Word: kinseyisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Leading nature hikes at summer camps helped Kinsey to pay his way through Maine's Bowdoin College, where he majored in biology and zoology. He had studied the piano since he was five, and at the Zeta Psi fraternity house he loved to play Beethoven or Chopin with tumultuous Paderewski-like tossing of his blond mane...
Born in Hoboken, NJ. in 1894, Alfred Charles Kinsey was the son of a self-made man who had started as a shopboy at Stevens Institute of Technology, and later headed its department of mechanical arts. Little Alfred spent most of his first ten years in bed, beset by rickets, heart trouble and finally typhoid fever (which nearly killed him). Then the family moved ten miles from smoggy Hoboken to the green hills of South Orange, and Alfred's health improved. He speaks with almost ferocious intensity of what South Orange meant to him: 'Twas raised in city...
...Alfred found a flower that wasn't in the book. That was the beginning of his passionate curiosity about nature. Soon he was immersed in a research project: in shower and thunderstorm he pulled on his raincoat and dashed out to see what the birds were doing. Kinsey's first published work, What Birds Do in the Rain, appeared in a nature journal when he was still in grade school...
...Kinsey graduated from South Orange High School at 16 with top honors. Yearbook editors put a wildly unprophetic line from Hamlet under his picture: "Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither...
...Kinsey moved on to Harvard and took up wild food. He became as expert in this as in everything else that he has chosen to study. By 1920, with the late Merritt Lyndon Fernald, he finished his first book: Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America (not published until 1943). For the distinguished members of the New England Botanical Club, Kinsey and Fernald spent days preparing a wild dinner: cold pigweed salad, pickles from cucumber root, bread from the acorns of swamp white oaks, squawberries, a cake of ground hickory nuts filled with blueberries and topped with maple syrup...