The Big Show, Shinning Up a Light Beam 11.

Mom and I left Seattle in a large propeller-driven plane, landing in Spokane, Billings Montana, Bismarck North Dakota and Minneapolis-Saint Paul. I noted every detail of pretakeoff acceleration, the extra dimension of movement once airborne and the popping in my ears. This was the first time I’d flown and flying I assumed was the logical precursor to Space.

In the Twin Cities, we transferred to a jetliner but a faulty hydraulic pump kept us on the ground for more than an hour. We missed our connecting flight from Chicago to Saint Joseph, Michigan. I was sitting next to a businessman in our 2^nd-class seat and we fell into conversation. He asked me a lot of questions about the TV shows I liked. When we arrived in Chicago and were told "Sorry. You’ve missed your flight, but there’ll be another one in the morning," our travelling companion went ahead of us and let the airline know they owed us a night’s lodging.

Mom and I spent the night in a very nice hotel room near the airport, with limo service to bring us back in the morning. When we looked at the card our friend had given me, it turned out he was the Vice-president of a major advertising agency.

Uncle Vick met us in Saint Joe and took us across to Benton Harbor where he lived. We spent Thanksgiving with Vick, Carol and the kids. Grandma and Grandpa Plassman were also there for dinner and it was clear Grandpa’s mind and speech and deteriorated quite a bit since last we’d seen him. Grandma hadn’t been taking particular care that he got his medication and whenever he said anything she’d say "Shut up you stupid old man." Vick yelled at his Mom, which sent her flying to the guestroom in hysterics, fairly common stuff for Grandma.

On Friday we drove one of Uncle Vick’s cars to Uncle Bob and Aunt Marilyn’s house in Taylor Township, a Detroit Suburb. Aunt Marilyn turned out to be a brash and loud as Bob was soft-spoken and courteous. Don and I watched TV together, the first time I’d seen Johnny Quest and the Adams Family. I had a fight with John, my younger cousin and was bitten by Bobo, the ugly little poodle. All in all, a pretty successful evening!

Saturday morning Mom and I drove to Ann Arbor and met Uncle Verne at the dry-cleaning plant in the Westgate Shopping Center. We started looking for a house. By now Chris and Dad had joined us and we found a one-story two-bed room with a large basement. At this point it was assumed I’d be home on weekends and summer only. It would be five years by plan that we’d be paying off the $30,000 price of the plant and would then own it outright.

Tuesday afternoon, Mom and I drove the 40 miles to Lansing where the State School for the Blind was located. The school was about twice the size of the one in Vancouver. The superintendent, Dr. Thompson, shook my hand and told Mom "We’ll be very proud of him." For some reason, Mom decided she needed to say that I wasn’t very big, but I was a pretty good kid. Dr. Thompson said kindly, "We often find that great things come in small packages."

We were then ushered to the dorm to meet Miss Benzey, my house parent for the evening, and to be shown about the quarters in which I’d be living. They were a far cry from what I had known in Vancouver. There we’d had modern, clean-smelling cottages to live in. Our house parents were primarily middle-aged women who resided off campus when not on duty. This was a floor in a multi-storied building, fifty years old at a guess, which frankly stunk. The rooms were barn like and had two or three beds in each. Miss Benzey seemed as old as the hills and had a cross, hectoring way of talking. She lived in the dorm, with us, right next to my room actually and even when off duty, was fond of coming out and screaming at the boys to be Quiet!

As she talked to Mom and me, a big kid who’d come up to stand next to me, kept feeling my face, head and upper body. Miss Benzey kept slapping at him, telling the boy to quit mauling me. I was frightened and miserable once again.

Later that evening, I was approached by a boy, several years older than me, named Bob, who seemed desperately interested in getting into the room I was occupying. He promised he’d keep everything clean if I’d let him room with me. When I asked Miss Benzey if Bob could be my roommate, she said "I’ve been listening to you in there and I knew Bob has been pumping you to let him move in there. I’ll decide which boy to put in there with you. It’ll be somebody more your age." For some reason, a room big enough for three of four beds, (mine,) had been standing empty while all other rooms had two or three occupants apiece. Perhaps this was because my room was coincidentally next to hers.

The boys in my dorm were nice to me. Some of them went out of their way to be so. Some of my dorm mates however, like many of the students at Vancouver, were mentally retarded, acted strangely and frightened me. In Washington, residents were segregated by age. Effort was made to move a boy or girl into the older cottage at Thirteen or Fourteen. Here the segregation was by grade and boys 16 or 17 were sharing living space with Nine and Ten-year-olds.

Our showers had two showerheads in one big stall. Our sinks seemed more appropriate for a factory men’s room. In general, everything was just so Different from what I’d been used to and in truth; I’d barely gotten used to Vancouver when I had to move to still another strange place.

My teachers were Mr. Zarka and Miss Becker, both quite nice though Mr. Z. had a rather strange sense of humor. He told one student "If you handed in a paper like that to a professor in college, he’d tear it up and throw You in the garbage!"

The studies were quite interesting. We were making a map of North, Central and South America for Social Studies Class. With Christmas approaching, we were making centerpieces with hand-dipped candles to take home.

In Math we used an intriguing device called a Numberaid and Calculaid. This was a flat device with a small abacus at the head and below that, toward the user, was an array of wheels arranged in rows, turning individually on horizontal bars or axle rods. Each wheel had Braille numbers around the rim, so by turning the individual wheels forward and backward on their axles, one could set up numbers or whole math problems. I guess the combination of the two devices was intended to offer greater flexibility than one or the other devices alone. I’d not seen this system before, nor have I since.

The other thing at school, which was strange to me, was the use of the Slate and Stylus, described in chapter 7, for writing everything taken down or composed in class. I knew how to use the slate and enjoyed doing it as a fun activity, but had neither the speed nor accuracy for long exercises. The sudden transition made me feel illiterate all over again.

On the third day in class, which was Friday, Mr. Zarka said "They sure didn’t Learn you very good where you came from, did they?" He said I’d have to start coming a half an hour early, beginning Monday, for remedial instruction. I felt defeated.

During these three days I had gone to a Radio Club meeting and had become interested in Morse code. I’d gone to an At-home wrestling meet to which a near-by high school had come to wrestle our senior team. We won. I’d had a couple of guitar lessons, which I’d been denied at Vancouver. Finally I was going to learn the instrument I’d been wanting to play ever since I heard cowboys did!

Mr. Weir, the Dean of the dorms, drove some of us to the bus station after classes on Friday. Dad was there to meet me in Ann Arbor. I started crying in the car.

During the weekend I tried to keep up a fairly brave front but after dinner Sunday, when it was time to drive me back to school, I threw up, something I’d started doing lately when I was stressed or upset. Mom decided that before sending me back, she’d do a more thorough check of local schools to see if there was a program for blind students with normal intelligence. She’d evidently been doing some checking while I’d been in Lansing because she’d found out about a program in Ann Arbor for blind retarded and it appeared there might be a program in Ypsilanti, about ten miles distant, which accepted blind grade schoolers.

I had probably overreacted to fairly minor matters. Though everyone had been friendly enough, there was a certain amount of moderate hazing, like dragging the new kid through the snow which had recently started falling, or running at speed down unfamiliar stairs. By the time I got home, everything had been blown considerably out of proportion. Though Mr. Zarka had made me wear rubber boots three sizes to big for me, because I had none of my own, learning was stimulating and he had given me his own Braille Weekly Reader to keep. I’d been familiar with this publication in Seattle and this issue had an article on Gemini space suits and another one on hydroponics.

Mom seemed very eager to believe all the negative about Lansing. Many years later I found out why. Based on the behavior of the boy who in Miss Benzey’s words, had been Mauling Me, Mom had decided that I’d been living in a den full of homosexuals. I of course had no idea what a homosexual was. I didn’t even know what sex was, though I had begun suspecting there was something about the body and what people did with it, which I didn’t yet understand. I don’t know whether Mom was right or wrong about the boy in question. I hadn’t noticed any overt gestures from my dorm mates, unless you counted poor Bob’s rather wifely promise to keep everything clean for me if I’d let him live in my room. Of course English boarding schools have no monopoly on homosexual play. I’d not encountered this sort of thing yet at Vancouver, but would in the future and women with whom I’ve spoken, who’d spent time at Vancouver and other boarding schools, including Lansing, assured me that girls did it too.

I didn’t return to Lansing then or ever. Monday morning I went to work with Mom and Dad. Mom spent much of the day looking for a program for me. For some reason Chris was able to return to school almost immediately but even when a school was located for me, I must for some reason, wait till after the New Year to enroll.

I spent some of this time at the dry-cleaning plant but this was mostly just enforced inactivity. Home seemed little better at first, but early on I opted to spend days by myself at the house. It had been decided that I should have the basement, exclusive of the laundry area for my room. I had my bed, a chair, my toy chest and toolbox, as well as my diary from Vancouver and Mr. Zarka’s weekly Reader, my only sources of reading material. I could well identify with people like young Abe Lincoln and the boy from the Caxton’s Challenge story, both of whom had thirsted for books. In this day of data overload I still have great difficulty throwing a book away.

To occupy my time, I got some cardboard boxes. One of them originally held our new chest of drawers. Chris and I spent a number of peaceful hours turning it into a model house. I cut doors and window shutters with my pocketknife erecting a cardboard chimney on the roof and fashioning a sword and musket to hang on the wall. Chris colored the shutters and trim red, drew a fireplace with blue and orange flames under the chimney and otherwise decorated our little house, even copying the numbers 1006 from out front onto our play facade.

From other boxes, working with my knife, scotch tape and string, I made everything from model robots, to rubberband guns to spaceships. Dad got me some chunks of wood, which I whittled and even drilled, with the small blade of my pocketknife to accomplish other projects. Since I was living in the basement, it didn’t matter so much that I had wood shavings and scraps of cardboard all over my floor. I still feel a pang of regret when I have to throw a cardboard box away and I still use cardboard in some kinds of model making.

Upstairs, I had my record player and a few records unpacked, as well as the TV. We could get only one channel at first, Channel 7, WXYZ Detroit. programming in the morning and early-mid afternoons was pretty dreadful. I learned to occupy myself till about 4:30, with music records, making lunch, writing stuff, usually plans for the anticipated adventure next Summer, and with just putting in time telling myself stories.

I was still pretty much under the influence of the Oz books. I’d about 95% convinced myself that if I could discover some way to accomplish tessering, possibly through a mental discipline, I could reach a place like Oz even though it was generally held to be imaginary. Perhaps physical laws were different in Oz or Narnia, accounting for the admittedly strange occurrences in the books chronicling the respective places. It’s interesting to note that the writer, Philip Jose Farmer, accomplished the highly entertaining feat of making the Oz books correlate with a set of self-consistent scientific laws, in his novel Barnstormer in Oz. Farmer also proceeded through his main character, as I had, in developing a preoccupation with Glinda The Good.

I spent many hours over a year and more, having detailed conversations with the Sorceress of the South. We discussed science, religion, adventures I would have had by the time we met, the appropriateness or not of keeping a girls’ army, the workings of magic. Sometimes I imagined exchanging scientific knowledge, including the secret of tessering, for some of Glinda’s magical powers. Sometimes I imagined myself becoming a wizard, like the one in the Emerald City, though not so much of a humbug. Sometimes I’d imagine us getting married.

Sometimes I argued forcefully with Glinda and her officers, concerning what had been caused to happen to young Tip at the end of the second Oz book. Glinda represented for me feminine power with whom I could argue and hold discussions regarding issues, which seemed unimportant to most people. Glinda being such a fascinating person to me, it’s been amusing to discover how many other people have been affected by her at one time or another, especially since she really didn’t say or do all that much in either the books or the movie.

At Four-thirty in the afternoon, there was finally a break in the long parade of soap operas, with Trail Master, a half-hour version of Wagon Train. Then at five, there was The Big Show. The fact that I usually got to finish the 90-minute movie was an indication of how late it was before Mom and Dad got back from the Plant in the evening. These movies were generally of fairly light content and of various genres, but the station must have had a considerable backlog of science fiction pictures because they seemed to show nothing else for weeks on end.

This was the first time I’d had unrestricted access to science fiction movies. Mom equated all SF with monster or horror films. Happily, a fair number of these were space operas. My access to space fiction had also been rather scant and I studied these movies as if they were textbooks. Most of them seemed to deal with flights either to the moon or Mars. There were comparatively few about Venus and one of those was an Abbot and Costello comedy.

People on other planets tended either to live in domes or underground. There seemed to be an ordinance against anyone but primitive Earthmen using conventional firearms. Everyone else used some sort of energy weapon, be it raygun, blaster or disrupter. Landing on another planet might disclose entirely different sorts of elements than those found on earth. The flow of time might change from one planet to another. Even ones size might change on contact with an alien atmosphere. Perhaps my own ideas about Oz weren’t so farfetched after all?

Not all of the movies were about space. In one, a group of men were cast ashore upon a south sea island, populated only by immortal women. The men, who had lost their possessions, evinced consternation at having to wear sarongs and were soon engaged in a battle against the Head Priestess and her Volcanic god.

Another movie, starring Glenn Ford, was about early aeronautics before the Wright Brothers first flight. The was a movie about Thomas Edison, one about Robin Hood. Then there was the long series about Hercules and his twelve sons, spanning many cultures and thousands of years, from the Paleolithic to the 17^th century or so.

It was the space adventure movies though, that inspired in me the best imaginings. Again I was designing rocketships and flying saucers in my head, wondering about the daily events of an astronaut’s life, and for the first time, imagining what it might be like to not only visit, but live on another planet. I started thinking about writing a book-length story myself, set not in the past but in the future, perhaps on Venus. Those dense Venusian clouds could be hiding anything at all. I visualized enormous living and working complexes, with centralized kitchens and robotic servants. Emissaries from earth would arrive and help forestall some catastrophe threatening to rock the entire planet. Perhaps my story might even be made into a movie, perhaps turn up on The Big Show!

I had still another fantasy, which hearkened, back to my preoccupation with the past. This involved, or rather took off from, the story of Robinson Crusoe. The story wandered about somewhat in time and probably space as well. In one form it occurred in the 1600s, like the original. In another it happened in the present. Sometimes a spaceship would even be involved, rather than a sinking ship.

The theme of being cast away by myself, like Crusoe, was a constant. I didn’t like the idea though, of everyone but me having to die. Perhaps everybody else would be fortuitously rescued out of lifeboats and would be brought away from my uncharted island that I alone had reached. Our ship, having taken it’s time in sinking, or lodged upon a sandbar, would afford me time to bring away sufficient tools, weapons and possessions with which to build my solitary island dominion.

The date of my imaginary voyage would of course, affect the sorts of things I would find aboard ship, whether swords and flintlocks or modern revolvers, automatics and sporting gear. Sometimes I’d be able to rescue only trunks and suitcases, which more times than not, would be mostly full of women’s clothing. On my island I’d shear goats and twist the hair into yarn, knitting from this something we might call Sweats now, but the goat’s hair yarn would be scratchy wouldn’t it? and I’d need to wear something underneath.

Dangerous PARAGRAPH #1. With more time available to me, alone and at home, perhaps influenced as well by my own ambivalent feelings about my own suspected femininity, I resumed the episodic wearing of female undergarments. Now I sometimes wore slips as well, which were in the same drawer as the panties. I don’t think I perceived this as a sexual thing. I spent some time analyzing what I was doing and it didn’t seem to be entirely a matter of tactile sensation. The experiences had some other powerful attraction for me as well, though I couldn’t say exactly what.

DP#2. With the move, the distinction between my parent’s work and home lives had blurred considerably. Chris and I were thrown into contact much more than previously, with unfamiliar adults of both sexes. I think this made me feel that I was a good deal more mature and grown up than I really was. I’d tended to think in these terms previously and now my tendency to act out as a young male, among men was magnifying as I returned to school. This tended to make Mom react in a more repressive manner in order to maintain some level of childish innocence and appropriateness for Chris and me.

DP#3. Conventional wisdom, it there is such a thing, would suggest that I was acting out in order to compensate to myself, for wearing girl’s clothes. I hadn’t been doing the experimentation when I was in Vancouver, not even on going-home weekends and though I wouldn’t have admitted it for the world, I’d taken a certain guilty pleasure in being referred to as girlish by an older boy in my cottage. I tend to think what I was doing was an attempt to maintain some inner softness against the external hardness I felt myself developing, a male-male sort of hardness in which I felt I must participate, yet which still frightened me at some level.

My island adventures included a good deal more than a preoccupation with apparel. I considered building machinery of pottery and wood, vehicles driven by springs made from twisted branches, water conduits made from clay formed about wooden cores which could be burned out in the firing process, waterwheels of driftwood to provide power. All of these were fairly good science fiction gambits as well. Sometimes I saw myself living in a sort of alternate Egypt, where myself and other inhabitants learned to weave cloth from plant fibers and make weapons out of fire hardened wood.

The marriage of the island adventure story with the space opera occurred with Robinson Crusoe on Mars, not the most sophisticate of science fiction movies and made rather corny by the obvious parallels with original R.C. but full of fun ideas nonetheless. An Alien slave served in place of Friday and a miraculous yellow rock contained sufficient chemical oxidized to sustain it’s own combustion and give off free oxygen for the stranded space man. The Russians, aboard the Mir Space Station used emergency air candles, which worked in just this way.

Business wasn’t going all that well at first and Chris and I frequently heard we didn’t have a dime to our names. I told Mom and Dad that I didn’t need anything for Christmas if that would help. Mom said she appreciated it, but we’d make do. Chris still believed in Santa Claus, but I’d been in on the Parent Conspiracy for a couple of years now. This year I asked for a harmonica. The one I got had been damaged somehow and had only two notes. I also got a variety of craft kits. Most of these I never put together as intended, but used yarn, tile, plastic string and all manner of other things for a myriad purposes.

The young women at the Drycleaners gave me an album of Chipmunk songs and Chris a pollywogesque stuffed toy with huge eyes, called a Slurp.

A Special Ed. teacher, Dolores Lambey, who’d discussed the program in Ypsilanti with Mom and me, had visited us. In early January I enrolled at Fletcher School, spending the first day or so in Mrs. Hessler’s Special Class. Mrs. Hessler was the full time, on site teacher for the blind who did interfacing between students and their teachers and also ran the special class for students who had mental and/or emotional issues besides being blind. In John Hay, we’d reported to one of three special classrooms, then went out to Contact Classes as deemed appropriate by our Special Ed. teacher. At Fletcher, we reported to a regular sighted class with which a student would spend most of each day, reporting back to Mrs. Hessler for review sessions or special help if needed. On my second day I was presented to Mrs. Falahee’s Fifth Grade Class. She told me all of the boys in our room were very excited about me coming because there’d been sixteen girls and only fifteen boys. Now we’d be even. I was then asked to stand up in front of the class and tell about Washington’s main industries. I recited by rote, about lumbering, fisheries, aluminum refineries and aircraft manufacture.

Everyone in my class seemed very accepting of me and Mrs. Falahee was a good-natured woman, not over-permissive but easy-going. I was given a Social Studies book, covering North, South and Central America, a Reading book, Spelling Book, and English book. My Reading and Spelling books were press Braille. My English and Social Studies books were Thermoformed reproductions.

Since I had no Math book, I would in theory at least, visit Mrs. Lambey twice a week, for Math tutoring and also for typing practice. Once a week, on Friday, I’d meet with Mrs. Hessler to go over Brailled assignments I’d prepared, so she could write in the answers in print before sending them on to Mrs. Falahee.

I said I’d "in theory" meet with Mrs. Lambey, because if one must choose a single word to describe special education as I experienced it at Fletcher School, that word must be Lackadaisical. Some of this was helped along in great measure by my own childish laziness, but it stemmed from a lack of structuring and supervision. Quite often, Mrs. Lambey wasn’t in her office at the appointed time and since I didn’t like Math and Typing particularly, I didn’t spend a lot of time waiting for her or checking back later. She in turn, no doubt judging me to me a non motivated student, didn’t generally expend a lot of effort in tracking me down, so these two subjects all but disappeared from my curriculum.

In Mrs. Falahee’s class I was simply given my textbooks and pretty much left to myself. For some reason, nobody set things in proper motion by suggesting I should do my Reading during Reading Period, Spelling during Spelling Period, etc. Perhaps Mrs. Falahee wished to avoid embarrassing me or hurting my feelings. It was also the case that it sometimes took Mrs. Hessler a while to find the volumes of my textbooks I needed for a given area of study. The long and the short was, I had too much responsibility for my age and very little consistent guidance. Left to my own agenda I quickly devoured all of my textbooks, (even English), skipping over the exercises of course. Then I started in on The Dictionary.

Our Reading book had a set of vocabulary words and a set of study questions appended to each story. Our school library held a rather credible Braille dictionary in 30 volumes or so and I was allowed to go there, pretty much whenever I chose, to work on these vocabulary lists, each word of which I was expected to define, then use in a sentence.

At first I really did look up, quite diligently, the words I was meant to learn and understand. Soon I was side tripping more and more frequently and before long, was spending entire periods looking up words of interest to me, without reference to class assignments.

I’ve said previously that a person, who truly loves to read, can’t avoid being educated. At the end of Fifth Grade I emerged Math and Typing deficient, but vocabulary enhanced, and having read several times, every word available to me in Braille. I all but implored Mrs. Hessler for leisure reading material and soon had consumed the Fourth Grade textbooks as well as my own. I also wrote compositions, which I shared with my class, on the history of automobiles, flying saucers, and a tall tale about a drunken superhero called Hercuwatermelon. (Why, I haven’t the foggiest.)

It’s an indication of the growing dysfunctionality in our family, that with a lending library only forty miles away in Lansing, and that library able and willing to mail me books as in Seattle, no one could find the time to sign me up for services, though we traveled widely and entertained house guests during the week, including Grandma and Grandpa Plassman and Lois with her children.

Mrs. Hessler typed up an order form for me to get a subscription to Boys Life Magazine in Braille even gave me an envelope and stamp. Nobody could get around to putting in a $5.00 check and mailing it. One day I brought home a box of seed packets I’d volunteered to sell for a school fundraiser. Mom said flatly that I wasn’t selling them because I’d be unable to do so and she wasn’t going to pay for them.

Fortunately Mom didn’t strictly forbid me to try. Because I sold all but four packets to barbers, bus drivers, even younger students, by the time of Uncle Verne’s next visit. Verne bought two of my remaining packets for Aunt Marlene and gave me enough money to pay for the other two several times over, telling me "sell them over again. Make yourself some profit."

I’d been in school more than a quarter before anyone seemed to get the message that I was in trouble. The information took even longer to filter home. By the time Mom realized I’d been essentially "playing" in school, it was rather late to turn things around, though considerable progress was made by year’s end. Mom started telling people she was pretty sure I was going to flunk, which sounded like a death sentence to me and she gave me the choice of returning to Lansing next year or to Vancouver. I chose Vancouver without much hesitation, not wanting to return to the Lansing dorms, especially after Mom had told off the Dean of House parents when he’d phoned to see how come I hadn’t returned after the first week.

While things weren’t exactly optimum academically, I was having a reasonably good time otherwise. I quickly made friends in and out of class and compiled a phone list, so I’d have something to do after school before the movie came on. Several of us formed a Science Club, The prime purpose of which was of course, to build a spaceship. I assigned various experiments to individual members of the club, asking them to report back with the results.

One project was an attempt to develop a new thread from which space suits might be made. In Fourth Grade, our TV Science Lady had said that by putting a drop of milk into a dish of vinegar, you could make a very thin, but visible thread. (Possibly calcium acetate.) She said this was somewhat the manner in which nylon was made. I’d recently read in my Social Studies book that lead was an important mineral because among other things, it shielded against radiation. So I handed one of my members the task of dropping milk into a mixture containing lead as well as vinegar and several other items. It never amounted to much. Neither did another experiment aimed at creating a super high-pressure chemical mixture, on the principle of vinegar and baking soda, which I wanted to use in a kind of air pistol for use off-planet. We had a notion, incorrect as it turned out, that conventional guns wouldn’t operate in space.

I spent a lot of time concocting food mixtures which might be suitable for astronauts, such as walnuts pounded into paste, with salt, sugar and cooking oil added, or compressed bread tablets. I also put in time working on other life support issues.

My scientific horizons were widening in at least three directions just now. My afternoon bus school bus driver, Mike Sheman, was a senior at the University of Michigan. He was a Business Administration major, but had taken a year of Chemistry, a year of Physics and a year of Biology. Mike, his scientific knowledge still current, lectured me on elementary atomic structure and simple chemical reactions. We also talked about rockets; famous scientists like Einstein and mental telepathy.

In the spring, Gemini 3, the first of the series to carry a two-man crew, was launched for a brief orbital mission in order to test the craft. This gave me new opportunity to find out more details of space flight and wonder about others. Gemini 4. would be more eventful in terms of things astronautical and in my own life as well.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Hessler had discovered what a science bug I was and had managed to contact a former student of hers who was similarly inclined. This fellow, probably a couple years older than me, donated a large stack of Current Science Magazines, (about a year’s worth,) in Braille, as well as some Boys Life Magazines. Current Science, published by Education Publications in Middletown Connecticut and transcribed by the Clovernook Printing House for the Blind in Cincinnati, was a weekly science newspaper for Junior High students. It covered essentially all areas of science and technology. I started learning more about the difference between the various fields, also about lasers, what fuel cells were, of hovercraft, freeze drying, ant behavior, algae and bacteria. There was even an article on dry cleaning.

One article was particularly fascinating, in part because I misinterpreted it. Let me relate the story as I experienced it. The article was called Over the Waves and began with a joke about two boys and a flashlight. They are out at night and the moon is shining. One of the boys wonders what the moon is made of and his friend says "I don’t know, but we can find out. I’ll shine my flashlight at the moon, you climb up the light beam and have a look."

The other boy says, "What kind of dope do you think I am? I’d get up about halfway and you’d turn the light off!"

The article went on to say that microwaves, not light exactly, but a source of radiant energy, had been used to power a model helicopter. A bank of diodes was used to turn the microwave energy into electricity and the electricity powered the helicopter. A source of microwave energy like the guts of your microwave oven could sit on the ground and zap bead like diodes on the helicopter to keep it flying. Microwave radiation was turned into electricity, in the same way solar cells turn sunlight into electrical current. The electricity spun the rotors of the toy helicopter, keeping it aloft.

Only I didn’t quite follow all that. On the first fifty or so readings, it seemed as if the microwaves were interacting with the diodes in some fashion, so as to directly push against the helicopter model. I thought perhaps the toy copter was something the engineers on the project just happened to have laying around which they used as a demo flying machine.

The implication was that with a powerful beam of light or microwaves, one could Push an object off the ground and maybe right on into space!

I guess I shouldn’t be faulted too much for making this mistake. Cartoons were full of such nonsense as magnetic lasers and antigravity lasers. Lasers could do anything from dentistry to deep space exploration. Besides, light beams and microwaves do exert a true push against objects toward which they are aimed. The "weight" of sunlight shining on a square mile of earth’s surface is something like the weight of a large grapefruit, so you’d want a pretty strong light source if you wanted to exert much pressure, but a number of proposals have been put forward for accelerating starships away from our solar system, using huge reflective sails, pushed by ground-based banks of huge lasers.

Eventually I realized my misunderstanding of this article, but in the intervening months I fell in love with the idea of some sort of ground-based device which generated a pusher beam of some sort. Astronauts could ride to the top of the atmosphere in a rocket plane, like the X-15 and eject through the roof of the plane by means of ejection seats. One or more pusher beams would then catch the astronauts in mid-air, (or upper-air) and launch them out into space, later cushioning their descent back to earth. The astronauts would be sitting on vacuum, with only their suits and their seats, which would contain parachutes and life rafts in case of the need for emergency landing.

Several ideas developed out of this rather extensive fancy, impractical and downright mistaken as it originally was. I’ve returned off and on over the years to the idea of a small, human form spacecraft with movable arms and legs, which being about as small as a capsule can get, could consequently be light of weight and could be lofted by a small booster. Astronauts could spend hours or even days in such a craft, avoiding the worst rigors of claustrophobia, since they’d be able to move their limbs. Such tiny craft and their occupants might be flown back to earth in a shuttle whose cargo has been discharged in orbit.

Another idea, not exclusively mine, is a stream of small but nonmicroscopic particles of metal or ceramic, accelerated electro-magnetically to high velocities, in order to provide thrust or Push against an accelerating spaceship. This is the engine on the ground concept again which would allow propulsion units to be built much more easily and probably more cheaply as well. Weight saving would no longer be an issue nor repair and maintenance.

Now that I was thinking not so much in terms of space ships but self-contained space suits, life support issues seemed to be truly paramount and must be handled in a minimal space as well. Some of us had heard that air could be run through a pound of charcoal granules to purify it for an astronaut to rebreathe. A cigarette called Tarrington had a charcoal filter and the misleading commercial, which hyped the brand, suggested that the same charcoal granules in their filter made it possible for men to breathe in space. Though charcoal can be used to remove odors and many sorts of chemical for air in confined spaces; it doesn’t remove water vapor or carbon dioxide from the air. Water can be condensed out of air through to use as some sort of air conditioning device, or a chemical drying agent such as calcium chloride, can absorb excess water out of the air. Carbon dioxide can be scrubbed from cabin air through the use of lye, lime or lithium-hydroxide, (like lye but lighter in weight,). These chemicals eliminate unwanted CO2 through the formation of carbonates.

It wasn’t too hard to design a system for providing food and water. Squeeze tubes and bottles, along with gelatin-coated sandwich squares had been talked about for years. But how to provide plumbing was quite problematic, especially since girls might want to go into space too.

Lois was visiting about this time, with Deb and Kelly. For the first time I felt a fitted diaper. Some relative of Bruce’s had made up a bunch for the baby. For years I’d known about the Chocks Disposables, so without consulting much with the group, I designed an In case Nothing Better Turns Up waste disposal system, consisting of two suit pockets, one on each hip. The pocket of the right side could be accessed from the inside of the suit; it held a number of formfitting, disposable diaper pads. The pouch on the left had two airtight seals, one opening to the interior of the suit, the other one opening to space. It could be used as a mini airlock for jettisoning soiled items into space.

In later years I was amused to learn I wasn’t so far off the mark after all. This wasn’t for public consumption during Mercury, for fear of tarnishing the heroic image, but while training for long periods, wearing cumbersome pressure suits, it was common practice for astronauts to wet their pants. The pure oxygen supplied to the suit quickly dried the trainee’s soaked woolen underwear. Alan Shepherd, our first man in space had an emergency, which fortunately occurred when he was still on the launch pad and the delicate electrical monitors in his suit could be turned off until things dried out again. This however made project designers aware that something had to be done about the having-to-pee problem in space capsules. Astronauts ate low-ash foods but couldn’t avoid water.

Gus Grisholm went into space wearing a panty girdle over his long johns to keep any soaking localized. Later a condom-based urine-collection system was developed, and another reason for keeping women out of outer space. Gemini and Apollo astronauts used a laborious system of plastic bags to excrete more solid waste in a semisanitary fashion. Now in these enlightened, coeducational days, Shuttle passengers use a suction-type, zero-gravity flush toilet, but a super-duty disposable diaper provides emergency back up on extra-vehicular activities.

At school I spent a lot of time, especially after lunch, talking to Ginger, a sixth-grade blind girl who’d been at Lansing for two or three years and heartily seconded my feelings about the place. Ginger was very interested in music, sang and played several instruments. She dreamed of going to Nigeria when she was older, to be a musical performer there. She wasn’t black, nor had she any connection with Africa, save through her reading and I don’t know if she ever got there or not. Ginger and I talked about books and travel and smoking and even about self-defense weapons. Both she and I had tried smoking by now and we heard a lot about violence, much of it interracial, in Detroit and elsewhere. Governor Romany was cracking down on all concealed weapons and even Scouts needed a license to carry a pocketknife on campouts.

Cathy was in my class and had a strong interest in Braille. We sat in the library often, trading Braille lessons for things I wanted read. I was interested in parlor magic and Morse code and the pictures that were in the print versions of books I’d read. Cathy and several of her girlfriends were repositories of local legends about ghost sightings, and demented people, such as one woman who supposedly lived in the sewers near our school, ate rats and had, it was believed, come out at night and even entered houses, frightening children. Cathy and I spent a lot of time talking on the phone after school and on weekends, talking about pretty much everything. She said that for some reason, her little sister, whom I never met, thought that she was going to marry me someday.

At school, especially during recess I spent a lot of my time with girls that winter. The boys were allowed to go out in the field and play soccer or throw snowballs, but girls and me, were made to stand near the school building, remaining mostly still, so the goofy playground supervisor could keep an eye on us. During the springtime it was often the girls who would teeter-totter with me or play on the swings. I did however have a number of male friends, several of them in the Science Club, whom I phoned frequently.

Hal Buetler was probably my best friend. Our school had a class for kids with emotional problems, in addition to the program for the blind. Hal was in this class for the first half of the day, then joined us in the afternoon. I’m not sure if the kids in our class picked on Hal because of this or because he was overweight. Probably a combination. For whatever reason, Hal didn’t seem to have many friends, but we hit it off right away. Whatever his problems, he seemed normal enough to me. Hal’s feelings were easily hurt but he was generous and a loyal friend, threatening to beat hell out of kids who bothered me, as sometimes happened.

Hal’s mom was a nurse and I think his dad worked at the Ford plant in Dearborn. The family also owned a Christmas tree farm. Hal’s sister Cheryl, was a grade younger than us. They had an older brother and sister who seemed to be living at home off and on. We offended his brother Bruce rather thoroughly one day by pretending I’d taken out my plastic eye, then Hal handed Bruce’s girlfriend a marble in a Kleenex, scaring hell out of her.

Hal and I spent nights over at one another’s houses several times and had fun riding double on his bike, hanging out at the shopping center, making matchhead and gravel guns out of pieces of pipe.

At school Hal and I liked to talk about projects we might build, various sorts of guns and bows we’d seen and used, Scouting and camping out. I went to a Boy Scout meeting with Hal and my Dad and met the scoutmaster, Mr. Powers. There’d been some sort of regulation passed recently that said blind boys could join Boy Scouts even if they weren’t yet eleven. As often happens in such cases, Mr. Powers latched onto to Dad, as the only source of potential adult assistance that had come along in quite a while and that was the last meeting I attended. It’s interesting to note that a similar lack-of-help situation 22 years later, saw me becoming an assistant Campfire Leader and not even in my daughter’s troop!

At this point I’m going to tell about one of the saddest memories I have, and in many ways, the most reprehensible thing I ever did. As I’ve made quite plain by now, Hal and I were pals. His problems were mine. Mine were his. In short, we did stuff together. Some girls had built a kind of multi-structured play fort out of cardboard boxes in a field belonging to the school. Hal decided it would be fun to go over and wreck it. I never questioned whether this was nice, moral, right or appropriate. I just went along. Soon Hal was sitting on the model buildings the girls had put up and I was ripping the squashed cardboard with gusto.

The girls, Roxanne, Jocelyn and Caroline, showed up and started begging us not to destroy their work. They weren’t threatening us, just asking, sounding sad and frustrated more than angry. Hal and I kept at it, giving everything an extra stomping just to make sure nothing would be salvaged. "Oh, you’ll be sorry someday!" said one of the girls, still sounding more hurt than angry. Nobody told the teacher or the principal and I don’t know if either of these adults would have considered the incident worthy of notice.

A day or two later, Hal was sick and stayed home from school. After lunch, when I went outside, Roxanne, Jocelyn and Caroline let me know they meant to get even with me for what I’d done to them. I told them they could try. I honestly don’t remember all that they did. I don’t think any of them actually hit me. It was more like continued close following, some pushing, and a lot of insults. Somebody said, "Remember when we told you you’d be sorry someday?" I said I wasn’t sorry at all, that I was glad I’d wrecked their playhouse. For a while they made hissing noises and tried to loop a garden hose around my feet to make me think it was a snake. That was just a nuisance though and no, I didn’t fall down. Somebody asked me if I was beginning to feel a little sorry and I said no.

Sorry or not, I did get tired of the harassment after a while and took refuge in the obvious place until class was ready to start. Roxanne, who appeared to be the leader, cracked the boys’ room door a couple of times and said my name.

After that Roxanne and I engaged in a lot of insulting sessions and she threatened to tell the principal about any infraction on my part she could discover, such as the time she overheard me telling Steve Brandt the joke about an illiterate Jewish lady who had a prescription for suppositories. It ended "Vell, Vhat would you vant I should do vith them, shove them up my ass!?" Roxanne promised to tell Mr. Wheeler but never did. In that self-justifying way that hateful behavior validates itself and even seems laudable, at least to the perpetrator, I decided that Roxanne and her friends had been rotten to begin with and what Hal and I had done was merely just retribution for said rottenness. I don’t recall any further physical consequences. The girls were afraid to take Hal on and I stuck as close as I could, sometimes finding excuses to stay indoors during recess when he was absent.

It’s difficult for me to write about this event and I can’t seem to speak about it without crying. It’s not as if I haven’t done things since, which caused more physical harm, but most of those things, unkind and destructive though they may have been, had prior justification of some sort and were done in defense of myself, someone or something. They were reactions to some deed or set of circumstances, real or imagined. For sheer, plain ugly meanness I can’t think of anything to top this particular deed. I don’t mean to minimize other bad behaviors in my life by offering a trivial event. Trivial it was not. At that particular time I think I was being the worst me I could manage to be.

The memory of these events disturbs me so because they depict the sort of ugliness, which is often visited by males upon females. There are no valid Everybody statements of course, but we’ve most of us seen the model, destruction of fond or precious things to show that one can, disregard or ridicule of feelings, justification of ones bad behaviors by alleged flaws in the other.

I do pray that someday I’ll have a chance to meet the women these girls have become so I can tell them how sorry, sad and ashamed of what I did to them back then.

I had a couple of new starts or course changes while at Fletcher. One of them was if not exactly a dramatic role, at least a chance at rehearsed oratory. Our entire class participated in a musical and slightly dramatized presentation on South America, presented to the entire school and those parents who could be there. I was a representative from Bolivia, and discoursed on the topics of mineral wealth and the capital city, La Pas.

The other new direction I had suggested to me was in the area of sculpting. In addition to the book courses, we had also music, gym and Art. Music wasn’t a problem. I could sing like everybody else. I went to gym but was always put up on the stage or our gymnasium/auditorium by the teacher, (the same playground supervisor previously mentioned,) where I’d be out of the way. There I’d sit alone through the exercise period, or with anyone who happened currently to be sick or injured. Art threatened to start in about the same way. An art teacher came to our class once a week and directed the others in paper art, paper machette, weaving and other handicrafts. The first such session after I arrived, involved cutting letters out of construction paper and making designs with them. This looked like something which would be difficult to explain to me, so Mrs. Falahee asked if I'd like a piece of modeling clay.

Since it looked like my alternative would be enforced inactivity like in Gym, I accepted and she gave me a new bar of plasticine, right out of the wrapper. I think my first sculpture was an attempt at a statue of Hercules. In subsequent Art periods I made a flying saucer, a knife and brass knuckles, a mole, which Cathy said looked more like an alligator; Underdog, a robot with a raygun, Abraham Lincoln; (at least I tried) and other things, sometimes of my own choosing, sometimes requested by classmates.

I’d worked with clays before, both of the modeling and the pottering varieties and done well enough, but don’t know that I received any more praise than others did in my classes at John Hay. Now it appeared I was possessed of this astounding ability with sculpting compounds. As it happened, I made a bit of money at ceramics in high school, making bowls, vases and the like and I suppose the experience in Fifth Grade set me somewhat along the road to becoming a sort of amateur sculptor. The working exclusively with clay, on the stick to what you know theory also prevented me from doing any other kind of art in the time I was at Fletcher School. This probably didn’t hurt me all that much, but was yet another way to be set apart.

At home things were up and down. Chris and I did stuff after school, often making crank calls to people, asking about operational status of fridge’s and the like. Some fast talking on my part to Mom or the phone operator, more than once saved us from getting in a lot of trouble. Chris and I fought a lot too and had lots of time in which to do it. She was jealous that I had friends to talk with in the afternoons and she liked to push the cut-off button when I was talking on the phone with someone. I got wise eventually and had my friends call me back. In those days the conversation could only be terminated by the initiator of the call. It was great fun to call up somebody you didn’t like from a payphone, leave the receiver off the hook and go home. Chris then started kicking and spitting at me while I was tethered by the receiver cord to our wall phone and when I’d run after her, she’d slip past me and slam the phone down.

After such a maneuver Chris would often run into the bathroom, lock the door, then taunt me from there. After I’d exhausted myself a couple of times pounding and kicking at the door, I started picking the lock with hairpins or nails. Sometimes I hit Chris harder than I meant to, but I generally didn’t hit first.

We also watched TV together and listened to records, sometimes speeding them up or slowing them down to make them sound funny. We took turns drawing stuff on the easel blackboard in her room. Sometimes we played doctor, with Chris drinking a syrupy solution of brown sugar for medicine and getting shots from time to time.

Dangerous Paragraph #1. The Dr. games were innocent enough but on a couple of occasions, nonmedical in nature, Chris and I compared notes. She’d seen me before because we’d shared a tub until I was nearly ten. I was amazed at how mistaken I’d been about what a girl’s body looked like. It still took me a while to understand what the F-word actually meant though. A boy in First Grade had told me it meant lying on top of a girl who was naked.

DP#2. As far as how babies were made, I get that information on my next trip to boarding school in Sixth Grade, and Mom and Dad do that?!? Possibly not since Chris and I were both adopted, but certainly she and Keith—Yuck!

Chris had a good deal in an active way to do after school than I did actually. I wasn’t allowed to run around the neighborhood and meet people more or less randomly as she did, and for fairly good reasons. I did however manage to meet some people to hang around with after school or on weekends.

Dicky Simmons was a year or so younger than me, and quite a bit smaller, bless him! I think Dicky showed up in my yard one day and we started talking. Pretty soon Mom got home and kicked him out of the yard because she thought he was one of the kids Chris was having trouble with lately. Dicky came back though and eventually it got across to Mom that it was some other kids with whom Chris’d been mixing it up. She had trouble with a lot of kids and she started a good deal of it herself. I’d heard her pick quarrels with kids while we were walking to the store or just standing out in front of the house. A lot of people just didn’t seem to look quite the way Chris thought they should.

Dicky came from a family of three boys and three girls. His Mom wasn’t much bigger than I was. She seemed to like me quite a lot and invited me to have lunch, dinner and to stay overnight, all in one weekend. "You’re the luckiest friend I’ve ever had!" Dicky said. We rode double on his banana seat bike and walked quite a bit too. There was a little stream running through some woods on the fringe of our neighborhood. We built little campfires beside the stream and smoked cigarette butts or tightly rolled newspaper, (a trick my dad told me about from when he was a kid.) I never did smoke what you’d call Regularly, but I did off and on, especially with one particular friend, until I was sixteen.

Dicky had one sister who was a year older than me, another sister and two brothers who were younger than him and then there was Teri, who was my age. Mrs. Simmons liked to tease me about how Teri would make a good girlfriend for me and told me how pretty she was. Changing the Herman’s Hermits song slightly, Teri would sing "Mrs. Simmons, You’ve got a lovely daughter." Teri and I sat in her room sometimes, sharing suspect words we’d learned, or showing each other gross things you could do to freak out people, such as sticking a pin through your fingernail or just under the surface of your skin, then yelling you stuck the pin through your finger! She thought it was funny when once, her wrap-around skirt suddenly fell off and she told me what had just happened. Sometimes she’d say, "What do you want to do?" I didn’t know what the options were. Kissing I suppose, would have been a possibility but the constant ribbing and wisecracking which would be visited upon a boy of ten or eleven, who had a girlfriend, were rather more than I was prepared to endure just yet.

Though the Simmons liked me, they didn’t seem to get along with my family. Once she was told to leave their yard and returned in a few minutes, with an angry message from Mom that I was to get home immediately. I came home to a lecture on the theme "If your sister can’t play over there, neither can You!" I didn’t tell on Chris much because she always seemed to know enough things to tell about me, so I didn’t mention that she’d been asked to leave because she’d just finished telling the Simmons family they were a bunch of "damn farts." Mrs. Simmons had simply told Chris she didn’t want her around if she was going to talk that way. I hadn’t done anything and didn’t see why I should leave. Neither did they.

Early on, Mrs. Simmons gave me one of those little key chain nail clipper sets. My nails were usually quite long because Mom didn’t cut them more then every couple of weeks and kids made fun of me. My nails were long like a girl’s. Of course Mom got offended that someone would challenge her grooming of me and she said if I didn’t stop cutting my nails so short she’d take those damn clippers away from me, and what business did that woman have interfering anyway!?

Near school’s end we had a field day outside, devoted to games, contests and races. Blue, red and white paper ribbons were awarded for the top three placings in each event. I tried throwing balls, paper plate Frisbees, broad jumping and everything else I could physically do and couldn’t seem to win anything. At some point, two girls from my class, I don’t remember which ones, came up to me and said I’d actually won a ribbon. I responded that I’d kept pretty good track of the winners and my name hadn’t come up. They said it had been decided to give me one anyway since I’d tried so hard. It was a red, Second Place ribbon, which they pinned on my shirt. I was quite proud of myself for a little while until I heard some boys whispering that it was a ribbon somebody else had thrown away. I felt the paper then and could tell it had been torn. Feeling stupid, I took it off.

The girls, who after all had just been trying to make me feel good, came back in a while and asked why I wasn’t wearing my ribbon. I said I hadn’t won it and wouldn’t wear something I hadn’t earned. Now they were feeling bad and said that when somebody went to the trouble of giving you something, you should be considerate enough to wear it. (I used the same argument on Marcie Caldirola in our Senior Year when I gave her three fig leaves as a gift and she didn’t go for it either.)

Eric Lindahl, a wise friend whom we’ll meet around Chapter 24, once said "No Nobel Committee that ever sat had more right to give somebody an award more than those two girls did." He was correct of course, but I suppose if they’d been thinking things through, they could have arranged with the teacher for an E-for-effort ribbon, which wasn’t torn.

As it happened, I did win an award a day or two later. Mrs. Falahee asked anyone who chose, to write a poem to share with the class at our end-of-school party. Several of us produced verses, which we read to the class and everyone, including the poets, voted for their favorites.

I don’t remember Third place, but First was taken by a girl named Cindy, recently from Georgia, who didn’t want to read her poem at first because it was "dumb" but was eventually persuaded and it was a rather rambling, but delightful lament about Yaller (yellow) peas. Unfortunately I can’t bring back much of it, only the last three lines;

I sure do hate them yaller peas.

I give them to my dog

He eats them like a hog.

Which doesn’t do justice to the piece. Or for that matter, the peas. As will be fairly evident by now, I won second place with my poem about beer. I’ll let psychologists and alcohol counselors have a field day with this one.

Beer

I opened my dad a beer.

He hit me right over the ear.

I made a mud pie

And threw it in his eye.

Don’t ever open a beer.

You see, I got knocked on the floor.

And I didn’t take time out to snore.

So if you are dense

And don’t have any sense,

Don’t ever open a beer!

"You got five chocolates for That!?" my wife said enviously when, 30 years later, I confided the poem to her, the first time I’d spoken it aloud since the time of the reading. The class laughed its collective butt off. Nowadays the words would seem to indicate terrible child abuse, but this would be misleading. I got my share of spankings, but wasn’t knocked down, around or out. One of my jobs was to get beers for Dad and to open them with the church-key can and bottle opener and later with my new scout knife.

Mrs. Falahee had evidently assumed the winners would be preponderantly feminine, and she’d bought two jump ropes and a small box of Russell Stover chocolates. When it came time to face my parents though, with this poem which had taken Second Prize, stage fright struck and I started to cry. Mom said they hadn’t meant to upset me, they’d just wondered about a poem entitled Beer. I think the teacher had told her that much.

I said maybe I’d recite the poem for them tomorrow and they said that would be fine. The subject never came up again and it’s probably just as well. Though fanciful, the poem did reflect the sort of violent language to which both my parents were prone. "Cool-cock you, brain you, Slap you silly, Boot your butt around the block, nail your ears to the wall, break your neck, Kick your teeth down your throat...." I’d not like to see myself reflected in such a mirror.

Grandma and Grandpa Plassman showed up next day and I only got one of my prize chocolates. Dad was at work, but I had to share with my hoggy sister, Mom, Grandma and Grandpa. Grandpa’s candy, of course, had a houtsey-poutsey in it.

I did advance to Grade 6, largely due to a concerted effort on my part to turn in assignments and coordinate with the rest of the class during the last few weeks of the year. Still this wasn’t enough to restore confidence in the Fletcher Elementary program for the blind and I was still destined for Vancouver in the fall.

Largely due to snow days missed, school didn’t end until June 18. In Seattle where weather seldom caused school closures, we were usually out and away by the 7^th or 8^th. I thought it was absolute sacrilege to have to attend school on my birthday, which is on the 15^th. Dad came rushing into class about Two in the afternoon on that day grabbed me, saying we had to hurry home. This was the first time I’d seen Dad in school I think. Mom always did that sort of thing.

I had no idea why I’d been yanked out of class. Was something wrong with Mom or Chris? Had they just found out about something dreadful I’d done, like calling up the lady with the soft voice at 663-9768 and using my best English accent to make a bloody nuisance of myself? Guilt was a pretty constant thing in my life. Dad wasn’t volunteering.

A few days previous, Gemini 4 had splashed down, after four days in orbit and the first space walk accomplished by an American astronaut. This had been especially fascinating for me since my recent ideas about beam-assisted space flight was basically an extended extra-vehicular activity. I’d brought my transistor to school and checked on the flight any time I could get out of class. Even Mr. Wheeler, our principal had come by and asked me "How are the astronauts doing?"

"How’d you like to meet those astronauts?" Mom asked me as I walked in the door.

"You bet I would!" I said, having no idea what she meant by the question. On their return to earth, the astronauts, McDivitt and White, had embarked upon a welcome home tour around the country. One of them had gone to the University of Michigan, so our town had been placed on their itinerary.

Hearing they were scheduled to be in Ann Arbor on my birthday had set Mom thinking. She’d been stumped for something to give me for my gift and she knew this would answer admirably if it could be arranged. Mom had called the university and gotten ahold of some professor in Space Science or something and had explained that I’d followed the Mercury and Gemini programs very closely and this would be a dream come true for me. I’m sure my blindness was mentioned as well.

I can’t recall all of the links, but an official invitation was sent to our house by special courier, requesting the presence of Mr. David Plassman and one guest, at the Barton Hills Country Club in Ann Arbor. Dad took my suit to the cleaners to give it the famous one-hour clean and press for which our franchise was named, then ran to Ypsie to collect me.

Mom and I arrived at the Country Club in plenty of time to see case upon case of champagne being opened. Mom took a glass, which she surreptitiously shared with me. I thought champagne was wonderful stuff, having sipped it once or twice before.

Time passed and eventually we learned the astronauts’ flight had been delayed. They might not arrive before it would be time to start on the next leg of their journey. Finally White and McDivitt did show up, but time was so short and the guest list so long, that they were put in separate rooms so as to give a maximum number of people the chance to greet at least one of them.

Mom steered us to Jim McDivitt’s reception line. She’d watched some of the post-flight interviews and thought he seemed the more personable of the two. At last we reached Col. McDivitt. I shook his hand and said "Congratulations, Colonel," and he said

"Thanks a lot." Then I shook hands with his wife and his aid.

"Well" said Mom as we left the room on our way out to the way; "at least we got to meet one of them." I felt that even one astronaut was a very valid birthday gift and was content to go home. Our course took us past the head of Col. White’s line though and a man who was standing in line with his wife, just about to shake hands, stepped aside and said

"Bring the boy in here."

Ed White must have liked something about me because he literally squatted down on his heels and started a lengthy conversation with me. What grade was I in? What classes did I like? What were my interests? I told him I wanted to work on the space program someday. He asked me what part of the space program interested me and I told him I wanted to work on the physics and chemistry of rockets. He said, "This kid can do it!"

Our conversation grew so protracted that finally a large arm grabbed me around the shoulders and a hearty voice said "Come over here and talk to me, young man."

"Who are you?" I asked, a little stunned.

"I’m General White," he said. "That kid over there is my son!" So I talked with General White for a while and shook hands with both of the Mrs. Whites and with Ed’s aid. As we were leaving at last, Col. White’s aid said to Mom "Please write down your address and I’ll see to it that David gets some of the microfilm Colonel White shot on his space walk."

We thought this would be merely a keepsake and for a couple of months, nothing arrived. When it did thought, I was shocked once again. One day in August, a package with an envelope arrived from Houston Texas. The envelope contained a note from Ed White, expressing gladness that we’d met and wishing me well in my future endeavors. The package contained a seven-inch sound tape reel with the entire radio recording of Col. White’s historic space walk. I was several times brought to a state of near fury by people who said my tape was stupid because it was too hard to understand, being full of static, but that was the sort of condition astronauts and ground crews must deal with all of the time! Many times in the years to come, I took comfort when someone challenged my ambition to be a scientist because Colonel Ed White, the astronaut had said I could do it.

A year and a half later I was of course, saddened in a very personal way when I heard the terrible news Of Col. White’s death. He along with Gus Grisholm and Edward Chaffey perished in the catastrophically tragic trainer in the Command Module Mock-up, an event that would call for redesign of the Apollo life support system and would delay the program for two years.

Another event, which involved my birthday and Chris’s, was of a different character entirely. It had to do with a small gift of money. I think the two of us received sixteen dollars, which we were told had come from Ruth Johnson. Chris and I each took our allotted eight dollars and put them in our pottery piggybanks. A day or two later, when Mom and I were alone in the house, she said "I’m going to tell you something and I’m going to beat you senseless if you pull a stunt like this again!" I was of course mystified as to what I’d done (Now?!?) Mom proceeded to tell me that the money hadn’t come from Ruth. It had been sent by Lucy Zitcus, Chris’s natural mother.

Mom had decided that our move to Michigan would finalize our break with Lucy. Somehow though, Lucy had gotten ahold of our address and had compromised Mom’s decision by sending a birthday gift. Ruth had sent us each two dollars, my share of which Mom then handed me.

I was still no wiser as to what my fault might have been in all this, and said as much. "You told your sister who Lucy is" Mom stated, "when you’d been forbidden to do so." I replied that I’d done no such thing. I’d promised at age Five, (Chapter 3,) not to tell Chris and I’d kept my promise.

Mom said Bertha Magnus had told her I’d broken my promise and had told Chris who her mother was. Bertha has said that one night, (heaven knew when exactly, the whole thing was painted against a timescape of the deranged!) Jim had trouble going to sleep and Bertha had asked him what was wrong. According to her, Jim had said he was feeling terribly sorry for Chris because I’d told her that Lucy was her mother and she was afraid to say anything since she assumed she’d be punished if she opened her mouth.

The story was such an enormity that it was difficult to know even where to begin. For one thing, I don’t think Jim and I ever discussed Chris’s background. It wasn’t really something that was all that big of a deal to me and I don’t think Jim was particularly interested in it either. It’s my guess that the sleepless night and the conversation never took place. I think I convinced Mom of my innocence, but was still astonished at the vehemence with which I’d been threatened.

I think it was this event that made Mom start to realize the magnitude of the vicious tale telling Bertha was capable of. Bertha had in the past attributed things Mom had supposedly said about Ruth and visa versa, carrying the stories to the person implicated and causing considerable anger between the two women with never a shot fired by the principals involved. Ruth and Mom had managed to defuse their potential quarrel by comparing notes concerning the things Bertha had attributed to each of them. Why Bertha would pick on the sensitive issue of Chris’s origin as a focus for her web spinning though is unclear. Perhaps it was a misguided way of giving voice to her own dissatisfaction with how our family had handled the matter.

This sequence of events served as a forewarning of other episodes which would occur in our relationship with Bertha and a foreshadowing of developing behaviors of Mom’s as well. Mom and Bertha had at this time, been good friends for 24 years and they had much in common. Some of it was good, some not so good.

By summer our business was operating well enough that we could do a fair amount of weekend travelling. Marion and Rose, our counter clerks could run things for a day or two and let Dad get out of the plant from time to time. We’d gone in the spring to the Tulip Festival in Holland Michigan and with summer we visited Cedar Point in Ohio, known as the Disneyland of the East. We rode on train, stage coach and riverboat, past animated mechanized scenery of hostile Indians, bandits, river pirates; even a skeleton in an outhouse who slammed the door as soon as the train came in view.

Back in the neighborhood, we had once more a set of swings in our yard and I was meeting some more new kids, several of them Chris’s friends or their siblings. Christopher Elliot, (about a year older than Chris,) and his rather large family, were the only Quakers I’d ever met. Notable among them was Holly, who was actually a little younger than me. Mom hired Holly to baby sit Chris and I, not knowing I suppose, that I had a crush on her and that I was actually a few months older than our babysitter. "Well, she’s bigger than you," was the best comeback Mom could muster when I revealed her oversight.

Along with the supply of Current Science Magazines I’d received from Mrs. Hessler’s former student, I’d also gotten several volumes of Boys Life. I found in their pages one of the most engaging Christmas stories I’d ever read, a history of the Stanley Brothers of Stanley Steamer fame, and much more. There was even a science fiction story Space Tenderfoot, about a boy named Eddie, aboard a generation ship, or sub-light velocity starship which was nearing a planetary system after several generations in transit. This was another new concept for me and I wish I knew the author. The story focussed on learning to handle oneself in gravity shoes after spending most of ones life in weightlessness. "When we make planet fall, anyone who can’t handle himself in gravity will be interned as a moocher!"

Mrs. Hessler had also checked out for me The PT109, John F. Kennedy in World War II. by James Sullivan, I believe. This book was interesting, informative and exciting and kindled an interest in Patrol Torpedo boats during WW#2 and thereafter. It also made me remember poignantly President Kennedy’s untimely death.

Toward the end of July, Mom, Chris and I flew to Seattle to spend a few weeks with Lois and the family. I was excited by the prospect of seeing dear friends again, talking to school chums on the phone. I talked to Chris Gray, Marty Lanser and Shannon Hurd during our visit. Shannon told me that she and Anne Grant were even better friends than they’d been before. I hadn’t realized it was possible to be better friends than the two of them had been. I’d become rather weirded out by my brother-in-law, Bruce in a conversation we had one evening. I’d read an article about Jupiter in Current Science, which said among other things, that scientists thought astronauts would never land on that huge planet. Bruce rehearsed the same arguments set forth in the article, the heavy Jovian gravity, the extreme atmospheric pressure and corrosive atmospheric mix. I countered that I thought that future scientific capability, (should have said engineering) would be such that if the Day Of Judgement didn’t come first, we’d visit every planet.

"Bruce said "I’m sorry, but I don’t believe in the Day of Judgement." I was aghast, though I tried not to show it. I guess I’d naively assumed that everyone in the Western World believed in the Bible, even if they didn’t always practice its teachings. Didn’t Jesus tell his disciples exactly what to write in the Bible? That’s what Mom had told me when at age Five I asked who’d written it.

Suddenly, my brother-in-law was seeming rather the oddball.

The only comparison I can find for this revelation at the time, was a conversation I’d overheard between Mom and Aunt Carol, the winter previous. Aunt Carol was talking about a man she’d seen on the Johnny Carson Show, who was wearing a skirt and who had said that other men should wear skirts too, because they were more comfortable than pants. I kept going over that conversation in my mind, asking myself Did I really hear Aunt Carol say that? So it was with the words Bruce had uttered concerning his disbelief. He could believe in the sun going out someday, but not in the words of the Bible. I for my part, wasn’t very good yet at thinking outside of boxes. I’d need a lot of wising up in the next few years, belief or not, new fashion or old.

We visited the Johnsons of course and Ron was fascinated by my meeting with the astronauts. We went camping with the Alans, Fred said he was a Mormon with two women. Randy and I had a great deal on fun shooting off paper rocket planes with caps or matchheads in their tails.

We also went to the Seattle Center, site of the ’62 World Fair. Chris and I rode the Wild Mouse, a very fast little rollercoaster. I bought Hal Buetler a huge pencil with a picture of the Space Needle on it.

We’d planned to stay till school started, so Mom could take me down to Vancouver before she returned to Michigan. We’d made arrangements for me to reenroll at their State School, with Lois acting as my legal guardian while I was in Washington. This would make for a stay with the Browns of about five-and-a-half weeks. As I’d counted down each day remaining between me and going home while at Vancouver, now I cherished each day, which remained in our visit to Seattle. Just about from the beginning though, Chris and Deb, our eldest niece, started fighting and after about two weeks Lois and Mom’s nerves were both raw and Mom said we’d leave in a few more days.

Of course, the highlight of the trip was our visit to the Magnuses, at least for me! Jim and I went off to his room and had a fairly long talk, but we didn’t seem to connect as before. He told me about his girlfriend, Helen, and said that I probably wouldn’t believe it now, but I’d be interested in girls someday too. I knew that was likely true and said so. Then he showed me a switchblade he’d recently acquired, which was a shared confidence like in the old days. I kept saying "We need to set a date to spend the night together" which I assumed he’d understand as code for running away to be pirates and help Mrs. Kennedy. Jim didn’t take any of the hints. I’d been clinging to the forlorn hope that our adventure would keep me from going back to Vancouver, which I never really wanted to do, but Jim was obviously more interested in girls now than in swords and swashbuckling.

Back at Lois’s house Mom said to the other adults that Jim had come out of his room a couple of times and looked sulkily at his mother and Mom had figured he was "being corralled" Chris said she didn’t understand what that word meant and Mom said "I used the word because I didn’t intend for you kids to understand what I was saying." Well, I had no difficulty understanding.

I now expected to spend the next school year with John Zimmerman, as well as Stan and Gary Campbell and expected that together, we’d make a grand scientific team. I started writing dispatches, like in the PT#109, informing everyone about my eminent arrival and that they must be ready for Space Operations and such things. There wasn’t much point, because I had no way of sending the dispatches, but I had fun writing them.

There’d be one more bit of excitement before school’s onset. For several months now, I’d been planning to build, then building, then planning to launch a vinegar and baking soda-powered rocket. My parents had Okayed the project, which was supposed to have been the major summer effort of the Science Club. The rocket was originally conceived as an ambitious thing of metal or at least plastic. My idea was to send up an orange . I knew nurses used for practicing injections, since the skin and flesh of an orange simulated the feel of jabbing a needle through human tissue. I thought that if an orange could be sent up in a rocket and brought back unbruised, this would be a fair indication that a larger version could carry an animal or human being.

Hal had gotten a piece of parachute material to help soft-land the rocket. One of the neighbor women counseled me to put a note in the nose cone in case the rocket was blown of course or overflew its intended range. Mom suggested putting a whistle on it so people it might be preparing to land on could get out of the way.

I’d originally planned a fairly sophisticated device of twenty pounds or so, launched publicly and perhaps covered with advertisements from local businesses. I’d heard about two boys who’d build a noncombustive chemical rocket about five years before. It worked like an old-fashion fire extinguisher, which when turned upside down, allowed chemicals to mix and started spraying the reacting chemical solution through a hose nozzle. I thought I’d build something like this, using the reaction of vinegar and baking soda as propellant. The energetic foaming of this mixture was the only nonflammable means of propelling a rocket I knew about, except compressed air driven water rockets, which appeared even more difficult to build.

I was woefully ignorant of fabrication techniques and had few materials with which to work, so I defaulted to what I had and what I knew—cardboard. Dad brought me a heavy cardboard roll tube from work. It had originally held plastic bags. I put cardboard top and bottom on this. The bottom had a round hole in it, by way of nozzle. I lined the rocket with a plastic bag to keep liquid fuel from leaking out prematurely. On top there was a cardboard nose cone held on with tape.

I think I’d have done reasonably well had I procured sufficient propellant to actually fill the tank. I purchased for $.41, a half-gallon of vinegar and a box of baking soda.

I think that most experiments of this kind tend to fail for want of adequate mixing to allow pressure to build sufficiently before the nozzle is opened and thrusting commences.

The time of liftoff was delayed to literally the last minute. After breakfast on the day I was to leave for Washington, Mom said, "Get that rocket." We set to work preparing to launch it. In my nosecone I’d placed a note, written in Braille, giving my Name, Address and rank, Captain. We made a last-minute design change, I.E. cutting the nozzle hole bigger to more easily facilitate the fuelling process, which was to say the least, primitive.

First we poured in the baking soda. Then the idea was to pour in the vinegar as quickly as possible before turning the rocket rightside up for takeoff. It didn’t work very well. We got lots of foam but no motion. Even when I threw the rocket into the air, it tumbled back to ground without accomplishing flight.

I decided for future reference, I wanted a rocket lighter in proportion to the fuel it held, and a more efficient way of mixing the fuel ingredients. I suspect a dry mixture of soda and citric acid, held in a cup, a water balloon and a means of puncturing the balloon, all housed in the rocket casing was basically what I wanted. I did something like this for New Years Day 2001, but it would be a while before I launched any more rockets after this first ignominious try.

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