Dr. KINSEY of BLOOMINGTON

A the sturdy man wearing an unpressed suit and scuffed loafers strides determinedly across the Indiana University campus, students will nudge a newcomer and remark: "That's Dr. Kinsey." Beyond such modest attention, Kinsey has caused less stir in the college town of Bloomington (pop. 28,163) than almost anywhere else in the U.S.

Bloomingtonians repeat the usual Kinsey jokes. Residents driving east on First Street point out the Kinseys' brick house (which he designed) behind a riotous growth of trees and shrubs (which he planted). Friends know him by a nickname--"Prok," a contraction of Prof. K. But on shopping streets around the town square, Dr. Kinsey passes unidentified and unnoticed.

Kinsey is a friendly man with a passionate interest in people. Says Actress Cornelia Otis Skinner (whom he interviewed as part of his "female sample"): "He has the skill of a great actor in drawing you into what he is doing. He attracts you like a magnet. You forget all your fears and have complete confidence in him." But lately, as the weight of work has increased, Kinsey has become almost a recluse. He sees less and less of his old faculty friends, though most of them still like him. He can be impatient and cutting. His attacks on scientists in other fields border on arrogance.

Kinsey works 14 or more hours six days a week, and most of Sundays. An insomniac, he will often work in the middle of a sleepless night. He is compulsive about keeping appointments on the dot. He does not know how to relax. He can delegate little work, though his heart has begun to protest and doctors have warned him that he must rest. This summer he subjected himself to tremendous strain by personally handling his elaborate press relations--with results that a professional pressagent might envy. Though he decries publicity for himself, he wants it for his work.

Kinsey married Clara Bracken McMillen in 1921, when she was a graduate student in chemistry and he a young assistant professor of zoology at Indiana. Prok and Mac, as he calls her, have raised three children (a boy died in infancy): Anne, 30, married to Warren Corning of Chicago; Joan, 28, married to Dr. Robert Reid of Columbus, Ind. and Bruce, 24, a graduate business student at Indiana U. Mrs. Kinsey, a wiry, tweedy woman with neat black hair, now greying slightly, has gladly subordinated her life to her husband's career. As she once innocently expressed it: "I hardly ever see Prok at night any more since he took up sex." Mac used to enjoy hiking with him and sharing in his field work; nowadays she leads weekly hikes for a rugged band of faculty wives while he is busy with his statistics.

Kinsey's only concession to the social amenities is to hold Sunday-evening record recitals. But he is no relaxed amateur. He is a relentless musicologist, and his soirees are an exacting ritual. He plans a carefully balanced program and gathers material for commentary. Guests arrive on the stroke of 8 and are seated in a hieratic U pattern with the high-fidelity player and the master's chair at the open end of the U. All talk is hushed as Kinsey picks up the first record and announces why he thinks it worth playing. The ladies may knit with muted needles, but there is not another sound until the record is ended. While the music is on, Kinsey eyes his guests to see whether they catch the nuances of a fine performance. Between numbers, and at a sherbet and cake intermission, there is no idle chatter--only the point-counterpoint of lofty criticism. When the last piece has been played, the guests rise as one, thank the Kinseys for a lovely evening, and leave in a body.

Among Bloomington's music lovers it is an honor to be invited to a Kinsey soiree. But some have stopped going because the emotional undertones in Kinsey's intensity made them uncomfortable. Though he drinks and smokes only rarely, to put others at their ease, Kinsey makes an equally elaborate ritual of mixing a drink. (He is no kin to the late Jacob G. Kinsey, whose name graces bottles of blended whisky, although Philadelphia's Kinsey Distilling Corp. keeps getting requests for "free sex books," and sells more whisky, thanks to its namesake.)

Born in Hoboken, NJ. in 1894, Alfred Charles Kinsey was the son of a self-made man who had started as a shopboy at Stevens Institute of Technology, and later headed its department of mechanical arts. Little Alfred spent most of his first ten years in bed, beset by rickets, heart trouble and finally typhoid fever (which nearly killed him). Then the family moved ten miles from smoggy Hoboken to the green hills of South Orange, and Alfred's health improved. He speaks with almost ferocious intensity of what South Orange meant to him: 'Twas raised in city streets. It was amazing to me that there were flowers to be had for the picking, and that there were birds more brilliantly colored than house sparrows."

His father gave him a book on flowers, but Alfred found a flower that wasn't in the book. That was the beginning of his passionate curiosity about nature. Soon he was immersed in a research project: in shower and thunderstorm he pulled on his raincoat and dashed out to see what the birds were doing. Kinsey's first published work, What Birds Do in the Rain, appeared in a nature journal when he was still in grade school.

Kinsey graduated from South Orange High School at 16 with top honors. Yearbook editors put a wildly unprophetic line from Hamlet under his picture: "Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither."

Leading nature hikes at summer camps helped Kinsey to pay his way through Maine's Bowdoin College, where he majored in biology and zoology. He had studied the piano since he was five, and at the Zeta Psi fraternity house he loved to play Beethoven or Chopin with tumultuous Paderewski-like tossing of his blond mane.

Kinsey moved on to Harvard and took up wild food. He became as expert in this as in everything else that he has chosen to study. By 1920, with the late Merritt Lyndon Fernald, he finished his first book: Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America (not published until 1943). For the distinguished members of the New England Botanical Club, Kinsey and Fernald spent days preparing a wild dinner: cold pigweed salad, pickles from cucumber root, bread from the acorns of swamp white oaks, squawberries, a cake of ground hickory nuts filled with blueberries and topped with maple syrup. It was, he reports, a great success.

Armed with his Sc.D. from Harvard (he has no M.D.), Kinsey joined the Indiana faculty. But a classroom could not hold him. He was forever searching scrub oaks for gall wasps, which fascinated him as living proof that evolution is still going on. When he had collected thousands of specimens in southern Indiana and recorded 28 microscopic measurements of each in a growing pile of statistics, Kinsey had to go farther and farther afield. Eventually he logged 80,000 miles of travel (much of it with Mrs. Kinsey and the children along as helpers) and 3,500,000 gall wasps.

It looked as though, in its professor of zoology, Indiana University had a man who would enjoy fame only in the narrow circle of gall-wasp taxonomists. But in 1938 some undergraduates asked Dr. Kinsey about sex adjustments in marriage. Then he was off. He forsook the birds, bees & flowers for human specimens. And though the study of sexual behavior has since absorbed him so completely, Kinsey says with a straight face: "Frankly, I should think the public would be extremely tired of the subject."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.