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A Naturalist in Show Business A NATURALIST IN SHOW BUSINESS or I Helped Kill Vaudeville by Sam Hinton Manuscript of April, 2001 Sam Hinton - 9420 La Jolla Shores Dr. - La Jolla, CA 92037 - (858) 453-0679 - Email: [email protected] Sam Hinton - 9420 La Jolla Shores Dr. - La Jolla, CA 92037 - (858) 453-0679 - Email: [email protected] A Naturalist in Show Business PROLOGUE In the two academic years 1934-1936, I was a student at Texas A & M College (now Texas A & M University), and music was an important hobby alongside of zoology, my major field of study. It was at A & M that I realized that the songs I most loved were called “folk songs” and that there was an extensive literature about them. I decided forthwith that the rest of my ;life would be devoted to these two activities--natural history and folk music. The singing got a boost when one of my fellow students, Rollins Colquitt, lent me his old guitar for the summer of 1935, with the understanding that over the summer I was to learn to play it, and teach him how the following school year.. Part of the deal worked out fine: I developed a very moderate proficiency on that useful instrument—but “Fish” Colquitt didn’t come back to A & M while I was there, and I kept that old guitar until it came to pieces several years later. With it, I performed whenever I could, and my first formal folk music concert came in the Spring of 1936, when Prof. J. Frank Dobie invited me to the University of Texas in Austin, to sing East Texas songs for the Texas Folklore Society. The field of zoology was in no way neglected. I continued activities that had begun when I was a high school student in Crockett, supplyng east Texas reptiles of various sorts to scientists in New York, Chicago and Washington DC. My chief professor at A & M,. Raymond O. Berry, hired me as a sort of lab assistant and illustrator through the Depression-generated NYA (National Youth Administration) at 35¢ an hour, and he found space in a unused greenhouse in which I could maintain a stable of some 30 poisonous Water Moccasins whose venom I sold to the Sharpe and Dohm Laboratories in Pennsylvania.. But the greatest zoological boon was accorded in the summer of 1936, when I worked for the Federal Bureau of Biological Survey. This was under the i A Naturalist in Show Business PROLOGUE leadership of Dr. Walter Penn Taylor, a top scientist with the Bureau. The Bureau had earlier sent Dr. Taylor to College Station, where A & M is located, and he and his family had immediately become very important to me. Pleasantly brisk and almost infinitely knowledgeable, he was nevertheless unfamiliar with the East Texas biota, and permitted me to expound to him with my limited store of information. His black-haired daughter Elizabeth was 17, about a year younger than I , and a perfect delight to be with;. We could talk about poetry and music, and she shared her father’s and my fascination with the world of natural history. The whole family invited me to meals and to such social events as Sunday picnics, Sunday being one of the few days on which cadets at A & M were not required to march to the Mess Hall in strict military formation for every meal. All of the Taylors— Dr. Taylor, Mrs. Taylor, Elizabeth, her older sister Harriet and younger brother Benton — were unfailingly kind. In May of my sophomore year, Dr. Taylor told me of a possible summer job with the Biological Survey. It would entail camping out for the whole summer, making a study of the fauna of Walker County, Texas, and would pay $50.00 a month plus expenses. This sounded, to put it mildly, like heaven, and I lost no time in filing my application. But I was not accepted. So, early in the summer of 1936 I joined my Mom and Dad and my two younger sisters, Nell and Ann, in Livingston, in Polk County. They had just moved there from Crockett, in Houston County. (The city of Houston, just to keep things straight, is in Harris County.) Dad, a civil engineer with the Highway Department, was able to ii A Naturalist in Show Business PROLOGUE wangle a job for me (not easy to do during the Great Depression ) as a laborer on a road crew, digging culverts for the improving of a highway. Even on the operator’s end of a shovel, it was good to be outdoors. Polk County is the locale of the Big Thicket, which, although not yet dedicated as a State Reserve, was widely known to be teeming with wildlife. And there was plenty of that wildlife to be seen along the road where we worked. We often saw and heard Pileated Woodpeckers, locally known as Gawdamighty Birds from their call, and there were lots of the armadillos which had begun migrating into Texas only 30 or so years earlier. During the lunch break one day, I caught a large Diamondback Water Snake (Natrix rhombifera), and proudly displayed it to my shovel mates. They insisted that it was a deadly Water Moccasin, using the local term "Pied-ed" Moccasin to distinguish it from the rather drab, though truly venomous, Cottonmouth. To prove its harmlessness, I screwed up my courage and persuaded this non-venomous creature to bite my left forearm, which it did quite enthusiastically with its fish-grabbing teeth. This made some scratches, and drew a little blood—but it proved nothing to my shovel-mates other than that I obviously had some sort of a charm against its poison. This job lasted only a couple of weeks, and its ending had all the elements of bad theater, but I swear it really happened that way. I mentioned to the foreman one day that I was a sign-painter, enlarging quite a bit upon my limited expertise, and he immediately arranged for me to exchange my shovel for a paint brush. The next morning, armed with my own brushes and the Highway Department's paint, I was set to lettering a large caution sign warning of the culvert work. The bare wooden sign had been erected, and all I had to do was to paint it flat white and put in the required red and iii A Naturalist in Show Business PROLOGUE black letters , including the heading "Drive Slow." (I wondered aloud if it shouldn't be "Drive Slowly," but the boss, wisely, didn't want to talk about it.) The sign was to bear those large words plus some smaller letters at the bottom saying something about the Highway Department and the relation of this project to an over-all plan. The culvert crew was working a mile or two away, back toward town, and after driving me past their workplace to dump me at the sign, they returned to it, leaving me alone at the blank signboard. The sun, which can be fierce in an East Texas summer, was especially hot that day, and as soon as I had painted in the white background, it was reflected direxcly into my eyes. By the time the whole thing had been laid out and painted, the glare and the heat, coupled with the smell of the paint, had upset my stomach and given me a first-class headache. Quitting time couldn't have come too soon. Quitting time finally came, all right, but the personnel truck didn't. My comrades had forgotten me. Finally realizing that nobody was coming, I picked up my brushes and walked home in a grumbling dudgeon. On that five-mile walk, only a few cars passed, and none of them answered my pleading thumb. The family home lay on the far side of Livingston, and upon entering the town at its near side, I finally got a ride for the last half-mile or so. The driver was curious about me, and when I told him my name and home address he stopped the car in astonishment, exclaiming that he worked for Western Union, and was in the process of delivering a telegram to me! He handed it over, and although his job was thereby accomplished, he was kind enough to continue the journey and take me the rest of the way home. iv A Naturalist in Show Business PROLOGUE On the way, I read the telegram, and headache and disgruntlement were no more: Dr. Taylor was telling me that one of the selected candidates for the Survey job had backed out, and that the job was mine if I wanted it! I should telegraph my intentions if I wanted the job, and to report to him in Huntsville as soon as possible! I have no memory of how I quit the highway job. I guess I just left, and Dad made my apologies and signed off for me; before the end of the following day, I was long gone. Dr. Taylor's Survey crew consisted of four of us summer boys, plus Dr. Taylor himself, camping out in several successive spots selected by Dr. Taylor. The work was a preliminary biological exploration, using the standard techniques of that period. The idea was to collect and preserve specimens of all the animals we came across. We each had a 20-gauge double-barreled shotgun, with an auxiliary adapter in one barrel to take a .22 rifle cartridge loaded with graphite dust shot; the other barrel had a regular 20-gauge shotgun shell loaded with small bird pellets.
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