Swords, Sails and Space Warps 9.
After John Glenn got everyone’s attention in 1962, there followed three more one-man orbital flights of the Mercury Project; those of Scott Carpenter, Walter Shirah and Gordon Cooper. The final flight lasted twenty-two orbits, nearly a day and a half of flight time and covered about 450,000 miles. Some of us prospective astronauts began to grumble that this was pretty near the distance to the moon and back. If the government would give up its silly preoccupation with circling the globe; we could land the next astronaut on the moon. We imagined that fuel was being constantly expended to hold Astronaut Cooper aloft, fuel, which could push him into deep space if only Mission Control would allow.
Of course this was nonsense. Orbit is achieved by imparting to a spacecraft sufficient velocity in the horizontal direction, as observed by a person stationed just below the craft, to counter gravity’s tendency to bend it’s flight path downward. At orbital speed the satellite or space vehicle is travelling just fast enough to fall toward earth only the degree to which the earth is falling out from under it. There are other more technical ways of describing orbits, but this is a fairly good way to think about the phenomenon. Of course, a fairly precise velocity is required to keep the craft continuously falling around the earth, never landing, never flying off into space. Near earth, this velocity is about 18,000 miles per hour or Five miles per second. Once you’ve achieved orbital velocity, an altitude above the earth’s surface of 150 miles or so, you can stay up for a very long time. Not indefinitely, for even at several hundred miles above the earth there is still some residual atmospheric drag, however tiny. Reentry is accomplished by diminishing the craft’s speed just enough to allow it to graze the upper atmosphere and air friction does the rest.
Its fun watching episodes of Star Trek the original series, and hearing over and over Scottie crying in alarm,
"Captain, We’rre Loosin’ Powerr. We’ll starrt t’burrn in forrty-five minutes, Mebbe less!" The writer on Star Trek, the only serious space SF series on TV, then still several years in the future, obviously didn’t understand orbits. I think we could be forgiven our own celestial naivete. I’ve noted over and over through the years that some of the most creative, not always the most workable ideas stem from misunderstanding of selected information. My perception that NASA with it’s endless circling of the globe, was being unreasonably pedestrian, started me thinking that somebody else should build a rocket ship and gently nudge the Space Administration into a more sanguine approach to extra-planetary exploration.
John Zimmerman and I talked it over and it was decided I’d build the rocket, but could count on John for technical support. Neither of us had a very complete understanding of what fuel was. We knew though, that gasoline was a fuel and so was alcohol. Alcohol was anything from rubbing alcohol to beer. Perhaps a mix of Hams or Rainer with gas from our station wagon would work. (Don’t worry. We never got that far.)
Bruce, who did cost estimating for Minuteman and other aerospace projects, told me that a simple rocket engine could be gunpowder in a cylinder. Well, I knew the roll caps I enjoyed so much had gunpowder in them and I also knew that gunpowder was made of sulfur, saltpeter and charcoal. Perhaps one should build the rocket first then worry about the engine and fuel. I’d no doubt that a few hours with a chemistry set would yield several Nobel-level discoveries and a powerful new rocket fuel would most certainly be among them.
During the later part of 3rd Grade I made several attempts at building a spaceship of wood, because that’s what I had. John and I thought that plastering the spacecraft with clay would keep it from burning up in space, because who’d ever heard of dirt or mud burning? Here we were on the right track. Ceramics turned out to be the key to both high performance rocket nozzles and practical reentry vehicles.
I started over so many times not because I lacked confidence in my designs, but Dad, being astronautically ungifted, kept throwing successive models on the junk pile, or out behind the patio house where slugs lurked and often crawled across my cockpit floor. My vehicles evolved from a sort of space going hotrod go cart design, to a triangular cabin made of scrap plywood, to a flying platform.
Throughout, I had certain reservations about rocket building. Though I’d questioned my sources closely, I could not discover any Scottish persons who had built early flying machines or modern space rockets, at least not independently and not in Scotland. As a Scotsman myself, even if only by marriage, (my sister’s) it seemed disloyal and inappropriate to do so myself, so the plan I devised went like this.
One needn’t go to the moon nor do anything really spectacular. A trip to the top of the atmosphere would demonstrate the principle. John and I would make a short flight to prove the rocket worked, then we’d sell it to the government or to Boeing, for precisely $20,000. $10,000 was a lot of money. Dad said so. A hundred wasn’t really very much. A thousand wasn’t that much either. A new car cost more. With Ten Grand you could buy a house and still have change. So, that would be A Lot Of Money for my parents, A Lot Of Money for John and my integrity as a Scotsman would be uncompromised since my space voyaging would be modest.
The launch was planned to crown my ninth birthday party, only I didn’t have a birthday party that year. Not really. My birthday was celebrated on the 16th along with Chris’s and Fathers day for Dad and Bruce. No individual guests. Anticlimactic.
When my head wasn’t in space, it was jumping back and forth across the Atlantic and through about four centuries. Sometime that summer I had seen a movie called When Knighthood Was In Flower, about which I remembered very little, except that Sir Walter Raleigh was in it. There’d also been a movie about Sir Francis Drake. Both men seemed fascinating. I wanted to know more about what it was like to be a knight when armor was still worn, but guns were also common. That would be roughly, the Fourteenth through the early Seventeenth centuries. On my next meeting with Mrs. Finceth, the librarian for the blind, who visited our school each Fall, I asked her to please send me some books on knighthood during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She re sent me Robin Hood, the talking book version, and a book called Caxton’s Challenge. Robin Hood wasn’t about knighthood particularly and could be considered Twelfth or Thirteenth Century, though author Park Godwin holds out for the Eleventh. Caxton’s Challenge wasn’t about knighthood either, but it was concerned with the Fifteenth Century in England, 1482 to be exact.
Young Benedict is the son of a London scrivener. Bendy’s father, about to retire, fears the profession he has followed all his life is about to become extinct. A man named William Caxton is operating a new sort of machine called a printing press, which can produce entire book pages with the sweep of a lever. Bendy is fascinated by this process and is thrilled when his father apprentices him to Mr. Caxton.
Most of the story has to do with the quest of Bendy and his friends to obtain the manuscript of a book about King Arthur, written by sir Thomas Mallory while in prison after the War of the Roses. The friends are captured by ruffians, escape and win free to triumphantly present the parchment scroll for typesetting and mass publication.
This book was full of tantalizing references to the English civil war, The War of the Roses fought in the 1460s. Factions in the conflict were the House of York, The White Rose, which was at power at the time of the story, and the house of Lancaster, the Red Rose, which would soon turn the tables, providing England with Henrys VII and VIII, as well as Elizabeth Tudor. The followers of the Red Rose, being rebels and on the wrong side of the law, seemed much more romantic than the White. The story got me very interested in printing which eventually helped me decide to study Journalism in High School and minor in communications in College. The plot also whetted my appetite for more piratical adventure and outlawry.
A few weeks after learning about Caxton, I devoured a book called Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransom, in which six Children in the summer of 1929 live out dramatic island adventures on an English lake. The four Walker children, crew of the sailboat Swallow and the two Blackett sisters, The Amazons, vie with each other for supremacy and eventually mount a combined pirate attack on an author, resident of a nearby houseboat, who is also the Blackett’s Uncle Jim.
This story is full of details about sailing and sea lore. I dreamed of building a sailing vessel with my friend Stan. Ronny Johnson had built a sailboat hull in his family’s garage, though he intended it only for rowing. I’d followed the phases of construction avidly and Ron had taken me out in the boat once or twice before selling it.
Using the model in S. and AA. I drew up ship’s articles, giving myself as Captain, Stanley as First Mate and others of our acquaintance as bos’n gunner, Able Seamen, Ship’s Boy and so forth. We declared ourselves pirates and determined to lead a life of crime, preying on enemies of the U.S. if possible but doing dastardly deeds whenever expedient.
This was not quite as cute and laughable, as it might seem. We never caused very much damage but it wasn’t as if intention wasn’t there. In our group only Pandy Pierce was smaller than me. I was towheaded, very thin and delicate looking. I was generally liked by teachers and thought to be a Nice Boy. This was usually said in a manner that suggested that I wasn’t good because I chose to be, but because I’d be incapable of doing anything else. A lot of this feeling came from home, where Mom liked to say that my little sister was stronger than me and seemed to enjoy pointing any lapse of mine in strength or toughness. I think I just got tired of being the Good Boy at school and the ineffectual one at home. Billy the Kid might have felt somewhat the same way I did and though I didn’t kill my first man at the age of ten years, I did set out at Nine to show just how mean and how tough I could be.
I started fighting even more. Stan was big and tough and didn’t mind taking orders if there was plenty of horseplay afoot. Sometimes Chris was on our side. Sometimes Marty. Sometimes both. We usually had one or more of the sighted kids with us and we also duked it out with sighted kids, generally giving about as good as we got.
We blind kids learned to have the top three or so inches of our ski jackets down so to identify one another. When you caught a possible adversary, grab him by the throat to see if he has a V and is a gang member. If he doesn’t, continue throttling. Generally though things weren’t really all that serious. If we were fighting other blind kids, we’d sometimes switch coats so our classmates, used to recognizing us by the feel of our jackets, would accuse the wrong person of real enough atrocities and if the matter came before the teacher we could quite truthfully say "I didn’t do That."
We called ourselves The Band, Stan and me, Darnel from my cab, whomever else was with us. We were bandits and buccaneers, by definition people who robbed and stole. It was in all the books! Stan and I started stealing things out of desks, sometimes just pencils and pens, sometimes money. It was never very much, 30-cents maximum, that was what a lunch cost. But opportunity didn’t put more in our way.
Stan was questioned once over whether he’d taken 25-cents out of a desk he was using in a Contact Class. He had, but said he hadn’t and nobody pushed it. Nobody ever asked Me because I was too good.
I am not a bit proud of what I did. It was sneaky and unkind and uncalled for. I never kept the money or other things. I contributed it to the general treasury of our band and I believe it ended up in Stanley’s bank account. It was supposed to go for guns and ammunition someday but I believe most of it helped replace lost Scout equipment for Stan.
I started wising off in class more often and singing the wrong words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. I spent time in the hall, a new experience for me. Once Miss Larson swatted me across the butt for talking when she was. I felt a great sense of accomplishment for I was no longer, like Becky Thatcher, one of those sissy kids who never got spanked in school. I was like Tom Sawyer.
I was sent to the Principals’ office twice, both times for fighting. One was a play scuffle with John, which neither of us took seriously. The other was a trip largely instigated by me and for good reason.
Marty and some sighted kids picked a quarrel with Stan and me on our way back from lunch. Stan and I were giving a good enough accounting of ourselves when one of the sighted kids started throwing rocks. (pieces of concrete actually.) One chunk hit me in the shoulder, one on the collarbone, one in the forehead. That last one made me a bit dizzy and I figured this was something with which we needed some help. I made my way up to the classroom as fast as I could. Miss Larson was there and after I’d reported the situation she told me to wait there for her, while she went out and gathered up Marty, Stan and one of the sighted kids named Matt. Then she went over to the office and came back with the news that we were to go see Mr. Ryan.
Marty cried through the whole process. Matt lied through his teeth. Stan and I told substantially the truth though I’m sure we slanted it in our direction when we could. Mr. Ryan heard us all out twice then told us to go back to our classrooms and not to fight with each other anymore. Well that broke things up for the day, but we were back at it soon enough though. I never heard of any Big Rocks being thrown after that.
By now I was seeing myself as rather a school bad ass. I even wrote a threat letter to Miss Larson, (in Braille) because she’d taken several dangerous items, including a screwdriver, a lighter and a butter knife from Stan. Our misdeeds were fairly minor compared with today’s headlines I suppose but for a 50-pound towhead with girlish hands, I thought I was doing okay.
Another fascinating set of plots and story lines were entering my consciousness and those of the other blind students about this time. Ruth Johnson saw in the paper that on KVI Radio in Seattle, old mystery dramas of the ‘40s and ‘50s were being revisited. I tuned in at 7:00 P.M. on a Monday for the Green Hornet and was hooked. Same time next evening was The Shadow which was even better. On Wednesday I made the acquaintance of Sherlock Holmes. Thursdays, Famous Jury Trials ran, rather like the courtroom phase on Perry Mason, but with narration. Fridays there was a sort of private eye program called Dangerous Assignment. After the supposed death of Mr. Holmes, Wednesdays offered a horror-drama series entitled The Sealed Book. That series was full of murders, robots with human brains and deadly ghost hoaxes.
At nine years of age, the two story gambits which intrigued me the most were the Green Hornet’s gas gun, which knocked out an adversary for the police to find without doing any lasting damage, and The Shadow’s hypnotic power of clouding people’s minds, rendering himself invisible. I hadn’t thought much about non-lethal weapons previously and the idea of putting a person suddenly to sleep, held interesting possibilities. So did the prospect of clouding someone’s mind to make one self seem invisible rather than becoming invisible in fact. If we could use mind power to keep people from seeing us, what else might the mind be able to do?
Around this time I’d been learning some tantalizing things about scientific theory. A man Bruce knew from Boeing told me if you could go faster than the speed of light, you could travel backward in time. He didn’t tell me that travelling at the speed of light was theoretically impossible so I thought perhaps a very fast race car perhaps operating on a track, could get me back to the sixteen hundreds. As I became more and more interested in space flight I wondered if one could build a time machine whether it could be used to displace oneself through distance, possibly even to another planet. Travelling in space always resulted in one going ahead in time after all, so perhaps quick jumps forward or backward in time, could carry travelers to the stars.
Reading Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time made me even more interested in time and space and since interstellar teleportation in this book occurred without any mention of mechanical or electrical contrivance, there might be some sort of psycho motive power at work which was exorcised by the three lady practitioners of the story.
Meg Murray, the main viewpoint character in the story had told the school principal that her father was a physicist. It turned out that Dr. Murray also knew how to teleport or Tesser. Perhaps becoming whatever a physicist was could get one closer to the secrets of time travel, teleportation and possible mind powers? From this time onward, I maintained a parallel interest in Physics, to the extent I understood the definition of that science and in the powers of the mind. I still work with human and social issues as well as with computer models, energy problems and speculative astronautics.
When I started considering that I might become a scientist as Miss Gourder had predicted, I was told that I’d need a lot of Math. I could understand readily enough how knowledge of chemical compounds, metals, astronomy and streamlining could be helpful in designing a rocket but I didn’t see how much Math was involved. Science in Fourth Grade and for about five years thereafter, was largely a cataloguing of facts. Some of them were quantitative, like the mean distance to the moon or the speed of light but we never did even simple calculations of force, composition or velocity.
One would not expect a Fourth of Fifth-grader to do orbital calculations for example but some simple arithmetic comparing the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline with the amount of energy needed to heat a bathtub full of water or to run a hundred-watt light for a month could give kids a sense of resource use and what energy in it’s various forms is all about.
The other major criticism I have of early science education is that science and technology are lumped together. Science is the means by which we understand the universe. Technology is how we cope with the universe, from staying warm, sheltered and fed, to surgery, supercomputing and space flight. A lot of bright kids grew up thinking they wanted to be scientists when they probably wanted to be engineers. Nonspecialists use the term Rocket Scientist, but scientists generally don’t build rockets. Engineers do.
At the outset of Fourth Grade I began taking Math assignments home. For some reason, Miss Larson didn’t send math assignments with Third-graders. I couldn’t recall having problems with my arithmetic in Third Grade. At home I seemed to be doing Everything wrong.
Mom was good at English, pretty good helping with Spelling, Fair helping with reading. At Math, she tended to become acrimonious. I made a rather startling discovery, a happy one. Where Math was concerned, Dad was much more patient and thorough. I’d always assumed Dad was less sensitive and easygoing than Mom. That really wasn't so I decided. By the end of the year I needed less help than at the beginning, in Math and just about everything else. I had my own Brailler and Cubearithm board by now and sometimes I made up hard problems to do, just for fun.
At school I was working my way through Borrowing, Carrying, two and three-place Multiplication, some elementary fractions, problems with money; measurement; time of day. I didn’t enjoy much of this but got through it. Where I really stuck was Long Division. I just didn’t understand why one did multiplication problems in the middle of trying to divide. I could do the rote steps with the teacher’s hands on my shoulders so to speak, but couldn’t remember the sequence of events long enough to attempt a new problem. Eventually Miss Larson simply gave up. Fortunately I could do fairly hard division problems in my head and continued to do so until sixth Grade and beyond. I just didn’t know how to show my work. In Third Grade, we began English Class, as distinguished from Spelling and Reading. Marty liked English. I hated it. I’m not sure what it was about the subject that first irked me so. Dad hadn’t liked English when he was a kid, nor had most of the men I’d asked. Another boy-girl thing maybe. Bruce had liked English but there was no accounting for taste. Bruce didn’t even like black licorice. It’s interesting to note that after I finished Ninth Grade, I got an A in every English class I took, save for one B, Spring quarter my Sophomore year in College. I’d just entered the dorms and was having way too much fun for my own good.
One exercise in Fourth Grade English I found particularly irritating, or at least I acted as if I was likely to die of it. Marty, Bonny Baker, who’d been demoted back to Fourth Grade and myself were required to read a play, each of us taking a part. It was the Greek-Roman myth about Ceres and Persephone, Pluto and why it’s cold half the year, warm the other half. There were only three parts in the play and two were female. Miss Larson Made Marty and I take the female parts while Bonny was Pluto. Marty threw a bigger tantrum about that than Me! Actually, short of scrapping the assignment, Miss Larson could hardly have done things differently.
The women’s parts were full of endearments like Mother Dear and My darling Daughter. Marty and I sniggered at each other’s lines. "Look what You have to read!"
Bonny Baker being put back into Fourth Grade was a significant event in our school experience. Stanley McGovern and Mary Jane Kemp, (now Harlow after her mother’s remarriage,) were older than expected for the grades in which they were placed. Of course most of us had been threatened at one time or other with being kept back. John Zimmerman and Karen Fredericks, for different but understandable reasons had been held back after Second Grade. To have a Fifth-grader put back to Fourth in the middle of the year though, was Dramatic.
Bonny, as described in Chapter 6, was quiet and serious. A good student if I were any judge. She was popular with the other girls and John had a considerable crush on her. At some point, John started complaining to me that Bonny was keeping to herself more and more and didn’t want to play.
Bonny was throwing up frequently in class now. She was required to carry a sort of plastic satchel from place to place when she moved about the room. Miss Larson called this her Burp Bag. Bonny started exhibiting fairly obvious signs of frustration. She would jump up suddenly and spank herself. She started giving away her cubes, imagining I suppose that without her cubes the teacher could not make her do math. She sat doing nothing for long periods and was frequently sent to the nurse.
Miss Larson openly ridiculed Bonny, speaking to her in a highly sarcastic manner and treating her as if she were an infant. Other kids started picking on Bonny. At least the boys did. Miss Larson would leave us alone during rainy day recesses and sometimes for short periods after lunch hour. I remember Marty grabbing Bonny and whirling her around, making her fall once and cut her knee. I remember Chris and Stanley picking her chair up between them and dropping it. I’m sure other things happened. I don’t recall touching Bonny myself. If I had I’d certainly want to forget it, though these sorts of things I usually remember. I tended to have a better sense of self-preservation than did many of the other boys. I did however laugh and offer encouragement when Bonny was being tormented and for that I am profoundly ashamed.
Miss Larson treated Bonny as if she were stupid, recalcitrant, and stubborn; that she could do much better if only she tried. Then in the next breath, she acted as if Bonny had a fundamental lack of understanding. I guess I justified the treatment Bonny was receiving to myself at least in part, by assuming she was a person who misbehaved. I claimed not to like school but still I learned most of what was set before me and smugly assumed anyone who did otherwise was exhibiting a character flaw. Things tended to be treated that way at home a lot. That’s also the way teachers often acted and peer pressure against nonconforming students was widely used. I don’t know how the others justified their behavior if at all. It’s been many years since we discussed these things and did so minimally even then.
A couple of years later when I no longer lived in Seattle, Chris Gray told me Bonny had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. This accounted for her dullness and seeming resistance in school. Bonny had undergone surgery and the tumor removed. Chris waxed lyrical about how she’d gotten back her old personality and was now doing excellently in class. I think this recovery must have been quite short-lived. The tumor grew back and by the time I returned to school in Seattle, Bonny was no longer present. I think she underwent another surgery, perhaps several. I could never find anyone who could tell me definitely what had finally happened to Bonny, but it was generally supposed that she had died.
By Mid-year, Chris Gray had conceived a fairly serious case of puppy love for Shannon. Shannon had always been fully as tough as the boys and just as able to handle herself, but this year, whether under Anne’s influence, or just the fact she was growing up, Shannon had become much more authority-oriented and opinionated. While at school’s outset Chris had been up to the same hi jinx I was, by mid-winter, he’d pretty much allied himself with Shannon, and like her, tended to carry to the teacher tales of things Stan and I had said or done.
We still did a lot of fighting at recess. Now it was usually Stan, Marty and I, with me in nominal lead, on one side. Shannon and Chris on the other. Chris had an annoying tactic on sneaking up behind people and bending them over backward. Sometimes the fighting was more or less in play, sometimes more grudge-motivated. Shannon was tiring of this kind of fun. She tended to tell us off in the classroom then spend many of her recesses with the teacher.
As I hated English, Marty hated Arts and Crafts. I tended to like any activity, which involved our hands. Miss Larson taught weaving with a sheet of construction paper with a number of horizontal slots in it, running most of the width of the sheet. Through these slots, strips of paper could be worked vertically, over and under, to make a placemat. We worked a lot in ceramics. We starched strings and wrapped them wet around a balloon to make a sort of three-dimensional lattice. When the starched string hardened we’d let the air out of the balloons and make mobiles for hanging.
I loved to make Christmas paper chains of construction paper strips secured with paste, link by link, in multicolored succession. Shannon and I competed to see who could make more links in a given amount of time. We were probably the fastest in the class. Marty, clearly lagging behind, fumed angrily.
For Christmas that year, I got something called a Vacuform, a toy by Mattel, which let kids make toys. It consisted of a small square hotplate on one side and a platform on the other where one or more molds could be mounted. Under the platform was a small hand operated vacuum-pumped worked by a lever on the side of the machine. A frame was hinged at the center of the vacuform so it could be laid over the hot plate or the mold platform. The frame held a piece of plastic about the size of a playing card.
One chose the shapes one wanted and set them on the mold platform. Most of the plastic molds in the kit could be secured in an anchoring slot in the platform. One set the plastic, in its frame over the hot plate to soften. Probing gently with the eraser of a pencil, one could tell when the plastic was softened sufficiently, then the frame was flipped over the mold platform with one hand while the other hand vigorously pumped the vacuum-lever, sucking out air from under the plastic and causing it to form tightly over the mold or molds.
Molds might be car bodies, boat hulls or tops, jewelry boxes or lids, a set of beads, a brooch, kazoo-halves, airplane parts or items made in clay. There were even false noses, mustaches, eyebrows and beards. For all it’s potential though, I admit I never made nearly as many things with the vacuform as I’d intended. Vacuforming did give me my first exposure to manufacturing techniques and was an excellent learning tool, probably one of the most intelligent Santa Clausings I’d done and John Zimmerman first urged me to get one.
This same device could be used with another set, Creepy Crawlers, which was marketed a couple of year later, to make bugs, worms and snakes out of a rubbery compound. Still another kit, Incredible Edibles also made creepies, but from a gelatin candy substance. Of course toys like this turned out to be far too much fun and useful to be entrusted to young hands and all of them were off the market by the late Sixties.
If I disliked English and even the compositions required of me in that class, I did enjoy the process of writing. Off and on since First Grade, I’d attempted very short stories, sometimes original, sometimes attempts to collect old favorites, such as King Bruce and the Spider. Caxton’s Challenge had gotten me interested in the process of printing, but also the creation of historical books. I envisioned myself writing extensively referenced biographies of the kings of England and Scotland, histories of the Thirteen Colonies and of their Royal Governors.
My first foray in this direction was an attempt at a biography of Henry VIII. I gleaned bits and pieces about Good King Harry from several books and from friends who owned encyclopedias. I wrote each bit on a scrap of Braille paper. Full sheets being at a premium, we did much of our homework on scraps and so my growing book was likewise accommodated. My area of historical coverage spanned from the War of the Roses to the time of Elizabeth’s accession to the throne. Neither my sources nor my reporting was particularly thorough, but it was good practice and a lot of fun.
I spindled my paper scraps like a scroll, wrapping them in a handkerchief, one of those I’d received for my Sixth birthday, and tied the scroll with a string. I felt quite the proper scrivener Knight.
My knowledge of history was about to blossom. One day I received a book from the library entitled A Child’s History of the World. This was in seven records of the new 16-2/3 RPM format, 45 minutes to a side, about ten and a half-hours total reading time. This very readable book began with a description of how scientists thought the earth had formed, cooled, developed oceans and air. Life was shown emerging from the oceans and eventually the arrival of humankind was depicted. Prehistoric times were discussed in a lighthearted manner and how scientific guesswork could help create new theories of things happening millions of years ago. The reader was then taken through Egypt, Babylonia, ancient Greece and Rome. My first interest in Athenian Culture was sparked with the chapter of Greece.
Toward the end of the Roman period, the book changed focus, to the Teutonic Tribes, such as the Saxons, Franks, Vandals and Goths; which were then ravaging Britain, France, Spain and Italy. I became very interested in the Teutonic gods, such as Thor, Wotan, Theu and Freya. Against these fierce gods and their followers, Christians and their white-robed celestial hierarchy seemed mealy mouthed and uninspiring. For a while I pressed our Band to make a sacrifice to Thor, possibly some unwanted lunch materials. The plan didn’t spark much enthusiasm.
Soon the book moved of to a fairly compact discussion of Islam, how it developed and how it threatened the Christian world for nearly a thousand years. Moving back to the West, the development of monasteries, holy orders and the role of the Christian Church in Europe was discussed.
Next there were several chapters about knighthood, the peasantry, and the feudal system in general and on into the Crusades, including young Steven and his Children’s Crusades. From the Crusades, we were learning of King Richard of England, his brother John and the signing of the Magna Charta.
The travels of Marco Polo ushered in the next great wave of discovery, through Columbus to Magellan, Vasco Da Gama, Cortez and the other conqueror-villains of the Western Hemisphere. Then there were several chapters, which fed directly into several specific areas of interest I was having. One was about the inventions of the compass and of gunpowder. One was about the Tudor Kings, Henrys VII and VIII. Then there was a chapter called Queen Elizabeth. Then there was a chapter on Martin Luther and the Reformation.
I’ve mentioned before that my religious education and training had been rather scanty. I’d generally learned that a number of things were sins and I had been told that sinning sent you to hell. Probably my chief sin was saying, or more often thinking bad words. Stealing was also a sin unless you considered it taking war booty. Mom said there was a commandment against getting angry, which years later, I found there wasn’t. No one had ever explained to me about Christ’s forgiveness.
Anne Grant was a Catholic and I’d heard her describing the process of confession for Shannon, even the things she’d confessed. She said the priest was able to take her sins away. I guessed Lutherans just let them stack up, hoping that when they arrived at the gates of Heaven, the pile wouldn’t be so high as to top some arbitrary standard. (If you can’t go under this bar, carrying your load of sins, then to Hell with you!) I’d had dreams like that. Sometimes I made it. Sometimes I didn’t.
In the several books I had read by now, dealing with The Middle Ages, it was pretty clear that everyone was Catholic, except of course for the Infidel. I wondered if I wanted to become a knight, would it be necessary for me to first join the Catholic Church?
In a Child’s History of the World, the author discussed, from a fairly strong Protestant bias I’d admit, why Martin Luther had asked for correction of wrongs in the Catholic Church. The religious wars that followed were described in some detail as well as the persecution of Protestants, especially in Holland. Many years later I learned that Catholics were persecuted just as zealously in places where Protestants held power, notably in our own American Colonies.
Fair or unfair, I now had a sense of religious heritage and knew that to be a Lutheran knight was very appropriate, if I confined myself to the late 16th century and beyond.
The chapter on the Stewart Dynasty in England and Scotland let me know about the King James Bible as well as sirloin steak; (a cut of meat loved so much by King James I. that he knighted it.) The King James Translation was still in wide use at this time in my life and it’s the version I still stubbornly use when I read the Bible. Mine is in 20 Braille volumes.
This history ran up to the present, or as close as it could come, perhaps about 1960. The later two and a half centuries weren’t nearly as interesting to me as the middle chapters. I reread the portions on the Middle Ages and the age of New World Discovery, many times and in the next couple years I would read everything I could find on the conquest and colonization of the Americas.
I don’t recollect any more why we were fighting so much of the time at school. It may have been that there wasn’t very much else for us to do. The enmity between me and my side, Chris and his, had gone on for quite some time when Chris, perhaps with Shannon’s consent, called for a parley one day in the midst of our lunchtime battle. Chris said that he, as leader of his army, wished to challenge me as leader of mine, to single combat to be held at afternoon recess. The result of this combat would decide the war we were currently waging. This was canonical according to the history books. Edmond Ironsides of England and King Cannute of Denmark had decided a war in like fashion, saving thousands of lives. I could hardly do other than accept.
I was apprehensive of Chris’s questionable wrestling techniques and didn’t intend to open myself up to anything he might wish to employ in such a serious contest. In a whispered conference on the way to the Braille paper stack, I said I wanted the battle to be a contest of fists only. No laying ahold of, no airplane spinning. No bending over backward. Chris agreed.
At afternoon recess we assembled, Stan and Marty on one side, Shannon on the other, Chris and I in the middle. We set down the rules of combat. We knew that striking below the belt was generally held to be unfair and neither of us wanted bloody noses or split lips to explain to our mothers, so we added above the neck to the proscribed striking areas. Chris didn’t like being hit in the belly either and he had a rather fat one so bellies were also off limits. I think by the time we were done negotiating, we could hit one another in the chest, shoulders and arms.
We went at it, three short rounds, timed I can’t remember how. We drove each other back and forth across a space perhaps ten feet across, exchanging punches but not hitting too hard in case we missed and struck an off limits spot. It was virtually impossible for either of us to do any real damage under the rules we’d created and no clear way to score a victory.
When all three rounds had been fought to a draw therefore, I called "Sir Chris, Would you declare us to be equals?"
And he said "Sir David, I say equals!" The fight ended and with it the war. All of us even Shannon were friends for the rest of the year. I admit I can’t remember what we did with ourselves until schools end but there were always other irritants available on the playground and we needn’t provide all of our own conflict.
I’d recently been involved in a different sort of diplomacy, this one involving a teacher named Miss McLenden, who taught First grade and whom I’d known since starting school. Miss McLenden liked me a good deal and once in a while, invited me over to her class when I was still in Miss Gourder’s room, to participate in music rhythms and such things. She called me her little boyfriend and of course that made all of the guys go Yuck! Darnel Hamplet who was in my cab 3rd and 4th grade years would try to help me get in the car before Miss McLenden caught and hugged me after school. She was actually a very nice lady and I liked her too but things like that are embarrassing at ages Eight and Nine.
One day Miss McLenden and I happened to be talking on the playground and she asked me out of curiosity I suppose, what my daddy did for a living. I told her he worked for Safeway and was a truck driver. She said, "Oh, he must know Don Whitamore!"
I’d heard of Whitamore. I never even knew he had a first name. Dad seemed to get along with almost everybody but something about Whitamore always seemed to piss Dad off and I assume it was mutual. Dad had several times come close to blows with Don Whitamore.
I admitted apprehensively that yes, I was pretty sure Dad knew somebody named Mr. Whitamore. I’d ask to make sure. She said that if it was the same person I should ask my dad to tell him hi for Gracie McLenden. I did and Dad did and a greeting to Gracie came back from Don.
We went through several exchanges this way and fairly soon Gracie had gotten back in touch. One day Miss McLenden said, "Don Whitamore is really a nice man—isn’t he?" Her appended question might have reflected what had shown on my face. I said, "I guess."
"What do you mean you guess?" Miss McLenden said sharply. I explained that I’d never met the gentleman. "Well you go home and ask your dad to tell you how nice Don is," Gracie said.
That night I laid my problem before Dad. I certainly didn’t want to lie and I’d heard nothing from him that suggested that Don was anything other than a rat’s tail feathers. Now this teacher was demanding I say her boyfriend was wonderful. I’m still actually quite impressed by what Dad told me.
"Well actually Don’s a nice guy," Dad said. "He just needs somebody to mother him and his mother died a while ago." Dad went on to explain that from what he’d heard, Don and Gracie had been an item a lot of years before and Don’s mother had broken them up. He suggested that maybe this Gracie teacher could pick up where Don’s mom had left off and Dad said it was okay for me to go back to school and tell Miss McLenden that Don Whitamore was a nice person.
A short time later I received an invitation to Don and Gracie’s wedding reception, addressed to Master David Plassman and parents. We attended. It was on a Saturday afternoon and Mrs. Whitamore (now) greeted me at the door, drunk as a lord, clapping her hands and saying here was the person who had started it all! She presented me to her new husband, who shook my hand and called me a little cupid, saying my arrow had gone straight to the mark. Also at the gathering were Bill Young, Dad’s boss; Mr. Ryan my principal, with his wife, Miss Gourder, Miss Larson and Mrs. Swanson. Mom said this would be an event I would remember for a long time.
When I graduated high school in 1972, Mom sent an announcement to Gracie Whitamore. Don had since passed away but Mrs. Whitamore sent me a lovely box of chocolates as a graduation gift.
Sometime in late Winter of my Fourth Grade, Grades 4 and 5 had been moved from the older building where we’d been since we came to John Hay, to the newer building where the lunch room and school office were housed. We were closer to Contact Classes over there and closer to other students our own age. John Zimmerman, in 3rd Grade now but still with Miss Gourder, remained in the older, Primary building. Now John and I had different recesses and lunch periods and the fact that he was a grade behind was magnified a bit more than it had perhaps been before.
Off and on since 3rd Grade, John had tried to discredit me with the other kids by trying to make my ideas and activities seem silly. He felt competition from me and this was just a bid for more prestige. Typically he’d withdraw his support or friendship briefly because of some trivial reason, (pretty much like what I’d been doing with Marty,) but after a few days we’d be pals again. John and Chris weren’t all that close in Grade School and John couldn’t get the same level of conversation from Marty that he could from me. John always had an unkind sense of humor and greatly enjoyed the discomfort and even pain of others. He would snatch something I was playing with out of my hand and dance around in front of me taunting me as I angrily chased him all over the place trying to get it back. Eventually he’d return the item, often in a damaged state, or totally destroyed. Shannon was organizing a girl’s army and John was forever pestering her to let him into it because he knew it hurt me that he didn’t want to be in my band. We’d make plans to do things together, such as build a spaceship and John would from time to time withdraw from the project and even say he was building his own. These were of course silly childish squabbles but in 3rd and 4th grades, one tends to be childish. I think it was this bickering though that got me started thinking about just how a space capsule could be built. I’d envisioned what I wanted a finished product to look like but hadn’t really planned how to get there from step #1.
It seems I’ve done my best thinking while lying in bed right after waking. I believe this was another Saturday morning when I made my first from the ground up space cabin design. I wanted a smooth cone but wasn’t sure how to actually build one. As an approximation I visualized a number of tall, slender triangles joined together to make a facetted cone, rather like a pyramid but with more sides. The triangles would be made with wooden frames covered probably with flattened tin can metal, overlapped shingle fashion. The triangles would be fitted together, edge to edge with their top apexes touching and their side edges screwed or bolted together. A flat piece of metal could be bolted to the bottom of the cone to form the cabin floor. A door or hatch could be made in one of the triangle panels. I’d paint my spaceship with a combination of the various miracle glues that were currently being hyped on TV and the radio.
My information on propulsion was rudimentary but I thought one could produce thrust by leading high-octane airplane fuel through a hole in the bottom of the fuel tank and lighting it. Of course I was in no real danger of building such a thing but I occupied many happy hours thinking about doing so.
I did upstage John in another way sometime late in Fourth Grade, by meeting Buck Richie a country D. J. and well-known personality in the Seattle Area. My family was at a state park one Sunday, some miles from town, where Buck was M.C.ing at a concert sponsored by his station, KAYO 1150. Dad and I had been listening to a 30s era floor console radio given to Dad by Uncle Frank. I’d gotten to know Buck’s voice and when I found he was actually here in the park, I said I wanted to go meet him.
Mom asked why I’d want to do such a thing and I said I liked his show on the radio. At one time Buck had the reputation of being a notable lush, someone who’d accept a job to play music or announce at a dance, then would promptly get drunk and fall asleep where ever he might be. To be fair, he’d stopped drinking before the time of which I’m speaking, but a reputation like that is hard to change.
Dad took me up to the grand stand and said, "Buck, my boy here wants to meet you." Buck shook my hand warmly, asked me what grade I was in and if I liked his show. I showed him my Braille watch, which had a crystal that popped up so the Brailled dial could be felt. Buck was quite impressed and said maybe someday he could come visit me. "I went home that evening with the warm feeling of having met one more notable person to add alongside Roy Rogers, Dale Evans and Stan Borrison.
Next morning I was awakened by the phone ringing. Mom answered and it was John Zimmerman. "I was listening to Buck Richie this morning," John said, "He’s lost David’s address and phone number and he wants it back!"
Buck had written my information on the back of a matchbook and had accidentally given it away when someone needed a light. Several of our acquaintances heard him talking on the radio, saying he’d met a boy named Dave the previous day out at Flaming Geyser State Park and if I was listening, could I please call him and give him my address and phone number. I did. John was green with envy.
John started calling Buck or any other DJs who could be reached at KAYO, just to chat. He even asked Buck if he’d come to his house also. Buck did come to my house once when I was in Eighth Grade, to deliver seven record albums to me as a Christmas gift. I made him a ceramic pot with a lid in my tenth-grade ceramic class. I’d see Buck quite a number of times until he died of cancer in 1973.
Around this time I went with the family to make one of our more and more seldom visits to the Magnuses. Jim and I got together in a vacation trailer that his parents had parked out in the side yard and I said I had a proposition I needed to talk over with him. Jim poured us each a glass of Tab from the refrigerator and asked me what was on my mind. I started off my Stan and my pirate idea, going heavy on the parts about Mrs. Kennedy since I knew Jim and his family were good Democrats.
Jim said, "Being a pirate? Hmmm, I’d have to think about that." As my plans unfolded though it seemed more and more as if Jim was in on the game. We made a list of the weapons he, Stan and I had. Jim told me he knew where there was a yacht we could steal and sail down around South America, so as to avoid going through the Panama Canal and drop in on Mrs. K. by Sea. I went away with the firm conviction that Jim was still my friend indeed. In successive conversations the yacht idea changed to a motor scooter, then the possibility of going by plane but I firmly expected it to happen until about the time I started Sixth Grade.
Every spring, some of the blind classes from John Hay, made a pilgrimage to the Library for the Blind, which was up on Capital Hill, on Harvard Street. Mrs. Finceth, the librarian, would invite us to browse the Braille shelves for a while then she’d show a selection of new books just recently in, offering the use of listening booths in case we wanted to audition talking books.
Still under the influence of Jefferson’s biography, I asked to see anything by Shakespeare, which she basically refused to show me, on the grounds that she didn’t think I’d enjoy any of the plays. This is rather too bad, because a couple years later I found a simplified version of As You Like It, which would have been accessible to an intelligent Fourth or Fifth Grader. Next I asked if she had the book Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. She had.
I’d seen the Disney production of the story in Third Grade and had been fascinated by it. I own a well-watched copy of the program and have read both the Braille and talking book versions of the book many times. For those unfamiliar with the story, Young David Balfour, on his father’s death, is sent to his uncle Ebeneezer, Laird of the House of Shaws. His uncle is a mean spirited miser who seems frightened to death of David who fairly soon, has him sold as an indentured slave to the Carolina Colonies in America. A young boy is murdered aboard ship and when a fine gentleman is rescued following a collision with a boat in the night, the Captain and Mates fall to discussing how to rob him.
Alan Brecht Stewart is a Highland loyalist of the Bonny Prince Charlie in those days some five years after the ill-fated Rebellion of 1745. David throws in his lot with Alan and together they stand against the entire ship’s crew. When I get tipsy I will still sometimes even today, take a stick or my cane or a sword, of which I own several and striking a suitable pose will recite:
‘Do you see me? I come of kings. My badge is the oak! Do you see my sword? It has slashed the heads off maire whigamores than you have toes upon your feet! Call up your vermin to your back, sir and fall on. The sooner the clash begins, the sooner ye’ll taste this steel throughout your vitals! ‘
After much inconvenience David and Alan win through to the Scottish Mainland. Soon thereafter an agent of the king, (George of England) is killed in such a manner so as to cast suspicion on Alan. David and his friend must try to reach the Lowlands and then someone who might be able to help them.
This story has meant different things to me at different times. First it was a fine, exciting story, which among other things got me very interested in the Highland Claymore or great sword. It also taught me something of Scottish folkways in various regions. Rod Huff, the reader of the recorded version pronounced some things in a manner I found to be rather indistinct and I thought David was of the House of Shores. Reading the book in Braille some time later I found out that David’s hereditary name was Shaw like mine. He was David Shaw. I am David Shaw. Since in the meantime I had learned that I was myself descended from a Scottish line, this story in somewise became my story.
At the end of Fourth Grade, Miss Larson announced she would no longer be at John Hay next year, but was entering the Peace Corps to go work overseas. She gave away some of the disposable reading material from our classroom, including Wee Wisdom and Boys’ Life magazines along with leftover Braille paper. Reading magazines was yet another joy I’d recently discovered. As this was changing for Miss Larson, so they would soon be changing for me.
I’m leapfrogging at this point over several weeks to discuss this next event, since it fits more closely with material just discussed than it would closer to it’s own chronological locale. A month or two after school ended, I went with my family to visit the Magnuses. I was bursting with news of my impending spaceship project concerning which I was eager to confer with Jim. I was also still heavily under to influence of Stevenson. Jim was off to Scout camp just now, but the Magnuses happened to be hosting a nephew of fourteen or fifteen, named Lloyd. He and I sat in the rec.-room and literally discussed everything from swords to the five senses to basic nutrition to spacecraft to model rocketry to lab chemistry. It was a fascinating conversation and I think we both gained a lot from it.
Lloyd had recently read Treasure Island and we talked about that and Kidnapped for a while. Then we worked through most of our present areas of interest, converging on the problems of getting safely to the moon and back. He told me spaceships were guided by hydrogen peroxide jets and that space food was tested on volunteers in prison.
I must’ve confided to Lloyd my intention of building a spaceship and he told me I really didn’t need to do that. Then he asked me if I knew what the cheapest rocket fuel was. I asked what? He said "Water." I asked if he meant pumping water out a nozzle or perhaps boiling it to produce steam?
He said that no, water was made up of hydrogen and oxygen. I’d heard that before, but he said if you separated the two gases you’d have an excellent rocket fuel. Lloyd told me that water could be separated into its constituent gasses by passing electricity through it. He went on to describe an experiment he’d done with a battery, wires and two inverted test tubes. He said the experiment had worked, but he’d produced only small amounts of hydrogen and oxygen. "If you could come up with a cheap way of separating water," he said, "you wouldn’t have to build the engine. You wouldn’t have to invent the spaceship. Others could do that. You’d be a millionaire."
I went home and with essentially no knowledge of electricity, built an imposing-looking model, with dummy coils and batteries and represented wires. Maybe one of these days Jim and I would build it for real. Jim knew about things electric, or said he did.
As it turns out, the idea of separating out hydrogen and oxygen aboard a spaceship in order to use common water as a rocket fuel, isn’t a very useful one. Cracking water in space however, does have a number of potential uses and on earth, the process has many environmentally important near-future uses. Affordable units for producing hydrogen from water offer about the best potential for storing solar energy at home for electrical production while the sun isn’t shining. It would be easier to shoot large chunks of ice into orbit in order to make rocket fuel in space, using solar cells circling outside the blanketing effect of the atmosphere.
Though Lloyd’s suggestion wasn’t very useful as suggested, it was presented in such a way so as to make me think along lines I might not haveotherwise pursued until much later. In Ninth Grade I undertook a speculative science project partly aimed at getting hydrogen-rich fuels from water, through biological means. I’ve explored many concepts for making hydrogen and other fuels through chemical means, using water as a starting point.
I never saw or heard from Lloyd again, but I think of him just about every time I think of chemical electrolysis. A useful idea, I’ve found, isn’t necessarily one that yields direct results, but one that starts one off on a pathway toward new ideas, even ideas totally unrelated to the starting point. Now my own pathway was about to take me away from my starting places and through places I could hardly have imagined.