Now, a piece of my life story you have heard about from my side of the event — the first meeting of Ann Walcutt Daingerfield and Arnold Melchior Zwicky (which happened in the bowels of the Firestone Library at Princeton University) — from Ann’s viewpoint, as rehearsed in e-mail yesterday from our old friend Benita Bendon Campbell:
In September of 1959, I called Ann, who was languishing in Lexington [KY] and said something like, “I have a job and a nice apartment in Princeton. Would you like to join me?” She replied, “Bonnie, I am so miserable that if someone said ‘I have a job and an apartment in Hell. Would you like to join me?’ I would say, ‘Yes!'”
So she did. A week or so thereafter, she started a job in the Language Lab. Mr. Keefer [AZ: possibly Kiefer] was her boss and she reported in pleased tones about a pair of Student Assistants called “Franklyn and his partner Arnold.” [AZ: partner as in teammates / buddies; Frank Carr and I were roommates for three years]
That is how the milk got into the coconut.
I Did It. By Jove, I Did It.
And deserves credit.
I hope to post more about Ann as Miss Daingerfield of the Language Laboratory. (That could bring us À la recherche du temps perdu. And Bill Bradley as a very young man. Not to mention guys whose body electricity shorted out tape recorders.) As time allows; there’s a lot on my program. Here, today, just a note about Bonnie’s adaptation, for her purposes, of the text of Harry Nilsson’s novelty calypso song “Coconut” (“Lime in the Coconut”) from 1971, with the crucial lines:
She put the lime in the coconut, she called the doctor
Woke him up and said, “Doctor, ain’t there nothin’ I can take”
(I find this song to be a powerful earworm, so I’m not going to torture you with a YouTube recording. Unfortunately, just the memory of it is enough to fell me.)
August 16, 2026 at 4:00 am |
The curse of associative memory; I have fixed on the wrong source of the coconut allusion. Bonnie explains in e-mail to me:
https://wordhistories.net/2018/05/13/milk-coconut-something-puzzling/
August 16, 2026 at 12:50 pm |
[For Bonnie:] Right book, different incident.
When Lord Peter’s nephew is spotted hanging around the College for no apparent reason, the dean says in reaction to the appearance of Lord Peter with another character “Oho! So _that’s_ how the milk got into the coconut!” (Chapter XVIII).
(I just happened to have read this book in the last week or two, so my digital copy was still handy.)
August 16, 2026 at 1:01 pm
Wild thanks. I have managed to keep my Sayers collection here in Avant, but it’s a hardback book that I have no time to search through, so your information is timely indeed.