(5 of 10)
When she became Mary Bunting in 1937, her husband was earning $6 a month as a resident at Baltimore City Hospital. She supported him by teaching physiology at Goucher College. Then he got a $1,200 fellowship at Yale Medical School and became the breadwinner. She worked in a lab for $600 a year, "feeling darned lucky because at that price they had so little string on me." In two years she used her freedom for pioneer work on microbial genetics, and found her research specialty —a bright red bacterium called serratia marcescens, whose color makes it easy to trace.
Growing on Goat's Milk. Cash was scarce. "I don't think I bought a steak for ten years," she recalls. But life was rich. While Henry taught pathology at Yale, they lived in a series of rented houses in Bethany, Conn. The Buntings skied, hiked, played tennis, spent long nights banding chimney swifts in a New Haven heating plant. For $200 they managed to buy 50 acres on a Vermont mountaintop. built a tar-paper shack retreat for $26. In 1940 the first of their four children (a daughter, three sons) was born.
Invariably dressed in blue jeans, Mary Bunting raised all her own vegetables, kept chickens and four goats. "We practically grew up on goat's milk," recalls Son Charles. She raised her children to love independence, poetry and the outdoors. "We all hate the city," says Daughter Mary. Weekends the Buntings wheezed off in their Model A Ford pickup truck to camp out on the mountaintop.
Life in a Cellar. To Bethany, there was always something special about the Buntings. A neighbor recalls that "you could never do anything for them." They did things for others. It was Mary who ran the 4-H club, got the swimming hole dug, rounded up boys to fight a forest fire, served on the school board. She sparked the building of a regional high school. Henry Bunting played the fiddle at square dances, and at night made long rounds as the town's volunteer doctor.
When there was time again for genetics, Mary Bunting slipped back to the Yale lab. "When I was home all day, I got tired," she says. "When I was working part-time, I could enjoy the ironing." She needed spirit. The Buntings were building their own house. While digging the cellar, they all lived in a null goat house —after fumigating it.
When they finished the cellar, the family roofed it over and lived there until the house was built a year later. "A lot of people might think 'How awful,' " says Mary, "but we had all the essentials—and real fun." The fun, the house, the family, the research were all perhaps too good to be true. There was a little warning. Henry Bunting began to tire; he stopped teaching one semester; he grew ill. He died of brain cancer on Good Friday 1954.
Mary Bunting does not speak of it. She went on running the new farm, raising four lively children, studying her "bug." When Yale proposed that she take a full-time job researching and lecturing on bacteriology, she grabbed it. "I never once heard Polly talk about herself—ever," says an old friend.