16 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY august 22-28, 2024 www.montereycountynow.com wound up in San Francisco. Platt’s mother, Ellen Barlow, moved the family back to Burlington, Vermont within view of the University of Vermont, which Platt entered in 1879, when she was around 24. She earned a bachelor’s of philosophy degree in three years. In 1887, Platt began graduate studies at Harvard University in the Annex of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, according to the article. It was there she conducted research on segmentation of chick embryos and published her first study in 1889. Platt spent two summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts and studied at other U.S. universities. She also made three trips over the years to study in Germany and Italy. In 1898, Platt applied to be a candidate for a doctoral degree in zoology from the University of Freiburg. The approval by the science faculty was unanimous and she received her diploma on May 28, 1898. She was only one of 20 women from the U.S. in the biological sciences to achieve a PhD, helping to break down the barriers for other women who followed. Platt made several remarkable scientific discoveries. The one that created a “ruckus,” as Zottoli says, challenged what scientists thought was possible when it came to germ layers, the three primary cell layers that form in the early stages of embryonic development: endoderm, ectoderm and mesoderm. At the time, scientists believed that each of the three layers gave rise to the development of specific structures, distinct from one another. For example, it was thought the ectoderm could not create the same structures as the mesoderm, but Platt proved otherwise. “The germ layer was kind of set in stone. To have someone challenge it, and especially a woman—she got a lot of flak, I’m sure,” Zottoli says. Her findings were refuted by other scientists at the time, but eventually confirmed. “It was heartening to see that the male scientists in the end supported her findings,” he says. “She faced not only barriers of accepting women, but barriers of accepting the results that women found. She stood her ground, and in some of the cases it was proved what she found was correct.” Platt likely faced constant challenges and misogynistic treatment during her academic career. In one “cruel” instance, says Zottoli, the men at Woods Hole played a humiliating practical joke on Platt as she was leaning over, collecting specimens from a floating platform. According to an account retold in the article, Platt’s “ample girth and weight” caused the platform to sink into the water. Several men took advantage of the situation by stepping onto the platform, sinking it further and causing Platt to get soaked. Zottoli is unsure Platt ever knew if she was vindicated by scientists who affirmed her discoveries, after she left biology. “Once she went into civic duty, she went into it 100-percent,” he says. “I don’t think she ever looked back.” Exactly how Platt landed in Pacific Grove isn’t fully known. Platt herself wrote that she was “attracted by the little city’s world-wide fame in the field of biological research,” referring to Hopkins Marine Station, opened seven years before she arrived. It was directly modeled after the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole by Stanford University’s first president, fish biologist David Starr Jordan. Perhaps Platt hoped she could work there one day. Platt retiring from science to a life in P.G. didn’t make sense to Zotolli, he says, until he found a letter she wrote in 1899 to Jordan, the day after she saw him give a talk at Hopkins. She had hoped to catch him before he boarded his train the next day, but missed him. In her letter she made it clear she had been trying for some time to find a teaching job. “A year has passed in which no opportunity has offered,” she wrote. “I have about concluded that there is no chance for me.” She asked Jordan what he would do if he were in her position. Zottoli says he could find no reply. “Without work, life isn’t worth living,” Platt wrote. “If I cannot obtain the work I wish, then I must take up with the next best.” The “next best” was diving into the civic life of Pacific Grove, although the townsfolk were surely scandalized by her initial presence: She was a single woman with a PhD, not afraid to speak her mind nor, it turns out, punctuate her arguments with a bang. Soon after arriving, Platt purchased five lots extending from Laurel Avenue down 17th Street and built a cottage and planted a lawn and garden. In 1902 she was becoming increasingly annoyed by the fact that people’s chickens were roaming freely on the streets, making their way into her garden. “These creatures appeared to feel that long and unprotected use of the lots which I had purchased gave them rights and privileges thereon which were not listed in my deed,” Platt wrote in an article looking back that ran in the Grove Above High Tide in 1930. Platt asked the mayor for his permission to shoot the chickens. “Why certainly, certainly,” she remembered him saying, adding that he probably thought she’d never actually do it. “However, I bought a second-hand pistol, opened the gate of my wire fence and dared the chickens to come in. Two of them accepted the challenge. Bang, bang, and two dead chickens were thrown over the fence.” The neighborhood was in an uproar, charging that Platt had endangered the lives of passersby and neighbors. The town’s marshal told her permission was withdrawn. A constable suggested she circulate a petition asking the town’s board of trustees to pass an ordinance prohibiting chickens from roaming the streets, which she quickly did. Platt began “She created a legacy for the future.” Julia Platt made sure a news photographer was on hand when she demolished the gate blocking public access to Lovers Point Beach in 1930. Platt contended that state law and the original deed mandated public access. The owner of the bathhouse concession, Mattie McDougall, argued the declining morals of the public made the deed null and void. After the gate came down, McDougall gave up and the gate remained open. Lovers Point in 1907, about eight years after Julia Platt arrived in Pacific Grove. The beach was a popular tourist destination, and included a Japanese tea house and glassbottom boat tours. Platt took it upon herself over the years to keep the area clean and planted with flowers. Monterey Public Library California History Room Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjAzNjQ1NQ==