Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  Apologies ahead of time for any formatting or editing problems introduced during the digital translation. Let me know if you find a glitch, and I’ll do my best to fix it.

  If you have corrections, comments, or questions, you can reach me at http://www.thomashager.net.

  THOMAS HAGER

  Eugene, Oregon

  May 2010

  CHAPTER 1

  The West

  He could see everything from here.

  The green Willamette River, dotted with fishing and pleasure boats, slid in a long curve right to left. The far bank was fringed with cottonwoods and oaks, and he could see beyond that to the patchwork of farms and woodlots that filled the valley and, farther still, to the foothills of the Cascades, blanketed in black-green firs. Over it all rose Mount Hood, a jagged, solitary, snow-covered peak that guarded the valley. It made sense from here, the geography of his home. He liked the sense of seeing how things fit and of being where no one else came, and he loved the height and the wind—and the sense of danger.

  It was 1916, and Linus Pauling, fifteen years old, was clinging to the top of a crumbling smokestack in an abandoned smelter near the small town of Oswego, Oregon. He was a solitary boy with a quick and restless intelligence and was not afraid of much—not of exploring Sucker Creek, where his mother had warned him not to go because his father had broken his arm there when he was a boy; not of high-wiring out on the skeletal wooden railroad trestle over the Willamette while his sisters squealed in fright; not of climbing hand over hand up the rusted rungs of the smelter smokestack to its top, eight stories up in the air. He had no one to tell him no.

  The smelter was his playground, a place he came often on weekends when he visited his grandparents, riding the trolley and the interurban train from his home in East Portland to theirs, a few miles south in Oswego, where his grandmother fussed over him in German and fed him cake and his grandfather let him sleep on a pallet in the shack at the smelter, where he was the night watchman. They spoiled him because he was their only son's only son and because their son was dead.

  On Sunday he would ride home, sometimes with plunder. Exploring the smelter, he had found an old testing laboratory, a place where iron ore had once been assayed. Someone had left a good deal behind when the smelter closed: shelves crowded with small specimen bottles for holding ore samples; large, dark carboys of concentrated acids; various bottles and boxes of chemicals; odds and ends of laboratory glassware and equipment.

  Linus brought an old, battered suitcase with him from home and began loading up everything he could carry. This was not stealing, he told himself; it was more like salvage, because the laboratory had been abandoned. Nobody wanted these things but him. He packed the suitcase with pounds of potassium permanganate and other chemicals and carried it home with him on the train, innocently looking at the other passengers while gripping between his legs five gallons of concentrated nitric acid. Another time he took apart a still for making pure water and brought it home in pieces, thinking of making a fortune supplying pure water to garages for car batteries. Then he found out how little people would pay for pure water. His greatest feat was the transport of a small, brick-lined electric furnace. Since it could not be disassembled, he talked a friend into helping him haul it down to the river, where they loaded it into a borrowed canoe, paddled miles downriver, then pushed it two miles home up Hawthorne Boulevard in a wheelbarrow.

  When he was done, he had a surprisingly sophisticated laboratory in the basement of his mother's boardinghouse, in a roughly made room he had hammered together from odds and ends of salvaged lumber.

  Besides his grandparents' house, this was the one place he could go to get away from his mother, whom he hated, and his sisters, who often annoyed him. This was the one place where he could make sense of things.

  It was the only place that felt like home to him.

  Because his real home, his true home, the place where his family had been complete and he had been truly happy, was several years in the past and several hundred miles to the east.

  "Doctor" Pauling

  Condon, Oregon, sits on the side of a high plateau overlooking a thousand square miles of gully-scarred brown-and-gold hills. It is a dry country. The town sits in the middle of a vast volcanic plateau that spreads east from the Cascades. The mountains lift and shred the rain clouds as they sail inland from the Pacific, wringing out the moisture and giving it to the Willamette Valley. By the time the air gets to Condon, it is sere and crystalline, too dry to grow anything but bunchgrass and sagebrush.

  To the first white pioneers, this arid land was the far end of the Great American Desert, a final barrier to be overcome on their way to the Willamette Valley a few score miles farther west. It was not until later, when some of them found the Eden at the end of the trail too crowded or too rainy, that a few trickled back east over the mountains, pushing out the local Indians and following the gullies up into the rolling hills to fatten their sheep and cattle on the bunchgrass. The creek beds held the only easy water, and the first pioneers made good ranches and farms down there, long, narrow strips of surprising green snaking through the plateau.

  Outside of the creeks, one of the few substantial sources of water was Summit Springs, a large, cold font that sprang out of the rocks high on a hillside. It was here, in 1879, that Harry C. Condon, a lawyer in the nearby town of Alkali, platted a town and named it after himself.

  To everyone's surprise, it boomed. An enterprising farmer discovered he could sink a well in the plateau and find ample water, then harvest two good crops of grain a year from the area's deep, windblown volcanic soil. Within a decade hundreds of settlers had moved in, and one observer was calling the Condon area "Kansas with hills." By the turn of the century the town had become the county seat and regional shipping center for some of the richest wheat-growing land in the world. Per capita income in the area was among the highest in Oregon. Promoters began calling the dry plateau "the Inland Empire" and Condon "Wheat City."

  - - -

  On a blisteringly hot summer day in 1899, Herman Henry William Pauling stepped off the stagecoach in Condon. Twenty-two years old, tall, clean-shaven, with wavy blond hair, full lips, and a penchant for dressing well—high collars, dark suits, and a pair of pince-nez—he cut a figure in the rough-and-tumble town. He had been asked to come to Condon by a group of Portland investors who wanted him to start a pharmacy. And he did not like what he saw.

  Instead of the booming regional mercantile center that had been described to him, he was looking at a raw, dirty little farming town— six blocks of rough wooden buildings facing a wide dirt street, several under construction, a scattering of small houses, and a public watering trough. Chickens scratched in the road, flies were thick, and dogs roamed everywhere. Beyond the end of Main Street was nothing but wheat farms and desert. No trees, no rivers or lakes, no other towns. Just a huge sky, a thin pall of dust, and the sound of the wind.

  It was disillusioning, but he wasn't there to enjoy the scenery. He set off to inspect the site that had been arranged for his new enterprise. Condon's only "drugstores" until Pauling arrived were storefronts where untrained storekeepers sold an appalling collection of sometimes useless, sometimes dangerous, patent medicines, many of which were used on both man and beast. The only other option for remedies was through the medicine shows still making the rural circuit, with quacks hawking their cure-alls from the backs of wagons.

  Complaints from physicians unable to get reliable drugs and a public tired of useless, expensive medicines finally spurred regulation in Oregon in the 1890s. Reputable druggists formed associations and policed their members. A state board of pharmacy was formed early in the 1900s. In this atmosphere of change and reform, a group of Portland investors saw a chance to make money: Full-scale drugstores staffed by registered pharmacists in fast-growing towns would outsell the patent-medicine shops and make a fortune. Condon looked like a good test market. And Pauling was just the sort of young man to make their new en
terprise fly.

  Despite his youth, he had already earned a reputation around Portland as a well-trained, hardworking, bright, and likable pharmacist. His parents were German immigrants who had come west from New York and settled in Oswego, a little town south of Portland, drawn by the lure of employment in what was then the biggest iron foundry west of the Rockies. Herman (born "Hermann," he later dropped the second "n") was born during a stop in Missouri. An ambitious boy, he dropped out of school in the tenth grade and talked himself into an apprenticeship with an Oswego druggist who taught him the craft of compounding medicines.

  Pharmacy was as much a craft in those days as a science. At the turn of the century there was no synthetic pharmaceutical industry, no Food and Drug Administration, little regulation of the purity or quality of drugs. There was, however, a self-governing pride in the quality of their work that guided the best pharmacists. Herman learned from one, a teacher who emphasized the absolute importance of careful measurement and conscientious formulation, who stressed the power that drugs had and the responsibility druggists shouldered in their preparation. Herman's Bible became the Pharmacopoeia of the United States of America, a recipe book for the preparation of drugs, compiled by a national convention of pharmacists, from which he learned how to assay morphine and ferment bitter wine of iron; how to compound mustard liniment and extract syrup of rose; how to pull the active essences from wild cherries, coca, dandelions, and poppies and use them to make pills, ointments, tinctures, and oils.

  He was good at it, and his skill and sympathetic manner soon made Herman a town favorite: When the Oswego doctor left town, people would stop the teenager on the street and ask him to diagnose and prescribe for their medical problems. By the time he was nineteen Herman had moved to Portland and started working his way up the ladder in some of the city's biggest pharmacies. Within a few years he had earned an invitation to manage the Condon store.

  - - -

  Condon was delighted with its new pharmacist. The weekly newspaper rejoiced that "Doctor" Pauling was "a registered, reliable and experienced druggist"—in contrast to the patent-medicine peddlers. It was an image that Herman did his best to live up to. His father may have been an uneducated farmer and foundry worker, but Herman had found a way to become a professional man running his own business. He opened his doors, worked hard, and soon earned a reputation for honesty and skill in his craft. Among those who took special notice of the young druggist were Condon's young unmarried women. To them, the arrival of an eligible bachelor of Herman's caliber was cause for celebration.

  This was especially true in the household of Condon businessman, attorney, and town founder Linus Wilson Darling. Darling had four daughters, his "Four Queens," he called them: Goldie Victoria, Lucy Isabelle, Estella Martha, and Elizabeth Abigail. Goldie, the eldest, had married a leading merchant in town. The next in line for matrimony was eighteen-year-old Lucy Isabelle, a handsome, dark-haired, occasionally melancholy girl whom everyone called Belle.

  All through the fall and winter of 1899 the town's dashing new pharmacist was a featured guest at dinners, dances, and sleigh rides. And almost everywhere Herman Pauling went, he found himself talking to Belle Darling. By Halloween they were ardent sweethearts—Herman wrote poems to "A maiden fair with jet black hair / Her heart beats kind and true / She confides in me her every care / This maid with eyes light blue"—and by Christmas they were planning their wedding. An ornate valentine in 1900 came to Belle inscribed with a note to "my sweetest fairy" in which Herman outlined his role as a husband: ". . . You shall share my every joy equally while our sorrows I will bear alone. . . . Dear love, when life's storms are raging fiercely I offer you my arms as your protection, and you can trust in their fond yet firm embrace. When in after years the cares of home and motherhood bear upon your mind you shall find me ever an able assistant and benefactor." In May 1900 they were married. The ceremony drew a good-sized crowd of the town's leading citizens to Condon's largest church, which was beflowered, the local newspaper noted, "like a veritable Garden of Eden." One witness recalled that Herman and Belle were the handsomest couple she had ever seen.

  - - -

  Life's storms, however, quickly followed. Within weeks of the wedding, the Portland investors behind Pauling's drugstore received an attractive offer for the business and decided to sell out. Herman was not asked to stay on. He searched through other small towns in the area to find one where he might start his own business but couldn't come up with the right combination of affordability and opportunity. He was forced to return with his bride to Portland and take a lesser job as a clerk for a drug-supply company. It was a disappointing step down, in both position and income. Herman and Belle could afford nothing better than rooms in a cheap apartment house on the edge of Portland's Chinatown.

  It was here, on February 28, 1901, that their first child, Linus Carl Pauling, was born. His name was traditional: The Linus was taken from Belle's father; Carl, from Herman's father. The birth of a son was a joyful event for Herman, who was by nature a warm and loving family man, close to his own parents throughout his life and affectionate to children. But Belle's reaction was more mixed. She was only nineteen years old when Linus was born, and like any small-town girl brought to the big city, she wanted to immerse herself in shopping, the theater, amusement parks—all the pleasures she could never have in Condon. Now, before she had had a chance to fully enjoy any of these delights, she had to face the responsibilities and constraints of motherhood. Linus was followed within three years by two sisters, Pauline in 1902 and Frances Lucile (who later dropped her first name and was known just as Lucile) on New Year's Day, 1904. Despite—and in part because of—her deep love for Herman, Belle began to resent the children. She started hectoring her husband to bring in more money and became a complaining, sometimes indifferent mother.

  Belle's difficulty adapting to parenthood was rooted in her childhood, one scarred by neglect, uncertainty, and the whims of a vain and unloving father. Her father, Linus Darling, was a self-made, self-concerned man with little time for his daughters. A Canadian by birth, at age seven he had been deserted by his own father, who ran off to fight for the Union in the U.S. Civil War. Destitute, Darling's mother moved her six children to New York State, where she died in 1867. The children were scattered, Linus Darling ending up a "bound boy" working for his room and board in New Jersey. He ran away as a teenager to work his way to Oregon, where he became a true western character: quick-witted, fun-loving, hard-drinking, peripatetic—a charming, selfish, irresponsible dreamer.

  While teaching school in the lush farm country of Marion County, Oregon, Darling met his future wife, Belle's mother, Alcy Delilah Neal, among his students. The Neal side of the family was pioneer stock, sober, hardworking, and long-lived. If there was a gene for long life in Linus Pauling, it can be traced back to Cornelius O'Neal, his great-great-grandfather, an Irish immigrant who served with "Swamp Fox" Francis Marion during the Revolutionary War. According to family lore, Cornelius came west in 1844 at age eighty-three with some of his thirteen children and then trekked back to Missouri in his nineties to bring back some more family. His son, Linus's great-grandfather Calvin Neal, homesteaded a rich square mile of bottomland in the Willamette Valley and went on to sire nineteen children by three wives. (The last was thirty-one years younger than he.) Calvin, too, had the Neal love for life: After his death at age sixty-seven the local paper reported that "fourteen hours after his supposed death, [he] revived and lived several hours longer," before the final dissolution of body and soul took place.

  Calvin's daughter Alcy Delilah and her new husband, Linus Darling, moved east of the mountains in the late 1870s to try farming. They failed. When Belle was three years old, the family faced starvation and was saved only by sheer luck when her father gambled his saddle against fifty dollars in a political bet and won. A year later, Linus Darling had talked himself into the position of postmaster in the new town of Condon, where he built and ran the town's first drugstore (
the patent-medicine type; he never received training as a pharmacist) and post office. Just when it looked as though their family life had stabilized, when Belle was seven years old, her youngest sister died of fever. A few months later, her mother gave birth to a stillborn son and never recovered from the trauma; tended by her four remaining young daughters, she died a month later.

  Belle and her sisters were left in the care of a father whose interests centered almost entirely on himself. The girls looked after themselves, with occasional help from a hired woman, while Darling concentrated on running his businesses and teaching himself law. When Belle was twelve, the family's luck turned again: Darling married a wealthy young widow who had inherited one of Condon's finest wheat farms and brought with her a dowry of ten thousand dollars. Linus Darling suddenly found himself a gentleman farmer (although under his guidance the farm rapidly decayed), with a growing law practice. Belle spent her teenage years as one of the gentry of Condon, living in a big house, able to afford boarding school, with fine dresses and trips to Portland. But she suffered from bouts of melancholy, and she was never close to her father. After she married, Linus Darling and Belle seldom saw each other. Linus Pauling was nine years old when the man he was named for died; he would remember visiting his grandfather only once in his life.

  - - -

  Her own disjointed childhood left Belle ill equipped to take care of her young son and daughters. She wanted to be loved and cared for; she gave what love she had to her husband and seemed to have little for her children. Herman, desperate to make her happy, to buy her the ease and entertainment she craved, worked harder than ever. He was extremely ambitious, and he was willing to jump from job to job and put in punishingly long hours to make more money. The family moved often: to Oswego for a time, to be near Herman's parents and in a healthier atmosphere than that of the big city, then to the state capital of Salem, fifty miles away, where Herman took a job as a traveling jewelry salesman. He was gone for days at a time, driving his horse and buggy through hub-deep mud to the small towns scattered through the valley.