Haldan Keffer Hartline, 22 December 1903 - 18 March 1983

Abstract

Haldan Keffer Hartline was of genuine ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’ stock. His grandfather, James A. Hartline, a cabinet maker and also a farmer was from Reading, Pennsylvania. With his wife Hettie (Esther Ann) Schollenberger he lived as a farmer in Berks county, a Pennsylvania Dutch settlement (Dutch = Deutsch = German). One of the children of this couple was Daniel Schollenberger Hartline (b. 1866). This farmer boy rose in education to become a teacher in the natural sciences at Bloomsburg State Normal School. Clearly a man of considerable gifts he had taken a Master’s degree at Lafayette College and afterwards had spent some time (1901-1902) studying at the universities of Bonn and Heidelberg. In 1897 he married Harriet Franklin Keffer (b. 1864), daughter of Washington Henry Keffer, a violinist and orchestra leader in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and his wife Elizabeth Ann Moss of a New England colonial-time family. Harriet Keffer taught English at Bloomsburg State Normal School and played the violin in the school orchestra. She was a skilful amateur gardener and botanist and something of a connoisseur of ferns. The son of the two Bloomsburg teachers, Haldan Keffer (b. 1903) became the visual physiologist, known to his friends as Keffer. He grew up in an English-speaking family but his father had still spoken the Pennsylvanian German dialect at home and learned English in school.