The Age of the Plumber

(The following chapter, "A Storm Drain of Light," is reprinted from pages 81-85 of The Age of the Plumber: Observations on Sanitation in a Troubled Decade, a new book by Y.P. Emsun, Director of Harvard University Plumbing since 1953.)

I came to Harvard in the autumn of 1924, an unintimidated apprentice plumber in an expectant and receptive mood. My first impression, as I suppose is true of most new men who come to Cambridge from the Midwest, was a sense of the sanitation problems around me, illustrated by Harvard's old buildings and other evidences of sewerage difficulties of which I only vaguely conscious through my studies in plumbers' school. But my second impression was of my fellow workers--or at least the first group of them I met.

The first time I entered the Buildings and Grounds cafeteria, I went to the nearest empty chair. As I sat down, I said hello to my two or three nearest neighbors. They must have looked in my direction; perhaps they may well have grunted a response to my greeting. But my clear recollection is that with very little recognition of my presence they went right on talking animatedly among themselves.

What talk it seemed to bel Aluminum piping, chlorination, reservoir control. Back and forth the conversation went in quick repartee. Before dessert they had gone on to split system sewage disposal, and then in a postprandial few minutes they dealt to their satisfaction and mine with oxidative water purification.

This was not the kind of talk which experience back in plumbers' school had led me to expect. I was at once amazed, terrified, excited and pleased. And so began my experience of Harvard. Often I recalled the sick feeling I had that first night when I came to Harvard alone--my first trip east of Chicago--and was confronted with the incredible, if perhaps--may I add this now?--slightly pretentious erudition of a select group of Harvard plumbers, clearly much better prepared for what lay ahead than I. But may I also say that the great respect I acquired for Harvard plumbers at that time, though it may have changed character, has never been diminished in even slight degree by prolonged association with them?

Dare I admit that now my most vivid recollection of my first year's apprenticeship is a phase from a lecture on waste disposal? The teacher of this training course was a lively master plumber, whose name, unfortunately, has long since left me. For this particular lecture he had written a short whimsical account of the progress of waste from Claverly Hall down to the Charles River. At one point he described the meeting of this waste with run-off from the bakery rooms of the University kitchens and said it would be impossible for the two to be confluent. When asked why, he replied, "Because yeast is yeast and waste is waste and never the twain shall meet." Like so many master plumbers at Harvard he was teaching a great deal more than the immediate matter at hand.

A year or two later I had become acquainted with D.T. Siel, then Plumbing Director of the University. From that time, each day was filled with what were to me fresh ideas on plumbing and exciting inspirations to go on learning about sanitation. Associating with Siel was not so much an exercise in learning as an experience of life itself. There was much of the working plumber about him, but what chiefly remains is an image of Siel quoting--one might almost say spewing forth--an endless flood of didactic poetry with such delight that one could not fail to feel its enchantment.

Trickle, trickle down the drain,

Go mud and slop and waste and rain.

* * *

Over, under, in, and out,

Through the pipes and down the spout.

* * *

Making Cambridge clean and gay,

Keeping Harvard fair today.

From Siel, one learned more than ever that life and sanitation are not be separated. He was a superlative plumber whose thoughts flowed with import and were never dull.

Today it may be that I am more aware of and impressed by the splendor of the great plumbing network of the whole University and by its importance for safeguarding sanitation than I am perhaps by personnel. But fortunately there is no need to set the two against each other. They both belong: together they make Harvard plumbing.

In the complex, confused, and unsanitary world in which we all find ourselves it is possible to think of Harvard's plumbing as a kind of storm drain of light in a very dark cesspool, and I must confess I sometimes do just this. But I also know that the figure is not really an apt one, for Harvard's pipes and drains, praise God, have never been severed from the broad sewers of city and state and are certainly not so now. Instead, they are rather intimately involved with all the pipes and drains of Cambridge, and, indeed, of Massachusetts.

As the apprentice plumber comes into this place he cannot fail to be impressed by the extraordinary liveliness, concentration, and devotion with which sanitation long has been and is now pursued--nor can a Plumbing Director!