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Learning to type and clerking in the army

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Working before university
Eugene Garfield Scientist
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Before I got to the University of Colorado, in the summer of 1942, when I went out to Colorado by train, took the train out to, to Denver, I was met there by a friend of one of my uncles. And, I had over a month to go before school started. She said, 'How would you like to work for a month or so? I have a friend...' She had... a friend of hers was a guy named Carl Campbell who was a very interesting man. I had never met an albino before, and Carl was an albino. And, it’s an interesting experience because they have, you know, their, their eyesight is incredibly poor and Carl was a guy who, when he, he would, every... if he had to read, he had to read he would be up in, like, in a double bunk, he would be up by the ceiling reading with the light right down by him. But he was an incredibly literate man. He just... eventually became a Professor of Economics after, after the war, but he was obviously not qualified to go in the service and he was running the tool shed at a construction job in the Rocky Mountains. And, what was this job? It was... the army was just then building Camp Hale which later on became the... you know, the Headquarters for the Mountain, Mountain troops. And, so I went to work as a labourer out there. That was an unbelievable horrible experience working as a labourer. And, I, I got... after a couple of weeks I got really sick and eventually hitch-hiked... had to hitch-hike all the way back to Denver and almost, almost died on the way back because somebody had put... they had, they’d gotten a lift with some Indians and they dropped me off in the road and they said,'Oh, you’ll get another ride', and I waited for hours and hours, almost froze to death, while I was waiting for another ride to get into Denver. Eventually I got there and I remember staying... I, I checked into a hotel which was $1 a night, the Milner Hotel, and they had a chain all over the country. You could stay at the Milner Hotel and get a clean sheet and bed for one buck. And, I slept for 48 hours. I was, oh, really sick. And then finally when I got out of it, then I finally went up to Boulder and signed up for my course work and so on. That, that was how I got to know something about Colorado.

Eugene Garfield (1925-2017) was an American scientist and publisher. In 1960 Garfield set up the Institute for Scientific Information which produced, among many other things, the Science Citation Index and fulfilled his dream of a multidisciplinary citation index. The impact of this is incalculable: without Garfield’s pioneering work, the field of scientometrics would have a very different landscape, and the study of scholarly communication would be considerably poorer.

Listeners: Henry Small

Henry Small is currently serving part-time as a research scientist at Thomson Reuters. He was formerly the director of research services and chief scientist. He received a joint PhD in chemistry and the history of science from the University of Wisconsin. He began his career as a historian of science at the American Institute of Physics' Center for History and Philosophy of Physics where he served as interim director until joining ISI (now Thomson Reuters) in 1972. He has published over 100 papers and book chapters on topics in citation analysis and the mapping of science. Dr Small is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an Honorary Fellow of the National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services, and past president of the International Society for Scientometrics and Infometrics. His current research interests include the use of co-citation contexts to understand the nature of inter-disciplinary versus intra-disciplinary science as revealed by science mapping.

Duration: 3 minutes, 6 seconds

Date story recorded: September 2007

Date story went live: 23 June 2009