I keep thinking that things will settle down any day now, but I finally have to admit that this is not going to happen any time soon. It’s just frantic.
So I was digging through some boxes today on some sort of mission and I happened upon this newspaper photo. Let me just say that I see hundreds if not thousands of newspaper photos every week and flip past them without much thought, but this one reached out and seized my attention:
This is not normal. The hat, the corsage . . . . they don’t fit with the helium cryostat. I dug around trying to find out what on earth this was all about and was rewarded with a small scrap of newsprint wedged in between two pieces of paper. No date, but it had to have been 1954:
Well. What to make of this. I’m not sure, but I can confidently tell you that Mrs. Frank Henderson was what is referred to as a “live wire.” The shelf-life of cafe society is short so it’s not so easy to track her down, but it’s clear that Betty Henderson was a spectacular individual–a rebel from proper Boston, an accomplished athlete and a bit of a provocateur. Here’s the New York Times announcement of her wedding to Frank Henderson, an Oklahoma oilman, in 1912. He was her third husband and he stuck—strong fellow.
I still have no real notion of how she got mixed up with low temperature physics at the Rice Institute, but I aim to find out.