Rollin Hotchkiss: Elemental Units of Real Estate

[Marisa Macari]

When the Library & Archives began its Building Blocks of CSHL website http://library.cshl.edu/Buildings/index.htm, I emailed Rollin Hotchkiss--a member of the phage course in the 1940s and a summer resident at CSHL from the 40s-60s--to see if he had memories to share.

Rollin replied in an email on October 16, 2004. He died only two months later. I wanted to share his quite amusing email on the Memory Board.

He wrote:


"Yes, Marisa, I have associations with a host of CSH buildings!
---and an experience that loyal work in behalf of valid but at first poorly supported projects can eventually bring them richer support. This is true even down to the elemental units of real estate--the furniture.

I want to record that Mark Adams, who taught Delbruck's famous phage course for several years until his early death, playfully described at a "Phage Party" (around 1948) an inferred furniture status policy. He said that if a chair had four legs, it belonged to Carnegie Laboratory; if it had three legs, it was assigned to the Biological Laboratory, and if two or less, to the phage course!

In the cause of science archives.
Rollin Hotchkiss"