| Philip H. Pope and Louise Smith Pope |
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Philip H. Pope was the author of the verses of "It's a Long Way to Amphioxus".
In 1921, he and his fiancee Louise Smith were attending the summer course
at the Biological Laboratory of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. They heard some students singing the chorus to the song, and Louise commented that Philip should write verses for it. He did.
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| Philip Pope, about 1960 |
Louise Smith Pope and Philip Pope
admire their daughter Edith in 1923 |
| Photographs courtesy of Edith Pope Patten |
Philip and Louise both came from Maine (Manchester and Augusta, respectively).
They met on a class trip to Washington, DC, when Philip was 21 and Louise was
14. Louise went to college and did graduate work at Smith College. Philip
was an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, and went on to do graduate work
at Harvard, completing a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in the
area of herpetology.
Philip proposed to Louise that summer at Cold Spring Harbor, and they were
subsequently married.
(Louise broke off her graduate work just short of her Ph.D. to, as her
daughter Edith says, "get her P.H.P. instead").
Philip Pope spent one year teaching biology at Reed College in 1922. In 1923
an infection of tuberculosis became active, and he entered the
Veterans' Hospital in Walla Walla, Washington. That year their
daughter Edith was born.
Philip Pope remained in the hospital for 6 years. After leaving the hospital he had
no job, and they tried farming. In 1930 the Popes were offered jobs teaching
Biology at Whitman College in Walla Walla. They remained on its faculty until
their retirement (Philip retired in 1953, Louise in 1962). Their daughter
Edith remembers field trips by car to the Columbia River not far from Walla
Walla, with the Popes and their students singing biological songs as they
drove. Philip also contributed substantially to the
collections of the Whitman College Herbarium.
Both Philip and Louise died in 1970.
The house where the Popes lived was called "The Vatican". Some feeling for
their sense of humor will be found in the
article in the Whitman Magazine about Louise Smith Pope, which is available on the web.
I am indebted for most of this information to Edith Pope Patten and
Art Rempel.
Joe Felsenstein
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