The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (11 page)

our Virginia ranch house, they were accompanied by a thin pamphlet on the history and care of gerbils written by Victor Schwentker. Victor lived in Brant Lake, New York, a hamlet in the Adirondack Mountains just west of Lake Champlain, a place where only the hardiest tourists make their way to cool off in the summer or enjoy a few glorious days of kaleidoscopic leaf peeping in the fall. It’s an unlikely place for gerbils to make their first appearance in this country, but that’s where their U.S. story began. It was only natural that my father, in his pilgrimage to know the gerbil, eventually wanted to tap in to Schwentker’s expertise.

During our last year in Kansas, Dad and Victor began corresponding. Dad wrote his letters on the manual typewriter in his home office, and we’d hear the steady
tap-tap-tap
of the keys as the rest of us watched television in the next room, the sound of Dad’s fingers on his typewriter as methodical and relentless as rain on a metal roof.

Dad read Victor’s letters aloud to our mother sometimes, after Gail was in bed and Donald and I were settled in front of the television. He’d underline pertinent passages in the red
pencil he used for marking papers at the Staff College, keeping it poised to highlight key passages as he and Mom discussed the content of the letters. I paid little attention to these ramblings and caught only bits and pieces of the conversations.

Still, I understood that Victor Schwentker was my father’s idol. Victor was the sort of man who’d see a road and want to know where it went. As a young man, he had traveled down to South America to break polo ponies and then back up to Canada to run moonshine. Eventually he tried to settle down and worked as an engineer for General Electric in Philadelphia, where he met and married his wife, Mildred West, a society girl teaching private school. When the Depression cost Victor his job, the pair retreated to Brant Lake, where they lived at West Farm, Mildred’s childhood summer home.

At first, the Schwentkers eked out a living by renting out summer cottages and selling milk and butter from their cows and vegetables from their gardens to the summer people. They had one child, a daughter, and Mildred, who was forty years old by the time she became a mother, longed to return to Philadelphia. But Victor was thriving on the farm. He’d finally landed in the one place that felt like home. Now he just had to find a way to stay there.

It was Victor’s brother, Francis Schwentker, M.D., a Navy officer and well-known pediatric researcher, who gave him the means: Francis talked Victor into raising laboratory animals on the farm instead of cows. Francis was working with the military to develop vaccines for tropical diseases, and he knew there was a shortage of quality laboratory animals for scientific studies.

Victor renamed their homestead Tumblebrook Farm and
began with a colony of rabbits. Most of his business came from the military, which was shipping thousands of U.S. soldiers to the Pacific to fight in World War II. Military strategists had recognized during World War II that their deadliest enemies weren’t the opposing forces, but the infectious diseases the U.S. troops would encounter for the first time abroad. Developing the necessary vaccines and treatments for these new pathogens was a formidable challenge and would require many animals for experimentation. Thanks to this new military push for medical miracles and his handy family connection, Victor was soon providing not only rabbits but also guinea pigs and mice to researchers around the country. For many years, Tumblebrook Farm was like a Navy installation, complete with guards posted to keep the animals safe from evil Axis powers. Employees who worked there were even exempt from the draft, because what they were doing was considered so important.

Like my own father, Victor designed and hand-crafted anything he could, whether it was a new kind of cage or a milking machine for guinea pigs. Despite breeding so many different kinds of animals, however, the only animal experiments that Victor performed were aimed at trying to develop a germ-free mouse. His plan involved birthing “clean” mice via cesarean section and then guarding the young against contaminants, a practice common today in animal research facilities. Victor even designed and built a special mouse cage with openings for his hands, and crafted a little operating table inside the cage.

During World War II, the U.S. government ordered a million mice from Tumblebrook Farm to test a potential vaccine
against malaria. Before the order could be filled, the atomic bomb ended the war, but Victor remained optimistic about the brave new world of laboratory animal breeding. He reasoned that scientists not only would continue needing the animals he’d been providing all along but also would want other, more novel medical models, too, as research studies grew more sophisticated. Victor created the West Foundation, named for his wife’s family, with the sole purpose of conducting “a systematic search for such animals that might provide medical research with new experimental models.”

Victor knew that for animals to be truly useful for researchers, they would have to be small, easily handled, prolific, and easy keepers—that is, creatures that ate little, bred quickly, adapted easily to different climates, and were hardy enough to survive the rigors of being transported from one place to another. Along the way to discovering the gerbil—an animal that nicely fit this list of criteria—Victor bred cotton rats, snow ball rats, meadow voles, white-footed mice, wood rats, red-backed mice, jumping mice, short-tailed shrews, Chinese hamsters, rice rats, pine mice, lemming mice, long-tailed shrews, pocket mice, kangaroo rats, grasshopper mice, harvest mice, Philippine tree shrews, banana rats, and bandicoots.

Victor marketed each of his new finds to laboratory researchers and breeders by mailing them thick manila folders containing press releases and photographs. He shared these with my father while we were in Kansas, who in turn showed them to us. These folders were like the media kits that Hollywood agents send out for the movie stars they represent. The folders each bore the bold headline “Announcing …” followed by the name of the animal, with a photographic portrait taken
against an appropriate creative backdrop. The Chinese hamster’s portrait, for instance, was shot against a Chinese screen, along with a Chinese doll sporting a broad-brimmed hat and long white beard.

With his zeal for providing the healthiest, highest-quality laboratory animals possible, Victor earned a solid reputation among researchers and other breeders. And with more than forty men working for him at Tumblebrook Farm, Victor also ranked as the largest employer in the Brant Lake area.

By adventuring around the world, starting his own business from the ground up, studying exotic animals, and ultimately freeing himself from depending on anyone else for a livelihood, Victor Schwentker was everything that my father aspired to be.

T
HE
first written mention of gerbils was in 1866 by Father Armand David, a French missionary priest, when he sent what he called “yellow rats” from northern China to the Museum of Natural History in Paris. The scientist Alphonse Milne-Edwards named these gerbils
Meriones unguiculatus
a year later; this Latin name means “clawed warrior” in English and is derived in part from the name of the Greek warrior Meriones.

Nobody knows how Victor Schwentker first learned about gerbils. Given his steady consumption of newspapers, books, magazines, and scientific journals, it was probably through reading. At any rate, Victor received his first shipment of gerbils from Japanese scientists in 1954 and promptly produced his usual promotional packet. The original black-and-white
portrait on this publicity folder is of a gerbil standing on its hind legs, its long, silky tufted tail shown to best advantage. The gerbil appears to be reading the enormous book in front of it, which is titled
A Natural History of Central Asia
, volume XI:
The Mammals of China and Mongolia, Central Asiatic Expeditions
.

Inside the packet, the promotional literature is heady, almost giddy The gerbil’s many virtues—friendliness, curiosity, smarts, environmental adaptability—made Victor rave, “Of all the animals that have been introduced as potentially useful experimental animals, perhaps the most remarkable has been the Mongolian gerbil.”

Victor wrote those words at the end of 1967, precisely when my own father first contacted him for more information about breeding gerbils from our apartment in Fort Leavenworth. The two men exchanged several letters and agreed to meet early in 1968. By then, Victor was nearly seventy years old, and he’d been hoping to find someone to take over his gerbil colony, the last of his laboratory animals.

My father, meanwhile, was growing increasingly disillusioned with military life and with the country’s involvement in Vietnam. “I can’t believe this,” he’d say at least once during every nightly television newscast, as the body count rose. “They have to know this war is a mistake. How can they not? We should really do something.”

“Like what?” Mom would say, coming into the living room and shaking her head at the TV as if it were to blame for the state of our country. “We have to support the war. We’re military.”

Dad must have expressed some of his reservations about
military life to Victor, for in a letter dated December 4, 1967, Victor wrote:

This may not sound like much today. But in the 1960s, and added to my father’s pension when he retired from the Navy, it was such a princely sum that Dad used his red pencil to underline these heartening words as he read Victor’s letter to us.

He flew out to see Victor in Brant Lake shortly after that, and the two men sealed their deal. Victor agreed to let my father have his business, including the name Tumblebrook Farm, for $60,000. Dad planned to buy his own farm after he got his orders and knew where we were headed after Kansas. Once we were moved in, he would gradually move Victor’s breeding stock of gerbils and his equipment to our own plot of land. Dad didn’t have $60,000, but that didn’t seem to bother Victor: in a gentleman’s agreement, the two men shook hands and Victor agreed to let my father pay him back over time. They were both that sure of Dad’s success in the gerbil-farming business.