Love at Goon Park Read Free

the science. Jim King at the University of Arizona was everything a book researcher could hope for. He and his wife, Penny, played host, took me to Harry’s former home there, arranged a dinner with the smart and funny former head of the Arizona psychology department, Neil Bartlett, and his equally smart and funny wife, Olive, and got me thoroughly drunk on one memorable evening that began with Rob Roys and ended in a dream-like haze of after-dinner drinks, whatever they were, I’m not quite sure.

    Steve Suomi, head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) lab of comparative ethology invited me to his laboratory to talk—despite his doubts about my trustworthiness—and followed up for months responding to a thousand nit-picky questions. Jim Sackett met with me in Seattle to provide a candid and courageous interview, especially considering that he continues to be targeted by the local animal rights community. Seymour “Gig” Levine met with me both in San Francisco and in Madison, and as always charmed me into paying for lunch, gave me a hard time, and patiently explained both his work and its context. He has threatened to quit speaking to me for ten years now and I appreciate that he continues to answer my questions anyway.
    I would like to also thank Dorothy Eichorn, who met me on a spring Sunday on the grounds of the old state mental hospital in Napa to talk about her long friendship with Harry Harlow; Albert Hastorf, keeper of the Lewis Terman gifted files at Stanford, who invited me into his office on a bright weekend day, handed me the files on Harry’s first wife, Clara, and left to play tennis, saying “lock up when you leave”—which I took as an enormous compliment; the wonderful staff of the Archives of the History of American Psychology in Akron, Ohio, in particular, David Baker and Dorothy Gruich; and Margaret Kimball and Henry Lowood of the Stanford archives, who walked me through the documents I needed from Harry’s early history there. And I am indebted to Robert Hinde, Leonard Rosenblum, Melinda Novak, Judith Schrier, Ed Tronick, Meredith Small, Stephen Bernstein, Sally Mendoza, Kim Wallen, William Verplanck, Irving Bernstein, Larry Jacobsen, and Richard Dukelow for their generous help and invaluable perspective. Two people interviewed for this book died before it was finished and I would like especially to mention their patience and humor with the process. They are Art Schmidt and Richard Wolf, and they are both missed.
    The University of Wisconsin at Madison supported this book from the beginning, and in particular, the Graduate School provided funding for student researchers and summer salary so that I would have extra time to work on the manuscript. I was blessed with some dedicated
and extremely smart graduate students who read old psychology texts, tracked down long-lost contacts of Harry Harlow, and made a real contribution to the depth of this book. They are a group of outstanding young journalists named Tina Ross, Brennan Nardi, Suzanne McConnell, Krishna Ramanujan, Morgan Hewitt, and Maggie Miller.
    I owe an infinite debt of gratitude to Robin Marantz Henig, Kim Fowler, and Peter Haugen, who read the book in its earliest, most chaotic version and helped turn it into an actual story. George Johnson and Shannon Brownlee were enormously helpful with some of the trickiest chapters in the book.
    I am blessed, as always, in my agent, Suzanne Gluck, who believed in the Harlow story from the start and helped me see its potential as well. And I am doubly blessed in having the best possible editor in Amanda Cook. Amanda is such a good editor, so smart and so supportive, and so gifted in her ability to improve a story, that I have been congratulating myself on my good fortune almost since I started the book. Perseus’s talented and meticulous production staff improved and clarified the story I wanted to tell and then packaged it beautifully and I would