From Chapter Eight
My mind was filled with questions that moment on the beach, but one thought in particular stayed with me. “What was she like?” I wondered, as anxiety grew at the thought of meeting Dr. Jane shortly. This was the woman I had often seen on National Geographic specials shown in class. Hell, she was known as the National Geographic cover girl since her fresh, pretty, young face had graced the covers of the journal frequently during the 1960s and the decades that followed, changing forever the dusty image of the magazine.
Yes, this was the same woman who had visited Dr. Louis S.B. Leakey in Kenya at the impressionable age of twenty four. He became convinced that Jane would be an exceptional person to study the chimpanzees at Gombe. He couldn’t have been more right, for her research findings would later shake the staid scientific world right down to its foundation, especially when she discovered that chimps, too, were toolmakers and users, a skill thought only to be possessed by humans. And to add insult to injury, imagine the initial reaction of the world upon hearing that such a remarkable discovery had been made by a young, female non-scientist who had just graduated from secretarial school. She didn’t become Dr. Goodall until sometime later, when she wrote up her research as a doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University.
She must be quite a woman, I thought to myself, and I was about to live and work with her for a summer. This thought repeated over and over in my head.
