Harvard's Own Lewis Carroll, Expert in Physics, Writes of a Whale and Spit-Tag

He's already an expert on sub-helm-hotzhian wave forms and the publisher of some 32 pamphlets on such subjects as the biological effects of high frequency radiation, but now Harry Clark, research associate in Geophysics, has entered the field of writing children's stories.

"The First Story of the Whale" is the title of the first production of Harvard's own Lewis Carroll, but more are going to follow, such as "Herbert the Worm" and "Fitnia and Whee." Incidentally, Fitnia and Whee are two creatures, never seen, and they just can't be described.

Although he had never drawn anything but graphs before, Clark's tale is charmingly and cleverly illustrated. He did all his own printing too, and he did it in two months "just in my spare time."

The First Story finds the whale swimming around lots and lots of islands like Madagascar looking for companions. He finds some mackerel and they play spit-tag, but when whale gets playful and flips his tail, mackerel gets sore, bites his ear, and hangs on. What happens when the ear gets sore is beyond description.

Fifty-three years old, Clark's formal record sounds very like a geophysicist and very unlike a child story teller: Harvard Ph.D. in 1914 with a record of "A's", Phi Beta Kappa, teacher successively at ten colleges such as Radcliffe, Oberlin, Stanford and Victoria in New Zealand, he feels that children's books are too staid, that his are going to be different.