Hi everyone,

I’m back from my little vacation. I hope you celebrated the turning of the old year as you greeted the new one. For my first post of 2025, I’ve chosen to look back at a point in my life when I came to a fork in the road and chose which one I would take.

A few months ago I wrote a note to Sigma Xi, the honors society for scientific research, with headquarters in North Carolina. I explained that when I was a young man graduating in 1961 from Emory University with my Masters Degree in Science, I received that year’s Sigma Xi recognition for Research Performed at the Masters Level. I had studied parasitology and devised a new way to discover for examination young tapeworms found in rats.

That might sound somewhere less than appealing to you. Working with rats and tapeworms isn’t for everyone. But when I took the test with the application to Emory, the tester at Drury told me my score was the highest he had seen on an application to Emory and as a result I was offered the biggest fellowship that Emory offered in biology at the time. Granted, I had to agree to specialize in parasitology when I sort of wanted entomology, but the money covered my tuition, a rented room in a house off campus, and enough to eat if I was careful about what I ordered. It was a two-year master’s program but I completed my work a semester early. Raising my own rats, infected beetles with tapeworm eggs, feeding the beetles to the rats, and then studying what happened next was fun, but I was ready to wrap it up.

I co-wrote a paper with the Chair of the Biology Department, that was published in the Journal of Parasitology, my first publication.

Sandy and I had our first child, daughter Robin, while I was at Emory. When I finished my masters work, the Emory science faculty pressed me to stay for my PhD. But we owed money to the hospital for Robin’s rocky start in life and I needed a job so we moved on.

We settled in Evansville, Indiana where Sandy started teaching high school Spanish and English and I accepted an offer from Mead Johnson Pharmaceutical Company in their pharmacology division. My title was Associate Scientist and I was assigned to the unit that studied the effects of new organic compounds on the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) in laboratory animals.

I’d been there a few months when I received word from Emory that my master’s work had been selected to receive the Sigma Xi award. There was one such award at the PhD level and one at the Masters level. I was immensely proud but didn’t see how I could attend the awards event.

I told my boss about it and bless him, he saw to it that I got to fly to Atlanta for the ceremony. It was at the last minute and no one knew I was coming. I sat in the audience, saw my name in a prominent place in the program, and sat up straighter when my name was called as the 1961 recipient of the Sigma Xi Award. The thing was, I never received a copy of the recognition. I returned to Evansville emptyhanded, thinking that maybe I would receive my copy in the mail. It never arrived.

After one year at Mead Johnson I was promoted to Scientist and assigned a lab assistant to supervise. While there, I devised a new testing technique and gave my first presentation at a conference in San Francisco. I explain in my autobiography why we eventually left Evansville to move to Kansas City where I took a job with Hallmark Cards, son Jeff was born, and Sandy eventually went to work on her Master’s Degree in Guidance and Counseling.

After I got settled into my new world, I received word from two former colleagues at Mead Johnson who had moved on to other pharmaceuticals — one on the West coast, one on the East coast — of opportunities to earn my PhD in pharmacology, expenses paid. One was at Stanford, the other, Cornell. I didn’t pursue either. I felt it was too late. I had made the transition from one life to another.

So why now? After sixty-three years, why decide I want a copy of my Emory award? It’s hard to explain. I think it’s to have something concrete, some tangible reminder of a life that might have been, very different from the one I chose. For a while I was on that divergent road that Frost wrote about. Then I took the other one.