Betty Anne Curtis Cook

I feel like I've been connected to Woods Hole all my life, having heard family stories about this magical place since I was old enough to understand. My grandfather, Winterton Conway Curtis, was a student in the Invertebrate class at the MBL in 1896 and subsequently continued teaching there, then serving as emeritus, every summer until he died in 1966. He and his wife, Marion Hitchcock, stayed in the same corner room on the second floor of red brick building on the Eel Pond while active at the MBL. Winterton's writings about summers in WH were originally published in the Enterprise and later as a self-published pamphlet, "Good Ole Summer Times"; his collected poems are in "Cape Cod Horizons". Grandfather had grown up on the Kennebec in Maine and had among his belongings several paintings of the clipper ships which sailed in and out of that area. I understand they were given to the Woods Hole Library in the early 1960's.

In 1907, my father, William Dwight Curtis, first spent his summer in Woods Hole at age two, staying in the second floor corner room of the Bradley House. Bill Curtis was not a scientist, but no greater devotee of the MBL could you find. In his teenage years, Bill worked on the collecting boats and served on the wait staff in the "mess hall" for MBL professors and staff. After polio left him paralyzed from waist down at about age 20, he gained strength and learned to swim again at Stoney Beach. Bill left his orthodontic practice in Washington, DC twice a summer to spend 2 and 3 weeks in his cottage in "Bug Hunters' Gansett" on Brooks and Whitman Roads.

His love of Woods Hole transferred to his daughters. My husband, Joe Cook, and I purchased a home on Quissett Ave. in 1973, when we had no other home in the US. Joe worked for the Rockefeller Foundation on a Schistosomiasis research and control project in St. Lucia and, much later, was involved in the start of the Biology of Parasitism course at MBL. We bought the house sight unseen, leaving all the details to our dear friend Cornelia Hanna McMurtrie, whom I have known since I was 5 years old. We have returned here every summer since. Our three daughters attended Science School every year they were age-eligible; they learned to swim at Stoney Beach and enjoyed all the other wonderful things for children in Woods Hole: the weekly folksong sing-alongs, MBL Club activities, drama classes in the WH community hall, tennis lessons at the Ball Park tennis courts, MBL weekly movies, and on and on. Because we had lived overseas while they were young, but always came to Woods Hole in the summers, they thought of this as home.

Woods Hole, our many friends, our home and garden here -- all are sources of joy and beauty for my husband and me.