How Green Was My NIH
"Thomas Wolfe said: You can't go home again.
But shouldn't you be able to saunter past the old neighborhood without throwing up?
--Gene Weingarten, The Washington Post
[This was written before 9/11/01. By A.M., 9/12, the entire NIH Campus was secured against casual visitors, passers-through and has been made permanently so since. Recently a wrought-iron fence surrounding the property was completed.]
Largest and most depressing of upheavals going on in Bethesda is the work going on in front of The Clinical Center (Bldg #10, the largest) at NIH. Whatever it is--a nuclear power plant, missile silo, castle, place for chariot races--is taking forever to complete.
The Clinical Center loomed over our backyard. It was our backyard. We spent a lot of time there in 35 years. In fact, my grandmother worked in Central Sterile Supply from 1958-72. I remember helping her put caps on glass syringes and marvelling at the hand-drills that, she taught with an impish grin, were for boring into people's brains. The list of friends who worked and still work in that building goes on and on.
Our church was the Clinical Center chapel before 5:00P.M. Saturday Mass* came out. Even 32 years ago, we Conways, who stretch our religion out through the week, couldn't take St. Jane's Eucharistic Extravaganzas. NIH chaplains didn't dally when most of the attendants were falling over from chemotherapy, leaking brain-holes etc.
The NIH campus was a very serene place in the old days, lots of quiet, lonely sylvan walkways. You could park right next to the Clinical Center entrance which was a glass-walled canopy flanked by lily-ponds. This all fell to the huge glass box of an addition in 1983. We didn't like the glass box, but we got used to it and compared to what's going up now, it was the Parthenon.
In latter times my parents, she by day and he by night, performed the corporal work of "Visiting the Sick" on the Clinical Center patients who were giving themselves over as guinea pigs to research. I did that as a high-school service project until I got accidentally locked in the Psycho Ward. Fortunately the nurse in charge was a classmate's mother and let me out.
Otherwise I crossed the campus daily going to and from the Metro, often availing myself of the many Men's rooms NIH has to offer. I was a smoker then and Surgeon General C. Everett Coop, who lived in one of the residences off West Drive, would give me black looks when he saw me with the old pipe.
My last contact with Building 10 was in 1994 when I took my dad over there weekly to be studied by NINDS.
We used to take a shortcut through an "Authorized-Personnel-Only" area and check up on the lab mice therein. Sometimes we'd find them all dead on the way back. I suspect they had been given cafeteria food.
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| The NIH Campus sometime in the 50s when the Woodmont Country Club golf course was adjacent. |
Copyright © 2001, 2003 by Neal J. Conway. All rights reserved.