Rocket experimentation slowed down drastically after the backyard nut-scorcher incident. Besides, cold weather had ensued and my garage "laboratory" was unheated. Hard science would have to wait for warmer weather.
Science courses for Swanton high school students in the early 1950s had a very predictable path. There was "general science" for freshmen, "biology" for sophomores, "chemistry" for juniors and "physics" for seniors. Byron "Barney" Radabaugh was the teacher for both general science and biology. William "Pop" Daniels was the teacher for both chemistry and physics.
Byron Radabaugh was a tall, handsome, square-shouldered man with a rather stern, no-nonsense demeanor. No one goofed around in his class. I had done well under Barney's tutelage in General Science my freshman year. Now in sophomore biology he was instructing us in the mysteries of animal anatomy. We all got wonderful hands-on experience in this by dissecting small animals.
As I recall, there were two such dissection projects scheduled for the biology course. The first one in the fall dealt with a simpler, lower life form: the phylum, Annelida; meaning segmented worms. In the second, winter project we became intimate with the phylum: chordata; class: amphibia; or frogs. No, People, my memory isn't that sharp. Wikipedia helped me with those classifications!
One thing that "Barney" Radabaugh did in his teaching that I have always been grateful for was to empahsize our learning of new words. Of course, one is bound to encounter new words when studying any subject. But there were plenty of new words in biology! Anatomy words; evolution words; medical words! And every week we students were required by Barney (by the way, none of us ever dared use that familiar name to his face!) to look up the DERIVATION and DEFINITION of a list of new words pertinent to what we were studying. This gave me my first appreciation of where our English words come from (latin; greek; french; etc.) as well as what they meant. I became very familiar with using a dictionary while taking Barney's courses. This was a habit which stuck with me throughout school and college and was key to aquiring a proficient vocabulary.
However, something else made a deep impression on me during the biology course: formaldehyde! This was the strong, pungent preservative solution that the dissection specimens were shipped and stored in. And, BOY, did it stink! I'm not sure how biology specimens are handled in today's classes, but I know that formaldehyde is considered a toxic, dangerous material. Just breathing the fumes is hazardous. Back in the 50s no one seemed that concerned about it. We students breathed quite a bit of those obnoxious fumes while meticulously carving away on our fishworms and froggies! And afterward we would simply wash the formaldehyde off our bare hands... along with gut scum.
The biology classroom was located at the bottom of a stairwell in the old Swanton school building. Interestingly enough, the doorway to this classroom was right across a hallway from the upper entrance to the old Swanton gymnasium which was built mostly below ground level. The old gym was commonly referred to as "the sweatbox" and the odors emanating from it lived up to that name! It was a unique olfactory experience to leave the formaldehyde-laden air of the biology lab and immediately get a whiff of body odor coming from the gym. The gym's atmosphere was almost fragrant by comparison!
Later on in the school year I indulged in another biology experiment of sorts. It was early spring, April of 1955, and I was fond of roaming around the woods behind my house. I had spotted a squirrel nest up near the top of a small tree and seen Mama Squirrel come and go out of it. I knew that springtime was usually birthing season for small critters and figured there could be a baby squirrel in that nest.
Well, I got to thinking how cute it would be if I had my own pet squirrel! Not too long before that I had watched a TV drama where a grown man had a pet squirrel that scampered adorably around his arms and shoulders and would pluck a peanut right from the man's lips! Yeah!! I wanted a pet like that!
As a teenager I was pretty agile and nimble... and an excellent tree climber. So I scrambled up that small tree and gingerly inched my way along the top branch toward the nest. The branch was narrow and straining under my weight. Mama Squirrel had left the nest as soon as I started up the tree, but was racing up and down nearby trees furiously chattering at me all the time. At age fifteen I was a pretty skinny, wiry kid and didn't weigh too much. Luckily for me, the branch held as I cautiously reached out with one hand and probed my fingers into the nest. They made contact with a tiny, soft, warm lump! I gently gripped it and pulled out a small, hairless, newborn baby squirrel with its eyes still closed. I carefully tucked it into my shirt pocket and slowly climbed back down the tree. I did feel a twinge of guilt about the chit-chit-chittering Mama Squirrel I left behind, but I was too thrilled with my prize to let it bother me much.
When I got back home I showed the baby squirrel to my mom who always had a soft spot for cute little animals. She examined it closely and informed me I had gotten myself a little 'boy' squirrel. She immediately took to the idea of nurturing this young rodent to adulthood and instructed me on making a nest for it out of a Kleenex box stuffed with soft rags and crumpled tissues. She also said I would need to get a doll's baby nursing bottle and clip the rubber tip off to open a small hole so we could feed warm milk to the squirrel. Since my dad was a pharmaceutical salesman, we had an ample supply of powdered baby formula - one of his company's products. For the next couple of weeks the Sutherland household became a doting squirrel nursery!
Mom and I were the head nurses, but for the first few nights Mom said it would be my responsibility to get up at least once during the night to warm some milk formula and give my 'baby' his night-time feeding. Eventually all my siblings wanted to take a turn at nursing Samson. That was the ostentatious name my juvenile brain picked for the little fellow. It didn't take long, though, before we were all just calling him, "Sammy". And that powdered human baby formula sure worked fine on Sammy! In a few short weeks he was a healthy young squirrel munching on nuts and raisins and playfully scampering all over the furniture as well as our bodies. And, yes; he would pluck a peanut right from my lips!
Before it got to that stage, however, I had another neat experience with the infant Sammy while he was still in the nursing phase. In the 1950s there was an afternoon show on Toledo TV13 called, "Nature Trails with Jim Nessle". Mr. Nessle was a well known naturalist and ornithologist who regularly visited schools around Toledo giving slide shows and lectures on birds and other nature topics. His "Nature Trails" program on channel 13 was just 15 minutes long, but was a viewing favorite for nature lovers during TV's golden age.
My dad, in addition to being a very good salesman, was also a very sociable, outgoing man with a lot of nerve! Dad had pitched in enthusiastically to the squirrel rearing project by building an outdoor wire-mesh cage for Sammy around the trunk of a young maple tree growing in our back yard. This became a necessity as Sammy got bigger and Mom got tired of picking up little "Sammy pellets" all over the house! But I digress.
While Sammy was still a small, nursing squirrel, Dad called Mr. Nessle to inform him about our own nature project. Mr. Nessle was interested and thought Samson could be a fitting topic for one of his shows. So one sunny May afternoon Mom drove me and Sammy over to the TV13 broadcast studios and a starstruck young Guy nervously sat down with Jim Nessle about an hour before the show to discuss what we would do with approximately eleven minutes of live air time.
Jim Nessle was a fine gentleman with a very calm, easygoing manner. When he asked me how I acquired Sammy, I told him the facts. I climbed a tree and robbed a squirrel nest of its baby! Mr. Nessle's brow furrowed slightly and he regarded me silently for a moment. Then he looked away and we talked about how I would bottle feed Sammy in front of the cameras after he introduced us.
The hour came. I stood beside Mr. Nessle behind a short counter with Sammy in my hands and feeling very self conscious. There was a backdrop behind us with the Nature Trails logo at the top and trees and plants painted all over it. A small TV monitor screen was positioned off to the left below the counter showing the scene that the TV cameras were broadcasting. I had been advised by Mr. Nessle to not look at the monitor very much as this could be distracting. I'm afraid I was a poor student. I mean... there I was! On live TV with my baby squirrel!! ME!! On TV!!! During the proceedings the nervous, fascinated kid was constantly glancing down to his left. What an amateur!
At the beginning, though, after the opening credits and commercial had played, I received a surprise from Jim Nessle's introductory statement. He described how a young Guy Sutherland had been strolling through the woods about a month ago when he noticed a FALLEN squirrel nest on the GROUND. It had apparently been blown by winds out of a tree! Upon further examination of the fallen nest, the young man discovered a baby squirrel inside and immediately decided to RESCUE it! Mr. Nessle then introduced me and baby Samson. I was a little startled by this whitewashing of my nest robbery, but had enough common sense to NOT contadict him on live TV!
The rest of the broadcast went okay. I had a clean towel and recently prepared milk in a baby doll bottle to feed Sammy. In fumbling around with the bottle I lost my hold on Sammy at one point and he started to fall, but quickly grabbed the towel draped over my shoulder with his tiny paws and scrambled back up my chest. This caused an outburst of laughter by Mr. Nessle and the cameramen. Nessle quickly used the mishap as a reason to expound further on the instinctive reflexes and climbing skills of woodland creatures. I noticed the cameramen did a lot of closeup focusing on Sammy. The eleven minutes flew by.
I enjoyed a little local fame and glory as a result of my TV appearance with Sammy... which quickly faded. The school year was over in a couple weeks and summer prospects took over.
It didn't take Sammy long to reach full grown stature. By July he was plump with a full, bushy tail. He was also totally tame around humans. It seemed like everyone wanted to have Sammy perch on their shoulder while feeding him a peanut.
But Samson the squirrel was also a woodland creature with whatever instincts that entails. One warm summer morning I got up and went out to Sammy's cage to replenish his food and water supply. Sammy was gone! There was a very narrow gap between the bottom edge of the mesh wire door to the cage and its frame. I had always assumed the gap was too thin for Sammy to squeeze through. I don't know because we never saw Sammy again.