Renaming a street, WIBA's "Peter B"

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: Moe: Prof leads drive to honor biochemist Link : : : It would probably help Anatole Beck get a street in Madison named for Karl Paul Link if he, Beck, had his own radio show. : The last successful drive to have a street renamed for someone in Madison came more than 20 years ago, and it was fueled by a popular morning radio host. : Beck, who is a math professor at UW-Madison, was around back then. : "That's what lit a fire under me," he was saying last week. : Beck, then, has been thinking for two decades about honoring Link, the UW-Madison biochemist who discovered warfarin, a blood thinner that has been used to kill rats and extend the lives of humans for more than half a century. : Last week Monday, the UW-Madison Faculty Senate took up Beck's motion to change the name of Campus Drive to Karl Link Drive. : "It passed overwhelmingly," Beck said. : Various city of Madison entities also will have to approve the change before it becomes a reality. : Link, whose tenure at UW-Madison lasted from 1927 to 1971 (he died in 1978), was working in his Madison lab one day in 1933 when a farmer from northern Wisconsin appeared carrying a can full of cows' blood. Five of the farmers' cows had died after eating spoiled sweet clover. Their blood, it turned out, would not coagulate. : Over the next decade, Link and his team of chemists developed warfarin, which by the late 1940s was being marketed worldwide as rat poison and pumping millions into the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, for which it was named. : It wasn't long before the scientists discovered that, in small doses, warfarin could be used to treat heart patients with blood-clotting disorders. The most famous early patient to be helped by warfarin was President Dwight D. Eisenhower. : "It's saving millions of lives every year," Beck said of the drug. Renaming Campus Drive for Link, he continued, would remind the city and state "that there are wonderful things going on at this university." : Of course, getting much of anything changed in Madison can seem like moving a mountain. : Back in the mid-1980s, a man named Peter Boam -- known as "Peter B" to his many morning listeners on WIBA-AM -- launched an effort to rename Campus Drive for Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch, the legendary football great and longtime athletic director at UW-Madison. : Peter B's radio platform generated considerable support for the change, and the city Plan Commission voted 5-4 in favor of renaming Campus Drive for Hirsch. The Transportation Commission followed suit. : But once the cost of new signs -- an estimated $17,000 -- was publicized, the plan was scaled back. Instead of Campus Drive, a section of Oakland Avenue, a small street near Camp Randall Stadium, was renamed Crazylegs Lane. : Anatole Beck, an interested observer of the Hirsch discussions, was fairly certain WARF could be counted on to pay for changing the signs from Campus Drive to Karl Link Drive. : In 1992, it got more personal for Beck. He had a major heart operation. "I very nearly died on the operating table," he said. During his recovery, he was prescribed warfarin. : Beck then made a concerted effort, behind the scenes, to get the street named changed. : A 1994 Capital Times story noted that the UW Board of Regents had voted to give Chancellor David Ward the authority to ask the city to rename Campus Drive for Link. : Beck told me that one member of the Plan Commission strongly opposed the change and the UW administration withdrew the proposal. : Last week, a UW-Madison biochemist told my colleague Deborah Ziff that some of the resistance might be due to Link having been an "iconoclast." : Link drove an old station wagon and never stooped to an interest in tailoring. The veteran State Journal writer John Newhouse once noted that Link was always "getting into brawls with eminently respectable persons who have impeccable haircuts and wonderfully well-polished shoes." : He sounds like my kind of iconoclast. : Some years ago, after I mentioned Link in a column, I received a letter from a man named Frederick Bauch of Carefree, Ariz. : Bauch noted that when he enrolled at UW-Madison in 1945, he got a job with WARF. : "I was a mail clerk and general gofer," Bauch wrote. "One of my jobs was to buy a case of Budweiser in cans and put it in the refrigerator in the biochem lab for Dr. Link every Friday afternoon. While I was helping him, he invented warfarin. Forty years later, in 1997, I developed a blood clot in my leg. The Coumadin (the trade name for warfarin) they gave me dissolved the clot before it reached my lung and saved my life. I helped Dr. Link and he saved my life." : I think Beck can count on Mr. Bauch to support the street name change. : Doug Moe will discuss and sign copies of his latest book, "Favre: His Twenty Greatest Games," on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble West. Contact him at 608-252-6446 or dmoe@madison.com. : (Doug Moe, Wisconsin State Journal)

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