Mallinckrodt Janitor Creates Works Of Art, Telescopes, Violins, Boat

Three years age, a small, basement room in the Mallinckrodt Chemical Laboratories was temporarily converted into a museum. In place of the usual glassware and bottles of reagents there was an exhibit of oil and watercolor paintings, several pieces of finely done statuary, telescopes, violins, and elaborate plans for a two-unstirred schooner.

Every day for a week, a short, very serious, middle-aged man came to this room where he received the congratulations and good wishes of many professors, students, and other Cambridge residents. He was the creator of these many, varied works of art. However, art was just one of his many avocations; John Morris Dunn was a janitor in Mallinckrodt.

Today, Dunn is still to be found cleaning windows and sweeping floors in the chem labs, but when his work is done he returns to the creative world. At home he paints in his attic studio, grinds lenses and mirrors for the telescopes and telescope cameras he is constructing, tinkers with his radio transmitter and other electronic creations, or practices on one of the magnificent violins he has built.

How is it that a man of such-varied and well-developed skills is merely a janitor in a chemical laboratory?

The grandson of an escaped slave, Dunn was born in a log house in Salem. New Jersey. From early childhood, he showed a great interest in art, which he "first studied from nature." While in primary school, he was taught draftsmanship and coloring by an artist friend. After he graduated from grammar school, his father, a Delaware River fisherman sent him to the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia where he studied stone masonry. After this trade school, followed several years of training in a scattering of Philadelphia and Boston art schools. To finance this schooling. Dunn worked during the summer on farms and, during the fishing season, with his father. At the end of the first World War, he went into the construction business and by the time of the depression had been eight houses. He then moved to Boston where he worked as a gardener, at the same time attending night school

Started in Boston

It was here in Boston that he became interested in astronomy. As a member of the Boston Amateur Telescope Makers Club, he learned the skill of lens grinding. His telescopes are considered by a member of the Harvard Astronomy Department to be as fine as any amateur instruments he's seen.

As Dunn's goal in life is to set a good example for his people, he has not been discouraged by the menial jobs he has had to take; in each, he has simply tried to do his best. Quite naturally, though, he resents the fact that "They'll teach you, then give you no opportunity to use the training." This was the case with him during the first World War, when, as a licensed radio operator with a white friend for the greatly needed post of radio operator in the Navy. He was told that "the Navy doesn't make any provisions for colored men-except as messmen." John Dunn spent the war as a reservist while his friend served as a wireless operator.

South American Tour

Now, as he is rapidly approaching retirements age; he is speeding up the construction of his schooner. He hoped to sail in it to the Bahamas and South America to paint, to explore the ocean depths in his diving suit, and to study the heavens through his telescopes. On his return, he plans to write about his adventures.

When the ship is finished, and after he had completed several more courses in astronomy and navigation,. he will start on his journey. "Then Captain J. D. will be the master of his fate; only the wind will control him."