1948 magazine article about COLOMBIA, people, history, by biologist’s wife

Description

Selling is a 1948 magazine article about:
COLOMBIA
Title: Keeping House for a Biologist In Colombia
Author: Nancy Bell Fairchild Bates
Photographs by Marston Bates
Quoting the first page “Our decision to go to South America was made in mid-ocean in June, 1940, when we were fleeing home from Egypt where the war had made my husband's work impossible.
Both Marston and I had been brought up in the semitropical region of south Florida. He and my brother Sandy had caught butterflies along the dim trails of the Royal Palm State Park and hunted tree snails in the hammocks of the Everglades. If very good, I was sometimes allowed to trail along behind.
With the years, Marston's interest in the processes of living things had led him through Central America, Haiti, Cuba, and finally over to a laboratory in Albania where he spent four years with the Rockefeller Foundation studying the mosquitoes that transmit malaria.
Although primarily interested in music, I had become so steeped in the ways of scientists that it was certain I should marry someone of that calling. So my astonishment over our wedding was due only to the fact that my husband had been growing up right under my nose, the one person I had always taken for granted as Sandy's great friend.
In Albania my latent love of primitive and far-off places began to come out. In Egypt where we spent ten months among the millions that crowd the Nile Valley, this love became a longing for solitude. Here, too, a laboratory became less a place where I tried hard not to show my ignorance and more a world in itself where the most fascinating things went on.
In his laboratory the curiosity of the Boss had full scope, and his experiments resulted in a number of important discoveries about the private lives of mosquitoes. I learned to speak casually of larval ecology, species distribution, and similar "profound" matters, while he got used to having me nose about and often gave me little jobs to do.
Thus equipped, it was almost a foregone conclusion that we would choose the Tropics when it came to a discussion of where we should go next.
"I should like to try Villavicencio," said the Boss.
"Where's that?" I wondered.
"In Colombia," he said, "just southeast of Panama. The capital is Bogota."
"Oh," I said, waiting to see what followed.
"Villavicencio is in the hot-country Tropics, and Dr. Lewis Hackett, who was there, says it is swell, with lots of animals and jungle."
And so it was that we asked for, and in due course received, our transfer to Villavicencio.
October found us in Bogota installed in a small rented house awaiting the arrival of our first baby. While waiting there was plenty to do and learn, and all of it in Spanish.
The Boss made periodic trips down to see about a house, to look over the laboratory and the country. But he is not very observant of the details that a woman wants, so I got little inkling of the place where we were to live for so many years.
In the cold, damp atmosphere of Bogota, where the mean temperature is 57° F. and the altitude 8,660 feet, it was hard to realize that we were only a few degrees north of the Equator.
It was harder still to realize that only a few hours by car down the mountainside it was hot and golden, truly "tropical" in the romantic sense of the word. I would sit by the open fire, curtains drawn against a wet, gray afternoon, and dream of the day when we should set off for the land of warmth and light.
That day did come finally, six weeks after little Marian was born, and it dawned bright and clear. A pile of bags, boxes, and brown-paper parcels accumulated in the hall. The truck came by to take on a last load; the cook packed us a few sandwiches-"just in case, Senora, for you never can tell"; the nurse heated a bottle for Marian; we took a last look around. Finally we packed our-selves into the car and were off for Villavicencio.
Sure enough, after we had climbed the pass and started down, it began to get warmer. Every hour or so we would shed another wrap as the road zigzagged lower and lower. And…"
7” x 10”, 24 pages, 19 B&W photos plus map
These are pages from an actual 1948 magazine. No reprints or copies.
48H3
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