Looking back over 80 years, I have concluded that one can count on their fingers, maybe on one hand, the number of notable lasting acquaintances and colleagues. Beginning when we were both graduate students at UT Austin in the ‘60s, Steve Harris was one of my few. Marie joined the duo in the early ‘80s when we were both founding faculty colleagues of the Gordon Sato Cell Science Center program in Lake Placid NY. Marie and Steve were an inseparable research team similar to my wife and I. They pioneered the earliest molecular biology technology for the institute. Gordon provided garden plots at the director’s residence for the gardeners on the staff and Marie was the master guru for the novices there in the short growing season of the high Adirondacks.
In ’84 and ’85 our two families took adventurous tours to little known places on the Pacific coast of Mexico with our two young girls of similar age who tracked together in pre-schools during their time in Lake Placid. One of the most adventurous was the stretch from Puerto Vallarta to Manzanillo down highway 200 which required traversing the desolate inland stretch from Mismaloya to Perula which was rumored to be a notorious stretch for bandits even in the early ‘80s. We were in a rented VW bug and sure enough about halfway it quit in the hot late desert afternoon. After much discussion on what to do and I still don’t know our reasoning, we decided that Steve and I would hitchhike into Perula while the girls stayed with the kids. It was not a high trafficked road in the first place. We got a short ride with a local hired hand, but then about halfway not much luck as fear increased the girls would be left alone with the kids after dark. Finally we got a ride all the way into Perula and they even took us to the rare village service station with road service that took us back to the bug and got it running again. Ironically, they told us the reason we did not get rides quickly was because there were two of us and the locals we were so afraid of were more afraid of us. Alls well that ends well and both trips were forever memories.
Marie's Friendship