There came a Sunday when I flew down the dangerously steep stairs to the beloved basement and hoisted myself up onto the leggy lab stool in anticipation of making use of my favorite lens - in hand, no doubt, a "specimen" from the garden - a rock, or a leaf, or some small dead bug. Rather more to my scale was a small lens with a heavy metal base and adjustable neck - a tiny instrument of scrutiny that I had fallen madly, covetously in love with by the age of three.
#Prism kites how to#
Grampa taught me how to clip a delicate glass slide into place for viewing, although he was watchful of my interactions with the valuable precision German microscopes that were in some respects the totems of his life. While television had its charms, my thoughts were always drawn back to the magic realm in the basement - to the giant cameras, equally giant press scrapbooks, and the tall wooden stool that was my special perch for microscope sessions. The adults would later watch programs that only partially held my attention Bonanza, Ed Sullivan, and the like. They were ritual Sundays, family times of sharing in the American popular culture of the day: as I recall, we always watched Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom (Marlin Perkin's folksy monologues augmented by my grandfather's own huge fund of nature lore), and the Wonderful World of Color (which we watched in black-and-white, hosted by the still-living founder of the animation empire). While I wouldn't understand for many, many years the sadly truncated, almost refugee-status of his last lab, to me it was a wonderland of glass cabinets, beautiful wooden boxes housing scientific marvels (new to me, but mostly archaic, even quaint, by the standards of the time) - microscopes, lenses, measuring tools, delicate prepared glass slides with copperplate labels and huge metallic contraptions with imposing names like "Comparison Magnascope." It was my first classroom - though I didn't know it - far more exhilarating than the kindergarten one of naps-and-soda-crackers, or first grade's atmosphere of "Dick and Jane" in all their WASP monotony.Īlmost every Sunday of my young life meant a journey across Lake Washington from Newport Hills to my grandparents' last home in the Wedgwood District of Seattle. I grew up thinking it was the most normal thing in the world to have a laboratory in the basement - an essential element of "Grampa-ness" a grandchild was entitled to. He was supplier of my very first books - a board book of animals (how I loved the otter!) illustrated by Garth Williams, and a large illustrated child's version of Marguerite Henry's Misty - which added the euphonious "Chincoteague" to my 5-year-old vocabulary. To me he was walks along the pebbly beach near glistening tide pools at Golden Gardens on Puget Sound, and yet more walks through tall timber in now vanished Henry Osborn State Park near Redmond, Washington. To me he was a source of fascinating stories, but stories concerning how water traveled through the veins of a leaf, or the nobility of bald eagles, or how light was really color that a piece of angle-cut German glass could separate out into individual shades, like the Crayola tints in my crayon box. Luke Sylvester May, my "Grampa," was a famous criminologist - though along with those of many peers his achievements were largely forgotten by the time of his death, submerged beneath the advancements and technologies of the vaunted "space age." While he was still alive, I had a dim awareness of him as a "scientist," without much sense of the "crime" his particular discipline sought to thwart. What they were I can no longer access, but I can still feel the strange mix of excitement and emptiness that filled me upon learning my grandfather was dead. My mother's voice was low in the hallway, and my childish ears strained to catch her words. Past the time for welcome social calls, even the 7-year-old I was at the time felt an anxious chill, already certain of the call's import. Light Through a Prism: Childhood Memoriesįor some reason I was wakeful that night, although having been tucked into bed at the usual early hour, so I can clearly recall the loud, hollow ringing of the phone when that particular call came in.
Reid's account is excerpted from a longer version. Luke May, known as America's Sherlock Holmes, was a pioneering forensic detective. May (1892-1965), recalls him as a beloved grandfather. In this People's History file, Mindi Reid, granddaughter of the renowned Seattle criminologist Luke S.
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