On Memorial Day

By Blanche Gray (Blanche A. Botts), 1998

HAROLD RICHARDSON STREET

            Born November 18, 1908 in Deer Lodge, Montana to Bernard and Ella Richardson Street. From Deer Lodge the family moved to St. Thomas, North Dakota, then to Ely, Nevada and Huntington Park, California, where they lived until Bernard’s death. Harold lived with his family and grandparents in Oregon until his mother received a teaching position in Keewatin, Minnesota.

            Harold attended the Keewatin school. He graduated at age 15, as Valedictorian of his class. He then attended Hibbing Junior College for two years, then transferred to the University of Minnesota where he received his B.S. degree with honors. He took one year off from school and worked in the lumber camp in Michigan.

             Harold returned to the University of Minnesota Farm campus where he did all his work on his master’s degree. The subject of his master’s thesis was “Vitamin Requirements of the Trubolium Confusum.”

            It was while he was working on his Masters degree that he was working as a night orderly at the University of Minnesota Hospital, to help defray expenses. At that time I was a student nurse at the hospital, and that is where we met. Harold finished his masters work and I finished my nursing, took state boards and became a registered nurse. I worked for one year and we were married on August 23, 1933.

            Harold received a teaching scholarship at the “U” and started his work on his doctorate. His PhD thesis was “A Study of Some of the Physiological Effects of Vitamin G Deficiency.” I was able to help him a great deal with drawing of blood, lab work, feeding and caring for the dogs in the research. The most interesting study with positive results.

            In 1936 Harold completed his work on his Ph.D. and graduated. Harold applied for work at all the outstanding schools in the country and received a two-year Rockefeller scholarship at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut where he continued his vitamin G deficiency work on dogs.

            It was while he was at Yale that he had dogs down with vitamin G deficiency (black tongue in dogs, pellagra in humans) that a scientist had used nicotinic acid to treat the disease with good results. He sent for supply of nicotinic acid and treated his dogs with good results. The lab and his supervisors were so very pleased as he was the first one to duplicate this experiment.

            After Harold’s two years at Yale, he finished out a project in the Physiological Chemistry Department at Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio. In the spring, April 1939, he started a position at the Winthrop chemical company studying vitamin B. Harold and several chemists were unhappy with the director of the research department. Many of them joined the Army, which is what Harold did.

            Harold was stationed at Fort Dix and was able to come home on the train each weekend. While he was stationed there he was sent to Johns Hopkins University for further study in hematology. When he completed this work he went to Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina. He located a comfortable home for us there, and Marjory, Paul and I joined him. We remained there until the middle of February when the children and I went to Fergus Falls, Minnesota to wait out the war. The first of March 1944, Harold went to England with the 74^th General Hospital.

            Harold was very depressed and felt the war would go on and on and they would never get back home.

            Harold died November 3, 1944 at Tyntesfield in England. He was buried in the National Cemetery in Cambridge. We have visited the grave. The cemetery is beautiful.