44 AV 100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 188&-1988 



old-timer Dot Rogers recalls that she had the only car around and had to 

 make many emergency trips to Falmouth hamburger stands to keep people 

 happy. Fortunately, the lab managed to sustain the usual assortment of 

 collecting trips, Friday evening lectures, and library facilities, even while 

 researchers ate elsewhere and had to forego special seminars from visitors 

 who could not travel without rationed gasoline. 



At an earlier time, the Mess had been rather more formal. Each table 

 had a host, and the same group sat together through the season. The 

 tablecloths remained in place through the week. One host devised a plan 

 whereby anyone who spilled food onto the cloth would have to cover the spot 

 with an appropriate coin. At the end of the summer, they took the collected 

 money and had a fine party for all. Later Harvard biologist George Howard 

 Parker and his companions raised the ante so that the spill had to be covered 

 by a dollar bill, with the money used to buy jam and other luxuries — even 

 one season hiring an organ grinder, according to some perhaps fanciful 

 reports — to supplement the substantial but uninspired mess. 



"Miss Belle" (Dowoiing) ran the Mess for many years after 1940, and 

 insisted on white linen tablecloths and fresh flowers every day, even if she 

 had to go out and pick daisies herself. She determined where people would 

 sit. She mixed the senior scientists and the younger researchers and students 

 all together at a table, including developmental biologist Ernest Everett Just, 

 who was one of the very few black biologists at the MBL. This caused quite 

 a shock for one southern student, who recoiled at the expectation that he 

 would have to wait on a black man at dinner; it just felt wrong. Then when 

 Just asked him what he wanted to study and invited him to visit his lab, his 

 hesitation passed and his prejudice dissolved. No one thought of moving 

 after Miss Belle made her assignments, so people sat with the same group 

 long enough to get to know them. And they met people from all different 

 aspects of MBL life. 



Students earned enough money to pay their expenses in courses by 

 waiting on the tables in those days before the disruption of war; eventually 

 economic necessity turned the operation into a cafeteria. Singing has always 

 played an important entertainment role at the MBL, and waiters found 

 themselves immortalized in numerous offerings. Even Alfred Romer, later 

 director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, and Yale 

 biologist J. P. Trinkaus, an MBL researcher for nearly fifty years, earned 

 their way at the MBL as waiters. One set of verses to the tune of 'John 

 Brown's Body " went: 



Johnny was a waiter at the Mess of MBL 

 And the trials of occupation there would be hard to tell 

 It was a busy life with him when everything went well, 

 Alas when it did not. 



