
She arrives at the Longwood Alumni House with just enough time for
an admiring look at every room in the house and a light meal; then
Dr. Jane holds a six o'clock press conference. Reporters from WFLO
radio, The Farmville Herald and the PBS program Virginia Currents
record her responses. She has a quick walk to Jarman Theatre and several
minutes alone.
On stage at Jarman, Longwood President Dr. Patricia Cormier
thanks student Yared Fubusa for Dr. Jane's coming, then greets Dr.
Jim Jordan who introduces a capacity audience to a four-year-old Jane,
who went to sleep with earthworms under her pillow and told her mother
"I want to go to Africa and watch animals." Then the 1957
Jane, who went to work as a waitress and saved her money to make the
trip to Africa where she met Dr. Louis Leakey. In 1960 Leakey, because
of, rather than in spite of, her fresh perspective and lack of formal
training, sent her to a place called Gombe on Lake Tanganyika. Says
Jordan, "Today it stands as the longest unbroken study of any
animal group in the wild."
After beginning field observations, Jane made a trip back
to England, to Cambridge, and that university made a "decision
it had made only seven times in 790 years that the intellectual
promise of a student's research . . . was so great, that that student
would be admitted to the Ph.D. program directly, without studying
for the bachelor's or master's degrees.² In 1965 she became Dr. Jane
Goodall.
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