The Chemist

Alumnus, University chemistry professor, renowned scientist, entrepreneur — meet the gentlemanly and opinionated Walter Stott ’37.

By Robin Cody

The boy, 16, is about to utter the word that will change his life. Like they say the flap of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon rainforest might nudge successive air currents that alter Pacific Northwest weather, the boy doesn’t yet know the ramifications. The word he is about to utter is chemistry. He’s going to study chemistry and will become a professor of chemistry and will not only nurture in young humans a better understanding of how their world is put together but will also apply his entrepreneurial zeal toward making our Portland a cleaner and more livable place.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. The boy, 16, is Walter Stott, an eager, tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed go-getter from a distinguished Portland family down on its luck. It’s 1931. His dad had worked for a Portland bank, but the bank went broke and his stock holdings evaporated.

“My folks were not flush,” says Stott, now 91 years old. His body is failing him, but he still has those laser-quick blue eyes and a sixteen cylinder mind, amused at the flukey wonder of it all. He’ll tell it like it is. Was.

“After two years of high school at The Madeleine, they wanted to make it a girls’ school. So I went over to Columbia Prep. First day on the bus, I sat with some kid who asked me, ‘What are you going to take?’ I didn’t know. ‘Chemistry,’ I said, just the first thing I thought of. He said, ‘Father Davis teaches chemistry. Be sure to ask for Father Davis.’

“Now this was a dirty trick — heh, heh, heh — because there were two chemistry teachers, Charlie Lauer and Father Ernest Davis. Nobody wanted Father Davis. He was too hard. I got there and said I wanted Father Davis for chemistry, and the registrar looked at me like I had my head screwed on wrong.

“Oh, Father Davis was hard, all right. He scared the socks off most people. He’d sit at his desk and call you up to the board, your knees knocking. He’d bark ‘What’s the formula for that? What’s the equation for such and such a reaction?’ If you got it right, he’d keep firing until you got it wrong. ‘SIT DOWN!!!’ People were scared silly — heh, heh, heh — keeping low in their seats.

“On one test, I couldn’t remember a damn thing. I couldn’t remember my own name. Father Davis took a look at my paper and said, ‘Son, take this into the other room. Take your time.’ I got a hundred on it.

“Yes, a few of us got along with Father Davis. There were thirty of us in that class and only five of us finished. All the classes — at Columbia Prep and the college, too — were at West [now Waldschmidt] Hall. The facilities were good for a high school. On the third floor was the chemistry stockroom and a big lab for the high school and first year college students.  Each of us had a desk, with storage space underneath it. We performed our own experiments. It wasn’t like one guy doing it while half a dozen others stood around and chewed gum and watched. One time Max Bocek was making picric acid, yellow — heh, heh, heh — and splashed it on his pants. His pants all but disappeared. We went scouting about for enough safety pins so he could go home on the bus.

“Aw, gosh, I haven’t thought of this in years.

“We had a chemistry team. There was competition. Somebody wrote an exam, and if you were the best in the city they’d give you a volumetric flask. A volumetric flask! Father Davis’s class got it about every year.

“Most of the professors were of the Holy Cross Order. We wondered what CSC means. Chicago Street Cleaners? Can’t Smoke Cigarettes? Which was bunk — heh, heh, heh — because some of them smoked like chimneys. Brother Vitale sat up on a podium, like on a throne, monitoring study hall. He liked to take a nip now and then and might doze off. One time kids pulled Brother Vitale’s steps away from the podium. He went to run down after something, and KER-PLOP. He never did find out who did it.

“I lived at home, on the west slope of Mt. Tabor. To get to school I’d walk four blocks down to catch the Hawthorne car, transfer at Grand Avenue to Broadway, and wait for the streetcar coming across the bridge from downtown. If I was lucky, I might catch a ride there with Baron Fitzpatrick. His chauffer drove Baron Fitzpatrick to school in a Pierce Arrow touring car. His dad was president of the Real Silk Hosiery Company, I’ll always remember that. But usually the trip took an hour and a half, maybe an hour if everything clicked.

 “To help pay tuition, I became the salesman for all the ads in the school paper. They called me the demon ad manager. Later I took over the chemistry stockroom, filling reagent bottles and checking equipment in and out. I got to know Father Davis well. Out of the classroom environment, he was as pleasant as could be. He lived in Christie Hall with a parrot. He’d let that damn bird out of its cage. I was afraid it would come after me, but it just perched on the back of his chair.

“My first year of college, I took chemistry again. By then I was not so petrified. But the college offered only two years of chemistry at the time, so I was a math major. I was a bookworm, I guess you’d say. There were no girls. No distractions whatsoever. You could graduate magna cum laude, which means with large honors. In 1937 I graduated maxima cum laude, the highest average over four years. After college, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I breezed through those Civil Service exams and got an offer to teach school in Mist, Oregon. Then came an offer to teach in Anchorage, Alaska. I was talking it over with Father Davis and he said, ‘What’s wrong with staying here?’”

*

So Stott’s first job was here at The Bluff, as a lab instructor. He and Father Davis moved labs and stockrooms to a brand new building. The photo, here, shows Stott on the left, Father Davis in the middle, with Clifford Dernbach ’31. The three of them were the whole chemistry department. After a few years the military began drafting so many college-age men there were few left on campus to teach.

“Hitler over there was stirring up trouble. I hired on with the Electro-Metallurgical Company, a division of Union Carbide. They had a defense plant over by Spokane. The company got extensions for us because we were essential to the war effort, producing magnesium for making airplanes.

I was the analytic chemist. What’s IN this stuff? What is it made of? We sampled trainloads of ore that rolled in from the mines. Claude Bishop was the chief cheese at Union Carbide, back East. He sent me samples to verify from other divisions of the company. To test me, he’d send me a sample from the U. S. Bureau of Standards, and I didn’t know what the hell it was. My analysis had to agree with theirs, out to four decimal places. I guess it did, because pretty soon I became Union Carbide’s referee chemist.

“Our Spokane plant had 432 furnaces in two big buildings sucking up electricity from the brand new Grand Coulee Dam. Copper was scarce. They needed copper for shell casings, so we used silver buss bars in the plant for electrical conductors. There was heavy security. Guards wore sharp blue uniforms. This guard called me aside one day and said, ‘Can I ask you a question?’ Sure. He said, ‘Where is this silver I’m supposed to be guarding?’ Heh, heh, heh. I had my finger in the whole goshdarn pie.”

*

A voracious reader, schooled on the job, Stott returned to The Bluff as a professor. Because the war had interrupted his graduate studies, he never did earn his Ph.D. while teaching at the University. But Walter Stott was underqualified to be a college professor like Abraham Lincoln was underqualified to practice law and politics. An article in The Oregonian, 1946, announced his appointment — “College Names Chemistry Chief” — to direct teaching fellows and to supervise the construction of a new laboratory building for 270 first-year chemistry students, many of them older, returning from military service. The article, politically, failed to mention that those instructors under his direction were all Ph.D.s.

“They needed a high school chemistry teacher, too. I taught at Columbia Prep as well as at the college. My style was not like Father Davis’s. I didn’t want to scare kids off. If they could find me after hours, I was available. I remember we had this one kid, a nice guy, John Arthur was his name. John was getting nowhere in chemistry. He was in the wrong boat, and the boat was sinking. I asked him to come over to my office. I said, ‘John, if I asked you to measure the area of this room, what metric unit would you use?’ He said, ‘Square liters?’ I said, ‘John, give it up.’ He quit chemistry. Later he got a master’s degree — heh, heh, heh — in literature or some damn thing. I stayed friends with that young man, and later he couldn’t thank me enough.”

Chemistry, to Stott, should be as exciting to students as a mystery story, because a mystery is exactly what analytical chemistry is. What IS this stuff? What is it made of?

 “Look,” he says. He takes a Post-It Note, rips it vertically, and holds up the fuzzy torn edge for close inspection. “Cellulose fibers.”

The old chemist is a teacher again, he can’t help it.

“Everybody knows paper is made from trees. Wood is cellulose and a chemical binder called lignin. Cellulose is a long chain of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, C6H10O5. The tree drew carbon from the air, CO2, and solidified it. It sucked H20 from the earth and vitalized it. I used to take students out to a paper mill and show them the chemical changes. At West Linn there Crown Zellerbach had the biggest damn grinding wheel you ever saw. They’d shove a chunk of tree against it and get a mash of cellulose and lignin. They cook that stuff to dissolve out the lignin, leaving the cellulose. Half the volume of the tree then got dumped into the river! People began to realize we were wrecking ourselves, polluting our rivers. That effluent from the mill has reducing properties. It reacts with — uses up — oxygen in the water.

“Every living creature runs on oxygen. Fish need oxygen, just like us. Oxidation is the fire within us. It produces the heat that keeps us alive and warm. It’s why old people need warmer clothes. Their rate of oxidation — their metabolism — slows.”

Stott is afire with the joy of teaching. Atoms group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they end up manufacturing trees, fish, and humans. Atoms can even manufacture wonder and beauty in the old chemist’s brain.

 “In time we had half a dozen Ph.D.s in the chemistry department. But those were hard years. None of us made enough money to get along on. The most I ever made was $450 a month. I did it because I liked teaching, but I had a big family, seven mouths to feed. I sold my library to a brewery in St. Louis. I sold my wife’s skis. I did consulting work for extra pay.

 “In 1954 I quit the University and trumped up this business on my own. I had a large lab with eight scientists and engineers. The Water Treatment Corporation of America. We stopped boiler scale and pipe corrosion at all the major mills and at schools and all over. We checked liquid emissions and we tested the air, what goes up the chimney. When the EPA was invented, we were in good favor. Mills had to know what the problem was. I’d get these phone calls from mill operators, ‘We need this, that, and the other thing.’ These days at every mill you see these aeration ponds. They spray effluent up into the air. The lignin gets oxidized. Then it can go harmlessly into the river.

“But businesses aren’t dumb. Some were dumping at night. So I invented a thing you could put down in a sewer and sample at all hours. We’d open up a manhole cover and climb down. Set up this gauge, and send the results to the DEQ. Naughty-naughty. Gotcha.”

As Chairman of the Environmental Standards Committee, Portland Chamber of Commerce, Stott once faced the challenge of convincing civic leaders that sewage treatment plants were a good idea.

“If properly run, a treatment plant has no bad odor whatsoever. But the majority of people don’t know from Shinola about it. Sewage has a bad press. People just think of a smelly damn thing. So I arranged a catered lunch at the Columbia Boulevard plant — heh, heh, heh — for the press. We gave those jokers a tour of the plant and then sat them down, right outside, for lunch. I guess they were duly impressed, because after that they didn’t crab about it.”

*

The chemist knows that all Nature is a torrent of chemical change. We humans are part of a grand system, and the elements we use are not our own. The food we eat may have been processed a thousand times before. A molecule in the water we drink today might have been peed by Julius Caesar. From us these elements will pass on their rounds to build other forms of life.

“Our bodies seem to us fairly stable, but I, too, am getting close to the end.”

As a young man, Walter Stott stood 5-10. Now he’s 5-6 and bent, pushing a walker around the apartment at Mary’s Woods, adjacent to Marylhurst University. Ironically, his declining mobility was hastened by chemical mistreatment. After a mild stroke ten years ago, he was given large doses of an experimental anti-coagulant that can destroy nerves at the body’s extremities.

“Peripheral neuropathy is irreversible and progressive. It started with my toes, and up. Now the tips of my fingers feel funny. Isn’t that something? Nobody knew. I used to teach biochemistry at St. Vincent’s Hospital School of Nursing, to the sisters who ran the joint. I read medical books, and I didn’t know.”

It’s another wonder, not a complaint. He points to (“heh, heh, heh”) an Irish blessing framed and mounted on his home office wall. It ends with “May you be forty years in heaven / Before the devil knows you’re dead.”

A devout Republican, Stott is up on current events and active in the church, a big fan of Father Richard Berg’s homilies there at Mary’s Woods. And he is fortified by family. Walter and his wife, Rellalee, have spawned five kids into the mainstream of American enterprise and service.

Peter, the first-born, built up the eighth-largest trucking company in the U. S., switched into timberlands and milling, and now develops properties in Bend and on Portland’s South Waterfront. Rosemary, born six minutes after Peter, found her niche in administration at the Beaverton School District, St. Mary’s Academy, and Concordia University. Jim followed Dad into pollution control, cleaning paper mills from his own chemical plant in Tualatin. John, a chemical engineer, wrote the software that runs and refuels General Electric nuclear power plants. Tom got his start with Peter in trucking and now has his own business detailing high-end cars.

“Rellalee stayed home and raised those kids properly. That’s why every one of them turned out to be somebody.”

The scientist is a repository of stories, and a good share of them leave him agog at the mystery, captive to the beauty, of God’s universe. “If you meditate... If you think at all about the wonder of Nature, there had to be a Supreme Being. Consider a seedling, gathering nutrients to make a tree. Or the mystery of human life. Every birth is a miracle, that’s for sure. You’d have to be an idiot not to realize it. It’s just so marvelous, so mind-boggling.”

Robin Cody, who won the Oregon Book Award for his account of a summer on the Columbia River, Voyage of a Summer Sun, is also the author of the novel Ricochet River, which was made into perhaps the worst feature film ever. He has written in these pages of baseball, basketball, whales, neurology, and the courage of children.