Assistant is priceless link to inventor's work

C. Azell Prince was an aide to Thomas Edison in the 1930s. He's agreed to help refurbish the inventor's Fort Myers lab.

FORT MYERS - For officials at the Edison & Ford Winter Estates, C. Azell Prince Jr. is a living treasure.

Prince, who recently turned 91, holds intimate historical insight of Fort Myers' most famous resident and his laboratory on McGregor Boulevard, knowledge that's as priceless as it is rare.

Prince, a 1930 Fort Myers High graduate who now lives in St. Petersburg, served as Thomas Alva Edison's personal assistant in 1930 and 1931 at laboratories in West Orange, N.J., and in Fort Myers as the prolific inventor toiled to find an alternative source for rubber. Prince stayed on at the New Jersey lab until 1934.

Estates president and CEO Chris Tenne Pendleton has asked Prince to visit and help recapture some of the authenticity of the laboratory, where the contents have been shuffled over the past 74 years.

Except for the building being hoisted onto concrete blocks for preservation, nothing has been done to refurbish the lab. That is about to change.

The green rectangular building likely holds the best chance of the estates gaining national landmark status, Pendleton said. Estates officials are working on an application for a federal Save America's Treasures grant. The restoration is estimated to cost between $1-million and $3-million.

While Edison remains most famous for 1,093 patented inventions such as the X-ray, light bulb and phonograph, the last five years of his life were largely spent looking for an American source for rubber. He operated the Edison Botanical Research Corp., financed by him and friends Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone.

"He had a belief that if we ever got into another war, we'd be in one hell of a mess," Prince said.

One of Prince's daily tasks, he said, was to write reports of the tests that were conducted on various plants the previous day and give them to Edison for review. Wild milkweed, for instance, was found to contain some rubber, Prince recalled, but "when you cut the plant, it bleeds."

Edison wrote a lot, too. Some of Prince's most coveted possessions sitting in a box at his St. Petersburg apartment are dozens of research notes Edison wrote in the lab, the frail notebook paper now a shade of yellow. He signed many of them with either his full name, an "E" or his initials "TAE," using custom-made pencils with large erasers and his name printed on them.

Prince typed the notes, filed them and kept Edison's originals for himself. He's still got some of those 4.5-inch pencils.

Always eager to make his boss comfortable, Prince also gave warm milk and spinach to Edison every two hours to ease his ulcers.

"(Edison) would get a little cross once in a while, but then he'd come back and pat you on the shoulder," Prince said. "He was strictly business."

Edison's most successful breakthrough in his rubber experiments was a form of goldenrod, also known as milkweed, which yielded 14 percent rubber from its leaves, Prince said.

Prince remembers seeing soup lines in Newark, N.J., during the Depression and how thankful he was to be working for Edison as a teenager.

"It made me really appreciate getting a paycheck," he said.

After Edison's death Oct. 18, 1931, at age 84, the rubber experiments continued until 1934.

Edison could talk, but he was virtually deaf, so Prince and the rest of his employees had to communicate by writing words on paper. They sometimes affectionately referred to the elderly Edison as "the old man."

Prince enjoys telling a story about Edison's kindness. Prince and his family - at Edison's insistence - took a road trip to visit the Everglades. On their way back along a two-lane stretch of U.S. 41 in Bonita Springs, their Plymouth sedan broke down. Edison's limousine came down the road shortly after that, and he saw the family on the side of the road. Prince's father also worked for Edison, first as a pharmacist, then a chemist.

As the younger Prince tells it, Edison ordered his chauffeur to tie two snow chains together and pull the disabled car back to Fort Myers. The chauffeur took Edison home and returned to assist the Prince family at a Fort Myers service station where they were dropped off.

"That was the kind of person Edison was," Prince said. "The next day, he told me, "The mosquitoes would have eaten you up."'

After his work with Edison's company, Prince owned Dawson Pharmacal Co., in Winchester, Tenn., and later worked as a manager for Sinclair Oil in Tampa.

Prince retired in 1973, though he hardly stopped working. He and his daughter Patricia Burgess still own and operate Salt Creek Artworks in St. Petersburg. The business features a gallery, art shows and rental space for artists.

Prince, who moved to St. Petersburg in 1943, said he's anxious to share his memories of Edison's laboratory with estates officials.

"I was right there," he said.

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