and the woven tapestry of creepers. 

I was with Dr. and Mrs. Causey, a pleasant pair of Americans who are in charge of the Rockefeller Foundation's virus laboratory at Belem. The Foundation has set up labs in San Francisco, Trinidad, Uganda, and India as well as Brazil to study viruses. 

There is a central lab in New York which runs tests on the material sent in from the other.
The Belem lab has discovered a considerable number of previously unknown viruses in the jungle and has also detected the presence of several familiar viruses which were not known to be present in the Amazon valley. 

Calista and Ottis Causey with one of their caged monkeys. Credit: Rockefeller Archives
The research is of course "pure" but the Causeys are willing to speculate on the importance of their work. They think it possible that the jungle serves as a great reservoir for viruses (this has been proved in the case of yellow fever and dengue) and that it is probably that many of these viruses are carried around the world by birds. While I was in Belem, Dr. C received word from Washington that a banded tern which had been shot with a bow and arrow by a native hunter at the mouth of the Amazon in February had been tagged by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife people in Massachusetts the previous March. And Dr. Casals (a relation of Pablo's) who runs the NY lab and who happened at the time to be in Belem, immediately pointed out that the line of flight of the tern coincided with the areas most often struck by outbreaks of encephiamytis (spelling questioned), the virus of which the Causeys have located in the jungle. Incidentally they find the viruses in a very simple way, by bleeding people, and monkeys, who have gone into the jungle and come down with a fever. If the patients recover, the Causeys bleed them again. Then if an injection of the original blood and an injection of their later blood with the antibodies fails to kill at least half of a batch of baby mice, the Causeys know they have a virus in the 1st lot, and its antibody in the second. It is up to the NY lab to determine which virus. 

The Causeys are fortunate in that lots of exotic types are being sent into the forest to clear ground for rubber plantations or farming colonies. Causey visits them regularly at the camps in the forest and takes blood from any fever victims, then treats them as best he can. 
Harry Watt

As for monkeys he has found an island off the coast of Brazil which is protected from the mainland by the on-shore winds. The monkeys there have no antibodies against the viruses of the Amazon. So Dr. C traps them, takes them to Belem and hangs them in cages in the jungle, where the mosquitos can get at them but the cats and snakes cannot. A satisfactory number get sick. 

Well, as you can see, I'm going to be an awful bore when I get back and soak up a number of martinis. 

I should tell you about having tea at the leper colony and about spending a week in Rio with Harry Watt, [Harry Watt was a British director and screenwriter. He was a friend and colleague of Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti] who made The Overlanders and Ivory Hunter, and Target for Tonight. But instead I'm going for a swim and then I'll engage in a bit of intensive girl watching. 

Remember the letter to Rosa and Lane at the consulate in Genoa.

Love,
Murray
 
What I remember from Brazil was throwing up into the topiary at the airport after a wild flight from Paraguay, and later being spanked for misbehaving at some grownup occasion in Rio, maybe including Harry Watt. What I learned later was that my parents were on the brink of divorce. Their letters to each other while Murray was in Africa were very different from the ones for more public consumption. 

Friday, August 9, 2013

to Phyllis and Otto Goldschmid, Brazzavile, April 1957 -- "what has France done to prepare these people for independence?"

Murray spent some weeks in Africa in 1957, researching World Health Organization projects for a book, published the next year as Doctors to the World.


Dear Phyllis and Otto—
 
The rain has been falling steadily here today, like a Northwest summer rain. It beats the heat, but the African boys sitting under the banyan tree look sad enough, and I feel sad enough. This country is depressing. There is such an air of permanence about the European colony (not that in itself bothers me) but everybody is here to make money fast, or to start a government career at the very bottom rung; no one has any connection with the town itself.
 
Poto-Poto, by Congolese photographer
Serge Gatien Sita "Valloni"
http://damoison.com/atelier/congo_net/congo_pages_bios/bio_sita.html

As for the native population, which lives in a section of the town called Poto-Poto, which means Mud-Mud, They are docile and gentle and sweet and undemanding, and how they are going to get in position to demand schools and representation and finally independence, I don’t know. Rags might ask, “Are you unhappy because they are happy?”

I get out of here May 1 for Nigeria, and I anticipate a contrast for the British, to the consternation of the other colonial powers, will turn Nigeria loose in less than two years. Not ready, the French tell me. But is any country ever ready? I ask.

“Some more than others.”

“Well then, what has France done to prepare these people for independence? How many colleges are there for the natives?"

“None.”

“How many high schools?”

“None.”

“Grade schools?”

“Oh yes. But only to the third grade.”

“And does everyone go?”

“About 40% of the boys in the towns and cities.”

“What about the girls?”

“Almost none. Native women don’t ask schooling.”

And so forth.

The land is beautiful—low mountains in the distance with the broad valley of the Congo in between, the river red brown, unhurried through the city, bursting into wild rapids below. Flowers bloom everywhere. The trees are aflame with bursts of red and orange and pink and yellow. Poinsettias grow fifty feet high, the river itself is choked with water hyacinths. Trees, planted mostly by the missionaries in the last century, line the streets. It’s hard to see how such a pleasant place can be distressing. 

But during a lightning storm the other day, I saw, in a sudden glare, a coral snake swept past my feet in the gutter overwash. Then darkness and it was gone. 

Yours,
Murray

Congo got its independence in 1960, and Murray’s disquiet has been justified by events.