When Barry was a graduate student at the University of Georgia in the 1970's, he went to see Mel Brook's comedy Blazing Saddles at an Athens movie theater.

The scene came on in which Mel Brooks as a Sioux. Indian chief (with a nod to the practice of casting jewish actors as Indians in western films), confronted a lonely wagon of black settlers on the Oregon trail.  Brooks started spouting Yiddish: 'Shvartses! (Blacks!) (To Indian raising tomahawk): No, no, zayt nisht meshuge! (Don't be crazy!) (Raising arms to the heavens in stereotypical Indian pose): Loz im geyn! (Let him go!)'

Well Barry couldn't help letting out a loud guffaw at the unexpected Yiddish, which of course he was familiar with since his dad and grandparents spoke it.  He said a couple of others in the theater laughed too, but most of the audience probably thought it was some sort of Native American language.

See the clip at:

When Barry and Ev were graduate students, they both participated on cruises of RV (Research Vessel) Eastward operated by The Duke University Marine Laboratory (DUML) in Beaufort, North Carolina. Eastward, commissioned in 1965, was the official oceanographic training vessel of the U.S. research fleet. She was available for both oceanographic research and class cruises in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. Barry participated in graduate student cruises led by Larry Pomeroy, and Ev did her thesis research on Eastward along with a Pomeroy student, Gene Turner.

Eastward was called the oceanographic training vessel for good reason. She was only 117 feet long, with a round bottom, and rolled something awful even in moderate seas. ‘Barf Bucket’ was an unofficial label Eastward deservedly earned. This was the only research vessel on which Ev saw a cruise participant literally turn green from seasickness. That was in June 1972, during one of Pomeroy’s class and Ev’s research cruises, when Hurricane Agnes churned from the Gulf of Mexico over Florida and across coastal Georgia, building up high waves over the shelf where the scientists were sampling. The incessant rolling and alarming jolts when a huge wave hit athwart the ship, combined with diesel fumes wafting up the corridor of the scientists’ cabins, were just too much for queasy stomachs.

Larry Pomeroy, who was the head scientist on that 1972 cruise accompanied by marine science graduate students, wrote about this episode in a memoir about oceanography on Eastward, posted on his memorial web page:
'On one occasion we found ourselves in the edge of a hurricane off Brunswick, Georgia. The eye of the storm was reported to be in the Gulf of Mexico, but even where we were the wind was lifting sheets of water from the sea. Sea and sky came together in a white shroud of blowing water. Visibility was zero and radar could not function. Sandoy (Eastward's captain) radioed his port captain, George Newton, in Beaufort for permission to dock in Brunswick because of the storm. The port captain was mystified by this request, because, he said, the storm was in the Gulf of Mexico. Radio exchanges went on for some hours until finally the port captain relented, and Sandoy summoned the Brunswick pilot. We waited in the blowing water. Finally, the pilot radioed that his boat was taking too much water, he was in danger of sinking, and he could not even locate us. He was going to have to turn back.In his heavy accent, Sandoy said, "I think I'll go south." We went rather slowly and blindly southward by compass, more or less toward the hurricane. Off northern Florida, we found a patch of relative calm, as one does far from the storm center, and without consulting anyone, Sandoy made a run into the nearest inlet and docked at Fernandina. We stayed there three days, spending all our money—on beer, mind you—in a brothel called the Palace Saloon. The eye of the storm passed nearby during those days. Then we went on with our cruise, except for one graduate student who had taken the first bus home.' (Note – that was the student who had turned green before the ship went into the port, he decided on a land-based career after that experience.)

Oceanographic sampling on Eastward was a holdover of methods used before CTD (Conductivity-Temperature-Depth) rosette sampling packages and computer logging of data were universal on research ships. Temperature profiles were determined by sending down a continuously recording bathythermograph (BT) instrument or a reversing thermometer for each depth.To collect water samples, separate hard plastic Niskin bottles were hand-hung on a metal wire on one side of the ship, and lowered to specific depths.The bottles were snapped shut to collect a sample of seawater at each depth by manually placing and sending down on the wire a heavy brass messenger, which popped the top bottle, releasing the next messenger to close the bottle hung below it, and so on to the last bottle on the wire.Needless to say, hanging 8-liter bottles on a wire when the ship was rolling and waves were breaking over the railing was a challenge.If there was a current tilting the bottle package away from vertical, the wire angle had to be determined to calculate the exact depth of each bottle. Taking the full bottles off the wire and carefully walking them to the bottle rack was even more daunting in a heavy sea.After racking and securing the Niskin bottles, separate smaller sample bottles were filled from a nipple at the base of each bottle for different analyses: glass salinity bottles, plastic bottles filled and frozen for later nutrient analysis, bottles for chlorophyll determination, large polycarbonate bottles for particulate carbon and nitrogen samples. Salinity and chlorophyll were analyzed between sampling stations during the cruise.

Seasickness is experienced by most sea-going oceanographers. Usually scientists would be nauseous the first day, and then get accustomed to the ship's motion. But stormy seas brought back the woe, first as overproducing salivary glands, and then a desire to heave.PESR watch duty, which all the crew had to stand up on the bridge, was the worst. The Precision Echo Sounding Recorder, or PESR, sends bursts of chirping sound; the echo returning from the sea bottom is picked up by a hydrophone, and the time differential between the chirp and its echo is converted to a measure of depth electronically.  As the ship steams, the PESR continuously draws a contour of the sea bottom by a hot wire on a broad chart of moving paper. The PESR task was to monitor the output and label the ship's depth chart as it un-spooled with the date, time and position. The exaggerated motion of the upper part of the ship, combined with the smell of burning paper and electronics in the small instrument room as the depth was continuously monitored, was often just too much. When scientists got too ill, they would repair to their bunks, as lying down quieted the sensation.

Research ship food varies with the ship and the cooking staff. On Eastward Howard Wilson and Clyde Everett labored in the tiny galley at the rear of the ship to provide three calorie, fat, and salt-laden down-home meals for the scientists and crew each day. Breakfast usually included plate-sized pancakes, eggs, sausage or bacon and freshly baked biscuits.Lunch and dinner presented various fried or sauce-covered meat entrées with overcooked vegetables. When steaks were on the menu, Barry observed Howard liberally salt the cuts on both sides before frying them in a pan. Dessert was ice cream or pie - sweet potato pie was a favorite. Sometimes, though, the cooks would go trolling between meals and there would be fresh fish  for dinner. Those working at night could raid the pantry for saltine crackers, peanut butter, and sardines. The cooks were berthed below deck in the most forward part of the crew's quarters. The ship's bow, of course, had the most violent motion in heavy seas, and the cooks would risk being tossed from their bunks.In those conditions, they would evacuate aft to the galley and sleep on the padded benches of the dining area.

Of course, there were moments of delight on the cruises when the seas were calm.I t was always a thrill to look around and not see land or a single other ship, and have the sense of being in a watery wilderness, far removed from civilization. When the Eastward was underway bottlenose dolphins would be attracted to the ship’s bow waves, and the crew would stand at the rails looking down at the elegant forms torpedoing along or splashing in and out of the standing waves on either side of the ship, obviously having great fun.The ship also stirred up flying fish, which would leap out of the waves ahead of the track and skim the ocean with fins outstretched for long seconds.Gulls and terns often flocked aft to snatch small fish and squid churned up by the propellers. When the ship was far from the coast, at the edge of the Sargasso Sea in the central North Atlantic, scientists scooped up clumps of sargassum weed floating on the surface with a bucket attached to a rope flung over a side railing. Then the golden-brown seaweed was put into clear glass jars to view the myriad fish, shrimp, and other sea creatures sheltering among the algal strands. Some endemic species, like the sargassum fish, had color patterns and body appendages to mimic the hues and patterns of the seaweed, perfectly camouflaged in their floating home.

Watch YouTube videos of a 1972 Eastward cruise that Ev participated in to see old fashioned sampling in action:
WOE 15 Science and the Sea Parts I and II
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2fSCDKMruY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO_9iBtZPyk

I had forgotten about this, but in 2004 a reporter for the Corvallis newspaper, the Gazette-Times, did a story on us for Valentines Day:

For some couples, the secret to a long-lasting marriage is maintaining a certain independence, a special piece of life that is separate from the other partner's.

Some even take separate vacations, and most at least have a job or hobby that takes them away from their house, and their spouse, for at least part of the day.

But when you ask Ev and Barry Sherr about taking time off from each other, they exchange confused glances. The two Oregon State University professors of oceanic and atmospheric science work side by side all day, and go home together at night, and never complain that they're seeing too much of each other.

"We're used to being together," Ev says, her eyes locking with Barry's. "It's hard for us to be apart."

Barry is a little less sentimental. He can think of plenty of times that they're not together.

"When we come home, I sit on the couch and watch TV while she's in the kitchen," he volunteers as proof of their time apart.

Ev and Barry haven't been apart too often since they met 30 years ago. At the time, Barry was a Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia, studying estuaries on Sapelo Island off the coast of Georgia. Ev was a post-doc researcher who came to Sapelo as a senior scientist on the same project.

When they first met, they were each married to other people. Ev's husband was also an academic, who lived on the mainland while Ev lived on the island. Barry's wife was living far away as well, and neither couple was spending much time together.

Work was the focus for Ev and Barry for the first few years, as Barry worked on completing his degree, and Ev was busy with her research. But once Barry finished his course work, he returned to the island, and love began to grow.

Both marriages had subsequently fallen apart, and the island, isolated and beautiful, was a natural backdrop for their relationship.

"It was a magic place," Ev said. "There was a deserted beach, and because it was isolated, it was a pretty romantic place."

While their first marriages had dissolved in part because of distance, their new relationship grew because of their proximity, and a shared passion for oceanography.

When Barry got the opportunity to do post doctorate work in Israel, they decided to marry, making it easier for them to travel together and live abroad. Ev took a year and a half leave from work on the island, and they flew to Israel just a week after their wedding day, Sept. 11, 1979.

Barry, who admittedly is a little light on romance, pointed out that the date of their anniversary is now a hard one to forget.

After completing his work in Israel, Barry returned with Ev to the island, where they continued to live and work from 1981 until 1990. They adopted one child, Aaron, in 1982, and nine months after his adoption, Ev discovered she was pregnant. Their second son, Jared, is now a freshman in physics at the University of Oregon.

The children led a sheltered life on the island, which had few inhabitants and no school. The boys had to take a 45-minute boat ride to the mainland and another 45-minute bus ride just to get to school.

"We wanted to get off the island," Ev said. "But the problem is working together as a research team, it's not that easy to find a job."

Oregon's higher education system has a history of supporting duel-career couples, and when a position opened up at OSU, the Sherrs jumped at the chance. The university allowed them to split the position between them, allowing the couple more time to raise their family.

Ev said their colleagues don't understand how a married couple can survive being together 24 hours a day, but Barry shrugs it off with a little chuckle.

"You can get used to anything," he joked. "Time flies."

Research does occasionally split the couple for a few months, including the time Barry spent half a year on the Arctic Ocean. Ev has two 40-day cruises to go on this year, which Barry said he's "not looking forward to."

"Mainly because I'll have to take care of the dog and the house, and our eldest son moved in with his cat, so now we have a grand-cat," Barry grumbled. He didn't mention the part where he'd miss Ev, but he didn't have to.

When they're apart, the couple e-mail each other daily, and have even discussed digital cameras attached to their computers for video conferencing.

As for Valentine's Day, the couple has no big plans. They don't exchange gifts or make a big deal out of the day. In fact, the most romantic gift Ev can recall receiving is something Barry and the kids gave her for Mother's Day a few years ago. Her eyes lit up as she recalled the "wonderful" present.

"They gave me a pressure cooker!" she said. "It was exactly what I wanted. I don't want jewelry."

It must be true love.

Barry said what he thought, often with off-color language worthy of a sailor.  The kids were listening. One of the first things Jared liked to say was 'A-ho', usually when he was upset with his brother Aaron. We thought it was cute until we realized what Jared meant.  On a trip to visit Barry's folks in New York City, they took us to a party at their synagogue.  Jared seemed like just a sweet little 3-year old.  One of the elders at the party picked Jared up to admire him.  Jared said something to the man, and a shocked expression came over his face and he quickly put the little guy down. We imagined that Jared had said his standard phrase expressing displeasure, picked up from Barry, and the man had realized what it was.

Ev loved to cook, and Barry loved to eat. (That made it all the more distressing that in the last few months of his life, Barry stopped eating He said that food tasted like sawdust, and just didn’t want any. But the last coherent thing he said to Ev in the hospital was: ‘Ev, want to get something for dinner?’)

Barry most enjoyed all the bad stuff: deli meat and cheese, pizza, hot dogs (we called them ‘tube steaks’), fatty ribs, fried chicken, grilled steaks. His mother Miriam was a good cook despite working six days a week with Barry’s dad Saul in their variety store in Greenwich Village. He was raised on New York Jewish cuisine: bagels, lox, pickled herring, knishes, brisket, kosher deli meats. Since Jewish tradition is that meat has to be drained of blood before cooking, beef was always prepared very well done. Barry insisted that hamburgers, steaks, and roasts be cooked with not a hint of pink.

Barry loved fresh baked bread, and fondly remembered the little bakery near his parents’' apartment in the Chelsea district that had fabulous rolls and rye bread. He also always raved about New York pizzas, and how no other pizzas could compare to those. He liked to get bakery baguettes to make crusty sandwiches.

And sweets – Barry had a well-developed sweet tooth. There was a pastry shop near Penn Station, D’Aiuto’s, that Barry always took our family to when visiting New York. The place was famous for Baby Watson Cheesecake. It was founded by Italian immigrants and their company was once among the biggest producers of cheesecake in New York City. Barry loved their cannoli, too. Ev would make cheesecakes at home that almost, but not quite, measured up to D’Aiuto’s’. A favorite place for brunch in Corvallis was New Morning, a restaurant/bakery. Barry loved their cinnamon twists and carrot cake, Ev their strawberry-rhubarb pie. If one wanted a fancy cake, that was the place to order it.

When we lived in Israel for a year and a half just after we married, we were thrown into a new gustatory experience – Middle East cuisine. Israel had wonderful fresh fruits and vegetables that the natives used in innovative ways. Israeli chopped salad for breakfast was one we easily adopted. Israeli restaurants had lots of ‘little plate’ appetizers that could easily be a whole meal. We were introduced to hummus and smoky eggplant dip scooped up with fresh baked pita bread. Our lab friend Miriam Edelstein showed us how to make the eggplant dip (Baba Ganoush) by first charring an eggplant on a gas grill. Ev especially liked a roasted eggplant, fresh tomato and garlic salad. Of course, we indulged in the traditional Mid-East snack, fried hummus balls (falafel) in pita halves with pickled vegetables and hot peppers on top. In downtown Tiberias there were multiple falafel stands.There was also a conditoria, a pastry shop, which we visited regularly for cookies and strudel. We liked the old couple that ran it. When we visited with Jared in 2009, the little shop was still there, run by the old couple’s son.

A new fruit we discovered in Israel was the pomelo, a large sweet, dry grapefruit that can be peeled and eaten in segments. We also were introduced to the small, crisp Persian cucumbers that were used in salads. We were amused when we went to one of the two movie theaters in Tiberias to see young people bring in cucumbers and bell peppers to snack on during the show.

Beef was mainly imported to Israel as frozen cuts of meat from Argentina, and was expensive. We mainly cooked chicken and fish in our apartment. A favorite way to make chicken was to pound breast fillets flat, coat them with bread crumbs and fry in oil for chicken schnitzel. Our friends Bina and Didi Kaplan took us on a picnic up in the hills around Lake Kinneret and grilled chicken hearts for us – definitely not something we would think of. One could get pork chops, but since pork was trafe – forbidden - in traditional Jewish cuisine, the Israelis referred to pork chops as ‘steak lavan’ or ‘white steak.’ We were introduced to new types of pasta that we had never seen in Georgia. One was rice-like orzo. We called this pasta ‘ee-tri-oht’ thinking that was its specific name. But it turned out that ‘eetrioht’ was just the general Hebrew word for pasta. In Tiberias there were a number of restaurants catering to Christian tourists that served ‘St Peter’s fish’, tilapia caught in the lake, usually crisp fried.

In the Middle East, everyone drank coffee rather than tea. In the lab people would prepare Turkish coffee. Israelis called it ‘botz café’ which meant ‘mud coffee’ because of the dark grounds at the bottom of the cup. When we took a road trip down to the Sinai Peninsula, we had botz café at a Bedouin camp. In coffee shops we liked to order ‘café im hel’. which meant Turkish coffee with added cardamom. But instant coffee was also popular for its convenience, and that’s what we mainly drank. In summer restaurants served ice-café, coffee with vanilla ice cream, or milk, sugar and ice cubes, as a cool refresher.

When we came back to Sapelo, we got back in the groove of harvesting fish and shellfish from around the island.We would go out oystering in the creeks, and leave crab traps baited with chicken necks for a blue crab feast. Ev would go feeling around the sandy bottom of a creek near the beach for clams to make clam chowder. And of course the fishing was great. At the first cold wave of the fall, we would anticipate a run of sea trout up the tidal rivers, and go at night to troll for trout from Meridian Dock using shrimp or wiggly plastic lures.The most unusual way we fished was stalking red drum in the salt marsh. On the highest tides, these large fish would swim well up into the marsh hunting fiddler crabs. We waded out on an incoming tide with rods baited with a shrimp or a chunk of mullet. When we saw a fin poking up from the water covering the marsh, we would estimate the fish’s course and try to land the hook just in front of it. If the fish took the bait, we would wait until we were sure the hook was swallowed, then have a hard fight until we could reel the drum in. The smoked mullet prepared by some of the men in Hog Hammock was a delicious treat.

In Georgia Barry couldn’t wait for summertime fresh plums, peaches, ripe tomatoes, and ears of corn. When we moved to Oregon, we mourned losing Georgia peaches and good-tasting tomatoes.The Northwest did have many of Barry’s favorites, though: cherries, apples, plums, and blueberries. There was a blueberry farm just outside of Corvallis where Ev would go every summer to load up on the best tasting varieties. Ev would also bake a special apple pie piled high with apple slices that Barry eagerly prepared.Salmon and dungeness crab substituted for Georgia coastal fish and blue crabs.There were lots of good vegetables sold at the summer farmer’s markets, even ripe tomatoes grown in hothouses.

The Northwest is a food-lovers paradise, with many great restaurants. In Corvallis we learned to savor Thai dishes by often having lunch specials at Tarntip, a little restaurant near the oceanography buildings on the OSU campus in which the kitchen staff would chat in Thai.The family had another restaurant – in Paris, and every August Tarntip would be closed for a month so the owners could go to France to visit the other half of their family. Two other restaurants we frequented for lunch sat right by the Thai place: Bombs Away, a funky Mexican eatery that featured large burritos, and American Dream Pizza, where we would order a slice and a salad for lunch. Father down the street was a hippy-ish vegetarian restaurant, Nearly Normals, that had outdoor seating among trees and vines. Portland is also a foodies’ dream, but when we traveled there we usually wound up at a New York style delicatessen, Kornblatts, which served matzo ball soup, chopped liver, and deli sandwiches which Barry deemed nearly as good a the delis in New York. There was even a tub of fat kosher pickles swimming in brine on each table.

Of course, Barry never lost his taste for southern cooking. When we spent a few months on sabbatical at the University of Georgia in Athens in the summer of 1999, we made sure to indulge. We took Aaron, Jared, and Aaron’s best buddy Erich, who traveled with us to Georgia, to a famous Athens eatery: Charlie Williams Pinecrest Lodge. The place was surrounded by woods, and had the most impressive buffet we had ever seen. We loaded our plates with all the southern delicacies: barbeque meats, fried catfish, fried chicken, cornbread, okra, turnip greens, peach cobbler. We were lucky – the restaurant, a fixture in Athens since 1929, closed for good in 2004.