Newsletter
Volume 28 | 2005 | Number 1
Memories of Ogden Lindsley
By Rue L. Cromwell
I have just returned from a wonderful memorial service for Ogden Lindsley, presided over by Og’s wife Nancy and prepared by her with the help of survivors and friends. As a thanks to Nancy for her efforts, I jot down these stories of Og, about which she may or may not know.
I actually had little contact with Og during my life, but all of those contacts were memorable. We first met in the mid-1960s on Mt. Hood in Oregon, where a conference on mental retardation was being held at Timberline Lodge. Og was a tall slim red-haired articulate wild looking guy. He was a member of a group of graduates of Harvard’s B. F. Skinner. They came away from their training with him highly evangelistic. His methods to analyze and modify behavior seemed to have unlimited applications. I knew others of this group; Og was not the only evangelist.
At this beautiful old Lodge, once a favorite of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Og presented early in the conference and did so with a blast. He accused those of us doing research on personality constructs and psychotherapy of having blood and guilt on our hands. He urged us to wash our hands of the blood and guilt, cleanse ourselves, and come follow him and learn the true principles that will save humanity. Of course, my grad students and I, sitting in the audience, had already prepared our research papers on personality, social learning, and related topics. There was little we could do but listen to the assault and then later present our research findings when our time came.
A day or two later I happened to charter a “snow cat” with Og and a few other people to depart from our barren treeless rockful environment and take a trip into the mountain peak glacier, going up toward the top of Mt. Hood. …
… I wound up getting a seat by Og. I was not sure I wanted it. I feared I would get more of his Macbeth sermon and cantankerous theoretical discussion. It was not that at all. He was most affable and friendly. We found many things to talk about. The only professional reference was a question. ….So, Og asked: “How is it, Rue, that you have the reputation of turning out all these good Ph.D. students who get all the good jobs throughout the United States. How is it you teach them?”
“It is very simple,” I said. “I get all of them from the different year levels of their training together once a week, make beer available, and let them conduct a seminar. Year by year the older ones have taught the younger ones about research and about mental retardation. That is it.”
In only a moment Og asked, “But how did the oldest one in the program learn?”
I thought for a moment and then confessed, “I have no idea.”
That incident became lost to my memory. Og, however, saw some humor in it. When we met again at the University of Kansas about a quarter century later, he quoted my comments word for word with great joy while our mutual colleagues and I listened….
By the way, when Og worked on something, he did not always have the right tool. …. [One] time he was in his apartment in Cambridge while he was doing, I believe, a post-doctoral fellowship with Skinner at Harvard. He was living in an area inhabited by Harvard junior faculty. Og’s faucet had been leaking, and he became determined to fix it. But the only tool he had was an 18-inch monkey wrench. This is the kind of wrench you would use on a water hydrant, not a faucet. As he worked, Og could hear some yelling. Even though morning, Og assumed it was drinking and frivolity, but the yelling continued. Og finally paid attention and realized that the sound was coming from a nearby apartment. Also, it sounded like someone was getting hurt. So Og decided he would stroll down and listen more closely. When he got to the apartment the door was cracked open. Indeed someone was getting assaulted. Og, feeling timid and still not convinced he should interfere, opened the door and stood in the doorway. The assailant turned to see this towering figure backlit in the doorway of the apartment with an 18-inch monkey wrench in his hand. The assailant immediately concluded he had seen far more than he wanted to see. He raised a window and leapt out to the ground and ran away. Og took the victim, a Harvard junior faculty member we both knew, to the emergency room for swabbing and bandages. The bandages were worn for a few days, operationally attesting to the extent of injury. Og remarked to me that nothing was ever mentioned about the incident during the years to follow.
Just the other day, maybe just two months ago, Ginni and I joined the Lawrence Athletic Club. When I took my stuff into the men’s locker room, I immediately ran onto Og. I was there to build up my shoulders and cardiovascular strength to prepare for my shoulders to be totally replaced on each side. He was there, had been there for some time as a regular, to strengthen his heart, following a valve operation. I had not seen him to talk with him for many years. Almost every time I came back to the Athletic Club Og was there. It was in this way that I spent my final and, in fact best, days of acquaintance with him, always standing face to face, stark naked, in the men’s locker room.
Og did most of the talking. He was senior to me and treated me so in his ever-enthusiastic, generative, story-telling way. He was 82 and, after all, I was only 76. He told me of his heart operation, how many physicians warned him against heavy physical exercise on the weights, and how he was ignoring them. He kept in close touch with his cardiologist, who approved of Og’s general physical exercise.
The cardiologist said he knew the inside of Og’s heart better than Og and better than all the others. After all, he had lived in that heart for several hours while replacing the valve. As for me, Og gave me pep talks about how much my exercise was going to help my shoulder operation and to not give it up. As I look back now, I think I needed his comments more than I would admit to him. He enjoyed his upstaging moves. One day he confided to me that he was now lifting far heavier weights than the doctor and the club’s trainers prescribed. He winked at me, smiled broadly, and gave one of the handlebars on his large gray mustache a tweak.
Since my own family had endured losses in World War II, I was always ready to hear stories about Og’s days as a prisoner-of-war (POW) in Nazi Germany. The trouble was, when I talked with him I was usually lightheaded from a heavy workout, so I had trouble remembering the details of most of the stories. The part I remember best was during the time when the Russians were advancing their front in close to Og’s prison camp. The prison guards decided to vacate, take a long march across Germany, and avoid being captured by the Russians. With the POWs already ill fed, the decision to evacuate was so abrupt that no food, no supplies, and no supervision from a higher Nazi echelon were taken. They just marched away.
As time passed day after day the POW group became sicker and sicker. Some died off. One prisoner dug up a frozen potato with a stick and was shot to death by a guard on grounds that the potato was personal property of the local farmer. Certainly the hungry guards kept the potato.
Although I had known of this only from a Charlie Chaplin film, the prisoners with Og tried boiling leather to see if they could get some nutrient. They could not. Perhaps they were able to extract some tanning fluid. Finally, they discovered that the bark of a particular tree had nutrients. Og told me what kind of tree. I wish I could remember but I must have been a bit dizzy and the time from the day’s workout. By the time Og’s group in the caravan got access to these trees, prior prisoners had already stripped the bark from them as high as one can reach. In typical “greatest generation” style, Og was identified as the tallest POW in the group. So Og was assigned to hug a tree while another prisoner would stand on Og’s shoulders in order to reach a place on the tree where bark was available. It was not an easy job. Og was already weak, feeling sick, quite yellow in his skin from jaundice, and had some other kind of skin disorder on his face and body. But the job got done.
I wondered if this image I had of Og hugging trees across Germany would appeal to environmentalists’ organizations, but then I faced the tragicomedy that both trees and POWs were dying.
Finally it became very clear that the guards marching the prisoners had no idea where they were or where they were going. They, perhaps wisely, refused to listen either to prisoners or local peasants to get directions. Then they were most happy to encounter a couple of Nazi officers in a vehicle. As they sought directions, Og became apprehensive. He could well imagine at this point with the advancing Allies, that the POWs might be forced into some kind of participation in the war on the German side. Ironically, Og learned later that a labor camp under Stalin would have been the outcome with a capture by the Russians. Og could still tolerate walking, but he decided that he had just had enough of war. So he said to himself that if the caravan of prisoners turned south or west he would stay with them. If they turned north or east he was going to escape. Sure enough, the direction they moved the prisoners was east. So Og and one other prisoner (from some non-English speaking country; I regret I cannot remember) stole away from the rest of the group and headed east. They knew that sooner or later they would encounter an ocean.
I cannot remember the details from here, but all was successful and the two prisoners not only found friendly troops but also very shortly were in a hospital being treated for their illnesses.
Then, back to the present, Og did not show up in the locker room. I thought not much about it for a while since neither of us came daily. As days passed, however, still no Og. Finally I became concerned about his overextending on the weights. So I asked a trainer entering the locker room if he knew anything about Og. Og was so friendly and had been there so long that all the members and trainers seemed to know him mutually by their first names. The trainer broke down momentarily as he told me that Og had passed away. He mumbled some incoherent things about having experienced a lot of death in his young life. I could get no clear explanation about the reason for death.
Shortly I asked another member if he knew of Og and how he died. It was from him I learned of a bile duct problem and was reassured that the death had nothing to do with his heart or over lifting weights. I was momentarily happy. Og had challenged himself and won in this particular contention with the world. Later on I learned from Nancy that the bile duct problem very likely originated from that period when he was a prisoner of war and yellow and sick.
For days afterwards, as I entered the locker room, I would look over into Og’s corner of the locker room to see if he was there. I looked for that broad smile that made clear upon each encounter that he was glad to see me. Yes, I knew he was dead, but I still couldn’t help but glance over there. I still do that once in a while. I just wasn’t prepared for Ogden Lindsley to die.