Harold R. Hay: Solar Pioneer
(Page 4 of 17)
September/October 1976
By Mother Earth News Editors
HAY: I continued them through college—I graduated in 1932—and on until '34 with a little graduate work on my scholarship. We had a pretty good depression going on then, though, as you'll recall ... so I dropped out of school a year ahead of a Ph.D. I had an offer from the Monsanto Chemical Company in St. Louis to evaluate a line of products and I said I'd do it if the firm would manufacture pentachlorophenol as a wood preservative.
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Well, the people at Monsanto told me there was a little conflict of opinion in the literature about that product: some said it was good and some said it was bad, So I went to work for the company and tested pentachlorophenol for three or four months—I was given the right to do so—and I proved that it was a very good product for the preservation of wood. It's now produced throughout the world and it's saved tremendous amounts of lumber from decay and termite damage, which means that we have to cut less trees to keep us supplied with wood—in that sense, it's a very ecologically sound contribution to man's technology—and it probably will not be replaced for that purpose in the foreseeable future.
PLOWBOY: So, within months after taking your first job you made a major breakthrough for a large firm. I suppose that secured your future with Monsanto for as long as you wanted to stay there.
HAY: Possibly so. But once I had solved that problem there didn't seem to be much purpose in sticking around. I grew restless and started looking for something new to test myself on.
PLOWBOY: Something in chemistry?
HAY: No, right at that time I had gotten a little perturbed at the political situation in St. Louis. Gangsters had control of the city and there was corruption from one end of town to the other and I didn't like it. So I thought I'd just change things around. My roommate said, "You don't think you—one lone individual—can do anything about the whole political machine of St. Louis, do you?" And I said, "You're darned right I can." And I did.
I left Monsanto and it took me about a year and a half to consolidate what we called the "river rat" wards and then divide up the outlying wards of town to change the whole power base of City Hall. But I've never been a money raiser so, even though I got a lot of endorsements while I was doing this work, I didn't have any income at all during the whole 18 months. I stayed alive by eating peanut butter sandwiches but I got the job done. Then, of course, I needed to earn some money, so I left St. Louis and went to work in New Orleans for the Celotex Corporation. A year and a half later—when the reforms in the city of St. Louis had been approved by an election—I got a telegram that ended, "Thanks for eating peanut butter." That was the only pay I ever got for that work.
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