Robertson Hall naming connects college’s past to its future.
By Lynn Conlee
This is a love story. It is not a typical story about the sciences. Or a stone-by-stone account of a new building. Or merely a tale of successful alumni. Yet, science and buildings and alumni play the main characters in this story. Other key characters are education and gumption. And that makes this a perfect love story about Rhodes College.
It is hard to say when the story begins. There is the Ellis family, a well-known name in Memphis from as far back as the late 1800s. W.C. Ellis & Sons, a machine shop, opened in 1862 at Second and Gayoso before moving to its current location on Front Street near Beale. Meanwhile, a family by the name of Robertson moved from the heartland of southern Illinois/northern Indiana to Arkansas and on to Memphis, where the father of a young man named Charles Robertson became the secretary/treasurer of E. L. Bruce Company, a hardwood flooring manufacturer that later spawned Terminix.
The two families came together at Lindenwood Christian Church. And that’s where Charles Robertson caught the eye of one Lola Ellis. It is tempting to say that is where the story begins, but that version would exclude the role that a college education and gumption play in bringing the two together. You see, Charles Robertson came from parents who attended college. Lola Ellis’ parents had not. In fact, the men in her family were largely master machinists.
“She was given art lessons so she would have a career if she ever needed something to fall back on,” recalls their son, Dr. Charles Robertson, Jr. ’65. That quote constitutes a small spoiler alert, but it doesn’t diminish the love story at all.
Back at Lindenwood, Charles’ sisters conspired to help 16-year-old Lola Ellis snag young Charles. “Mom decided she was going to marry my Dad,” Charles, Jr. says. “He wasn’t quite in agreement with that. If you knew my mother, you would know that when she gets set on something, it’s hard to disrupt her.”
Charles, however, was not focused on marriage. The year was 1925 and he had just begun classes at the new liberal arts college in Memphis, known then as Southwestern, the College of the Mississippi Valley. His field of study was biology. And he thought he had deflected Lola’s attentions for a while by throwing her an emotional curve ball.
“He pretty much told her he wasn’t going to marry anyone who didn’t have a college education. I don’t know what he was trying to do. Maybe turn her off,” laughs Charles, Jr.
If so, it didn’t work. In 1929, Lola Ellis enrolled in Southwestern. Her field of study? Biology. “Her father wasn’t very happy with it,” says Charles, Jr. “He’d put all this money into an art education, and now she was going to get this college degree.”
By then, Charles had graduated Rhodes and was planning to leave for graduate studies at New York University. Expecting Charles would be at the Marine Biology Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, MA, for the summer, Lola signed up for the MBL embryology course. She was very surprised when Charles instead came back to Memphis to be an instructor at Southwestern that summer. Lola finished up the course work required for her major at Southwestern and took on the challenge of getting a job in New York City, Charles’ requirement for the two of them to get married. “That was 1932. Guess what the economy was doing then? But Mom got a job in New York,” Charles, Jr. relates. Lola and Charles were married in June following her junior year and began married life in New York City.
Here is where the story transgresses time a little bit. Just as with students at the Rhodes of today, “Lola had gotten real-world experience working on campus as an illustrator for Dr. Lackey in the Southwestern Biology Department doing his publication drawings,” says Charles, Jr. “In that day and age, you looked through a microscope and made india ink line drawings using stipling and other techniques to make formal scientific drawings. That job paid off in helping get the job in New York at a time when many degreed people were selling apples on the street to survive. Dr. Horace Stunkard of New York University wanted a lab tech who could do his drawings. So she went to work for him at NYU while Charles completed his studies.”
Together, Charles and Lola had a good life in New York. When Charles completed his PhD, they moved to Eureka, IL, where he taught biology at Eureka College in the late 1930s.
“My parents lived a nomadic life in Eureka because of wartime efforts and the difficulties completing their house,” he says. “My dad was teaching at Eureka College, but he was working at night teaching Army pilots to fly using Link Trainers at the old Chanute Air Force Base. He couldn’t fly, but he knew how to teach. He also worked part time at Caterpillar Tractor Company as an analytical chemist.”
>Because of her training as a biology lab technician, Lola became part of a major medical development that grew out of wartime efforts—the mass manufacturing of a new miracle drug called penicillin.A team of British biochemists had been working to find a way to mass produce penicillin. Conditions of the war made their research difficult in England, and so they were brought to the United States and set up in a government research lab in Peoria, IL, the Northern Regional Research Lab. A call went out for lab technicians, and Lola was hired to work with famed biochemist Norman Heatley.
Under Heatley’s direction, a group of United States fermentation biochemists conducted successful experiments that resulted in discoveries leading to more fruitful penicillin production techniques. Soon, pharmaceutical companies saw enough progress to warrant interest in the new drug and, with the biochemists’ full support, took over production research so that the drug, much needed for fighting infection in the combat theater, could become widely available.
The arrival of Charles, Jr. in 1943 ended Lola’s work on penicillin. Soon after, she and her family moved to Charlotte, NC, where Charles, Sr. taught biology at Queens College. They later moved to Evansville, IN, where he taught biology at Evansville College for the rest of his career. One might be tempted to think that Lola would have considered her lifetime’s work complete having contributed to a project as large as the mass production of penicillin. Not so.
After attending Rhodes, finishing her classes at NYU, returning to Rhodes to graduate in 1936, moving to New York, finding a job during the Depression, marrying Charles, having children, and making a significant contribution to pharmaceutical science, Lola still had another career to go. She began teaching special education in a private school, then returned to college at night to get her teaching credentials. She taught special education in the public school system in Evansville for the next 15 years. After retiring, she was active in many community organizations.
Charles, Jr. followed largely in his parents’ footsteps. He came to Rhodes in 1961 and graduated in 1965 with a degree in physics. He was on campus during a golden era in physics when noted professors Jack Taylor ’44 and Fritz Stauffer led the department. He was among a group of student-scientists who participated in a trip to Alaska to observe a solar eclipse, a story that is a rich part of Rhodes’ physics lore.
During Robertson’s college years, physics occupied the basement of Kennedy Hall, the place where the major came alive for him. “For me, the big value in the physics department was the stuff we had to experiment with,” he says. “I did a number of experiments on my own, some of which were beyond the usual, it seems. I cannot imagine taking physics and doing only the formalized laboratory experiments and not going beyond on my own. I believe it was the ‘going beyond’ that made me what I am today.”
That “going beyond” propelled him to graduate school at Florida State University, where he was able to do a lot of instrument design work, the same kind with which he’s involved to this day. Robertson worked for the DuPont company for 29 years, before founding NanoDrop Technologies, which was sold to Thermo Fisher Scientific in 2007. Under his leadership, NanoDrop pioneered microvolume instrumentation techniques that allow scientists to quickly and easily quantify and assess the purity of small volume liquid samples, such as solutions of proteins and nucleic acids.
A Rhodes trustee, Robertson has more than kept up with the sciences at Rhodes. In honor of one of his mentors, in 2005 he and his wife, Patricia, members of the Benefactors Circle, established the Jack H. Taylor Fellowship in Physics. In addition, there is the Dr. Charles W. Robertson, Jr. Endowment for Student Research and Engagement in Physics and a state-of-the-art Zeiss Confocal Microscope System he provided the biology department. Grateful for his untiring support, in 2008 the college awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal.
As steeped as the Robertson name is in Rhodes’ past, it is about to become a vital part of Rhodes’ future. Because when you combine love, education, gumption, science, buildings, alumni, and Rhodes, the denouement of this love story will be Robertson Hall, a state-of-the-art science building set to open in 2017. A “groundbreaking” ceremony took place in April, attended by Charles, Jr. and Patricia.
But the building is not named after Charles, Jr. His generous gift to the college makes it possible, but the Robertson name attached to it is in memory of his parents, Charles and Lola.
“The building will be used largely for biology,” he explains, “so it is named after two Rhodes graduates who were very successful in biology. I hope that it will encourage young people to do good things.”
For an example of doing good, students of today and the future need look no further than the legacy of the Robertson family and the story of their love for Rhodes and for each other. It is a love story that provides a rich history for Robertson Hall even before the cornerstone is officially laid.