SCENES
FROM
HALF A
CENTURY
Robb Murray
50th Birthday
Dedicated to Dr. Al Reed,
longtime family friend,
for his request over many years
that I “write my memoirs”
© 2003, Robb Murray
SCENES FROM
HALF A
CENTURY
1 A TIME FOR REMINISCING . . .
4 MY AUDIO
WINDOW TO THE WORLD
10 WHAT
HATH THOMAS EDISON WROUGHT!
11 VISTAS
FROM THE CLASSICAL PAST
13 WORKING
FOR THE CITY, or “HOW DO I GET OUT OF HERE?”
15 COMMENTS
AS I APPROACH AGE 50
In my world of today, with
so many job changes and friends coming and going, those whom I know and love in
Chicago who have any ties with my life of even so long as ten years ago are
very few. The hurried brevity of so many of our
interactions prevents our getting a
fuller picture of each other; not only as we are today but who we were growing
up and first starting out in our lives as adults.
When I was a kid, a lot of
friendships were deepened by hobby pursuits; and fishing and camping trips
added further depth. Such mixing is rare
for me with so many of my friends today, and time is passing. Turning 50 years old is a momentous occasion
for any person, and I would like to commemorate it in my life by reaching out
in story. I request, and I hope for,
stories from you, too, as we continue our friendship.
I am not really one who
spends a lot of time in mulling over the golden and not-so-golden moments of my
past. My boyhood friend, Dennis Burns,
was always much more that sort. He was
reminiscing about second grade in fourth grade.
Now and then, I would say to him, “Dennis, don’t you think we should let
some time go by before we reminisce?”
Years later, Dennis told me that when we were kids growing
up, he was always afraid of dying. He
was afraid that either he would die, or his mother would or his sister, Diane,
would. This had all been set off in 1957
when Dennis’s dad, who was one of my dad’s medical partners, died in a tragic
car collision with a train. Dr. Burns
left behind the small band of three and their survival became Dennis’s preoccupation. I think reminiscing was his way of cherishing
life, and reassuring himself that most things would not be taken away from him
the way his dad had been.
And the time does come, it
seems to me, when, if we have stories treasured up to tell, they need to start
coming forth. Life is such a rich
experience and yet its continuation is not guaranteed. I only know that, so far, its savor has been
sweet, its happiness great, and its poignancies touching. Tales of gratitude are in order.
My hope is that as you
read these lines, you will be reminded of similar times in your own life, and
feel happiness. My wish is that you will
know me better and that you will let me know you better, too. And if there is any entertainment value in
these stories and you find yourself smiling, I have more than achieved my
purpose.
There is so much more I
wanted to tell you than I have time to do now.
I hope some of it will come out in our conversations of the future. Perhaps when I turn 60, I will extend the
coverage and write more of a full-blown autobiography. My brother-in-law, Steve, has already done so
and my Dad is publishing stories from his life just this year. So, you see there is a trend going in our
family. This time around, I will leave
in this book stories I have completed, even if they do not tie fully into the
surrounding material. I hope you will
forgive any continuity flaws.
Before telling any
particular story, perhaps I should lay out the basic facts of my life. There are more perspectives on these facts
than can be quickly expressed in a small space.
Such would include the development of my general philosophy of life, the
fun and fulfillment of hundreds of friendships, my love life, my political
perceptions, and my overall world view.
But the simple facts are not difficult to relate.
My childhood in
We were taken to church
and Sunday school where Dad had grown up
and which his parents still attended, a German Evangelical and Reformed Church
called Calvary E&R. Our friendships
there were warm and some of my happiest memories are of Easter
In my earliest years, I
established a preference for indoor activities due to my congenital aversion to
bright light. My journey through grade
school was a combination of social enjoyments and confrontations with visual
demands that required determination. I
could never read the blackboard, being too nearsighted, and worked around this
as much as possible. Learning to read
was difficult because so many of the lessons were shown on the board or on flip
charts. The teachers would try to say
everything as they wrote it aloud for me in the beginning but would usually
forget or feel too tied down by it and simply sail ahead. But when I would be challenged to read aloud
in a circle with others, my adrenaline worked for me and I was as able to read as
any of the others.
My roots as a kid were in
music and books and church activities, and science hobbies, and inventive pastimes.
By invita
tion of my dad, I developed an interest in
chemistry, which was made stronger by an emotional identification with Thomas
Edison that began in fourth grade when I was given his biography as a sort of
prize. I set up a basement lab. This lab became something of an institution
in our family and neighborhood. It gave
me my first experiences of learning a technical subject, then transmitting it
to others through interesting activities.
I had two best friends,
Dennis Burns and Sam Warner. Dennis and
I were in the same grade and were in many classes together throughout
school. We were very much like brothers
and felt a combination of affection and, at times, competition. We rarely discussed the latter, but managed
it as best we could to stay good friends.
In second grade, our class would sing a song to the tune, it so happens,
of the Austrian National Anthem:
“Friendship true is a golden token;
Friendship true is a chain unbroken,
Shaped to last a lifetime long.
Peace and mercy its gold refining,
Love and honor the links combining,
Links combined forever firm and strong,
Links combined forever, ever firm and strong.”
Dennis and I decided that
this song was about us and that it would always describe us. Through many twists and turns, we have kept
our friendship to this day.
Sam, my other main friend,
lived next door to me, was five years younger and was like a younger brother to
me. His parents, though quite well-off,
had a troubled marriage, and his father was very arbitrary and had a white hot
temper. Sam and I began making tape
recordings of radio shows and would make up the songs as well as the
commentary. Sam was very creative and
uninhibited and, like Dennis, very intelligent.
Because of his parents’ divorce, and a general lack of guidance and
encouragement, Sam skipped college and after high school became a laborer,
blasting the rust off oil barrels in a reconditioning yard, and only many years later went to college,
where he majored in art history. I don’t
know where he is today.
In grade school, I think
it safe to say that I was known for my musical abilities, my chemistry, and my
willingness to take the lead when asked.
I was made president of the Library Club and then the Science Club. Though there was always a certain amount of
fear associated with them, I loved to give demonstrations and oral reports in
class.
In
junior high, I found I had to buckle down and study to make grades. Early on I got a bad mark after blowing off
studying so I could help a friend with his paper route. This really scared me, and I thereafter curtailed
the news deliveries and started finishing homework right after school every
night.
I was
sent to confirmation classes, and passing the course required that we learn
certain basics of the Protestant faith, such as the books of the Bible, and
various scripture passages. This
exposure gave me enough information to become genuinely curious about my
family’s faith, which I had seriously adopted as my own, and I acquired several bibles in modern
English and went to work reading through them on a daily basis. In a related project, I set out to read the
Bible aloud from the beginning, with Sam, with the stipulation that we were to
assume we knew nothing about religion and would be instructed entirely by what
we read. This thorough tabula rasa approach to Bible study
helped me immensely later when I joined a fundamentalist church. Because of my own independent reading from
the Sourcebook before having ever met a fundamentalist, I could readily discern
the additions of attitude and stricture that such people were pancaking on top
of their claimed Guidebook.
I
had taken piano lessons from the age of five but found sight reading extremely
hard. To escape further lessons, I told
Dad I would take classical guitar, which I did for seven years. I was always
much more interested in composing than in performance and my guitar teacher,
Carl Steiger, encouraged my originality.
Together we would play the duets I would bring in to the lessons. I was a classical music lover and wanted to
write for small groups of strings and woodwinds, on the order of Handel’s
“Water Music.” I made friends with some
musicians in the high school orchestra and they would come over and play my material. The most important ingredient in music to me
was melody, and this made my pieces appealing to others. At the end of senior year, I had a string
piece performed in the concluding student recital and it was very well liked.
School
was never something I could take for granted.
Because, again, I couldn’t read the black board, even from the front
row, I had to listen very carefully. My
concentration paid off, however, and I received many awards throughout school,
sometimes amassing them to an almost embarrassing extent. At the end of 9th and 12th
grades, I won just about every subject award the schools gave. My senior year, the school created a new
German award just so they could give it to me.
I was high school co-valedictorian with perfect grades in our 1971 class
of about 600 students. More meaningful
to me, I was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” and I was famous for my imitations
of our school’s faculty, and of celebrities.
With two other classmates, I had won a college bowl-type chemistry
competition that was broadcast on local TV, and therewith a small college
scholarship.
As a
present for my high school diligence, my parents sent me to
In
college, I was put into sophomore chemistry and started to find the visual
demands on me growing heavier and harder to work around. The lights in the lab were too bright and I
couldn’t even read my thermometers, which were always clamped high above a lab
assembly. The upperclassmen weren’t keen
on studying with a freshman, either. My
consolation was making friends with a tremendous violinist in my dorm, John
Weeks. I wrote numerous duet pieces for
him, and we sounded great together, playing violin and piano in the school
chapel.
I
was beginning to have some strong second thoughts about my religious faith
which, though a source of optimism and, at times, consolation, contained inner
contradictions that I questioned my ability to espouse for a lifetime. I took more Bible classes. I also began
asking the questions that perplexed me.
The preliminary results were not good, and there were never really good
answers to my questions. At the same
time, the lore and atmosphere of biblical studies was fascinating in the same
way that most technical subjects can be once you understand them. My junior year, I left chemistry, having
completed a year of physical chemistry, definitely NOT a jolly subject. I finished with a humanities major cum laude in 1975 and then needed to
become employable. With sister Cindy, I
took a second trip abroad, this time for a month in
This
led me to library school and transplantation to
Finishing
my masters in 1977, I went to work for the Social Science section of the
Working
at Sears was a major migration, to a world both more materialistic and more
practical than my previous milieu. I
formed a group of close friends, and we did a lot of social outings
together. Similarly to my library
experience, however, I found after three years that there was nowhere
attractive for me to move in advancement.
I took a weekend seminar called “PLERK: Your Work Can Be Your Play,” and
I remembered Tom Edison’s saying, “Find an occupation you really enjoy and
you’ll never work a day in your life.” I
wrote a description of the traits of my ideal job, and a job description. I wanted to write user instructions for consumer
microcomputer software, then a fairly new species. I began to give voice to my interest
socially. In six weeks, I had my dream
job and I started it in June of 1983.
It
was with Davka, a quirky but lovable bunch of Apple enthusiasts holed up in the
office spaces in back of
A
headhunter led me to Beatrice Foods in the summer of 1984, across the street
from
There
were two things I had always wanted to do:
have a counseling practice, and do commercial voiceovers. I had had a lot of psych in school and taken
a course in counseling methods. The most
important piece, for me, was getting a good history and description of the
difficulties of the client, and keeping my understanding of the situation very
much on the factual level. I prepared my
intake outline. Jeanne Skelton referred
a friend as my first client, and I was underway. Over the next three years, I saw over 500
clients, loved the work, and was very
pleased with the results.
I
also took every class and seminar I could find on the work of commercials and
made a professional demo tape at an ad agency in One Mag Mile. The demo was super for me, and I began to get
jobs fairly soon. In six months, I had
my first national TV spot, for Keebler's O’Boisie’s Potato Chips, which paid residuals
for over a year. In a half hour’s time I
had made as much as a previous year’s income.
I
liked both the counseling and commercials, but each had problems. The counseling could not be discussed with outsiders,
since confidentiality was very important.
This made that part of my work life very insulated, and that didn’t fit
my nature, which is communicative. The
commercials could pay very well, but what was required to actually land one of
them was endless auditioning. Voiceovers
involved sales in almost its pure form, because your product was something you
used all the time and normally gave away free.
However, the benefits to humanity of getting them to buy “Brain Bash” by
Tiger, another of my nationals, did not seem to me as fulfilling as helping
people to have an easier time in their lives.
I
thought I should think over my work life and used some of my profits to go
around the world in 1990. This was a
momentous trip, covering 22 cities in almost as many countries. While wishing not to bore you, I do want to
tell you my itinerary, for this trip was indeed the trip of a lifetime for me:
Trip Dates:
February 4 to
Destinations:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Jaipur (in
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
The Rock of
15.
Tangier
16.
Asila (in
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
Home to
When I got back, I began
to look for corporate training jobs and was introduced during my job search to
a multilevel sales program for Nu Skin International. I decided I would be wise to use my training
skills to build a sales team. We called
ourselves “The
Training
of a more technical sort was now due to reemerge. I began training for small schools around
During
the tech run-up in the stock market around, literally, the turn of this
century, I formed an investors’ club to keep my hand steady on the mutual fund
throttle. Thinking my positions through
to be able to explain them to others greatly assisted me, though no one else
seemed to really care about my approach.
I believe you should never buy anything till you know when you’re going
to sell it. In April of 2000, I dropped
8% below my highs and exited the market, keeping most of my gains. Others I knew took their eye off the ball and
rode the subsequent decline down to – well, I won’t go into the gory
details. They’re far too widely felt.
I
took a few more vacations abroad, but 9/11 definitely had me concerned about
kidnapping in third world countries, which is where I would be wanting to
go.
I
had had a major falling out with my dad in 1999 but, thanks to the intercession
of my ever-sweet sister, Betsy, we got back together. I was able to help him publish a book of his
memoirs in 2003. The
In 1953,
Its name indeed derived
from the Peruvian capital but has always been pronounced in a Midwestern way
with a long vowel, as is
The big excitement started
in 1895 when a driller named Ben Faurot struck oil and became
From Lima came Phyllis
Diller and Hugh Downs, both alumni of my high school, as well as Helen
O’Connell, the famous big band singer (she died in 1993). A Nobel prize winner in chemistry named Bill
Fowler grew up on my dad’s block.
Wapakoneta, which is basically a Lima suburb, is the home town of
By the mid-70s,
My dad, Emmett Murray,
Jr., and his family were all born and raised in or near
Mom, originally Pauline
List, was from Bexley, a suburb of
Because of P.J. (her dad)
Mom wanted to get out of the house as soon as she could. After high school, she obtained a job as a medical secretary at the VA
hospital in
By the time Dad got his
M.D, my older brother, Scott, was born.
We still have pictures of Dad in cap and gown cradling him on graduation
day on the steps of the
Dad decided to go back to
Downtown Lima was already
crowded with doctors so Dad got together a group of mavericks who decided to
start a practice on the far west end of town, out near farming country. Papa (Dad’s dad, Emmett) built their office
building.
On
There I would stand most
afternoons when I was two years old -- at the foot of the stairs, leaning onto
the top of the 45-rpm record changer, feeling the warmth from the radio tube
within its housing, and watching my
records spin. My parents had gotten me
a subscription to a record club for children, and every few weeks I would get
another installment. Each record offered
four songs, and each month there were songs from different parts of the
world. Some that I remember were “On My
Pony I Went A-Riding” (
My records were very colorful, and my folks bought
me others beyond my subscription. Most
were black vinyl but some were clear – red, yellow, and translucent white. The labels also had personality. A common one showed a long medieval coronet
jutting out with “Children’s Music Library” hanging from it on a banner. Some of the records had the RCA Victor symbol
on them with the dog looking into the old recording horn. The record player had one of those emblems,
too; and it was in the center of the warm top front ledge where I would always
rest my head.
Scott liked music also but
he was usually playing outside instead of tending a record player. Though I wanted to be outside, too, the
problem for me was the daylight. It was
blinding and I could not stand it.
There was no obvious cause for this.
Examinations of the retina looked normal. But every bright light, even daylight on a cloudy
day, made me turn away and my folks had noticed this very soon after my
birth.
At the age of six months I
had the first of what would be five operations to correct eye turns (strabismus). These were deemed successful; but an apparent
side effect was that I developed permanent double vision. My visual status has never changed, and never
will. In particular, it will not
deteriorate.
My condition is called Achromatopsia (“no color”) and results
from a lack of cones (the color receptors, responsible for most of our vision)
on the retina. I learned about all of
this when, in graduate school, I took
myself to the university hospital to see if there was anything known that could
help me. Before that visit, no eye
doctor could ever tell me what my root condition was. At the
At about two, I got
glasses and also a pair of prescription sunglasses. The latter allowed me to get going outside,
but often Mom would look over at me out in the yard and find that I had ripped
them off and flung them into the grass somewhere. Then she would get down on her hands and
knees and comb until she found them.
Though I would be dazed by the sunlight without sunglasses, I grew not
to be distressed by this. This
psychological compensation was to serve me countless times in later years. I discovered that, even though I
sometimes could not see things I
expected to, I could still function fine
in many ways despite not really seeing what was happening. A research optometrist 45 years later termed
it “learned toleration of a degraded image.”
I would have said that it just amounts to remaining calm whenever I suddenly
can’t see.
My liking for records kept
growing. Sometimes on a lazy Sunday
afternoon, Dad would play his classical LPs.
Boy, I hated those opera ones. I
had a few in 45 rpm format, and it was all I could do to make myself hear
them. However, I liked to try to give
all my records a regular playing, regardless.
I thought it was probably good for them and kept the dust out of the
grooves, which I was always concerned might build up and harden in there. On one slow day, Dad and everyone else had
left the room for a long spell. I
thought it was time for more records, so I started pulling Dad’s out from the
cupboard, yanking them from their sleeves and skimming them over the
floor. After about ten records, they
were looking pretty good out there, like a great big puzzle made of huge
Lifesavers. Just like my records, they
were so colorful, with vinyl of different shades of red, blue and brown, and
the big labels were all so unique!
Pretty soon, Dad came back in.
The opera music abruptly ceased and I soon found some inspiration
administered to me that set me off into a new aria of my own composition.
Sound became the sense
that I most enjoyed using, and this led to numerous branch-offs in both hobby
and career endeavors later on.
At the time of my growing
up, no one would have found me especially considerate towards or appreciative
of my immediate family. I say this not
with pride. However, my complaisance did
produce moral reminders in my direction, which internalized and seem to replay
at the proper times.
As in most medical
households of the day, the doctor was definitely NOT in most of the time where
we lived. Somehow, Scott seemed to sense
and regret this a little more than my two sisters, Cindy and Betsy, or I, did,
especially if Dad would miss a Scouting event or a Father and Son Banquet at
church. At the same time, he was also
quite aware of and expressive of gratitude for all the work Mom put forth to
keep our family in shape.
Mom had wanted four
children, as both sets of grandparents had had, and she always seemed delighted
with us kids, and so glad to have us.
Our band seemed to me to have a magical symmetry: two boys and two
girls. Dad’s family had had three boys
and one girl and Mom’s had had three girls and one boy. But our family averaged them together and
evened up the mix.
The way Mom and Dad raised
us would make a book in itself. For
Dad’s part, he was fond of singing and would customarily set the tone of the
day by whatever he was singing or humming when first coming down the stairs in
the morning. He also had a real talent
for telling stories. He made up moral
fables to tell us about “other kids he had heard of.” He got on a roll and made up a whole cast of
characters for these tales. The hero was
Honest Johannes, and the villain was Steal-um-Squeal-um and he was always
tormenting Gorgeous Georgius, the Kosher Grocer. Dad had a thing about rhyming names.
To backtrack: at first,
there was just Scott and I in the kids department; then along came Cindy
Ann. She, was a very pretty, spirited
little girl and looked just like Mom, so she got a lot of attention from
Dad. He would love even to just watch
her drinking out of her little glass and he would call her “Sippy Sue” and “Little
Pocahontas.” Mom seemed to be fussing
over her, too. So when Scott and I got a
Davy Crocket tent, we set it up and Cindy, who was by then three, tried to come in and play with us. We said she wasn’t allowed and she felt hurt
and ran away crying. But then she
thought a minute and came back and yelled, “Mom’s gonna buy me a whole BAG of
tents!”
As time went by, Scott and
I had many interests in common, including science, reading and the enjoyment of
many colorful characters in our neighborhood and at school. Scott was more of an explorer and adventurer
outside and had a whole career in scouting, where he was an Explorer. He looked out for me a lot during our growing
up years, and that was fortunate for me, since he was a fair bit taller and
also much more athletic than I was. On
a couple of occasions he came to my rescue when I wasgetting thrashed by
various neighborhood bullies.
Scott introduced me to so
many things – from new words, to classes that were to come up in school, to
games – that they would merit a whole story.
After high school, I lived with him one summer in
My next sibling, Cindy,
was usually very solicitous and conciliatory as we grew up. She was often complimentary to me and when I
became something of a school celebrity for my faculty impressions, she was my
biggest fan.
We liked to stay
connected. At night during grade school,
when we were all in our separate bedrooms, we would pretend she was calling me
on the phone and yell, “Ring, ring!” until
I would answer and we would have a conversation. Then I would call her back the same
way.
My second sister, Betsy,
was born when we moved to
Cindy and I could mix it
up sometimes, being fairly close in age, and somewhat bound to collide. Betsy and I have never had a fight, really
-- cross words at most. We both live and let live. We see no need to aggress and feel nothing is
to be gained. The one you hurt will only
try to get you back. Betsy and I are
also very similar in that our love relationships are always very egalitarian.
I am grateful to my family
for both our peace and our wars. Let me
start with the peace. Mom and Dad laid
down a policy from the start: all the
kids were to be treated the same. No one
would get more of anything, including love.
None would be a favorite nor was there room for accusations of
favoritism. I always said Cindy was
their favorite and, when Betsy got older, I said she was. Cindy said I was. I think Betsy wavered between accusing Cindy
and me. Scott opted out of the
competition. We considered him a special
case anyway since he was the only one who had had Mom and Dad to himself; so,
he already had some separate demerits to work off from the get-go.
In the main, though, my
brother and sisters were kind, thoughtful and considerate to me and to our family
and friends. In our family, about the
worst thing you could do was to be rude.
Your job was to make another person feel welcome, respected,
appreciated, important, etc. We did not
respect rude people. Mom didn’t tolerate
any foul language, not even
“crap.” Her dad had filled her ears with
a lifetime’s supply of foul sounds. When
she would get a call from a boy from school, P.J. would grab the phone, yell
some obscene words to the boy to embarrass both him and Mom, and then hang up
on the kid. To this day, poor Mom is
phobic about talking on the phone. She
feels terrified to do it, and she will never initiate a call.
More than once, Mom would
force me to bite down on a softened bar of Ivory soap and to clamp down hard to
grind some cleanliness into a mouth gone temporarily filthy.
I said I was grateful for
our wars, too. Scott sometimes had a
taste for fights, and these could get fairly all-out. He liked to torment me until I would fight
him. He was a lot bigger, and it was
no-contest every time, so to me there was no fun in it. But he would goad me anyway. When he got me wound up enough to go after
him, there were no rules. Once I backed
him off with a heavy pewter candelabra, and another time I cut his head open
with a heavy cowboy pistol thrown clear across the yard to get him. That one
sent him for stitches out to the
If Scott would provoke
either me or our friend, Dennis Burns, into fights in the house, Mom would usually
make us stop for the sake of not breaking anything. But if it was in the yard, she would let the
fight run. She might look out now and then to make sure
there was no serious injury but she never stopped us. I really credit her with that, because I know
what a peace-loving soul she was. She
just knew you have to be able to defend yourself sometimes, however you could
do it. She wasn’t going to take up
anybody’s part for him. She and Kap had
kicked the devil out of P.J. shins on more than one occasion to make him stop
hurting their mom. Sometimes, a person
just has to get nasty, and she knew it.
Despite Scott’s occasional
aggressive streak, he nonetheless carried around a lot of compassion. When I was in high school, my Uncle Ken
committed suicide with a shotgun. Upon
hearing the shocking news, I was furious at him for it. But Scott felt a tremendous sympathy and,
that night, when I was momentarily angry at “what Ken had done”, Scott came
back from the scene very distraught, and argued with me to feel
compassion. Scott became a psychiatrist
and he works with people much like our Grandpa List. He has a real willingness to help.
When I was four years old, our
family of five moved three blocks away to a new house at
After crossing the wide front porch, you entered a high vestibule of 15
or so feet with a chandelier at the top.
You then went in through another complete front door to the main hall,
where hung another chandelier. On the
wall to your right was an old-fashioned door chime with five tuned pipes. When you went upstairs, you saw there was
another even longer flight leading back down in another direction! Pursuing that, you found that there were also
two different stairways leading to the basement. There was a clothes chute, a fruit room in
the cellar, a mysterious furnace room, an electric bell to call the kids in at
night, and a huge, friendly attic for storage.
Inside the back door was a little lavatory and when you’d walk forward
from it through the kitchen, you saw a second back door! Our house was like a giant puzzle box, with
high ceilings, and, wherever you looked, hanging chandeliers. This was going to be like living in an
amusement park. Everything was in
duplicate!
The house was nonetheless a little gloomy, so Mom set about redesigning
and remodeling most of it. She laid
comfortable carpeting over cold wooden floors.
She broke up drab green walls with green wainscoting slats. The living room was completely changed, with
lovely cherry paneling installed, and indirect lighting. There was a solarium on the front of the
house that became our music room, and it had huge window seats that lifted up
on hinges to reveal equally large toy boxes beneath, room for more toys than
you ever could have wished for.
The backyard had two swing sets and several trees, with a little apple
tree towards the rear. Cindy, who was 3,
took to climbing up this one, and calling out to me, “Jesus! Jesus! Help me! Help me!”
and I played the part of Jesus, yelling, “Don’t worry, I’m coming!” I would run and grab her down out of the
tree. We enjoyed playing this little
ritual out many times.
The best part was that four months after we moved in, Dad said we had to
go to the hospital “to get something”, and here was little Betsy, just
born. It seemed like our good fortune
knew no bounds! Add to all the
duplicates in the house a duplicate little sister!
Equally as good as our new house was our neighborhood, which was
populated with many families with kids our age.
To the south of us, separated by a privet hedge, were the Basingers,
whose mother was from
On the other side of us, to the North, was Mary Bob Matthews and her
family. Mary Bob was a blond high
schooler about eight years older than
me, who wore saddle shoes, bobby socks and ponytails -- and boy was she
cute! One time she gave me a large poster map of “Roma”, drawn
for her Latin class. I had no idea what
it was, but kept it for years nonetheless because of the Donor.
There were a lot of doctors, dentists, engineers and lawyers who lived
in the vicinity. My dad’s partner, Dr.
Wright, lived only a block away. A lot
of doctors’ kids were socializing together, and I think it had a very good
effect. All of us were used to hearing
medical cases discussed in the evenings, at parties, etc., when the doctors
would commiserate, brag and problem-solve.
We not only learned medical terminology but were also acquainted with
the logical processes of diagnosis and treatment. We heard procedures and operations discussed
and heard all kinds of war stories. I
think it left us as a group as people who look for logical causes when problems
arise and for specific, effective responses.
At the same time, it was clear that there was an art as well as a
science of medicine, knowing when to do nothing, recognizing the obsession of
over-testing,
Our
grade school,
Somehow, Johnny really liked me
and wanted to imitate me in many ways. I
had braces, so he wanted some. He was
glad that he had glasses because that made us the same. I liked all of his brothers and sisters, but
most of all I liked his mom, Margee (pronounced with a hard “G”, for
“Margaret”). Margee was a warm,
wonderful matriarch, loud and brash (she swore!) and she was a Democrat,
something really different than I knew.
In fact, I didn't know any other Democrats but the Robenalts. The Robenalts had help, a woman named
Shirley. (Basingers also had help,
a friendly black cook named Betty
Hampton.). I found their dad a little
stern and loud, but he had such nice people around him that I thought he must
really be nice himself.
Margee always pretended like she was trying to convert me to be a Democrat. She really liked FDR, and I told her I liked
the other
Across the street from us were the Harters, another family with a
wonderful mom. This woman, Teen Harter,
was at first a little cruel to me. When
I was four years old, I couldn’t say my R’s properly. Teen always asked me to say “Park the car in
the barnyard” and then would laugh at my attempt. She also liked me to call her by name so I’d
have to say “Mrs. Howda.” One time she and Dad teased me together about
my R’s. I still remember the feeling of
horror the first time I stopped laughing with them in realization that I was
basically being mocked. But Teen
redeemed herself and eventually stopped teasing and treated me in a warm
way. After that, I always felt like I
was a celebrity in the Harter house.
Teen put me up to telling stories and jokes, and she started calling me
‘Big Robb” I would come over and she
would exclaim, “Hey, it’s Big Robb!” I knew that she meant it only teasingly, but
to this day if I'm feeling a little low, I say, “Hey, Big Robb!” And I have to smile, remembering Teen and how
wonderful it always felt, getting that attention from her.
One of Teen’s four kids, Jenny, was in my class. She was kind of a teacher’s pet and, as a
result, there was a little tension I would feel with her now and then, because
teachers liked me, too. We probably competed
for who could get the most attention from her mom and from our favorite
teacher, Mrs. Shook. Jenny was blond
and very pretty, and I kind of liked her; but she was very athletic and seemed
to pay attention mainly to the boys were very good in ballgames. I admired Jenny, though, for her warm sincerity and bold style, which
she shared with her mom.
The best times in our neighborhood were our parties in the summer. We would hold them in our driveway and garage
and people would bring food from all the streets around. About ten families would be participating.
During the summer, sometimes one of the families, like the Blanchards or
the Robenalts, would put on a show. We
would gather in a back or front yard towards nightfall for a vaudeville or minstrel show and have
popcorn. We’d listen to high school girls
sing “Sweet Georgia Brown” and do the
One of the main
neighborhood pursuits with us actually centered on our basement. Over the years, my chemistry lab became a
real draw for the science-minded kids of the area. Early on, some of them would disrupt the
experiments and want to just continue their horseplay in the lab. So I drafted them as my “assistants”, which
quieted them down, and I gave them things to do. Anybody who started a fight or swore had to
put a quarter in the Lab Fund box (an empty Nestlé’s Quik container) and every
couple of months I would use it to buy another piece of glassware or some
chemicals.
I gave little “lectures” at the blackboard just outside the lab door and
the kids honestly learned a great deal, as did I. For the really serious ones, like Jon Wright,
son of my Dad’s medical partner, I would give tests, which I would type up and
administer, that would underscore the basics,.
Grandma List called me “Professor”, which was probably my highest
honor. Chemistry became my life’s
passion and three of my assistants, who had never had any interest in science
before the lab, became chemists later, which thrilled me.
To put all the fun and
adventure of being a kid into a connected story would take forever. So, instead of that, let me just tell the
highlights, in no particular order.
Since I am turning 50 years old, here are:
THE TOP 50 WAYS I HAD FUN AS A KID:
1
EXPLORING old houses, abandoned buildings, barns, woods and fields. Near our house was a large old mansion with
an abandoned two-story carriage house that had a pool table on the second
floor. We used to like roaming through
it, feeling the vague apprehension of some possible danger or menace, such as
bums who might be hiding out in it. We
would look for secret doors and panels that might slide or fall inward such as
we had read about in the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books.
2
NEIGHBORHOOD
WARS. For a couple of summers, a good-vs.-evil fever in our neighborhood led to
our Valorous Wars. These were basically
a revenge or grudge fight for various beatings-up, and they drew themselves out
over many weeks and were the culmination of all that practice in playing cowboys
and Indians we’d had.
Our side consisted of the
Civilized Kids -- Scott and about twelve
of our friends. The Nasty Side, who provoked the Wars by a rash of ambushing
and beating innocent kids up, was based east of our neighborhood by two
blocks. These boys were aggressive and
would use fire and long spears to intimidate you. They also gave out the idea that you would be
tortured with chains in somebody’s garage if you were captured. Just walking through a deserted alley near
their turf was terrifying.
Skirmishes could take place
anywhere, but the loudest and most thrilling battles were in an overgrown field
and forest next to Pete Harter’s house (Jenny’s cousin). As far as I was concerned, the less you saw
of what was actually happening at the front line, the better. The main weapon was fear, and it could be
evoked using dead tree battering rams, whirling chains or nasty dogs. There was a lot of talk about constructing a
catapult to lob heavy projectiles, but talking was as far as we got.
Scott, being one of the taller
guys, and liking adventure anyway, was one of our leaders, and we used to have
strategy meetings in the attic. Mind
you, the actual combatants and sides were never totally clear because there was
always the threat that adults would get wind of this and stop the conflict before
justice could be finished. So the whole
thing was conducted in excited, secret meetings and hurried conferences. We had a table set up in the storage area
next to Scott’s room that was our
Some day, people closer to the
front lines should tell this story better than I can. All I remember is fighting through tall
grass, throwing a lot of rocks and dirt clods, trying to roll big logs down on
kids, and making good and sure I was never captured. Most of the fight probably consisted of shoving,
threats, and swearing but you never knew how ugly it was going to get.
The Wars never officially ended in
truce or victory, and gradually died out as kids got involved in sports and
other diversions.
3
SATIRE AND COMEDY RECORDS. I was
a big fan of Tom Lehrer’s and memorized many of his wry songs. When Bill Cosby was first coming out, we used
to listen endlessly to his routines. We
loved Jonathan Winters because he was from
4
MY CHEMISTRY LAB. Chemistry was a
social draw in our neighborhood.
Chemistry sets were just the start, with considerable add-ons made of
books, apparatus and chemicals from pharmacies and science supply houses.
5
MAKING TAPE RECORDED COMEDY SHOWS.
We liked to make reel-taped shows pretending we were DJs. We emulated our comedian heroes somewhat, but
I had a large repertoire of teacher impressions that were always a hit, too. I
would make a little 3 ½ reel tape program and give it to a friend at school who
would take it home and give me a response the next day. We liked taping the radio and albums, too,
just for the experience of capturing sound.
I made a few novelty tapes combining phrases from popular songs centered
around a story line, in imitation of records on the radio that were doing
that. We were crazy about “They’re
Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha!”, “Surfin’ Bird” and any bizarre radio material,
such as “I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman,” “
The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere
Comet: It Makes Your Teeth Turn
Green
Home on the Range
While the Caissons Go Rolling Along
6
GHOST IN THE GRAVEYARD. A spooky
game of tag played at night. Its rules
escape me, but it was thrilling. Lightning bugs were often in abundance when we
played. Any way we could spook ourselves
out was always a ball.
7
VISITNG COUSINS TO and FROM
My Dad’s
The cousins from
8
RE-READING THOMAS ALVA EDISON
by G. Glenwood Clark for the umpteenth time.
It never got stale to me.
9
PLAYING FOOTBALL IN UNIFORM. One
of the fun adventures Scott led me on was when I was in about 4th grade. Some guys were going to play football in the
lot across from Tom Blair’s. And Scott
had a hand-me-down football uniform with a helmet I could use. This was Destiny calling! I was going to take my place in the lineup
with all those other tough players of
At that age, there wasn’t enough
of a difference between the sizes of the guys to make the game that
dangerous. We could tackle and be
tackled, and it really wasn’t a big deal.
And it was great: Scott was a super player, as always, and then he would
feed me the ball at times and then other guys would, too. With their teamwork, I would actually get the
handoff or get to throw or even catch the pass (a real miracle). But at one point on the bright field, I ran
smack into a small tree that was supposed to mark one of the goals, and I began
to question my suitability for the sport.
Scott was pretty well liking it; but we were playing by a steep hill
full of trees, and some of the guys were a little nervous that somebody would
be run down into that and tumble down the cliff.
We actually played on three or
four different days. I don’t remember
whether these guys all just lost steam or whether they just changed locations
and didn’t tell us where they ere going.
But it was a patch of glory, and a seemingly open-ended experience
of “Possibility!” that I never
forgot. Scott had bidden me into his
world of sports, and it had been wonderful.
10
DOING IMITATIONS. When I was in
sixth grade, Vaughn Meader’s album, “The First Family,” was a big hit,
especially in Republican
Starting in this grade, kids were
getting the board all of a sudden, there was a huge number of very lively black
kids around compared to before, kids were figuring sex out, and we had male
teachers, a total first after our all-woman faculty at Lowell Elementary. Beginning in seventh grade, I occupied most
of the time walking the mile home from school with recapturing dramatic scenes
from the school day. My friends liked to
do it, too; but I seemed to have a particular relish for it and I loved to
really lay them out with a memory from the day that convulsed them into
spasmodic heaps. Kids were always
putting me up to going farther. In tenth
grade, I wrote a play lampooning all our favorite teachers, played by my
classmates and me, and “telling it like it was”, but still carefully fulfilling
a class assignment by using so many quotations from Shakespeare in it as
possible. It had a great reception, and
we were prevailed upon to repeat it for other audiences. My senior year of high
school, we had a faculty roast assembly, and I did almost all of the teachers
who were being skewered.
My last two years of school, I couldn’t go
anywhere without kids yelling at me from down the hall, “Hey, Mr. Boyer! Hey, Mrs. Amstutz!” I would almost have to hide at times. I was truly famous. The experience was a combination of power and privacy
management, exhilaration and dread. I
could give these hoards something they wanted but they were always asking,
never had enough, and showed no signs of concern for my fatigue or boredom with
the whole thing. It left me with a
respect for what attractive women go
through on the street, and socially. You
do want to be gracious, but you have to set limits all the time.
In college my senior year, there
was an entire student body program dedicated to my faculty impressions. We had a conference table set up with a
spotlight, and I spoke from the wings as a spotlight moved around the table and
slides of these professors were shown. I
was asked to do the one-man show by a pretty girl I liked named Margie. Most of the worthwhile things I have undertaken
in life seem to have been at the behest of some specific person who started it
all off by asking me to do something I would prefer not to have volunteered
for. I had to write and prepare the show
in a week, and it was both exciting and stressful. I must say that there were some very funny
lines I came up with in that script that captured these people dead-on, and I
later made and gave my closest friends a memory cassette of the program.
That day, as soon as the scripted
part of the program was over, I ran out onto the huge stage to speak to the
audience of several thousand people in my own voice and as I was taking the
microphone, WHOOSH!—a mob grabbed me, consisting of all the faculty I had just
lampooned. Ambushing me from behind,
they hoisted me up on their shoulders and carried me around on stage, cheering
me. I had been set up with this fabulous
surprise by Margie, and it was one of the high points of my entire life,
because I admired many of these professors very much.
I continued the impressions into
grad school for use at parties, during waiting period in the hall, etc. I learned that you have to really make a
conscious decision about your skill: if
you let it be known that you can do impressions, you are going to be slammed
into that role forevermore. People will
not let you out. Still today, Cindy
wants me to do impressions from college.
You have to keep your head on straight and not construe the demand for
what you do, which is popularity pure and simple, to be some kind of oppression. You get away with saying a lot of court
jester-type “the emperor has no clothes” remarks, so the power you have is a
lot of fun. It takes sensitivity, too,
especially when the person being satirized is present.
11
GETTING LAB SUPPLIES AND SETTING OTHER KIDS UP WITH LABS. I thought chemistry was the greatest hobby on earth and I had many
friends who caught the fever. I set up
about a dozen kids with basement labs.
Usually these would fold in a month or two when the kid didn’t use it
and his mom would want to reclaim the space.
But a few of them stuck.
In fifth grade, my friend, Bob
Lunsford told his dad he wanted a lab like mine. All the other kids’ labs had started as the
insinuation of a few supplies on a workbench top and grew from there. In Bob’s case, though, his dad wanted to
know what the whole lab was ultimately going to cost, up front. This seemed to
me, however, in violation of the exploratory nature of a such a hobby. But the crusty insurance salesman asked me
“what it was going to set him back to get a lab for Bob.” He had some of his insurance agency
stationery lying around and so I used it to make up an itemized list of the basic equipment, chemicals and
books that would normally be needed by a motivated kid, and totaled it up. I think it came to about $36.00, which was
pushing it, in 1963. Mr. Lunsford
grumbled that that was too much. I would
have to pare down the list.
Then Bob said, “And Robin has this
really great Bunsen burner! You open an
air vent that’s on threads and the flame burns really blue . . . “ That did it for Bob’s dad! He just had to have that Bunsen burner! Where could he get one? I said, “They don’t sell them like
this. This was a present from my Uncle
Mark to my dad in college. I don’t think
they even make them like this anymore.”
And that REALLY peaked his interest!
“How much you want for the burner, Robin!” he kept saying. (I didn’t change my name to “Robb” till
seventh grade.) “Tell me what you want for it.”
“I don’t want to sell it,” I said.
”Oh, yes you do!” he said,
“Everybody’s got his price point. I bet
if I offered ya a hunnderdollars [exactly the way he said it], you’d take it!”
I was shocked at his cynicism and at his aggressing onto my lab. I was really torn because I wanted Bob to
have a lab, too. I could see if his dad
got that toy he wanted out of it, it would be a done deal. I told Mr. Lunsford I would have to think
about it. Then I made sure I didn’t go
back over there when the Mr. was around for awhile. And I think I ended up just setting Bob up
with a pathetic little newspaper in a corner somewhere with a bottle of vinegar
on it, and left it at that. That was
about all the further I was willing to get into it with him any more. The risk of ambush and hyper-examination by
his dad was too great
The whole process of selecting
supplies from the catalogs of Central Scientific and Skillcraft companies
had a romance all unto itself. Scott and Dennis Burns and I used to enjoy
poring over the supply catalogs, dreaming of various pieces of apparatus we
might someday be able to afford. There
was no thrill like unwrapping from the packing material a big buret for
titrations, a nest of beakers or—best of all—a condensation column used for
distillations.
12
VISITING THOMAS EDISONS’S LABS.
When I was in fifth grade, Dad took us to
One year when visiting our
Then, in 1981, one of my Sears
colleagues, Linda, said that her parents lived in
Another Sears colleague,
Karen, 
was from
But the last hurrah was yet to be
sounded. When my parents retired in
1995, they decided to live in
I wish I could tell you that I have
only gone to the
13
PLAYING COWBOYS AND SOLDIERS with cap guns and rifles. I’m sure you know all about that. “BLAM!
BLAM!”
14
JOKING. Jokes kept things alive
at school. In junior high we were big
on Mad Magazine. Some of the stories and poems we picked up
were very elaborate. Here’s one I remember
from seventh grade, something you’re supposed to write on a card and send on a
special occasion:
You’re always very near to
me,
Forever at my side,
Fate has decreed for you and me
Together to abide!
You’re with me every moment,
Every hour of the day
You have become a part of
me –
Why don’t you go away?
There was another poem that I learned in seventh grade
(1965) and used to recite very fast for my friend, Brandon, that he would
always listen to intently, before cracking up at the end:
“George, Who Played With a Dangerous Toy and Suffered a Catastrophe of
Considerable Dimensions”. By Hillaire Belloc
When George’s grandmama
was told
That George had been as
good as gold,
She promised in the
afternoon
To buy him an immense balloon.
And so she did, but when
it came,
It got into the candle
flame,
And being of a dangerous
sort,
Exploded with a loud
report!
The lights went out, the
windows broke,
The room was filled with
reeking smoke,
And in the darkness
shrieks and yells
Were mingled with electric
bells,
And falling masonry and
groans,
And crunching as of broken
bones,
And dreadful shrieks then,
worst of all,
The house itself began to
fall!
It tottered, shuddering to
and fro,
Then crashed into the
street below,
Which happened to be
Saville Row.
When help arrived, among
the dead
Were cousin Mary, little
Fred,
The footmen, both of them,
the groom,
The man that cleaned the
billiard room,
The chaplain and the
stillroom maid
And I am dreadfully afraid
That Monsieur Champignon,
the Clef,
Will now be most
completely deaf.
And both his aids are much
the same,
And George, who was in
part to blame,
Received, you will regret
to hear,
A nasty lump behind his
ear.
The moral is that little
boys
Should not be given
dangerous toys.
15
CHURCH CAMP (4th and 5th
grades). We went to Templed Hills in
16
PULLING, OR BEING PULLED IN, A WAGON.
Especially when we were very small.
It seemed miraculous to move the big vehicle and to actually be able to
take your little sister places in it. It
was especially fun to tie it to the back fender of your bike and to clack over the
sidewalk cement at a brisk clip.
17
MAKING HYDROGEN BALLOONS. You
don’t think I learned that long poem for nothing, do you? A recipe passed down from my Uncle Mark to
Dad, then to me, was that if you put aluminum foil or bottle caps with Drano
crystals (sodium hydroxide) into a big pop bottle and added some water, hydrogen
would fizz out of it as the mixture got extremely hot as this went along. If you then took the loose end of a balloon
and snapped it over the bottle mouth, the balloon would soon fill with pure
hydrogen. You could then pinch off the
balloon and knot a string onto it for
carrying it around or for attaching a
written message addressed to the world before letting it go. If you inhaled the hydrogen, it made your
voice even higher than helium would, because hydrogen is twice as light.
We would send firecrackers up with
the balloons and put long fuses on them so the balloons wouldn’t explode until
they were about a hundred feet into the
air. If you also blew some normal air
from your breath into the balloon before typing it off, there would be oxygen
pre-mixed with the hydrogen and, when the whole thing exploded, the bang would be MUCH louder! In a typical “next move”, I decided to use
the bottle and balloon method with water and some calcium carbide stones from
the hardware store. The balloon would
fill with acetylene. Then you could tape
it to a stick and light a candle and hold the balloon out over the candle from
a distance. When the balloon exploded,
the acetylene would burn very inefficiently and leave a ball of black smoke
hanging where the balloon used to be. COOL!
I had a fascination about passenger
balloons ever since reading kid’s books about the Montgolfier brothers in
18
FIRECRACKERS AND BOTTLE ROCKETS, often gotten from
19
SCOUTS. I only lasted about a
year in Scouts. I was invited into a
troop different from Scott’s which was better, really – avoided more
conflicts. I found the boys highly
rowdy, their language and hostility continually offensive, and their pranks
juvenile. I had no use for all those
knots anyway.
20
MUDBALL FIGHT! We had one once
where we had a huge muddy area in a yard next to a white garage. We made the mud balls so fast we stacked them
up in rows like cannon balls on a plank.
Then we would throw them at our enemies as they were dodging past the
garage and – WOW! – you should have seen that white garage by the time we were
done with it! Probably some white butts
changed color afterwards, too.
21
DRIVING MY GO-KART. Knowing I
would never be able to drive in the future because of my eyesight, Mom allowed
me to buy a go-kart from a kid I knew who wanted to unload his. We
kids were all surprised that she allowed this, since she was very cautious
about danger. The frame was a little weak, and we had to keep getting it
repaired at the welder’s. It had a
three-horsepower Briggs and Stratton engine, and it was fascinating to run it
and to have to tune up the engine, which was nearly a daily need. If you held the go-kart in place while
accelerating, the clutch would blister
the paint off its casing. Sometimes
the throttle would stick open while you were driving, and you’d have to turn
around in your seat and pull the wires off the sparkplug to stop the
machine. All the kids in the
neighborhood loved riding it. We would
run up and down not only our driveway, but the neighbors’, too, cutting across
the front sidewalk. On Saturdays, we
would take the kart to a ball diamond or empty church parking lot and go for
broke! It was a blast to fishtail around the ball diamonds. I finally sold the go-kart to Marty, one of
my best friends and lab assistants, who had moved to
22
PLAYING CARDS WITH THE BABYSITTER.
We had a great teenage babysitter named Carol Burgoon who knew a lot of
card games and taught us crazy eights, hearts, pinochle, etc.
23
INVENTING NEW EXPERIMENTS
NOT IN THE CHEMISTRY BOOKS. This is when the lab was the
most fun. By analogy you could figure
out what would happen by substituting various reactants from prescribed experiments.
Once I was studying salts. You learned that, to put it simply and perhaps
a little inaccurately, a salt solution
was not stable in the presence of metals that had atoms smaller than the
metallic element in the salt did. So,
for example, you could throw a penny into a solution of silver nitrate and
metallic silver would soon coat the penny!
You could throw iron or zinc strips into copper sulfate and pure cooper
would come out of solution and cover them (“copper plating,” the pandering lab
books disingenuously called it). These
changes and the colors involved were very dramatic and impressive.
But what, I wondered, would happen
with nonmetals? What if you bubbled a
stream of chlorine gas (which a book had already showed me how to make) through
a salt solution where the nonmetallic part had atoms larger than the ones being
introduced through the gas bottle? I
stirred up some potassium bromide in distilled water, bubbled some chlorine
through it and --
24
CHECKERS. One of the few
activities Dad ever got time to do with me was playing checkers using big huge plastic checker pieces on a plastic
fold-up board. I can still hear him
saying, “King me!” The most fun was when we could double and triple-jump the
other guy.
25
MORSE CODE WITH WALKIE TALKIES.
Yeah, walkie-talkies were neat.
But the way you got your partner to answer was to beep his handset from
yours. There seemed to be no other use
for this beep, except as a page.
Then I remembered that Tom Edison
had traveled the country as a telegrapher in his teens, and I had to recreate
his experience. I told my next-door
buddy, Sam, that we were going to learn Morse code, and so we did. Then, we would each go upstairs in his house
and beep Morse code to the other guy, who would transcribe the received letters
one at a time into a log book. You were
not allowed to cheat and say out loud what your message was. We had a great deal of fun going back in
technological time like this.
I was very fond of telegraph sets
anyway. Next to the lab itself, the
telegraph set was my most popular export from my basement. To make a set, all you needed was two large,
square three-volt dry cells from the hardware store that you would hook in
series. Then you would wrap wire into a
coil around a nail or spike so that it became magnetic whenever a current was
sent through it. You would then nail a
strip of scrap iron horizontally to the board where you had nailed the spike in
a vertical position, and bend it so that
it stuck out just above the spike and would be pulled down onto the spike with
a click if the magnet were turned on by current. Next, you would make a pushbutton that would
complete the circuit and hook it up into the circuit, and you would string wire
about twenty feet between the push button and the magnetic telegraph
receiver. When you pushed down the
button, the iron strip was attracted, and came down onto the spike and make a
click. You would hear not only when the
click happened, but also the release, so you would know whether the sender were
transmitting a dot or a dash. We had a
lot of fun with these telegraph sets.
During high school, my bedroom was
just above the kitchen. Mom would call
me down for supper or errands but sometimes I would have music on and couldn’t
hear. This made everybody exasperated. So, I bought a buzzer and bolted it down to
a board in my room. I then hooked up
the wires and the dry cells to the push button from a telegraph. I strung long wires out my window and down
into Mom’s kitchen window, put the push button down there, connecting the push
button to the buzzer. We had a
system: three buzzes meant I had a phone
call. Two meant I was supposed to take
out the garbage. One meant COME RIGHT
NOW! There were quite a few of the
latter single-buzz signals sent over that rig, and they would be held down a
REAL LONG TIME if I didn’t heed the first signal and come immediately.
There was a last application for
the telegraph circuit idea. I decided
that I needed a burglar alarm for my lab because kids would sneak in there and
do pranks on me. Sam, next door, had a
“VROOM” engine for his bike that made
the sound of a race car when you turned the switch on. The switch broke, and Sam was going to throw
the engine away. I spied my chance. “Wait, Sam!” I said, and I took the engine
and bolted it inside my lab door. Then I
found some old aluminum pipes from a decrepit lawn chair and decided to use
them as electrical conductors. I
attached one wire to each pipe. I
fastened one pipe to the door and rested its opposite end up onto a nail that
served as a holding platform. Before
leaving the lab, I would make sure the engine was set to ON and take the top
pipe and prop it up on its nail. Then I
would leave. If somebody came in, the
door would pull the top pipe. It would
then fall onto the bottom pipe, completing the electrical circuit and making
the engine roar. The engine would stay
on as the intruder escaped and I would hear it upstairs and come running. Most of the time it was only Mom.
26
PRETENDING TO BE IN A TRAIN. This
was when we were very small, of course, but it was great how anything could be
turned into a train – the couch, the bathtub, the front porch swing, a big box
. . .
27
WALKIE TALKIES. We used them
normally, too, of course, and liked to say “ten-four”, “do you read me”, “I
copy”, “Roger and out”, etc.
28
KEEPING A DIARY. In grade school,
I saw girls keeping diaries with lock and key and never thought much of
them. Then at the end of seventh grade,
I was rummaging in the garage attic at the house of this kid named John
Moye. There were a bunch of old
paperbacks up there and one of them was pretty battered, and cracking apart. It was Dracula,
by Bram Stoker. I opened it and saw many
chapters entitled “Jonathan Harker’s Journal, 
mania, and how things keep seeming strange to him. I
kept reading and couldn’t put the book down.
Our family went camping and Mom read the book aloud to us in the car on
the way and in our tent at night. The
book was good but I really liked that diary.
It seemed like there were a lot of things I thought about each day that
people around me didn’t necessarily have a lot of interest in hearing. Dad had given me some blank notebooks he had
gotten from a pharmaceutical rep. These
were in my desk along with dozens of plastic rulers that said “Chloromycetin,
USP” on them. I thought I would give the
books a workout.
I kept a diary every day for the
next nine years. When I skipped a day, I
would go back and make it up. After
awhile, I started typing the entries, which make them much easier to read. I loved to go back a year or two or more in
them and see what happened on that same day, or just to browse them. Sometimes I read them out loud to people, but
they rarely seemed interested, especially my pop. During the Great Cleansing of 1986, the
diaries went into the trash and my personal Library of
I had become very interested in
diaries, however, and read every diary I could find, including George
Washington’s, The Secret Diaries of
William Byrd of Westover ( a plantation owner who had lived in the 1700s
not far from Williamsburg), a Confederate soldier’s diary during the Civil
Wart, and others too numerous to mention.
My neighbor, Diane (Sam’s older sister, who was always thoughtful towards me), gave me a Treasury of the World’s Great Diaries, containing over a hundred
people’s materials, and I was in seventh heaven, reading it.
In grad school, I spent a year
researching and studying the personal notebooks, paper scraps, and marginal
notations kept by well-known literary authors such as Emerson, Mark Twain,
Thomas Hardy, Francis Bacon, Thomas Wolfe, and others. I learned that most of these people started
keeping “commonplace books” because it was required in school; then found the
practice agreeable and continued it.
Others had the idea suggested to them as a way of keeping their ideas
straight (Thomas Wolfe). Mark Twain got
his start when he had to keep a log book of obstacles and water depths when he
was in training to be a steamboat captain on the
In my researches for the thesis, I
also cruised through sets of published personal papers, some being only the
first few volumes of mountainous projects underway, of Edison, Einstein, Isaac
Newton, Gandhi, Leonardo da Vinci, Woodrow Wilson, Jefferson, and
Franklin. Then, I broadened by readings
into the personal and musical sketch memorabilia of Bach, Beethoven,
Stravinsky, and many others. The
research seemed to take forever, and I realized one day that I had a potential
bestseller on my hands if I would just write a popular book. But my student loan supply (from Dad) was
running out, so I finally made an oral proposal report to my advisors and
interested students and – wow! – got a standing ovation. The thesis was later published by the
Department of Education. But I’m not lying
awake at nights waiting to get that advance from a publisher towards the
best-seller version.
29
COMPOSING MUSIC. When I was small, I used to notice how Mom
would change a song around when she was singing or humming. Sometimes, she would jump an octave up or
down to catch a note. Sometimes, she
would change a phrase to suit her
mood. From her example, I learned that I
could make music my own and that it was fun to do so. Because of Mom, I felt entitled to do such things. I’ve met a lot of people who feel no such
freedom and who will only perform “received music.”
Mom took me in for piano lessons
at age five to Mrs. Wertz, a very sweet older lady who had played in vaudeville
and for silent films. She had written
and published a banner-hoisting song
called “The
“My Stars!,” she said, “Robby, you
have perfect pitch. Do you know what
that is?” “Not really.” “It mean you can
name a note by just hearing it.” I
didn’t really understand the big deal since everybody could identify colors,
and these notes were just different kinds of colors. I always saw colors when I heard notes.
Mrs. Wertz telephoned my mom,
“Mrs. Murray, your son has a gift. This
is very rare. God has given him a
special gift.” When I got home, Mom seemed changed, as if thinking. She started to pay even more attention to how
much I practiced – too much attention, I thought. A few years later she took me to a Farrante
and Teicher concert in Memorial Hall and afterwards, she pushed us up to them
and pointed to me. “How long should he
practice?” Diplomatically, one of the
two said, “Well, how old is he?” “Ten,”
she said. “Oh, I think about a half hour
a day,” said the man. That was wonderful
since I was already being made to practice for 45 minutes a day.
It was, however, very difficult
for me to work with sheet music on the piano.
The notes were just too small. At
home, our piano had a shelf where the music stand sat and you could pull your
music quite a bit closer. But at Mrs.
Wertz’s we had to try other ways to make the music legible to me, such as
making a string railing closer to the keys for the music to rest against. We tried head-worn magnifiers, but they
weren’t strong enough. When I wanted to
learn a piece, I would take the music off the stand and hold it up closed where
I could see it. Then I would play and
work with one hand, the free hand. It
was laborious, so I memorized as much as I could.
Mrs. Wertz had us play in recitals
twice a year, Christmas and summer. She
and I resigned ourselves that I would memorize each piece rather than try to
play from music during the performance.
Since sight reading was no longer at issue, I could memorize and play
just about anything Mrs. Wertz had in her collection, within reason. I would say, “I would like a piece in a minor
key that moves fairly fast and is catchy.”
Mrs. Wertz would dig through her stacks of pieces and pull out about
five or ten to try out on me. Usually we
would find one, and I would watch her play it to learn the fingering. The method worked fine, but was limited to
pieces of about two minutes in length.
I knew I wasn’t destined to play Deep Purple, or the movie theme from Ebb Tide, like some of the advanced students played. So I widened my repertoire by playing songs
by ear at home. Gradually, I learned how
to fill in around melodies, much like my Grandma List had done when playing her
melodeon. Then, I moved to original pieces.
30
SPEAKING BEFORE GROWNUPS. Dad had
a favorite game where he would ask us to stand up in front of him, Mom and the
rest of us, and speak extemporaneously about any subject that would be
named. He said you ought to be able to
talk coherently for sixty seconds about ANYTHING.
31
COPYING OUT BOOKS. I once wanted
a book by Edgar Allen Poe that Scott had, and so I decided to make a typed copy
of the better stories in it. I would
staple these sheets between cardboard covers and then keep them as mine. I felt I learned a lot of vocabulary and
style by paying close attention while copying.
32
UFOS – READING ABOUT 
backs about them at
Matthews Drug store that I would buy and read.
I accumulated over 25 paperbacks about UFOs, most of them containing a
lot of repeated stories. There were also
feature magazines about UFOs.
Scott found directions for making
a pseudo-UFO. You would take a dry
cleaner plastic wrap bag and make a frame around the bottom with coat hanger
wires and drinking straws, placing candles at the center of the frame. You were supposed to be able to light the
candles and heat the air, sending the craft up.
We never got any farther than burning through half a dozen plastic bags,
and we gave up. We realized later that
we could have sped up the heating by using a hair dryer to start the air going
hot, but by then we were too discouraged to try again. In college, I gave my UFO book collection to
a professor who had a great interest in the phenomena.
33
CARAVANS OF BIKES. Towards
nightfall, we used to ride in a Golden Goose-type caravan of bikes around the
blocks surrounding our neighborhood.
There was a different feel to riding in such a team on wheels, a big
energy boost. We would call out to each
other and various of us would try to take over the lead as our bike line wended
along. If you used a clothespin to stick
playing cards into your spokes, you could make your bike sound like a
motorcycle.
34
KITES and GLIDERS. I bought
things that flew from Matthews, such as little five-cent gliders (they would
come as big as 25- or 50- cent sizes). I
had read two stirring biographies of the Wright brothers and knew about their
flying of propeller toys and that they would attach themselves to huge kites
and go up in gales, tethered to a stake in the ground. I went through scads of kites over the years
and was very good at getting them started into flight and balanced. Once you get over the trees, it’s another
whole world of air up there and your kite can climb amazingly. Also, the way the kite will lag once aloft,
then catch an unseen draft and again start soaring straight up is very
instructive about energy and opportunities in life. Stay out there and unseen and unexpected
opportunities can catch you still higher.
I also had a helicopter that would fly when you pulled the string.
Do bubbles count as flying toys?
35
BUILDING TREEHOUSES AND LOFTS. My
friend, Maurie Lewis, had a tree house, and I was very jealous. We tried putting up planks and old timbers
from discarded picnic benches into trees.
Our pulleys always gave out and we had to watch ourselves and keep
safety first. About the best we ever did
was nail down flooring in our garage attic so we wouldn’t crack through the
plaster ceiling. It was hotter than
blazes in that attic in the summer but we didn’t care.
36
STARTING CLUBS. Our neighbor,
Bruce Basinger, read some English books about kid spies in a group called The Secret Seven. He and Scott decided to form a Secret Seven
club. Bruce had a shack that could be
the clubhouse and various adventures were supposed to be commanded from this
headquarters. We were very good at
getting enthusiasm for clubs that had been given names, but what to do once
kids were interested was usually the problem.
Scott started a Junior Forest Rangers Club, and Gail Basinger started
The Pink Princesses Club. Some hoody
kids at school started The Rat Cat Club and got in trouble for it. Some neighborhood high school girls, named
Lee, Norma and Sally, started the Key Club.
In second grade, Dennis Burns and
I started the Roman Club, inspired by Dennis’s seeing Ben Hur, which I have still not seen to this very day. We started making scrolls of proclamations
using shelf paper glued to and wrapped around various sticks, rods, and
cardboard tubes. Our two most used slogans
were:
”Hear ye, hear ye! The City of
“Hear ye, hear ye! The City of
We had a feeling a chariot
race was supposed to happen at some point in our history, so we tried to build a
chariot out of a wagon that had been sawn in half. We could take the front two wheels and attach
them to the bottom of a large drawer, and add the back wheels. However, when we tried to hammer the vehicle
together, we were too weak to drive the nails. Mom saw us struggling out in the driveway and
was not one to see our hopes die. She
came out and got Mrs. Basinger to help and they both knocked the chariot
together in nothing flat! Dennis and I
painted a ceremonial eagle in green paint (the only color available at the
house) on the bottom of the drawer. We
then pulled our chariot triumphantly around the driveway four or five times,
taking turns being the horse, then retired it, where it was never used again.
37
WRITING TO FARAWAY FRIENDS. Mom
started me writing to Pam, one of our
38
WRITING STORIES. Mom used to type
stories for me when I was in second grade.
I would dictate, and she would put it all down. On Friday nights, a TV program would come on
called “The Outer Limits” that was always very scary. It would start by scaring the living hell out
of me when the announcer would say, “We are about to TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR
MIND!” and I figured adults might really know how to do that. So, I would absolutely freak out at the idea
and would run out of the room, refusing to watch it.
There was a milder show before it,
though. The show lasted a half hour and
usually had some terrible murder in it.
In one episode, this couple moved into a new apartment with a huge bay
window overlooking a beautiful river view.
At night, they would hear something and would see an apparition of Death
with a sickle in his hand beckoning them
to the window. Eventually, they
were driven crazy and the last scene of the story showed them crashing through
the window and falling to their deaths, to finally obey the Reaper’s call. This was so frightening that I had nightmares
about it for several nights. I thought
that this was so spooky that I should write a story about it. I did, and called it “The Grey Reaper”
(because I couldn’t quite remember the real name).
I got some orange X-ray paper Dad
had brought home from the office and typed the story on it. At school, Mrs.
Heinrich said it was probably the GRIM Reaper, and I didn’t know how she would
presume to know this because she hadn’t even seen the show.
My friend, Bob Lunsford, and I
used to do a lot of things together (we saw the Three Stooges when they came to
As we played on swing sets, Bob and
I, who liked various vehicles, used to wonder what it would feel like to just
keep drifting up when you got to the top of the arc. So our first story was “The Flying Swing Set”
starring Adam Adams (kind of a Superman kid) and Douglas Dingdong (the foil
character). They decided to take the
swing set they were on and “make it atomic,” and when they somehow magically
did this, the thing blasted off to Mars.
The problem for Mrs. Lunsford was that we kept giving the heroes so much
to say, that typing all those quotation marks and commas finally wore the poor
woman out. We’d start to throw in more
dialog and she’d say, “Are you sure he has to say that?” We could tell she was flagging. After about three stories, she managed to
distract us on to other pursuits.
Without going into more
detail, here are my remaining favorites:
39
BUILDING FORTS MADE OF WOOD or
SNOW, and SETIING UP TENTS
40
PLAYING SPUD, FOURSQUARE and SKATEBOARDS
41
MODEL RACING CARS and TRAIN SETS
42
TELLING SCARY STORIES FROM THE MOVIES, such as “Night of the Living
Dead” and “Fall of the House of Usher.” And MAKING SPOOK HOUSES in the dark
basement.
43
MAKING PUPPET SHOWS
44
PLAYING YAHTZE, MONOPOLY, and CHESS
45
MAKING TAFFY
46
SQUIRTING EACH OTHER WITH THE HOSE
47
PLAYING SCHOOL
48
TATTING, CROCHETING, and SEWING BEAN BAGS
49
SINGING IN THE CAR
50
PLAYING WITH OUR PET ANIMALS. We
had a rabbit, a parakeet, a dog, chicks (very cute!), chameleons (they really
did change color and match what they were on), and we would nurse a lot of baby
birds back to health. She wasn’t a pet
but, when Betsy was a baby, she was a lot of fun to play with also.
I didn’t mention cartoons
and TV because – that’s so obvious!
During the fall of third
grade, our family was visiting in the living room one night, just talking, and
Dad said to me, "Christmas is coming.
Do you want a chemistry set like Scott has?“
“I don't think so,” I said, “I really don't understand about all that
chemistry kind of stuff”
“Well, you could have a lot of fun with one of those,” Dad urged.
I replied, “Well you can give me one if you want to, but just so it’s a
small one, OK?”
At
Christmas, I received a shallow rectangular box which, once opened, was
revealed to be a small Gilbert chemistry set, the smallest they made (what a
relief – no overwhelm). Opening it, I
found that it contained ten small, square glass bottles with chemicals. "Even these seem like too many,” I
thought. I took the box down to the
fruit room in the cellar where Mom would keep her green decorative bottles for
starting plant shoots from roots and bulbs.
The previous owners of the house had used it as a darkroom, so there was
a small ceramic sink cut into the left counter top. The counters lined the left and the front of
the small space. Scott already had put
his chemistry set there, but only make sporadic use of it. I was hoping to have a big alcohol lamp like
his, but my Gilbert set only gave me a pitiful small one with a wick that
looked so oversized that I thought it seemed more of a fire hazard than a
source of directable heat.
The first thing I noticed was how dusty those two counters were. Plaster would fall from the ceiling periodically
and grit would stay on the counters. So,
I taped newspapers down over the counters after I had wiped off all the
grit. I arranged my little test tube
rack and alcohol lamp on either side of
the main space, and I put the manual describing the experiments you could do in
the center. Then, against the wall in
front of me, I arrayed my little bottles, as follows:
ammonium nitrate
boric acid
calcium chloride
cobalt chloride
ferric ammonium sulfate
glycerin
iron filings
phenolphthalein
potassium permanganate
sulfur
The little manual presented many
demonstrations and the one I chose was making Prussian blue ink. It was pretty easy, and I thought this hobby
might be fun. Clearly, tough, I was
going to need more bottles for keeping things like my ink in. So, I asked Mom to start saving me jelly jars
and medicine bottles and soon had a nice rack of containers ready for full
production.
Dad came down and saw what
I had, and said, “I think you need some glassware.” The next day, he came home from the office
with several Erlenmeyer and
Dad snapped the mouth of a balloon over one of the Erlenmeyers, took the
flask by the neck and started waving it over the flame. “Heat your flasks gradually,” he said. “Avoid heating unevenly or too fast.” He kept
swirling the flask over the heat, waiting for the balloon to expand.
All of a sudden – BOOM! – the flask blew up! We all jumped about ten feet in the air. “Don’t worry,” said Dad. “The balloon’s just a little stiff, that’s
all. Blow it up a couple of times to
loosen it up.” I did so as Mom picked up
the big glass pieces. Dad attached the
balloon to a bigger flask this time.
Mom sidled away from the area.
“Duke, be careful,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” said Dad. “This is
a very simple process.” He applied the
heat dexterously to the large Erlenmeyer and I started clenching my fists, just
in case.
BLAM! – the flask blew apart and Mom protested, “You guys get out of the
kitchen with that stuff!”
“Well, obviously we have to change some things,” Dad said. By this time his ego was involved and this
experiment WAS going to succeed. Dad
took one of the finger cots and attached its mouth to that of the remaining
Proudly Dad waved the flask over the flame as the finger cot slowly
stood up in turgid tribute to the fact that a gas expands when heated.
“OK, that’s enough,” said Mom.
“Don’t worry, Robb,” said Dad.
“I’ll bring you some more flasks tomorrow. Then I’ll show you about glass blowing.” Mom rolled her eyes. “Oh, Pauline, I was very
good at glass blowing in college
and I used to help my classmates put
together their glassware assemblies.”
The next day, Dad brought a Bunsen burner with a wing tip for glass
blowing, several beakers, more flasks, rubber stoppers, and some glass tubing
with a long, three-sided file. He
hooked the Bunsen burner with rubber tubing
to a propane tank. Soon I was watching
him fire polish the rough edges of glass tubes that he could crack apart after
a little file scrape, like a diamond cutter.
In no time, he had bent the tubes, then wet them once cool and put them
through a rubber stopper. He put the
stopper onto a brown square bottle that had held some liniment and attached a
rubber tube to one of the glass ones.
“What’s that?” I asked him.
“That’s your wash bottle,” he said.
“You aren’t going to use tap water for your experiments because it
contains too many contaminants. I’ll
bring you a gallon of distilled water from the office and you can blow a stream
of it out of this bottle any time you need some in a test tube or to rinse
something out.” He put a little water
into the wash bottle and blew a stream.
“See?” he said. “Try it!”
I blew into the rubber tube and water came out of the bottle.
“Wow,” I said. “That is
neat!”
“Here,” said Dad, “Let’s clean up our work area. Here’s a smaller file that you can use to
make scratches in your glass. Where
should we put it?”
“I have one of Mom’s jelly jars here,” I said. Dad took the jar, which Mom in consideration
had denuded of its label, and put the file into it and closed the lid. “What should we label this?” I asked.
Dad put some masking tape onto the side of the jar and said, “I don’t
know. . . How ‘bout this?” and he wrote onto the label: “MISCELLANEOUS. Do not mess with!”
We laughed and shut down the lab for the night.
The next 
week, Dad brought more
equipment and we made a gas generating bottle for CO2. We used vinegar and baking soda, the obvious
ingredients. The baking soda started in
the generator by itself. Then, we poured
the vinegar into a funnel that we had inserted into the double-holed rubber
stopper. The gas would be bubbled
through a cake pan full of water via a glass tube. We would fill jars with water, then hold them
over the production tube that was bubbling out the CO2. The jars would fill with carbon dioxide,
displacing the water, and we then covered them with glass plates in readiness
for more demonstrations.
“That was great, Dad!” I said.
“Yeah, it was,” said Dad. As he
stood up to go, he picked his arm up off the center and there was vinegar
soaked all through the sleeve of his suit coat.
“Oh, gosh,” he said, “I’ll have to be more careful.” And he grinned at me as though to say, “Don’t
worry about the coat. I don’t care.”
Future activities, however, were confined to a few lectures he gave me
at the blackboard. The combination of
time pressures and occasional lab Snafus seemed to redirect him and, after
that, I was on my own. Dad had little
more to bring me from his office lab, where they only did blood tests and
urinalysis and developed X-rays. So, I
began to search out chemicals and equipment from Matthews Drug Store and the
American Feed and Hardware Store, which sold an amazing number of
chemicals.
Chemicals were available all around, I learned, and it was very easy to
find them once you looked. Many of the
things I needed, such as boric acid, hydrochloric acid, sodium and calcium
hydroxide, sodium silicate and glycerin were in stock within four blocks of my
house. In those days, drug stores were
much closer to basic science than they are today, and many pharmacists had
their own formulas for medication that they made in back of the store. For me, this meant that Old Man Matthews had
more supplies than I could ever hope to use up.
Others got involved to help the lab.
Papa made me a wooden test tube rack.
Mom started a towel laundering service; she would fold and stack my hand
towels neatly back on the countertop a few days after I’d leave them by the
laundering area. And every one in the
family eventually took their turns putting on the goggles and helping me smelt
lead, bring liquid mercury out of mercuric oxide, distil water, or detect the
iodine in table salt with an indicator.
At the end the fourth
grade, our teacher, Miss Nelson, announced one day that she had some surplus
books that should go to good homes. She wasn't
sure how to distribute them but decided she would just read off the titles from
the pile she had, and see who wanted them.
Back then, probably the most inspiring book a boy could hope to read was
about a famous athlete like Babe Ruth or Knute Rockne. So when Miss Nelson started her dispersal
with a biography of Mickey Mantle, practically every hand shot up in interest.
I was hoping that she would show favor based on some kind of academic
prowess where I may have stood a chance.
But she gave the first book to Doug Turner, who was a great
athlete. The pattern seemed to
continue. A biography of
This was not leaving me in very good shape, and the books were rapidly
disappearing. There weren’t quite enough
to go around, and I was afraid that I wouldn't get one at all and started to
give up. Miss Nelson had almost reached
the last book when she picked up a little worn-out green paperback and read the
title, “Thomas Alva Edison”. It sounded pretty boring. No one raised a hand. Then Miss Nelson looked straight at me and said,
“Robin. This is for you.”
“I guess I've been pigeonholed,” I thought as I slowly rose and
grudgingly went to the front to get my blooper prize. Class was dismissed and everyone scampered
off to begin their summers, reading their cool books about great athletes and
mighty explorers and discoverers of faraway lands. But me, I just had my lowly light bulb
book. Big deal. You already knew Thomas Edison had come up
with electric lighting. Case
closed. I had been typed with the
obvious.
For some reason, perhaps because of a threatened book report, I slowly
began to read my little book. I was kind
of surprised to learn that Thomas Edison had been born in
And he
had a chemistry lab. Well, now!
From Tom Edison, I learned both things to do and things to avoid. Like him, I labeled every bottle of chemicals
“POISON!,” even the harmless ones, to keep other kids from tampering. But I was more careful with fire than he, it
seemed, and only had one major scare in
my lab career; a magnesium ribbon I was burning as a flair overheated and
popped apart, scaring me out of the lab.
Tom's lab was in the
boxcar of the train where he sold newspapers, and he used brackets to hold his
bottles and equipment stationery. I
didn't have quite that problem, but he didn't have one I had: my brother and
some of my friends like to come into the lab and start fights or harass me by
stealing things or upsetting when I was doing.
Scott liked to give me his share of devilment, often with the help of
Dennis Burns. They used to yell at me
through my lab door if I would lock them out for fighting or hijinx, and would
fire squirt guns through the big hole where the door lock had originally
gone. During more peaceful times, we
all used to enjoy poring over the supply catalogs from Central Scientific
Company, Edmund Scientific, and Skillcraft.
I would try to get adults to help me develop some of my off-the-book
ideas for experiments but there often wasn’t a good connection:
For example, once I was interested in fuel cells and thought maybe I
could make one for a science project.
Dad asked Fred Towner to come over from across the street and tell me
about them. This man was an electrical
engineer at Westinghouse. This was going
to be great; I could hardly wait to get my battery to work! Fred came into the lab; Dad introduced him
and then departed. Lucky Dad. The introduction was the last I understood of
Fred for the next hour. Or was it eight
hours? It felt like it. “This is the anode; this is the cathode,” he
said. Then, WHOOSH! He just took off into some region of the
atmosphere beyond gravity. Like a lot of
scientists, when asked a question he’d make his answer more confusing than what
I asked about, and then would barge right on.
He left behind some articles which might as well have been written in
Hindi. I never did figure out how to
build my fuel cell.
Today’s kids can be much more independent because of the web. And what a lot of boring quasi-explanation
the Internet saves them!
Though he didn’t spend much time with hands-on help, Dad used to
encourage my lab work from the side by doing things such as quizzing me on
chemical symbols. One day when I was in
seventh grade, Dad brought me home from the office some guy’s workbook from
high school chemistry. I couldn’t
believe my luck. It smelled like a lab
bench, like chemicals I wasn’t allowed to buy yet. This was the Big Time! Over the next few years, I worked through
most of the book, carefully filling in the answers to all the problems and
question sets. I didn’t want to miss any
of those important details.
Dad had always had a knack for picking out good presents, and some of
them were truly magical. The first I
remember from being very small was a little dashboard and steering wheel, with
a motor sound. Then I got a robot with a
blue light on top of its head that could magnetically pick up metal disks and
put them on a moving conveyor belt. Once
I got a transistor radio for my birthday, and they’d hardly been on the market
for any length of time. When I was ten,
I got a very beautiful dark red Spanish guitar.
But one Christmas, I got an Ohaus chemical balance, lab stools,
glassware, and a hotplate. At that moment,
I felt realty established in the lab.
Especially with those lab stools!
Even throughout the year, Dad would bring home gadgets and science toys
all the time. Once he got us all a
ten-power telescope that we would use to look at the moon, especially on
vacation in
In addition to chemistry, a
major interest of mine had always been reading, and a lot of that was devoted
to great literature from the past. I
eventually amassed a library of over 5,000 volumes, which I arranged chronologically. It stretched from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Egyptian
Book of the Dead through contemporary writers.
Later, I pursued such
studies in college, but whenever I see, today, college courses being offered in
areas such as “Languages and Literature” and
“The Humanities”, they somehow strike me as very dry, even to my
humanities major’s ear. In particular,
the ancient languages look boring. What
would have drawn anybody to the pursuit of studying them?
Speaking for myself, an
attitude of reverent curiosity always drew me to classical studies, especially
where dead languages were concerned.
The central-most point of attraction was always the undeniable, great
fact of -- the sheer actual reality of
-- the very existence of -- what you
might call “preserved signals of quality” from the distant past. To follow the leadership of graphic ciphers
left by the long dead who had given their best in their day felt somehow a
hallowed trail. It was like a visit to a
mausoleum, where the crypt turned out to reside in my own head, and it would
open slowly as I studied, with antique beings floating out of their spirit
chariot box.
An early example of this feeling, and an
experience of this trans-epochal communion, happened to me one day when I was
walking home in the rain from seventh grade.
As I passed the nursing school, I looked over in the bushes and saw a
book of piano music, all rolled up. It
was soaked, and I took it home and dried it out in curiosity. The owner’s name was now an illegible smear
on the top front cover. Open opening the
folio, I saw that it was some sort of piece by Beethoven. I started playing through it as best I could
and suddenly realized that this was a piece that I had on a 45. It was a familiar and solemn composition and
I hadn’t known its name, really. It was
the “Moonlight Sonata.”
Since the piece was far
above my expected level of proficiency at my piano lessons, such sheet music
would never have crossed my way normally by that age. I felt I had chanced into
a leg-up experience. I promptly brought my record of the piece to the hi-fi
near the piano and put it on. As it
played, I followed the music on staff.
A shudder went through me. It was
as though I were getting an actual message from Beethoven: “See?
Those people claiming to play my work really are dong so. These are my notes. Follow them and prove it out. And what I have done, perhaps you may do
also. When you write with quality, your
voice and your leadership may remain.”
Soon thereafter, I asked
Mom if she would buy me a large volume I
saw in the Publishers Overstock catalog:
The Nine Symphonies of Beethoven in Score.
“Only if you start STANDING UP STRAIGHT!” she said. I made promises suitable to the request and
in six weeks I had my scores. I’m afraid
the book did little for my posture, however.
I would prop open the outsized volume on a music stand, drop a needle
onto a Toscanini performance from 1945, and absolutely thrill as I would hunker
down and follow the execution in detail.
Not only were the main melodies there, clearly to be seen, but also all
the ornamental flute parts, the occasional percussion, and the inaudible
filler-parts for oboes and clarinets that you usually only felt rather than
heard suddenly became noticeable once you saw them on the staff. The full totality of Beethoven’s message was
coming across the ether as never before, and I was privileged to be able to
experience it.
In the literary realm, I
picked up many old volumes for my library from various book sales and owned a number of the Loeb Classics. I much
enjoyed their juxtaposed languages layout, and would try to piece through the
Latin or Greek on the left-hand page and then get a rescue out of the
translation on the right.
Unearthing ancient texts
was something of a hobby also of my friend, Dennis Burns, who had continued in
his high school sophomore year into a second year of Latin while I moved on
into a spoken language, German. We
used to browse the small Jewish alcove of our public library where copies of
numerous massive reference sets had been donated. The Anchor
Bible was a multi-volume commentary on the scriptures, with the critical
materials juxtaposing the actual biblical text on the same page. The original text was small indeed in volume
by comparison to the accompanying exegesis.
The Babylonian Talmud was
there as well, both in Hebrew and English.
Now and then Dennis and I would check various volumes out and pore over
them.
The summer after tenth
grade, Dennis and I (who. you remember, had started our own Roman Club in
second grade), conceived the idea of simultaneously translating aloud different
Bibles from the past. This would be a
unique voice-giving to our revered,
studious and pious predecessors. (Both
Dennis‘s grandfathers and three of his maternal uncles were Baptist
ministers.) From the public library, we
each borrowed a huge book. I checked out
a mammoth-sized, pulpit version of Die
Heilige Schrift [The Holy Scriptures] of Martin Luther, from the year 1534,
written in Gothic script. Dennis checked
out the BIBLIA VULGATA of St. Jerome,
from the year 380, the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church.
We opened the books onto
the large school table I had in my room and began a game of Dueling
Scriptures. This was a noncompetitive
duel, however; more of a duet than a duel.
We turned to the Beatitudes, the Twenty-Third Psalm, Genesis Chapter
One, Psalm One Hundred, and to Proverbs.
One would challenge the other. “Okay, start: What is it saying here in Matthew 6:1?” and the other would start sight-translating
from his Bible. We were pretending as
though these two Bibles were the only ones left on earth and that we were
reconstructing our religious heritage, much as POWs (or characters in
Fahrenheit 451) might try to remember and recapture every bit of the Bible or
poetry that they can remember. When one
guy would get stumped, and visits to the Latin or German dictionary became too
frequent, the other guy would take up the torch from his own alternative
language, and fill in until he was stumped, and the turn would again pass.
It was a thrilling process, imagining we were
saving the Light of God for humanity. I
think that in me was the impression that somehow, by deciphering the words of
God’s translators from earlier times, I was getting closer to the original
signals in some way, and that I was coming closer to actually hearing the voice
of God Himself, sifting through to me across the eons, like a crackly Marconi
broadcast.
Not long thereafter, I
chanced into a German church in a nearby town with beautiful stained glass windows
that were catching the morning sunlight.
They were inscribed in Gothic script, with one of them reading, “Ich bin das Licht der Welt” (“I am the
Light of the World”), which impressed me as a blaze of celestial revelation.
With such a background of
attitude, with the door already cracked like this, it was only a matter of time
before my mental vault’s tumblers would fall into place, resulting in a college
schedule card on which I was taking New Testament Greek and also Biblical
Hebrew. Against better advice, I took
them both in the same year and I think it was because of that earlier
experience; Dennis and I had handled the two ancient bibles well enough at the
same time, and I would just do it again,
albeit with a lot more energy and application required than before.
There was definitely a
state of mind that seemed to descend upon me in those language studies and accompanying
investigations. It is hard to express
what an exciting privilege it always felt to open the Greek New Testament in
the library, and to read and parse out the actual words of St. Paul, or to worm
through a passage in the Pentateuch or the Psalms, a real sweat for non-speakers
of Hebrew, and to whisper, even at all these epochs of distance away from Moses
or David, the words they had left.
The romance of the
classics was full upon me at this time, like an intoxication. Finally being able to have some idea, any
idea of what Francis Bacon or Thomas Jefferson was getting at by a Greek
reference was to have access into a privileged tent indeed. These discoveries were my own private mental
Renaissance. Going on to study French at
Yes, they were dead – the
ancients were all dead, and so were the languages and cultures in which they
swam. But, for a span of perhaps six
years in my life, these things were all very much alive in me. The amount of information that was known
about, say, the Athenian audience’s
reception of the comic plays of Aristophanes never ceased to amaze me. When I read, in some of the thick study
outlines of classical literature that I got from the bookstores, of the dramatist Martial resorting to his apartment
in Rome, I could fairly picture the place and see him ascending the stair and
lighting his lamp at twilight.
I knew I could not stay in
this realm of antiquity much longer and, as my years of expected formal education
began to wane, I used to satirize my own interest in the antique, while not
necessarily realizing what I was doing.
I won an extemporaneous essay contest my senior year and got an award at
Commencement by writing a character sketch of a book-besotted librarian who, every Spring, would begin to
fawn over his volumes, to talk to them, give them pet names and carry them around in the crook of his
arm. He was particularly enamored of the
rare and older books and now and then had a dalliance with a scroll. A top-of-essay quote from Chaucer in Middle
English that I had had to memorize for a class is what I think clinched the
prize.
In graduate school, I was
good friends with a masters student in
writing, Rex Roberts, and I would entertain him constantly with an imitation of
my undergrad classics professor, Frank Wilbur,
a gentleman with a gift for making any topic boring. Frank used to drone
on endlessly, lost in a world of and for himself. He loved to quote “arma virunque cano.”[1] In my imitations, I would
have Frank falling into a faint while naming off various classical works that
were to be read during his course, such as The
Medea by Euripides, and he would always be finished off while hymning the Loeb Classics, especially any of them
where the author’s finished works would be followed with a section of
Fragments—small passages attributed to him in quotations by others or that had
been found on pottery shards, etc.
Now just who were these
kooky characters I was lampooning, anyway?
I’m sure I didn’t know.
I often thought I would
teach the classics, literature and history later. I took the GRE in comparative literature
after grad school, and scored on par with majors in the subject
nationwide. But I didn’t want to become
a Frank Wilbur, who always struck me as kind of a screwy, backward-looking man.
Also, I began to
reinterpret my experiences of “communion” with my forebears, as I became more
psychologically knowledgeable and aware.
I could see that the experience of connection had been a construction of
my imagination, enabled and suggested by my culture.
Poems are indeed in
persons, ultimately, and must be so, as much as they are on the page. This demythologization never turned off my
liking of the classics. But it did sober me up to a more practical focus in
life, which, God knows, I needed.
My Cultural Revolution
culminated in my selling off of all my books and records, and trimming my sail
towards the rising rather than the setting sun.
When I went off to college,
one of my dreams was that I would finally get some thorough training in music
composition. And for many in school,
acquiring the skills and energy to compose either “serious” or “commercial”
music can be a fairly straightforward path. The detours for me involved the difficulty of
following theory courses in class because of the blackboards’ being so hard for
me to read. Even as a college freshman,
I found the beginning theory class difficult to follow but my prior music
lessons and decent ear more than allowed me to pass. More advanced classes, however, seemed to
offer only the promise of becoming hopelessly lost, with the bright lights and
lockstep pace of so many classroom situations.
I managed to get a certain amount of tutoring from a couple of music
professors, one in particular, Mrs. Joan Pinkston, a pianist and sacred music
arranger. Mrs. Pinkston was an angelic
friend and mentor. She would noodle over
my quartets late into the afternoon till her husband would prevail upon her
very irritably to come to supper. I
hated to influence her to be late, but
she was giving me pure nectar, and she was all I could find at the time.
Once when I said I wanted to study a particular contrapuntal piece I had
liked form high school, she allowed me
to tape her playing the song ”Come away to pleasant groves, Aminte” (doing a
tremendous sight-reading job) so I could
review it thoroughly. She had very complimentary things to say about my Baroque
style and urged me to enter two of my quartets in a national Young Composers
Contest, in which I received third prize and honorable mention. She also allowed me to present my work in a
senior recital along with the music majors, which I considered a high
honor.
When I got to
Now, it so happens, the guy who lived next to me in my dorm,
International House, was quite a composer.
Jim Hebda was a math PhD student and he wrote extremely beautiful art
songs, always with French lyrics. Once I
broke out crying as he played and sang
them, really startling and shocking him.
He was so talented, it hurt; the poignancy and beauty of his work were
just too much to bear. I think he
identified with Chopin, being Polish himself, and his style was indeed quite
Chopinesque. No wonder he wrote only
songs in French, in imitation of the repatriated composer’s assumed
language. As a mentor, however, Jim could not serve, being
too busy with his studies.
I did nonetheless succeed in producing a small violin sonata sketch or two while in
graduate school and I persuaded a fellow library student, Bernadette Barton,
who had played violin in college, to come to Bond chapel and try out the pieces
with me.
These little sorties were stirring up a great appetite in me for more
concentrated composition. When I got out
of school into the work world, a main goal I had in life was to write string
quartets, and my ultimate goal was a concerto
grosso, in the styles of Albinoni and Corelli, two Baroque masters I
particularly admired at the time.
In early 1977, I sought out a teacher through “The Learning Exchange,” a
short-lived hobbies club, and I soon
found my man. Thomas, his name was -- an eccentric music master right off a 
page of
Dickens. He was a 45-year-old bachelor,
something I could hardly comprehend at the age of 26. He was a kind and thoughty man, very humble,
like an overly-beaten puppy, and he spoke in the simpering, musical cadence
that many a conservatory graduate seems to have. Tom was tall and filled-in, though not at all stout, and he could have
been intimidating had his personality allowed him to be so. He lived in Rogers Park and had come from the
east coast. He had graduated form
Julliard in his twenties and like so many of those alums, he had been thoroughly
blistered and traumatized many times over by the extreme rigor of the
place.
If there ever were a fellow upon whom you least wished the inhuman and hideous boot camp experience
of Julliard, it would have been poor Tom.
He was a Suzuki violin instructor and on his shelf was the book, Nurtured by Love, by the master,
Shinichi Suzuki himself, that told of an imitative approach to music education
he developed in bombed-out
Thomas was fascinated by my U of C past and alluded to it continually
and, I thought, obsequiously during most every lesson. He used to listen to Milt
He loved to go bossy on
me. Tom worked as a fiddler for various
lesser-light Midwestern orchestras, and there were often new works he had to
learn. Now and then he would trot out
some avant-garde piece he was working on and begin playing a record of it, asking
for my opinions. ”See if you like this,
Robb,” he would say. After five minutes
or so, he would finally ask me my opinions.
If I ever said I didn’t care for it, he would hastily chide me: “You
don’t know yet!” and then go right on indulging himself by hearing
more. Despite obvious poverty, he
owned a personal copy of the multi-volume Grove’s
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, not an inexpensive work, even in
paperback, and he resorted to it at length whenever possible with the flimsiest
of excuses.
I would show up for a session, ready to go over a counterpoint exercise I would have prepared for the lesson and he would immediately fly off topic: “Robb, to