Medicine: Dr. KINSEY of BLOOMINGTON

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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.