L. Oppleman’s Pawn on Main Street in Lynchburg advertises itself as America’s oldest pawn shop. Jacob and Lena Oppleman started it in 1890. It was then passed down to their son Ike. When Ike died, a young man who worked in the store took it over but decided to keep the name. Each owner afterward did the same so to this day, L. Oppleman’s Pawn is open for business.
During the Depression, they must have done very good business. With little to no income coming in and no prospects for jobs, people parted with treasured objects just so that they could put food on the table. One day, when he was in his early teens, as he was walking past their front window and looking at all the interesting things they had displayed inside, my dad’s eyes landed on a perfect precision microscope. It cost twelve dollars.
In the early 1930s, twelve dollars had the buying power of about $230.00 in today’s market. It was a lot of money, and my dad could only dream of one day having something so wonderful to explore the world with.
My dad was a nerd.
About a week after the family’s big move back to Lynchburg, Dad started first grade. Ruffner School was an easy walk away from the new house. It housed grades 1-4. Fifth and six graders went to Garland Rhodes School on Rivermont Avenue. Rivermont Avenue was where the wealthy people in town lived, and Garland Rhodes was considered by them to be the top school. Despite its nearby location, Ruffner was not where kids from monied families went. The rich didn’t even want their kids associating with any of the Ruffner kids. When the Ruffner School “roughneck” kids went into fifth grade, they were placed in classes of their own, away from the wealthier kids.
Ruffner school had separate entrances for boys and girls and the playground was also segregated that way. Only white children went to these schools. Children of color were taught in different schools. While you were young, you might play with a black friend at home, but the educational system likely kept you from continuing those friendships as you got older. The class recited the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm every morning.
Teachers didn’t have to teach their kids that the races were different, because from a very young age they could all see for themselves that you were treated differently depending on the color of your skin. It was an accepted part of life. White kids got better teachers and more supplies and equipment, and Black kids had to make do with what was left over. It was expected that boys would grow up to become professionals and wage-earners and that girls would grow up to become housewives and mothers. So, that’s what most of them did. It was thought that education was wasted on people of color because they would never need it to do the menial and physically taxing jobs that they were heading for.
Some of the black kids that were my father’s age probably had living relatives that had begun their lives in slavery. There is an enormous difference between thinking of someone as free versus thinking of them as a freed slave. During the Constitutional Convention in 1787, it was decided that enslaved people would be considered 3/5th of a person for the purpose of determining a state’s population. The Dred Scott decision in 1857 stated that people descended from enslaved people could not ever be considered citizens. It wasn’t until 1868 that the 14th Amendment changed all of that on paper. Despite the time that has passed since then, we are still living with all that underlying inequality. 1868 sounds like ancient history but it was less than seventy years before the time that my dad was in grade school. There were plenty of people in Lynchburg, Virginia who still believed that black people were lesser beings. There are still far too many people, today, who believe that. Much of the Republican Party’s present-day legislation proposals are designed to keep that inequality going. Those who oppose this way of thinking have a never-ending uphill climb because those hateful ideas have been baked into the people who espouse them over generations.
I truly wonder if my sister and I would have maintained the friendships that we had with the children of the people who worked for my mother’s father in South Africa had we not left and moved back here. We were already going to different schools by the time we moved - mine was just down the road and theirs was many miles away in Location, the black township. Jabulani, who was a few years older than me, ended up going to college and becoming a teacher before dying from AIDS. N’Kosinkulu and Marva, who were between my sister and me age-wise, went to school, too, but died in violence before they finished. When we left, I was only in second grade, but I already knew that we were different. My black friends didn’t come to my white friends’ birthday parties.
In Lynchburg, at Ruffner school, after Christian prayers, lessons were taught. Classwork was written in pencil. When kids got older, they switched to pen and ink. Ballpoint pens hadn’t been invented yet. Instead, each desk had a little bottle of ink that sat in a hole in the upper part of the desktop. You had a wooden handle that you stuck a metal point in. The point was split so that when you dipped it into the ink bottle a little bubble of ink would attach to it. Using just the right amount of pressure on the paper the ink would stream out as you wrote. Too much pressure and it would just blob out and make a mess. My grandfather and his father used fountain pens which worked the same way but had a little reservoir of ink in the handle, so you didn’t have to keep dipping it into the well. They were expensive though, so dad didn’t get one of those until high school or even college.
Dad always tested extremely high on aptitude tests but was often not a great student. His grades veered all over the place. He was, however, obsessed with science.
Dad was the one kid out of a hundred that got a chemistry set as a present and not only played with it but expanded upon it. He very proudly mixed ferrous sulfate and tannic acid and made his own ink. One Christmas he got a little microscope that had a magnification of about 50x. That was enough to get a close-up look at a fly’s leg. After a while, he got a slightly better one that allowed him to be able to see individual cells in a piece of plant. My grandparents let him build a lab bench in the basement next to the coal bin. Remarkably, they installed a gas line so that he could use a Bunsen burner to heat things up instead of having to rely on just a candle.
My grandmother had gone to school with a woman named Nan Thornton who became the head of the chemistry department at Randolph-Macon College. Eunice arranged with her to let my father sit in class and observe experiments being done. He drooled over the flasks and beakers she used that he couldn’t afford. Up until that point he’d only ever seen things like that in textbooks.
Eunice had a younger brother named Scott who lived in New York. I never met him. He died before I was born. He was a bachelor for most of his life and very… artistic. He illustrated books and designed table linens. He and a partner designed a set of glass bowls that is in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. My family had all manner of different ways to describe my Great Uncle Scott, but I truly believe that, in the end, what everyone was trying to say, in their polite Southern way, really, was that he was gay. More on him later.
Anyway, Uncle Scott came down to Lynchburg for a visit and noticed my father’s interest in chemistry. He told him to make a list of all the glassware that he wanted. His “companion”, a guy named Irving Carey, was a vice-president at Corning Glass and was able to get him everything he asked for on the list and more. Suddenly my father had a lab full of professional equipment.
In Junior High School, my father contracted Scarlet Fever which was serious enough that he was quarantined at home for many weeks. The city health department tacked a grey sign on the door warning children to stay away. Eunice, my aunt Helen, and my great-aunt Martha all had to move in with the neighbors temporarily so that the latter two could keep going to school. While he was recovering in bed, he started writing off to companies for free samples of the chemicals that they advertised in magazines and the newspaper. Ultimately, he had to stay out of school for nearly six months until he fully gained his strength back. The samples started coming in.
My aunt Helen, who was younger than my father, came down with a throat infection that nearly killed her just as my father was getting better. There were no medicines available for either of these illnesses at the time. The only thing doctors could do was try and alleviate the symptoms. Dr. Echols, the ENT who lived across the street, would come over and swab Helen’s throat with mercurochrome or silver nitrate. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work, and she eventually had to go to the hospital. The infection spread throughout her body and my father remembers them cutting a hole in her back and inserting a rubber tube to drain her lungs. The tube had a large safety pin in it to keep it from sliding inside.
A woman named Miss Cook ran the clinical lab at the hospital. She didn’t have a lot of chemistry equipment, but she did have a kick-ass microscope. It was a Bausch and Lomb with three different lenses that rotated under a single eyepiece and a mechanical stage to set the slides you were looking at on. My father was in love. He hung around the lab every time he came with his mother to visit Helen. Helen accused him of being far more interested in Miss Cook than he was in her. It wasn’t Miss Cook he was lusting over, though, it was the microscope. Miss Cook occasionally let him look at things through it which only increased his desire to get a good one of his own.
Both he and Helen gradually recovered. They both missed a lot of school which they made up over the course of two summer school sessions. In addition to writing away for Chemical samples during that time, Dad also wrote away for Bauch and Lomb catalogs which he drooled over when they arrived.
When he walked by L. Oppleman’s Pawn that day and saw the microscope in the window, he was hooked. He knew he couldn’t afford it, but he went in to take a look. He says that they were very patient with him and demonstrated it to him then and every time he came in thereafter. He told my grandmother about it, and he must have worn her down because eventually, she went down to have a look at it herself. It was a lot of money to spend on something that they couldn’t eat or drive. After thinking about it, though, she went back a few days later and bought it for him.
In my father’s words, “I looked at everything with it. I collected water from various ponds and streams and made hay infusions and watched the paramecia, amoebas, and other protozoa. I also looked at algae, including the beautiful spirogyra, with its helical chloroplasts. I pricked my finger with a sterilized needle and looked at my blood cells. Once I placed a newly hatched goldfish about a quarter inch long still attached to the egg yolk at its abdomen and watched the blood cells circulate through a single artery going to the tail, through capillaries to the vein, and back to the heart.”
He kept that microscope for his entire life. I remember him showing me things in it. When I was about twelve, I think, I got a microscope of my own for Christmas. I used it a couple of times, but it didn’t ignite the passion in me that it did in my dad. My sister has his collection of microscopes now. I’m so glad we didn’t get rid of them.
As I read the pages where he describes all the things that interested him as a kid in endless loving detail, what impresses me the most, I think, is the idea of my grandparents encouraging him through all of it. For heaven’s sake, they let him run a gas line down next to the coal bin in the basement and stood by while he mixed God only knows what chemicals together day in and day out. That takes some faith. They were not idiots. They knew what he was doing.
There were three movie theatres in town that changed their films every three or four days. One of them was called the Isis. On Saturday afternoons for a dime, you could see a cowboy movie, a comedy, some cartoons, and a serial that often featured a mad scientist and a killer robot. In the newspaper, Buck Rogers and his adventures in outer space also appeared every week. That’s where it all started. Science Fiction led him straight to the real thing. A love of Science Fiction was another thing that we shared. He took me to see Star Wars when it first came out when I was fifteen. I was desperate to see it. It turns out, so was he. It didn’t take much convincing on my part. He loved it as much as I did.
While I didn’t devote my life to science, I remain enthralled by it. For my eleventh birthday party, when I could have done almost anything, what I wanted to do was bring a bunch of friends into the city and go to the American Museum of Natural History. It was my dad who brought us.
His whole life long, he never lost his sense of wonder for what he saw in the world around him. However much of what I have of that in me comes directly from him. As I walk down our neighborhood streets on the Upper West Side, I often pass rows of the ubiquitous reddish-brown stone townhouses. I always think, “Triassic sandstone.” That’s what those homes are built out of. It is a type of stone that was created during the Triassic period starting over 250 million years ago when sand compressed deep in the earth over untold eons. My father told my sister and me the story of that stone so many times that we could repeat it back to him verbatim. Every single time we were with my father, and we passed by something built out of it, my sister and I would yell, “Triassic sandstone” before he could get the story out again.
We’re both nerds, too.
Such brilliant detail, Richard! How fortunate you and Sue are to have grown up with a sharing, curious and interesting Dad.
What a wondered history. I had scarlet fever at 5 (1956). I was quarantined for two weeks and all my toys were incinerated. I was oldest of five at that point so no easy task for my mom. Today we know that scarlet fever (red rash) is a symptom of strep throat. Thinking your sister had same, but not rash. All it takes to remedy is penicillin or a derivative. They did not know that then. Untreated strep can be damaging and deadly. Glad they both survived!