Composing a Further Life

uncle in Chicago and spent summers shining shoes in his uncle’s barbershop, starting as a twelve-year-old. “Glen Walsh. He was an extraordinary man, a guy with a poor fifth-grade education, who had a seven-chair barbershop and met a payroll every week. His sons worked in the shop. One son became a judge in Chicago; another had a law office. He treated me very much like a son.
    “As I look back, I remember what a great manager he was. He hired two porters in his barbershop, and the job of a porter meant you kept the shop clean and you brushed people off when they got out of the chair. They would give you a dime or fifteen cents, or you shined their shoes, and they would pay you fifty cents for the shine, and maybe they would tip you a quarter or so. Well, when I came up in the summer, another person coming in, it cut into the income of the people who were there all year, so my uncle did two things, one of which I didn’t learn about until after I left. He supplemented their income during the summer when I was there, gave them extra money. And secondly, he gave me some of the dirtiest jobs to do around the shop. I had to clean the spittoons and I had to mop the floors. I resented cleaning the spittoons; I didn’t resent mopping the floors because that seemed like heavy work and I was trusted to get the floor clean. He was a great manager, everything being orderly and clean, so I was kind of proud to be chosen to do that. Cleaning spittoons wasn’t any fun.”
    “Good thing you didn’t know much biology then,” I joked.
    “He was a figure I could look up to as someone who had accomplished and who had very high standards. He was uncompromising and a person of great physical courage,” Dick said of his uncle. When labor organizers tried to pressure his sons working in the barbershop into joining, he refused to let them. “So he would bring his shotgun to the shop and put it in the corner. Now the unions were run by organized crime, and they could have taken him out just like that. But I think they figured it wasn’t worth the trouble. He was willing to put things on the line that way. He was that kind of person.”
    “Barbershops are very important community centers in the black community, right?” I said. “I mean, people would have known he was doing that, and it would have influenced them.” That twelve-year-old boy was certainly impressed by the quiet presence of that shotgun, but he was equally impressed by the quiet determination behind it and by the order and cleanliness of the barbershop.
    As Dick moved on in life, he mostly encountered fairness and, especially, helpful teachers and mentors. At the University of Kansas, where he majored in chemistry and graduated in 1957, he was placed in a scholarship hall, the first black to be so admitted, and was elected president of the hall in his second year. Although his teachers were expecting him to go to graduate school, he initially took a research job at Monsanto in St. Louis, and there again found someone to admire, Bob Redoux, who had gotten his master’s degree as part of a Monsanto program. “He was just terrific, just a wonderful person to work for and with,” Dick said. “Probably the most gifted person I have ever seen in a laboratory. It was like watching a very skilled pianist. You would just watch the way he handled reagents and glassware and the way he moved—he had this towel he put over his arm. It was a performance.”
    Dick married his first wife, Barbara Ann, in St. Louis, and then in 1958 went on to three years at UC Berkeley, where he shifted into biochemistry. He grinned. “Chemists are smarter than biochemists, just like physicists are smarter than chemists and mathematicians are smarter than physicists. It’s a different order of abstraction. But biochemistry gave me a chance to show that I could do quite well at Berkeley. Then the second semester came along, the preliminary exam. The preliminary exam at Berkeley was different from what it was in most places. There the first question was, ‘Tell us about your research.’ And that was the most important question you were asked during that examination. This meant that from the beginning you had to find a lab you thought you could work in and get going on a research project. And they expected results. You didn’t have to have a paper published by the end of your first year, but you would come and work in the lab, and after a while you kind of knew what you were doing.