Nobel Flashback

Post by Grubb.

After our first stop in Gamla Stan where we had been awestruck by the Stockholm Cathedral (four hosannas), we cut through a plaza to go to the Nobel Museum.  When I was growing up in Chicago where my father was at the university doing his thing, my parents would throw a tree-trimming party every Christmas.  This was in the 1950s so it was quite the bibulous affair.  I remember one of the last to leave was usually Henry Taube, one of the chemistry professors at the university, who enjoyed matching my father martini for martini.  Years later, after my father passed away, my mother asked if I had heard the news about Henry Taube.  No, what?  An alcohol related death?  “He won the Nobel Prize!”  Really?  It was hard for me to picture. 

Inside the Nobel Museum there is a line of monitors separated by decades where you can select a prize category and then select the picture of one of the prize-winners from that category to get a bio and why the prize was awarded.  I immediately went for the 1990s where I tapped on Dario Fo’s smiling face (I was involved with the American premiere of his play, “We Won’t Pay, We Won’t Pay!”), and then the 60s for Sartre, who refused the prize, and the last decade for Bob Dylan, who didn’t show up to accept it.

I vaguely recalled my mother telling me about Henry winning the prize in the ‘80s, so I went to that monitor and hit the chemistry button.  There he was!  Mom wasn’t pulling my leg after all.  

Ella’s favorite part of the museum were the objects on display that prize winners had worked on, like penicillin, or Marquez’s typewriter, or, best of all, Marie Curie’s work table where only a copy of her notebook is allowed since the original is still too radioactive to be placed in a museum case.