Inside Duke Medicine

Comments

• Mike Cook said on 2009 07 15 at 12:43pm

  What year was that that Dr. Lynn removed the offending sign?

• Linda Gale said on 2009 07 16 at 1:23pm

  As a college freshman, I spent the summer of 1966 working in the Bell Building for Dr. Joe Beard. Dr Beard hired 3 of us (all college students, Hilda Cates and Chuck Lewis were the other 2) to work in Al Langlois’ lab. We spent our days keeping utensils clean (washed in either scalding hot water or in some cases cleaned chemically) and participating in some of the experiments by “feeding” petrie dishes. Dr. Beard was a very good bridge player and would join us for bridge games during lunch (which sometimes stretched on for 90 minutes if we were trying to finish a rubber). Dr. Dani Bolognesi was a graduate student doing experiments with us. Occassionally, we would be invited to accompany “the Docs” on a foray to a Broad Street bar they liked to call “The Owl”. We felt pretty important when that happened.
  I remember my mother letting me off each morning and I would cross the railroad tracks to enter the buiding. It wasn’t unusual to see gurnies with animals (dogs, I was told) with sheets draped over them parked in the corridors. Kidney research , was the rumor. It was a fun and profitable summer-Dr. Beard payed well, especially when he learned the monies made would go toward our educations.
  Almost 30 years later, 1990-1992, my daughter Megan Williams would work there in the summers as a high school student with Dr Joanne Kurtzberg. I would sometime drive her to work and see that familiar building again and remember fondly that summer so long ago and those bridge games.

• Ed Rickards '63, Law '66 said on 2009 07 17 at 12:07pm

  I see no mention of how Duke University will continue to recognize the contribution of William Bell after the building named in his honor is torn down.

  This issue is now arising with increased frequency:

      —At my suggestion, my undergraduate class provided for the Deryl Hart Reading Room in Perkins to honor the President. Forty years later, the space was divided and resold and other names posted. 

      —The Gross Chemistry Labs were named for Paul M. Gross, one of the true visionaries who set the trajectory for Duke’s magic rise among universities.  40 years later, this too was taken apart.

      —Bransom Theatre has been sold to a new donor, whose name now adorns the space in addition to that of William Branson.  At least he survived since his death in 1899.

      —and worst, War Memorial Gymnasium, honoring Trinity’s dead, on East Campus has been reduced to a plaque inside Brodie Center. One can only hope that Page Auditorium, which bears the family name of the first Trinity graduate to give his life in World War I, will not also be resold to a new bidder during coming renovations.

  We are destroying our history!!

  Finally, some information about the whites only - Negro bathrooms in so many Duke buildings.  The time frame for Dr. Lynn’s wonderful action probably was around 1960. In May of 1962, President Hart, who had been chief of surgery for many years, was able to say accurately the medical center had removed all such designations, from bathrooms, from waiting rooms, from wards.

  The first Duke building designed without white-Negro bathrooms side by side was the Law School, dedicated in May, 1963. 

  Some nastiness remained. Even with Negro (to use the contemporaneous term) graduate and professional students enrolled, the athletic director refused to remove the Negro section sign at the football stadium until the first undergraduates arrived in 1963.

  Footnote: I do not believe William Bell was a trustee of Duke University, although I have no way of really confirming this. He was one of the original Trustees of The Duke Endowment, which is often confused with the University, although hopefully not in official university postings.

  One of James B Duke’s business ventures was American Cyanamid, a giant chemical company DOWNSTREAM from Mr Duke’s country estate in NJ. This venture gave rise to the drug giant Lederle, as well as brands such as Old Spice, Pine-Sol and Breck. It also made some of the first plastic dishes and “silverware.” Today the company is nestled as a division of American Home Products.  Other Cyanamid executives played important roles at Duke University, notably Thomas L Perkins. And in his will Mr Duke left a huge block of the stock to the Endowment.

  There. More than you wanted to know.

  
  Editor’s note: The ornate stonework surrounding the main entrance to the Bell Building and a plaque from the building were removed before demolition started and have been preserved for display at a site to be determined.

• Linda M. Simpson said on 2009 07 20 at 2:02pm

  In 1963 when I came to Duke we could park in front of the red brick building - Bell Building.  I hated it when they painted the building white - it took away from the uniqueness of the building.  My job wasn’t going to be available until July 15 so from July 1 for two weeks I worked for Dr. William Lynn and Dr. Bill Wynn in the Bell Building.  Then I began working for Dr. J.B. Sidbury, Jr. and around 1970 we moved from the D&T Building to the Bell Building - what a change.  The room my office was in had been a lab, renovated to be an office except for the pipes in the ceiling.  The first day I saw stuff moving through those pipes I was a little startled and found out that it was trash!  Even though we were removed from the hospital and had chickens close by (with the smells) it was an interesting and different place.  Whenever you got on the elevator you weren’t sure if you would get off - or actually you weren’t sure it was even going to open to get on!  At that time the Employment Office was also in the buiding - which was an improvement over a little house to the right of what is now PGII when I was employed.  So many changes!

• Susan Engel Zarutskie said on 2009 07 23 at 7:09pm

  Bell Building is full of bittersweet memories for me - I practically grew up there.  My father, Frank Engel, M.D. was a clinician and researcher in the Dept. of Medicine from 1947 until his death in 1963.  His endocrinology lab was one of the early labs in the building and my mother was his research assistant.  He was in his lab when he had a fatal heart attack in 1963 (when I was 16).  After he died, my mother worked with Bill Lynn in his lab there until they moved to new quarters.

  As a child, I spent many afternoons in the lab helping load the centrifuge, learning to pipette, and playing with the electric adding machine.  My favorite place was the room where the research animals were kept and where my pet mice and rats came from.  They lived in the “rat room”  during the school year and I would often visit them in the afternoon.  A neighborhood friend (who also kept his rat there) and I would climb the (then small) trees in the front of the building and take our rats up with us.  We also drove everyone in the building crazy by racing each other (without the rats) from floor to floor - one on the stairs and the other on the elevator. 
  My father taught me to drive in the old (long since disappeared) Bell Bldg. parking lot.  I had a summer job in my father’s old lab (run at that time by Harold Lebovitz) after my jr. yr. in college.  During my sr. year the secretary let me study in her office in the evening.  I got to know the then night watchman (a biochem grad student) who spent his free time repairing his motorcycle in the hallway or practicing repelling in the stairwell.  My last “quality time” spent in the building was in the 1st yr. of med school because the gross anatomy lab was in the basement.

  I am sad to see it go, but - like much of the rest of Duke - I hardly recognized it anymore.