Doc Edgerton

In 1971, I was working for marine archaeologist Peter Throckmorton in Greece. I was eighteen at the time, trying to figure out whether I wanted to devote myself to photojournalism or archaeology.

I had been told “Doc Edgerton” was coming to work with us on a few projects, but I’d never heard of him and I wasn’t one to ask too many questions. I mean, I was the youngest of the crew and didn’t want to seem too dumb, so I figured I’d find out who this guy was when he arrived. And I was very busy, putting the finishing touches on a darkroom I had built for Throckmorton, cataloging all his photographs from his years as a photojournalist and archaeologist, and photographing artifacts and ship models for his chapter in George Bass’s next book.

But I was curious enough that I mentioned Doc in a letter to my father. He rarely wrote to me and we weren’t getting along very well since I’d decided not to go to university straight out of high school. I wrote to him regularly anyway because he was the only person who knew me well enough to make it worthwhile opening up and sharing what I was thinking, even if he didn’t reciprocate. So I was pretty surprised when I received a response in what was, for him, record time. And what a letter! I don’t think I had ever received a letter so full of surprises.

My father, Curtis Marshall, earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Washington as the possibility of a second world war was looming. His family had called World War I “Wilson’s War”, and they wanted no part of what they were already calling “Roosevelt’s War”. What I learned in his letter was that he had applied to and been accepted by MIT for graduate school because he wanted to study under the man who had invented the strobe light, professor Harold “Doc” Edgerton. But he became convinced that graduate studies wouldn’t get him a draft deferment and medical school would, and he wanted to avoid the war more than he wanted to study with Doc, so he gave up his spot at MIT and went to medical school at McGill instead. He threw away his chance to do what he really wanted and never had contact with Doc again.

It was his bad luck that the war lasted longer than he had expected, and he was drafted into the army right out of medical school. I’ll tell you another time about his experiences as a doctor with Patton’s Third Army as they rolled across Europe. But I will say this much: he was an amateur photographer and machinist and as the war wound down he heard of this Frenchman in Marseilles who was experimenting with taking cameras underwater. My father had accumulated leave and he used it to take a train to Marseilles and find this guy, someone named Jacques-Yves Cousteau. They hit it off, and my father used his machinist’s skills to build camera housings while Cousteau was kind enough to teach him how to use his underwater breathing apparatus. They stayed in touch, but the last time they saw each other was in the mid-sixties, when Cousteau’s research vessel Calypso made port in New York for a fund raiser. He said Cousteau was more interested in raising money than in seeing an old friend, and he was probably right – it takes the fund-raising skills of a politician to keep an organization like Cousteau’s going. I always get a good laugh when I watch the film “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” because it really does have some witty sarcastic insight into the world of egotistic explorers and their personality cults. Archaeology certainly has its share, especially marine archaeology, where I spent so many years. It’s a strange way of life.

And in case you’re wondering, I think yes, my father’s interests in photography, machining, diving, and sailing might, just might, have rubbed off on me. My father had me open ocean diving when I was five and I’ve never stopped. I’m not bragging. Five is too young and I wonder why he allowed it. But he didn’t push me. I pleaded with him to let me do it, and I guess I was persuasive. He also taught me to use a lathe and mill when I was eight, I build my first oscilloscope when I was eleven, and I took up photography when I moved east full-time for high school.

I digress.

Doc arrived in Piraeus while I was up in Jugoslavia renewing my car’s visa. You had to drive out of Greece every three months and then back in to get a new car visa and hope there was a different customs agent on duty who didn’t look too closely to see when the last one had expired. Otherwise you had to pay a tax nearly equal to the value of the car. It usually worked. I was the only one of the crew with a car. Not even Throckmorton had one.

So Doc was there when I got back and I only had time to say hello before Throckmorton commandeered my car and sent Doc and another member of the crew off to Istanbul to pick up Doc’s side-scanning sonar gear that had somehow been shipped there instead of to Athens. It was another week before they would return so I got back to work machining some new parts for the darkroom enlarger – some negative carriers, autofocus tracks to match our lenses, and a new manual focusing rack and pinion. I was finishing this up when Doc returned and I was aware he was looking over my work. We started talking, and it turned into a good conversation and the beginning of a wonderful friendship.

The assistant Doc had intended to bring along took ill before he had left Boston, so I was seconded to him as his driver and gopher (again, I had a car!). He worked with us on a search and survey for wrecks from the 1571 Battle of Lepanto in the gulf of Patras and later on an underwater survey of the Minoan civilization on Thira, also called Santorini, in the Aegean. Ah, Thira! Maybe Atlantis? That’s a story all by itself.

Let me just indulge in a verbal sidebar for a second. I mentioned earlier that Doc invented the strobe light. Just one of his many accomplishments. There was once a giant defense contractor named EG&G that, among other things, ran the nuclear weapons testing program for the U.S. Government. Well, EG&G stood for Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier, so, yeah. And if you’ve never seen them, you should search the web for the strobe light photographs Doc did in his lab. My favorite has always been the milk drop splash, but the bullet piercing the apple is another favorite. He also did a famous series of multi-exposure stop-action photographs with photographer Gjon Mili. Photographs of tennis players and ballet dancers and the like. Beautiful images.

Anyway, Doc always carried postcards of his strobe light photographs in his shirt pocket and a small camera when we were driving around. When he would see a child, or maybe a group of children beside the road or in a schoolyard, he would ask me to pull over, he’d hand me the camera, and he’d get out and hand each of the children one of his postcards. It was my job to snap a picture that captured the moment of wonder on a child’s face, making sure I had Doc’s grandfatherly smile in the background.

Aboard ship Doc was an energetic inspiration. Every morning, before the sun was up, he came through the boat, shaking shoulders and nudging feet, saying loudly, “Wake up! Time to get going. Daylight’s wasting. If you don’t wake up every morning excited to face the day, then you’re just wasting time.” He would already have coffee made and was ready to get to work.

Doc taught me how to use side-scanning and mud-penetrating sonar and how to interpret the tracings, and he taught me the calculus behind the side-scanning sonar array, which was an eye-opener to me. It got me thinking I really needed to get going on my formal education. And after he left at the end of the summer I realized I had made my decision. I would study anthropology in the American form, which included archaeology.

So in December I showed up in Cambridge and walked into Docs office at MIT. I threw back my shoulders and announced, “Doc, I’m ready to join up. I’m ready to start university!”

He kind of smiled and said, “Have you thought about where you want to go? Do you want to go here, or maybe Harvard, or somewhere else?”

I said, “Boston University has an excellent anthropology department. I was thinking there.”

He quietly took a piece of paper out of his desk drawer and wrote a note, handed it to me, and said, “Then take this across the river.” I did, straight into BU’s admission’s office, and I started classes the next month. Do you know what amazes me to this day when I think back to that moment? It’s that I passed up a chance to go to Harvard!

Two years later, after I had dreamed up and worked hard to get the universities around Boston to give college credit for SEA’s sail training and oceanography experience, which we named the SEA Semester, I was at a dinner celebrating the success of the program and was sitting next to Bradley Richardson, the director of Harvard undergraduate admissions. After a few glasses of wine he leaned over to me and said, “Brad, I know BU’s a fine school and all, but, tell me, why isn’t a bright guy like you at Harvard?”

I nearly chocked and then laughed out loud. I’ve got to go back a bit, to the January, 1971. I had just quit my job in New York and had taken a ski holiday to Stowe before I was going to head off to Europe. A gift from my father for Christmas and my 18^th birthday, even if he was still angry that I wasn’t going to college. To appease him, I had applied to Harvard, more as a gesture than anything else, but I’ll also admit I was beginning to get a little nervous about the draft. I had no student deferment and it was now my draft year. I was going to stop off in Boston on my way back from Stowe for my Harvard interview. Good plan, but it didn’t anticipate me having a horrible crash on a double black diamond trail, being removed from the mountain by toboggan, being put in a hip-to-toe cast for all the bones I had broken and soft tissue I had torn, being dosed up with oxycodone for the first time in my life, having a big glass of wine with all the other guests at our ski lodge to toast my marvelous ineptitude, having no idea what happens when you mix alcohol and oxycodone, setting off for Boston at nightfall, ending up in the Dartmouth University hospital at two in the morning having my stomach pumped, and stumbling into the office of Bradley Richardson, the director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, at 8 AM in the morning, disheveled, reeking, drugged, unsteady on my new crutches, unable to sit because of the hip cast, and still wearing ski clothes with one leg cut off. I thought I would at least get some credit for showing up! I didn’t. It was a short interview.

So, back at the Sea Semester dinner, I said, “Mr. Richardson, you don’t remember the first time we met, do you?” I told him, and we had a good laugh and another glass of wine.

Doc became my mentor and counselor. He used some magic to create a collegium for me, an arrangement by which I could take any course I wished at BU, Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern, a privilege I used and for which I was enormously grateful.

I had to earn money for housing and food when I was in college. After my freshman year I moved up to Rockport on Cape Ann, bought a lobster boat, and became a commercial lobsterman. Today I can’t even imagine having the energy I did back then. I was out on the water by 4 AM, pulled a hundred traps, fell onto the train, slept all the way to North Station, and took the Green Line to BU in time for a nine o’clock class. I’d study in the library until I had to leave to catch the last train home, sleep all the way, which was OK, because Rockport was the last stop, walk up the hill to my house, and start the whole think over again four hours later. I didn’t fish year-round. I’d start as soon as the weather allowed in the spring, lay-up the boat when I headed to wherever I was going to excavate that summer, then I’d get my traps back out in the fall and fish as late into December as I could. There is a whole story behind why I decided to do this and how I was able to become accepted into a New England lobster fishing community as a complete outsider. I’ll save it for another time.

I mention all this because Doc was constantly making small improvements to his sonar and he would bring new gear up to Rockport and we would take it out on my lobster boat for a test. His wife would make bologna and Velveeta sandwiches and send along a few bottles of Coke, and we would cruise Sandy Bay with the sonar pinging away. Those were good days.

There hadn’t been many times I’d been able to do something for my father he could really appreciate. My father and I eventually reconciled our differences and I was able to invite him to come up and visit me in Rockport. I think he liked coming fishing with me and seeing the life I had made for myself. But what I think made him especially happy was when I took him to Cambridge for lunch with Doc. It was a moment of closure for him and I’m glad I could make it happen.

Fifteen years later, in 1990, I was in my office in Washington late one January afternoon watching the news on television when it was announced that Doc had died suddenly, while having lunch with a group of his students in the student union dining hall, the same place where he had had lunch with my father and me. It is one of only three times in my life I can remember spontaneously breaking out in tears on learning of someone’s passing. Twenty-six years after that, while taking my older son Skylar on a tour of eastern colleges, I found myself standing in the hallway outside what had once been Doc’s office and laboratory. it’s still called ‘Strobe Alley’, and the walls are decorated with Doc’s strobe-light photographs. There are several kiosk-like demonstrations of strobe-light stop motion. You press a button and streams of fluorescing green liquid strike each other or splash into bowls. Strobe lights reveal the streams are actually pulses of droplets that appear to stand still, and by turning a knob that adjusts the flash rate, you can make the droplets slowly advance or retreat, making it appear the streams are flowing back towards the nozzle. But the most interesting thing is watching the streams collide because you can examine the splash of the impact as it appears motionless. Sky was playing with the demonstration when he looked up and asked why I had tears streaming down my face. I explained that the last time I had stood in this same spot, fiddling with the same apparatus, was with my father and Doc Edgerton, forty-one years earlier.

There’s another little story that isn’t long enough by itself for its own post, and it seems to fit in with these thoughts on father figures and how sons and students strive to please them.

There is only one thing my father ever asked me for directly. When I was leaving for Europe the first time with the plan to make my way to Greece and find a marine archaeologist to work for, he said he had always wanted a bronze hard-hat diving helmet, and that if I ever should chance upon one, would I try and get it for him.

Well, after our expedition to Thira that summer, which I’ll tell you about in another post, I spent a month on the island of Kalymnos working with Peter Throckmorton’s wife Joan to document the last sponge diving fleet in the Aegean. Her job was to interview the divers and their families and mine was to hang out in the shipyard and photograph the shipwrights at work and to generally document the sponge divers’ life on the island. Some days I went along with Joan and photographed documents, ship models, paintings, portraits, and other artifacts of the sponge divers’ families. On one of those days I was photographing a gallery of paintings of boats owned by many generations of one family. An old widow was rummaging around in a closet looking for another painting and I caught a glimpse of shiny yellow metal peeking out of the top of a gunny sack. I asked her what it was, and she said, “Oh, that’s my husband’s helmet. He died in it and no one else wants to use it, so it just sits there.”

I asked why she held on to it, and she just gave me a sad shrug. I looked it over and it was in perfect usable condition. We settled on a price of 135 dollars, payable in drachmas.

Getting it home was a bit of a farce. when I finally left Greece, I drove my car back to Amsterdam and flew out of Schiphol for Baltimore. I sure as hell wasn’t going to check the helmet as luggage, so I claimed it was a hat, and wore it onto my Pan Am flight. The stewardess balked and we argued for a while until the flight engineer came back to see what was going on. He appreciated my dilemma, and the helmet rode across the Atlantic strapped into the empty second engineer’s seat up in the cockpit. Those were the days when airlines tried to make passengers happy!

It felt good when I presented my father with an 1861 Siebe Gorman bronze diving helmet, the one and only thing he had ever asked me for. It stood on a pedestal in his library for the next decade, until an electrical spark in a junction box buried in a wall started a fire in the middle of the night that destroyed his home. The fire was hot enough to melt the solder holding the neck-ring bolts in place and about half were lost. The glass in all the viewports cracked, and the bronze shell itself softened and warped, but just a little. Today is sits in a corner of my living room, part of our family history.