TV Inspired Memory of a Different Sort of Person.

[arcticfox2005]

Have you ever had the TV remind you of something in your life that happened decades ago?

Last night after switching from the 10 o'clock news, the wife and I were watching an episode of The Big Bang Theory.

Sheldon was visiting Amy in her lab at Cal Tech and she was busy slicing a brain into pieces for probable study under the microscope. While holding the scalpel in her left hand she reached over with her right, picked up a sandwich and took a bite of it. That triggered the following.

North High School, Phoenix, sometime in the early 80's. I was teaching Mathematics and my best friend there was Gary, the chair of the Science Department. He was previously involved the hiring of a new Biology teacher,
A B, who was a lot like Sheldon, brilliant but a little strange. Gary told me this story. A B had a hobby of collecting bones, processing them and assembling them into skeletons which he had several of in his classroom. He had one day asked his honors class if any of them had recently lost a pet. One of the students said yes, she had had a pet monkey and it had died the previous month and it was buried in their back yard. A B was immediately interested and asked her if she would have one of her parents call him as he would really like to exhume it and thereby have a skeleton of a species that would be new to him. He got permission and showed up the following Saturday and left their house with the remains in a hard-sided aluminum suitcase. For the next couple of weeks he spent his lunch period in the dispensary with a hot plate, a stew pot and tweezers and forceps. He would remove a portion of the remains from the suitcase, place it in the pot of boiling water, and after it had been in there a sufficient length of time, pull out a bone and pick the remaining flesh off with the tweezers and forceps.

All the time, simultaneously eating his lunch.

Yes, A B was a dedicated teacher, but a little strange.

 

[darsben]

Two similar stories. My human anatomy professor would eat lunch in the cadaver room while we dissected the cadaver. If asked a question she would come to the cadaver in question and put her hands in the cadaver and answer the question. She would then go back to eating her lunch usually a no utensil lunch. Also in the county I live in the medical examiner would regularly boil body parts to clean the bones. They did this outdoors in huge pots. The facility was very near the homeless shelter spawning two varieties of jokes.