A Tribute to Felix H. Lauter, Ph. D.

            I met Dr. Felix H. Lauter in the late summer of 1965.  I had recently graduated from Muhlenberg College and was beginning graduate school at the University of South Carolina.  I was naturally somewhat anxious commencing a new phase in my life.  Dr. Lauter had a fearsome reputation amongst the grad students but he was the parasitologist in the department and that seemed to fascinate me the most. 

    I have always been gregarious and without too much concern, introduced myself to him one afternoon, with the suggestion that I become his newest grad student.  He had a craggy face, bushy hair, coarse eyebrows, and incessantly chewed gum (to alleviate his oral needs, having recently quit smoking).  He asked me bluntly, “why do you want to become a parasitologist?”  I gave a real cheesy reply, like any new grad student might, saying that the tapeworms always fascinated me.  Now, he wore heavy rimmed glasses but since they were reading glasses, he had to constantly put them on and take them off. Because of this, he had them attached with heavy, silver chains.  Chains may have been in vogue during the past 10 years, but not in the 1960s.  To wear chains then, would certainly invite ridicule, which is probably why he wore them.  He could stare down anyone.  Well, following my cheesy reply, he took off his glasses and with them dangling on his chest, looked/glared at me and said that I didn’t know enough to warrant him taking me on as an advisee.  I backed out of his office and hoped that we would never again meet.  However, the next day we had another encounter.  I walked by his lab and he saw me, gruffly telling me to “get in here”.  A microscope was set up with a slide containing a live specimen.  He told me, “sit down and tell me what you see”.  I looked at this spherical body with something squirming inside, and suggested it was an egg.  “An egg, an egg”, he replied.  “An egg is a haploid, female gamete.  That’s no egg, but an egg CAPSULE containing a live, active embryo.  In fact, it is an embryonated egg capsule of Hymenolepis diminuta, and the “squirmer” is a hexacanth larva.” He dismissed me rather abruptly, saying he was now SURE that I had not an inkling of what it meant to be a parasitologist.  Two days-two encounters-two failures.  However, I was determined to beat him.  That night, I spent six hours in the library reading all I could about the biology of Hymenolepis diminuta, taking copious notes.  I studied the notes well into the wee hours and arrived at school early the next day hoping to score some points.  This time, I purposely hung around, hoping to “show off”. And it happened.  “Tom….get in here.”  I dutifully entered his lab to once again see a slide perched on the microscope stage.  I looked and it was the same critter I had seen the other day.  I was so excited that I almost blew it by blurting out in a single breath, everything I knew about it.  That was the day I learned how to use what he called a“pregnant pause”.  Pause for a minute, feigning thought, before answering the question.  Somehow, a thoughtful approach seemed to impress him more.  So, I hemmed and hawed for a few seconds before telling him it was an embryonated egg capsule of Hymenolepis diminuta, that was approximately 55 micrometers in diameter, that I could see a thin mucopolysaccharide coat made visible with Lugol’s iodine stain and that the hexacanth with its six hooks could be plainly seen……six hooks that would disappear by the time this worm reached maturity as an unarmed tapeworm. Off came the glasses, dangling once again by the chrome chains, his gum being chewed in a more aggressive fashion, the glare a little more intense, but with a faint smile, before he replied, “you know Tom, book knowledge isn’t everything.  I want to emphasize more practical application and bench work.”  He took his best shot but I knew then and there I had finally won a round.

            He assigned me a research problem as a Master of Science candidate.  My first assignment was to do a literature review on the subject which in those days was laborious, searching biological abstracts page by page for key words and doing a lot of cross referencing (no online searches in those days, in fact no computers).  He set a deadline of three months, after which he wanted to see my first draft of the lit review.  For some reason when I relate this story, the deadline date in my memory was March 15, the Ides of March, but in retrospect, I may have been confusing my due date with another fateful day. On the day it was due, I was waiting for him to arrive in the morning.   He asked me what I was waiting for and I proudly handed him a 33 page manuscript, typed on an old manual Royal typewriter that I brought from home.  He said, “let’s see what you’ve got.”  He rather deliberately, pulled the writing slide on his desk out, put my lit review on the surface and began to read.  He partly read a single page, skipped to and skimmed the next and turned and looked at me.  Off came the glasses…….”.this is unacceptable.  Have it in better form tomorrow, first thing.” As I reached for the manuscript, he pushed it into his waste can and kicked the can out of my reach.  “That won’t help you”, he replied.   I left his office largely defeated but being a compulsive finisher, I knew that I had to “suck it up” and correct whatever was wrong with it.  Fortunately, I still had the original hand written copy which I carefully corrected, adding some things I thought were lacking and subtracting some comments I guessed he didn’t like.  After another all-nighter, I was at his office door, first thing in the morning with my re-vamped, typed, still 33 page copy.  He looked at me and commented, “let’s see if you learned anything.”  On go the glasses, out comes the desk slide,  a few seconds of pensive reading, after which he looked at me and said, “no….I guess you haven’t learned anything”.  Into the waste basket went my copy.  By this time I was really beaten down and as I walked glumly back to my office, I encountered my office mate who was a Lauter grad student.  Martha asked me why I looked so dejected.  I related the events of the past few days and she offered to look at my original.  She spent a few seconds scanning it and replied, “Tom, you didn’t underline your scientific names.”  Whaaaaaat?  “The scientific names of organisms are of a foreign language and as such must be italicized or underlined in lieu of italicization.”  In those days, there was no way to type and italicize so the common method was to underline.  I couldn’t believe his rejection of my well-written, 33 page typed tome was based on so minor a transgression.  Nevertheless, I re-typed the entire 33 pages again and waited by his door for the third consecutive day.  It was deja vu all over again (as Yogi Berra once said).  He looked at me, not upset, not apprehensive, not expectantly, but with an expressionless face when he said,  “let’s see if you finally learned something”.  He read a page, then another, and a third, and then gazed at me, dropped his glasses to his chest, and smiled.  I won round two. 

            I was officially his advisee and word spread around the department of our encounters.  I spent the next six years working on first a M.S. and then a Ph. D. with Dr. Lauter and was busy writing my 262 page dissertation when we locked horns again.  For my master’s thesis, he insisted that I type on an IBM typewriter and use four carbons to produce the five copies he and the department insisted on.  He demanded carbons because he wasn’t convinced that the new-fangled Xerox machine copies would stand the test of time.  By the time I was preparing the final draft of my dissertation, he saw the light and realized that Xeroxing was here to stay, and allowed me to use a copying machine.  The paper that I had to use for the master copy had to be high rag content paper which was expensive but had one feature I liked. It was erasable bond.  Unfortunately, he didn’t approve of erasures.  It made a thin spot in the paper which may lead to a hole some day, he mused.  So, despite the fact, I had performed an admirable piece of research and had written a quality piece of original thought, he rejected numerous pages due to an erasure which couldn’t be seen unless the page was held up to the light at a particular angle.  Every page ultimately was typed, letter perfect without an erasure before I handed it to him for final approval….all 262 pages.  He gave me his OK and I had it copied four times at a cost which was higher then than it would be now.  I was poor as most graduate students were and the cost of copying it nearly broke me.  No sooner had I endured the cost of the copying when he suggested I add a paragraph near page 40 which meant that the remaining 220 or so pages would have to be re-typed and re-copied.  You do what you have to do.  I finished my Ph.D. just after turning 27.  I went to the graduation ceremony even though I was now a college professor and more than 700 miles away.  I was sorely disappointed that he didn’t attend my graduation, but then again, we were not entirely civil near the end of my program.  However, I didn’t feel a need to cow-tow to him any longer and figured that it was time to close the book on our relationship. Three years later, by then married with our first child, my wife, daughter and I visited a grad school friend who was still living in Columbia, SC.  He implored me to go see Lauter….”.he’d be happy to see you”, my buddy said.  I wasn’t so sure, but three years had dulled the pain and stress of grad school, and I was going to give it a shot.  However, not an honest shot, since I went to see him on a Saturday morning when I would least have expected to see him in the biology building.  The building was dark but the light in his lab was on and he was there.  I walked up to his door and before I could enter, I heard his voice emanating from the laboratory adjacent to his office.  He was talking to someone and telling this other person about ME.  He went on and on about how Tom Buckelew could be counted on to finish any assignment in a timely and precise fashion.  He even went so far as to proclaim me his best grad student ever.  You have to remember that we hadn’t seen or talked to each other in three years and he had no inkling I was in town.  I almost became religious….almost.  I then walked into the back room and he clutched his chest, almost in the same manner Redd Foxx would do as  Fred Sanford in the TV sitcom Sanford and Son, some years later.  He said, that he was just talking about me and I replied that I had overheard and appreciated the kind words.  That moment I realized what a wise approach he had taken with his drill sergeant mentality, turning a green graduate student into an academician.  I have maintained the academic ideals he taught me and am forever grateful.

            Felix H. Lauter passed away prematurely at an age younger than I am now, perhaps not realizing what a devotee he had in me.  He was an excellent lecturer and a disciplined student of parasitology himself having worked under the renowned Asa Chandler at LSU.  He had a significant impact on educating pre-schoolers about the dangers of parasitism in the low country of South Carolina with his production of Carrie Ascaris, the educational comic book and movie and affected the lives of numerous students, undergraduate and graduate in numbers far greater than he would have believed.