Henry Bunting 1911-1954

It is presumptuous for any one person to claim to know another. It is especially so for me to claim to have known, in any total sense of the word, Henry Bunting. For, as I look around this assembly of friends or recall the variety of those who have spoken to me about him during the last few days, I realize how deep, yet how widely-ranging, was his power of friendship. I grew up with him, amid the peaceful, almost cloistered atmosphere of a college town where our families were friends and colleagues; we went on together to school and university where we both eventually returned to share alike the teacher's life and the exciting delights of rural living in New England. Others here have known him as a fellow worker on those scientific frontiers whose boundaries he was doing so much to extend. To the younger ones he was the professor and practitioner, ever-present and ever-willing to share his learning. Still others have known him in his home or in theirs, or in the hurly-burly of town meeting, or sharing the delights that only music can bring. What was it that we all found in him that has brought us here today? At first sight one recalls his many-sidedness, his versatility. Only yesterday I opened a student's folder, as we sat discussing his future, to have fall out a letter of Henry's, describing at length a series of interviews during which Henry and the boy had patiently worked together to try to determine the latter's fitness for medicine. Beside the teacher, but never submerging him, was the scientist-scholar-which not only gave Henry his profession, but also permeated his every attitude toward life. Yet of all people he was no disembodied scientist, barely tolerating the outside world, and always impatient to return to the splendid isolation of his laboratory. A dozen other Henrys come to mind; the puckish host or guest, delighted to take off in some extravagant fantasy or paradox; the voice of common sense and public spirit, rising above the petty cries of private interest or short-termed advantage; the silent support of a half-dozen causes and as many more individuals who never quite perceived, perhaps, what strength they derived from his backing; the lover and preserver of nature in every form and mood, her winter silences, her wooded retreats, her creatures large and small. Yet this curiosity, this interest, this awareness was constantly maintained without any feverish timetable or little book to regulate and apportion it. Whenever and wherever I met Henry, I somehow felt immediately that he actually had nothing else to do but to sit and talk to me, even though a moment's reflection would have reminded me that he had probably taught a couple of classes already that day, was dining in town to keep watch on something in the laboratory, had probably begun the day helping Charles