Shorty’s Paradise

Over the course of the next two months, Prok was in increasing demand as a lecturer, and we began, of necessity, to step up our travel schedule. Word had gotten around. It seemed that every civic group, private school, and university in a five-hundred-mile radius wanted him to appear, and at this stage, Prok never turned down an invitation. Nor did he charge a fee, even going so far as to pay travelling expenses out of his ow n pocket, though his first fledgling grants from the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation helped cover him here—as they did with my salary as his first full-time employee.

The routine was the same as always—Prok would find himself in a hall somewhere, the crowd already gathered, and he would lecture with his usual frankness on previously taboo subjects and then ask for volunteers—friends of the research, he’d begun to call them—to step forward and have their histories taken. When we weren’t in his office, working out our tabulations, curves, and correlation charts, we were off on the road, collecting data, because, as Prok said, over and over, you could never have enough data.