Of Wells And Wibberley 12.

This time I flew by myself. Actually, though my parents had to buy an adult ticket for me from Detroit to Portland, Oregon, the Stewardesses let me sit with them. In Chicago I was handed off to a new pair of young women and all through the flight had plenty of pop and treats. By now I was feeling quite the old hand at this flying business and though I cried through the last couple of hours before getting to the plane, I calmed down well enough once airborne.

We had a pilot sitting with us during part of the flight. He and I talked about flight suits, rocket belts and spacecraft. He also explained the concept of degrees of angle to me and I had a conversation with one of the stewardesses about the damaging effect of extreme noise on human hearing.

In Portland I was met by Bob, a college student who worked as a part time driver for The School, in exchange for board and room. I was brimming with details about my morning rocket launch attempt and he told me about an experiment of his own some years back in which he’d packed a pipe with a cap on one end, with a mixture containing mercuric oxide and powdered zinc. This highly combustive recipe which he’d gotten out of a magazine, had burst the pipe and Bob’s rocket had also failed to leave the launch pad.

Bob was an English major and was in the Naval R.O.T.C. He wanted to put in 20 years in the Navy then return to college and become a lawyer. Less than a year later though, Bob was called up for active duty. Viet Nam had hotted up while I’d been in Michigan and boys were disappearing from campuses all over the country.

I got to the cottage just as everyone was sitting down to dinner. I’d eaten on the plane since Michigan time is three hours later than Washington’s but I sat down at Mrs. Howgan’s table and got caught up on things. Gary Campbell had gone to the older boy’s cottage. David Peck who’d been shamed so badly the previous year had been sent home indefinitely. Larry Dizatelle had left sometime the year before. There were several new boys. John Zimmerman, whom I’d been counting on seeing again, was not among us.

John had been here for about a week in December, about a month after I’d left for Michigan. During his brief stay he’d been constantly homesick and quarrelsome at the same time, according to my cottage mates and had managed to alienate just about everybody in the place except for Stan, possibly. John’s experience at Vancouver read a lot like mine at Lansing and he’d returned home to reenroll at John Hay.

Our teacher this year was Hazel Barns, the lady who’d talked to me during one of my fifth-grade sojourns in the hall, telling me as long as I was out of class, I should take a rest. I liked Mrs. Barns immediately. She was strict and yelled at students quite a lot, "What kind of Hodge-podge is this, Mr. Man!?" but if assignments were neat and in on time, you could kid around with her quite a bit and she left no doubt that she cared about us a great deal. "I love you kids more than anybody in the world except for my immediate family." She had four or five kids of her own and regaled us with stories, both good and bad about all of them.

We had pretty much the same group as the year before except of course Larry was gone and Terry Atwater had skipped a grade and was now in our group. We’d be covering some of the material that I’d had the previous year in Michigan, though I suspect, at a somewhat higher level. In Social Studies, we started with Alaska then proceeded to Hawaii and other Pacific Islands.

Fortunately for me, the others in our class seemed to be deficient in Math like I was. We started with addition and subtraction of dissimilar fractions such as fourths and sixths. "Can you add ducks and chickens together and get ducks?" ("No--.") "Can you add horses and cows together and get cows?!" ("Dont think so--.") "So what do you need to do?" ("Duh—find a common denominator?") "You bet! Now what’s a common denominator for Fourths and Sixths?!" ("Um---Twelve’s?") I don’t know if these barnyard examples ever helped anyone but Mrs. Barns was certainly fond of them.

We had another teacher for Spelling and English, Mrs. Martha Crockett Carden of Missouri, which she considered to be the South and wasn’t willing to let anyone forget she was southern. Mrs. Carden sometimes forgot to put on her accent though and sounded dangerously like a Yankee. I also liked her very much, almost from the beginning. I don’t know why precisely, possibly because she had interesting ideas and went out of her way to bring fascinating articles to share with our class.

One such article was on the sense of taste and the science of taste research in which it was stated that red wine was one of the tastes in chocolate and radishes fried in butter tasted like mushrooms while powdered sugar on green tomatoes tasted like strawberries. Another article was about the Soviet student science exposition, which had recently come to Portland. Still another was an hilarious piece about little-known saints; St. Adium, patron saint of ball players, St. Udio of film makers, St. Udious of scholars and if one believed all this one would risk being St. Upid.

Our PE schedule was pretty much as it had been the year before and there were no surprises. I had swimming right off this time and Mr. Olson didn’t holler at me near as much this year and called me Dave most of the time instead of "Plassman!!!"

Terry Atwater and I started off as thick as before and we were spending a lot of time talking about ghosts and hauntings. It happened that a Detroit family had been much in the news lately around the Michigan area. They claimed to be seeing and hearing a great many weird and unexplainable things in their very old house. Terry and I thought if we could find a way to get him back to Michigan with me next summer, we might be able to arrange for ourselves a chance to do some first-hand ghost tracking. For most of the year though, Terry and I didn’t get along very well. We seemed to have grown apart during the months we’d been separated and he said bitterly that I’d changed while I’d been in Michigan. Perhaps I had. Where I had formerly talked history I now talked science and I think that felt like a betrayal to him.

For his own part, Terry seemed to have something to prove in order to feel like a big guy. He kept wanting me to fight him. I saw no reason to fight and suspected he could beat me so I refused. He kept coming up with ways to try and goad me into a fight. I didn’t run from him, but spent as little time with him generally as I could manage after the first month or so.

Like Mrs. Rinquist, Mrs. Barns took us to the school library early in the year. The first book I checked out was First Men To The Moon by Werner Von Braun. It was one of those thinly novelized technical forecasts that engineers, (like myself) like to put out in order to popularize their ideas. After a lengthy explanatory introduction, we travel to the moon in a very large rocket, (Pre L.E.M.) and return safely to earth. Dr. Von Braun also provides advice on becoming a rocket engineer and cautions young boys not to "build improved fireworks in your father’s workshop."

The next book I read was a first installment in a lifelong friendship. The library had six books in Braille by Robert A. Heinlein, and another on Talking Book. Have Space Suit Will Travel was about the adventures of Kip and Peewee, his girl sidekick, mentor, antagonist; as they travel to the moon, Pluto, and the planets orbiting the star Vega, on a quest to save the human race. Pretty standard Heinlein stuff. The story opens with a contest to win a trip to the moon sponsored by Skyway Soap. Kip enters, (many times,) but wins only third prize, a space suit that he names Oscar. There followed several pages, in which R.A.H. using Kip’s voice, explains the air supply, atmospheric and temperature control systems of a space suit. Once I understood them, these pages became the best manual on personal life support systems I’d see for years to come.

Another friendship was about to flower, and partly because of Heinlein, now that I think about it. Greg Jack, one of the new guys, was from Spokane. He was in seventh grade and was also interested in science fiction. His favorite book was another R.A.H. Juvie, Rocketship Galileo. I would read this as well in a couple of months and love it as much as Greg did. I don’t recall exactly what Greg and I was talking about at dinner, one Thursday night I think it was. Science fact or fiction, that’d be a safe bet. Whatever it was, I invited him down to my room after dinner so we could continue our discussion and we spent much of that school year and the next talking together, listening to music, reading passages from books and magazines to one another and planning for The Future.

I asked Greg if he’d like to join The Science Club and he said "Sure." I told him I couldn’t just let him in on my own say-so. I’d have to ask the others at Christmastime, but for the present we’d be a club of two, the Western Annex.

At first it was difficult for us to spend as much time together as we wanted, because Greg was a Seventh-grader and had even more gym periods than I did. A couple of weeks later though, Greg told me he was being put back to Sixth Grade. It was common enough for kids from public school to lose grades when they came to Vancouver and Greg said he was comforted that we’d now have the same classes and free time together. Once, after Gym, I ran home ahead of Greg and hid in his closet, letting him discover my body in there while he was hanging up his coat. Greg hauled me out, laughing his head off.

I talked to Greg by phone the other day and he said he always remembered how Mrs. Barns had introduced him to the class and said "Anybody who gives Greg a bad time about being put back is going to answer to me!" Greg and I agreed that Mrs. Barns was possibly the best teacher we’d ever had.

While my interests were space transport oriented, Greg was fascinated by radio. He knew a lot about programs and stations and bands. He had a big table radio, which could pull in one of the TV stations from Portland. Greg’s record collection included both music and dramatizations. Notable among these were six long playing records containing dramatic adaptations of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Journey to the Center of The Earth and Around the World in 80 Days, also War Of The Worlds, The Invisible Man and The First Men In The Moon by H. G. Wells. It was fascinating to meet Greg (and his records) when I did because just now, I was discovering yet unexplored shelves in the library.

Some of us had developed the custom in evening Study Hall, of going back behind the banks of shelves, where there were a few chairs and proximity to all the leisure Braille. I’d already discovered Dr. Von Braun’s book and the shelf of science fiction. I soon discovered in addition, Countdown for Tomorrow by Martin Caidin, a history of space flight up to about 1958. (Since the lag between print publication and Braille or recorded editions if any, was quite lengthy in those days, our books were usually several years out of date.) Through Mr. Caidin I first learned of Dr. Robert H. Goddard, the American rocket pioneer. I’ve read everything about Dr. Goddard I’ve been able to find since and he continues to be one of my heroes. Like myself, young Bob and for that matter, old Bob, knew what it was like to be set apart from peers because his interests were radically different from those of people around him and how it felt to be thought at least on the verge of crazy for looking beyond his time.

One very special evening I found Going Into Space by Arthur C. Clarke. This was a book written for teenagers, on the general subject of space travel, from early dreams in literature to a Clarkean blueprint of how the planets and moons of the solar system would be colonized. It’s publication date just about corresponded with my birth, so there hadn’t been many large rockets launched by the time of this writing but I read about rocket principles and concepts of space flight in this volume and it served me as a valuable primer in the subject I loved most.

The first chapter discussed Cyrano De Bergerac’s solar heated, air gulping sphere, conceived (not too seriously I’d assume) in the seventeenth century as a means of space travel. Next, Jules Verne’s enormous cannon was discussed and critiqued. Finally, H. G. Well’s scientist Cavor and Cavorite, that wondrous gravity-shielding substance which bore his name was offered as another example of an unworkable concept for navigating space. In each case Mr. Clarke explained why the concept in question wouldn’t work, but in the cases of Verne and Wells, I took a while to be persuaded. JA cannon seemed so much more straightforward than rockets and it could be used over and over again, with only more powder wanted for each new launch.

It was Cavorite however, which really captivated my imagination. I had a strongly held conviction that given some uninterrupted research time and a supply of gasses and other ingredients, I could produce a substance, which could float a spaceship off the earth. Besides, I had such a wonderful dramatization of Wells’ The First Men In The Moon on Greg’s record to listen to, furnishing me with ongoing inspiration.

It was Mr. Clarke’s second chapter, From Fireworks to V-#2 though, which was more useful in the long run. I learned here about the difference between solid and liquid-fuelled rockets, concerning which I hadn’t really thought much. I also started learning about fuel mixes, such as alcohol or kerosene with liquid oxygen. Like Von Braun, Clarke counseled against building ones own rockets but mentioned the Jetex engine; small reloadable solid fuel rockets, which burned a combustible fuel, tablet and were intended for young experimenters. Jetex was the forerunner of modern model rockets, such as the Estes line, which are still very popular.

There was even some information on atomic rockets and Electric Propulsion, which was a glimpse into what is called Advanced Propulsion Concepts. I’ll have more to say about those in later chapters.

My other new friend that year was Chris Keppler. Chris was a big, loud, funny, friendly guy who had a giving nature and a very warm heart but was disliked by most of the staff because he had a filthy vocabulary and very little judgment as to when to use it. We got acquainted over a checker game with which we’d both gotten bored, so we started telling dirty jokes. His store was much more copious than mine was but I learned fast and I learned a lot! Within several days I knew several new names for private parts, male and female, how babies were made, about ejaculation and menstruation (sort of,) about homosexual intercourse, rubbers and Kotex’s. A couple of years ago a 19-year-old woman asked me what a Kotex was, she never having heard that term. For any other young ladies in similar situation, please read sanitary pad or maxi.—Go to bed, boys!—see chapter 10.)

Chris was also an accomplished belcher, an accomplished eater who never seemed to get full, and a hell of a nice guy to be around. He had a fair amount of sight and helped his Total friends with things like checking out books and navigating strange areas, sometimes even reading to us. Chris was a grade ahead of me and he went to the Lutheran church like I did. He wanted to go to the Episcopal Church with Matty Negrey, another new boy in our cottage, because they served pop and cookies after Sunday school, but Mrs. Howgan, our head house parent and a staunch Lutheran herself, wouldn’t let him defect.

On the way back from Sunday school, Chris and I liked to sit back by the fire door of the school bus. Though strictly forbidden to do so, we’d pop the door as soon as old Petunia came to a stop, jump out and run like the proverbial bat out of hell laughing our fannies off all the way! I guess I got in a fair amount of trouble with Chris but couldn’t think of a better guy to be in trouble with. Greg also liked Chris a great deal and the three of us had fun together too.

By the time we’d reached Canada in our Social Studies class Mrs. Barns started requiring us to write a report on each province as we covered it and to each read our compositions aloud in class. We were required to use two sources for each report. One could be our textbook. The other might be the encyclopedia or another nonfiction book.

I’m not sure if there was much of a connection between these reports and my leisure writing but I’d finally gotten around to starting the space adventure story I’d been planning since midway through Fifth Grade. I poured a lot of effort into the story and if the results weren’t all that impressive, at least it was a start, an attempt to enter the world of science fiction. I consulted with Jerry, a college man who helped out in the cottage and we discussed some of the technical points of the story, such as nutrition pills and an improbable soup of chemicals with which to propel the spaceship in which my three heroes would fly. Six or seven ingredients, including nitric and sulfuric acid, helium, nitrogen and some others were fed from separate tanks into a mixing chamber which communicated with the main drive which issued out the bottom of the spherical craft. There were also smaller attitude jets on top and at 90-degree intervals around the ship’s equator. I’m getting a bit ahead of my story though.

Flight To The Planet X went something like this, and I’ll warn the gentle reader in advance that it’s a rip off of Space Suit, The Mushroom Planet books and probably some others. Chuck rides the train to Seattle in order to spend the summer with his best friend John. John and his dad meet him at the depot and the boys prepare a pup tent in John’s back yard, where they intend to sleep for the next several weeks.

Next day Chuck and John are tramping through some woods, which there still were some even within Seattle in those days and a great deal more near the outskirts. They come upon a shack in which there is a table and chair and a few other appointments. Within a box or cabinet they find a piece of paper with a list of chemical ingredients undersigned Prof. Brown. Both boys being quite intelligent suspect the paper is of some value, so they contact John’s Uncle Joe, who is a physicist. He recognizes the formula right off as a sort of whip-it-up-and-go space propellant, which everyone knew Dr. Brown had invented, but whose particulars no one had been able to learn, Brown evidently being reclusive.

Uncle Joe also knows of a good use to which the propellant can be put. There is an asteroid that is just a few thousand miles from earth, with the inhabitants of which, Joe has been in radio contact for some time. They seem to be in trouble. There is a critical chemical shortage of some kind on the planetoid.

The three go to work, building the spherical craft, getting some hush-hush help from local machinists and welders. Soon the ship is ready and they take off. Their radio receiver picks up a station from Mexico, (it has an X leading its call letters), which reports that an unidentified object has been spotted in the sky. I guess that was to show just how far up they were.

Landing on the asteroid, the trio is met by the head of the planetary Council, who shows himself to be otherworldly by calling Joe Joseph as in "We are happy to meet you at last, Joseph." Right about then however, space pirates swoop down and grab the earthlings carrying them away to their home world where they keep the three in a sort of dungeon for a while.

The friends manage to escape by building a ladder out of ration cans. They discover an experimental teleporter under development by the Baddie Government and miraculously it works! They somehow manage to fire themselves at still another planet, which is an antagonist of the Baddies and allies of Joe’s radio pals, as well as secret mentors of the earth. The trio lies up for a few days with their newfound friends, long enough to learn that they make their food chemically like plants do, but without need of sunshine, dirt or cultivation and they can reach down into earthling minds sufficiently well to extract entire books which they now reproduce so as to furnish their guests with suitable leisure reading material.

An attack is mounted, the Baddies are handily spanked and the trio is deposited back on Earth, near John’s home by a flying saucer, which is of course, one of a fleet of saucers, which has been patrolling earth since 1947.

(At least this is what we Think has happened.) All three humans were required to take a sleeping medication before returning to earth, and they wake up in their sleeping bags in John’s back yard. All three of them have had some pretty weird space dreams during the night, which seemed pretty real and even agree with one another, --but isn’t that our spaceship sitting over there? In the dreams we left it on the asteroid when the Baddies attacked. Well as long as it’s here and ready to go and we’re all awake now, why not let’s go test it?

So Joe, John and Chuck board the space sphere, loaded with Brownian fuel ingredients, crack the valves, mix the chemicals and open up the main drive, first on low, then on full power. The ship lifts about six inches off the ground, then settles back. Either Prof. Brown is a crackpot or we’re all idiots to have believed him or maybe the aliens, if there were any, have monkeyed with the fuel. Three people don’t Usually dream about the same thing all in one night, do they?

The story might have covered fifteen typewritten pages and was written about as choppily as this outline. But faithful Greg and said he’d rather enjoyed it and had thought the dream gambit was rather good. (I obviously couldn’t be publishing real rocket formulae or we’d be having astronautics breaking out all over the place and the domain of The Science Club would be compromised.)

After I finished Have Space Suit Will Travel, I checked out a juvenile biography of Albert Einstein and reading this, renewed my determination to learn something about Physics. I’d talked to Mr. Walter who taught Math and Science for grades #8 and up and he advised me that "There are books in the library." This in itself wasn’t a very helpful bit of mentorship, but with the help of another teacher one Study Hall, I found First Principles of Physics, in Eight Braille Volumes, by Fuller et al, published around 1934. During the next couple of months I worked my way through about half of it, certainly not understanding everything, it being after all, an eleventh-grade book, but learning something of buoyancy, pressure, the laws of motion, the Metric system, also gaining some experimental methods and a measure of self-satisfaction for trying.

I was interrupted in my Physics readings by a decision, with Greg’s hearty encouragement, to devour Rocketship Galileo, the second of Heinlein’s books that I would read. This was the story of a trip to the moon in an atomic rocket, written only a couple of years after World War II. and serving as the basis for Destination Moon, perhaps the first space movie of the Talkie Era.

I admit the story confused me a bit at first, because I wasn’t sure in what year the story was supposed to be set. I finally decided it was probably meant to be sometime in the sixties or seventies but written from a W.W.II. perspective. The rocket which was to become America’s first moon ship had started life as a sort of SST upper atmospheric freighter, high altitude rockets being a popular concept back in the fifties and beyond.

The story begins with the test firing of an ambitious model rocket, by the remaining members of a science club like I wished I had. Everyone else has gone of to college and soon the place will be deserted. The rocket blows up. Some one is injured but it turns out, not permanently and not necessarily by the explosion. It further develops he is the physicist uncle of one of the boys. (I read this book After writing Flight to The Planet X—Honest!)

Dr. Cargraves it turns out has invented a nuclear propulsion system for a space rocket. The system works by superheating zinc in a nuclear reactor and squirting zinc gas out the rear of the rocket to provide thrust. I have to mention for the sake of honesty that for reasons having to do with the melting temperature of the nuclear reactor, the rocket itself and the relative massiveness of zinc atoms, the rocket would never be able to provide the performance imagined for in Rocketship Gallileo, but the book is well worth reading even today if you can find a copy. When Cargraves and his three young apprentices install their reactor in a scrapped freighter rocket and take off from the White sands Desert of New Mexico, you’re left with the impression that any trio of bright high school seniors with a physicist uncle between them can cobble together a rocket and head moonward.

I’ve discussed this book in some detail because it exemplifies a lot of writing on nuclear rocketry, which was done during the Forties and Fifties. Atomic reactors would furnish such tremendous amounts of power that spacecraft could become almost back yard propositions. There’s a lot of energy in the atom, but translating that into rocket thrust is a difficult and limited proposition. Atomic rockets can work and will likely come into their own in space where their relatively greater weights will not be so much of a handicap. On earth though where we must accelerate against the full gravity of our planet, I think chemical rockets may well remain the smallest and cheapest surface to orbit ships. We can build systems, which may allow smaller ships to be used, but we’ll no longer be talking about independent spacecraft like Apollo 11 or Rocketship Galileo.

Though Cargraves’ propulsion system didn’t teach me to build a practical rocket drive, it did, like Lloyd’s idea for cracking water to make fuel, start me thinking along new lines of inquiry. It’s not always the idea you’ve gotten that’s important so much as the one you’ll get.

Meanwhile back in the real 1960s, I was coming to terms with some truths, which, though trivial by comparison with physics and rocket engineering, were at the time, and for me, quite pertinent. About a week and a half before Thanksgiving, I came down with chicken pox. Since most of the eruptions were on my face though, it took the nurse a couple of days to diagnose it. On the morning of Wednesday, the first day, She told me I wasn’t going to school and ordered me to get undressed, assisting brusquely with the process. I was installed in one of the high, hospital-like beds and began perhaps the most unpleasant of my Sixth-grade experiences. I might have handled it more staunchly had I been able to maintain a better sense of humor but I was still dealing with the stark fact that I was 2400 miles away from my parents and little sister and had barely accustomed to being in residential school again, let alone this infirmary, with Mrs. Vbeausistoe, our rather problematic head nurse. She was the lady who’d threatened to spank anyone who wouldn’t eat his cereal on my first day of Fifth Grade.

Eva Beasistoe was I think, a kindly enough person at heart. She had a loud, cross way of talking however and tended to treat kids several years younger than they were. Her medical practices, though common enough, I understand, in the 1930s, were archaic in the Sixties. Such practices consisted largely of purging and enemas. On one occasion I was required to swallow literally a handful of chalky laxative pills. When I threw them up-, (I was sick to my stomach, not constipated,) I got an enema. I know of a boy who was given an enema for a runny nose and a headache. I once was a participant in parallel enemas, one male, one female, administered in the twin bathrooms of the Infirmary with Mrs. B. dashing back and forth between bathrooms, urging and criticizing.

My first day in the Infirmary was bad enough, but I avoided Mrs. Beausistoe as much as possible, by pretending to be asleep. She served me lumberjack-sized meals however, from one of which I’d just be recovering when the next trolley-load would come rolling in.

About nine in the evening, Mrs. Beausistoe said "goodnight" and left me to my books and blessed solitude. I knew a night nurse was known to check in on occupants so as soon as I heard footsteps approaching I lay as quietly as I could with the covers pulled up over my ears, not even breathing until the steps receded again.

Eventually I slept and eventually awoke somewhat to what I thought at first was a strange and very irritating sort of dream. Someone was guiding my body, pushing me into position, in effect, aiming me. I was failing to do something, which my tormentor required of me. I became aware that a toilet bowl was in front of me, but it kept drifting to the left then to the right, because I’d literally remained asleep from the bed to the bathroom. The woman, who had brought me hither, kept lining me up again, breathing coffee breath into my face demanded over and over that I "Go pee-wee." At about the fifth request and the sixth and seventh, I said, "I can’t!" Eventually she took me back, admonishing "Don’t wet the bed now." I said indignantly that I didn’t wet the bed. This was my first meeting with Mrs. Dunlappe who was an L.P.N. and also worked as a house parent in Primary and in one of the girl’s cottages. She had mistaken me as a child much younger than I was, which wasn’t uncommon in those days. I think I weighed about 65 pounds at age eleven and a half. I know I wrestled in the 70-72 pound weigh class a year later.

The next day I was awakened with a thermometer in my mouth, then a huge pancake breakfast was trundled in. The thought of food made me queasy to begin with and the surroundings were so strange and unfamiliar that my stomach tied itself in knots. At about midway through breakfast I gave out with a resounding belch of nervously swallowed air which in those days, was a pretty sure sign of trouble ahead. Mrs. Beausistoe laughed off that occurrence. A couple of minutes later I threw up all that I’d managed to eat. Mrs. B. asked me when was the last time I’d had a bowel movement. I told her I guessed the day before, after breakfast. She said next time I had one, not to flush the toilet.

In half an hour or so, she examined my output, declaring I was constipated and needed a laxative. I’d never had a laxative before and wasn’t even entirely sure what one was. She gave me five large vaguely fruit-flavored tablets, which I dutifully chewed up and swallowed. I’d never have believed how many times I could run to the bathroom in one day and how fast I could get there! This was one of the milder doses I’d receive from our school nurse before I left Vancouver.

The other thing that made Mrs. B. such a pain was that her authority wasn’t confined to medical issues. She worked in a 3^rd-story crow’s nest, which allowed her to keep track of things all over campus. She was forever phoning house parents, demanding that students be told to put on coats or hats. She regulated when boys could begin wearing cutoffs or shorts in the spring and when kids could start going barefoot. We pointed out that girls wore dresses all year-round and she countered that they were used to it. She sometimes tried to regulate bedtimes. On one occasion, she confined two entire cottages to eight o’clock bedtimes for a full week. No one ever seemed to challenge her.

Mrs. Beausistoes major grouse with me was my lack of sufficient pajamas. When I’d first come to the school, Mrs. Howgan had said that if I was used to sleeping in my under wear, that was okay. She warned however that if I was ever in the Infirmary, I’d have to be in pajamas.

I had one pair which Mrs. B. judged to be soiled on about the second day. When she called the cottage for more and found out I only had the one pair, my, did the biomass intersect the axial impeller! as it were. She ordered me to get another pair of pajamas when next I went to my sisters and to wear them in the cottage hereafter! because "if a fire happened and you had to run outside in your underwear, wouldn’t that look pretty?!" I became so sick of that argument--. I knew that if I could reach my door I could certainly hook my pants off the dresser where they always were at night,, on the way out. Besides, we lived in a one-story brick building. More recently, I’ve entirely circumvented the issue by wearing prettier underwear to bed!

I did get another pair of pajamas at Christmastime but the house parents and I decided that wearing pajamas wasn’t really a health issue and we wouldn’t bring the subject up with Mrs. B.

On Sunday, the fifth day of my commitment, Lois, Bruce and the girls came to get me and bring me back to their house. Most of my pox had already scabbed over by now and I ended up with a longer Thanksgiving vacation. I’d been visiting at Lois’s every couple of weeks and though not quite the same as seeing my parents, these visits were enough like being home to make me look very much forward to each one. I loved the train rides north, being met at the station and Lois’s good cooking. Their household was run a good deal differently than mine, but Lois expended special effort to make my stays pleasant. Bruce, rather unaffectionate and unemotional, save for sudden bursts of anger, nevertheless provided when he could, answers to questions I might have about science and engineering. He also discussed books with me and told me when interesting things appeared on the TV schedule.

A phenomenon on TV which had begun occurring at the beginning of the school year, was the series Lost In Space a science fiction series, which though inferior by most measures to Star Trek, nevertheless preceded it by a year. Most people have probably heard of the series, the movie or both. They are similar. A Family is chosen to colonize a planet in the Alpha Centauri System. The family is of course, named Robinson, though I’d wager none of them had been within yodeling-distance of Switzerland. The trip will last five years and their craft is relatively small, so the family will be in suspended animation during this time, with only Major Don West remaining out of hibernation incase of trouble. Trouble of course, occurs in the person of evil Dr. Zachary Smith, who sneaks aboard at the last minute to sabotage the flight. He is evidently some sort of enemy agent. The ship takes off with Dr. Smith unhappily aboard and he supplies about 95% of the histrionics though the three seasons the series aired, while most of the best one-liners are claimed by the robot.

Watching the pilot episode of L.I.S. with most of my cottage mates around me, felt almost like a religious experience. Not within my memory had there been a TV series devoted entirely to space. The story concept was lame from the beginning because spaceships between the stars seemed as plentiful as pick-ups on a country road and planets as frequent as islands in the Philippines. Dr. Smith’s added weight causes the precisely-calculated trajectory of the ship to go out of whack and along about episode Three, (the show is a serial,) they all achieve touchdown on a planet which could have been at best, light days from earth.

The first season offered some interesting variations on the Swiss Family Robinson theme but though they have been sent out to colonize the nearest known planet suitable for human habitation, and they’ve happened to find one even nearer, they suddenly become preoccupied with blasting off again and heading back to earth. The movie handled things a little more reasonably, allowing the planet to blow up and giving the Robinson’s excellent reasons to split.

After the first couple of episodes, Greg and I started listening to the show in his room since he could get channel Six, the CBS station for Portland, on his radio. Between the two of us we seemed to be able to piece together pretty well what was going on and these Wednesday night sessions, complete with critiques of the concepts offered in the episode just experienced, became in many ways, the high point of our week.

Even Lois and Bruce tried Lost In Space for a couple of episodes but they lost interest quickly. When I was home for Christmas, I had to pretty much talk like a Dutch uncle to be able to watch the episode, which showed during the Holidays, but I’m very glad I saw it. It was fully as silly as any of the other installments and more so than some, but it introduced me to a concept which was almost brand-new to me.

It had been decided that Lois and her family would fly back to Michigan for Christmas. So it worked out that I spent the first week or so of my vacation in Seattle. We shared Christmas Eve at the Brown’s with Bruce’s Aunt Rosie, who was originally from England and loved to tell me how clever I was. Rosie had evidently been a wonderful mother fill-in for Bruce when he was little and she was always kind to my nieces and me.

About midnight we boarded the plane for Detroit. Lois, Bruce, Deb and Kelly sat on one side of the Aisle, while I sat of the other with a young couple and their baby. The man was a bit tipsy and I suspect would have been a talker anyway, so we started discussing science fiction books, movies and space travel.

I mentioned that I wanted to find a cheaper alternative to rockets for travelling in space and he said "Do you mean something like mass transference?" This was a term I hadn’t known and he explained the concept as the process of changing ones body into light or some other medium able to travel at high speeds, then after going some distance, turning back again into the solid state. It sounded like an intriguing idea, though not entirely new. In one of the Superman episodes, back in 3^rd or 4^th grade, I’d heard the Professor explain to Lois Lane that her body was mostly empty space and the actual matter contained therein could all make up a pinhead or some such. "Why, Thank you, Professor." From there, it was but one long, shaky step to sending people over the telephone to emerge safely and fully reformed at the station corresponding to the number dialed. We talked about things like that till Lois told me to be quiet and go to sleep.

Mom, Dad and Chris met us at the Detroit Airport and we drove together to Ann Arbor. We started opening up presents at the house and had sort of a hurry-up Christmas festivity. I got a Chemistry set, a Disney record dramatization of Robin Hood, a toy camera which opened out into a pistol, secret agent style and a multi-purpose riot gun that fired plastic bullets, message missiles, smoke bombs filled with talcum powder and emitted a siren noise.

A couple of days later, Uncle Verne showed up with a two-speed Aiwa tape recorder with seven-inch reels. I’d wanted a tape recorder for years now. Dad confided to me that he should have bought me one a long time ago because I’d eventually be needing it for my schooling. Unc had gotten a good deal on that model and bought two, giving the extra to me. We spent a fun afternoon singing, reciting and generally being silly on the tape.

The Lost In Space episode previously mentioned, began with the Robinson children, Will and Penny, finding some alien artifacts. One of them had the ability to transport things, including people, instantaneously or nearly so, from place to place. It turned out to be a Matter Transfer Device, (a variation on mass transference or mass transmission.) It transported things on a maser beam, like a laser but different frequencies basically. We’d been hearing lots about how a laser could carry all of the radio and TV stations for a given region and to think such a beam might someday carry material objects, perhaps broken down into their constituent particles, seemed like a reasonable extrapolation at the time. As it turns out, lasers can be used to carry atoms around, but not very many at a time.

In general, our language about electronics and communications generally is all-wrong. We speak of sending sound and TV pictures via radio waves, but we don’t really do that. What we do is analyze the sound and pictures in complex ways, to render a pattern representing the sound waves and picture elements. This pattern is conveyed, or transmitted to somewhere else by turning some energy source, like a radio wave generator or a laser, on and off, up and down, or changing it’s output in some other way. A simple way to understand how a laser can transmit information is to think about sending Morse code by turning a light on and off. Lasers can be switched or altered so many times per second that a great deal of information can be sent on one. Still all that is being sent is light energy and information.

A lot of the mass transmission devices in science fiction stories, such as the transporter on star trek, allowed solid objects to be converted into energy then reconverted back into their original form at some distant place, sometimes by using the sending device only. Nothing must preexist at the destination point to reconstruct the transmitted object. So it is with the device on Lost In Space. Will makes a brief trip to earth, which the robot has managed to locate for him and he returns safely home to his family just before the alien machine blows up. A Gilligan’s Island gambit.

I stayed in Ann Arbor a few days longer than I actually had vacation and flew back by myself. Again I’d been insulted about my writing. When I left school for Seattle, I’d brought along some of my notes on space, some poetry, (I was into limericks then) and a rather stupid play I’d written about beatniks and street gangs. I think I had about an inch-thick sheaf of Braille paper with dots on it, not nearly as dense informationally or in terms of weight as an equivalent volume of printed paper. I proposed to bring this stuff to Michigan with me, to have something to do, review while home, share with the Science Club perhaps. Though Debby could carry a sizable walking doll on the plane and we brought numerous Christmas gifts, my writings couldn’t be considered for stowage of for hand carrying. That in itself wouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but like all of my fifth-grade manuscripts, I never saw the pages again. Lois took it upon herself to throw them away and she and Mom discussed it as another of the silly stunts I’d pulled.

Several things were new when I returned to school in January. The semester would be changing soon and we’d be having Science instead of Health. Batman was making his RV Debut later that month. Bruce had met B.M. in the comic’s back in the fifties. There was also a new guy in our cottage, One of Greg’s friends from Spokane.

Danny Lander had gone to Public school with Greg at one time, but because of health concerns and I suspect, a fair amount of over protectiveness on the part of his parents, he’d been tutored at home for the last several years. Danny was fourteen but in the way The State School had of prejudging other educational systems, he’d been assigned to the fifth Grade. His mother had relocated to Vancouver, so he could return home each afternoon and he wasn’t allowed to participate in Gym. Danny’s dad, who owned a casket-making business, commuted from Spokane on the weekends. This was a drive of about 450 miles each way.

Danny was a fascinating guy. Like Greg and I, he was interested in science and he probably knew as much or more about rockets as I did. Also like me, Danny was fascinated by all things military. He had a vivid imagination and a wonderful gift for storytelling.

Dan would hold whatever audience might be in earshot, spellbound during recess or after lunch, day after day, spinning out some ongoing yarn. The story might be about beleaguered solders in World War II, persons escaping a flood or Coast Guard cutters ferreting out smugglers along the Pacific Coast. We all competed for Dan’s attention and he seemed to value my company to a considerable extent. I spoke the same language he did, as he said and I was more sympathetic than some, to some of his special problems. Danny had a number of health issues. I’m not sure of their precise nature, but I know he was subject to profuse nosebleeds. He was also fairly overweight. Kids outside of the cottage, notably some of the girls, liked to pick on him. I don’t think it ever went much beyond irritants, such as stinging little slaps or some pushing, but it always occurred in a ganging-up sort of fashion and it was a fearful thing for him.

Danny would ask me in a subdued, embarrassed tone, if I’d "do the buddy guard bit on the way back to school." This meant that I’d walk from cottage to class with him. For some reason, the kids didn’t bother Danny much if I was walking with him. Perhaps their spiteful play wasn’t any fun if someone else knew what was happening. One of the girls used to try to get me away, usually with a question about space, then the others could go to work on Danny. I learned to avoid girls with space questions on the way to school, while I was guarding.

I avoided watching Batman for several weeks. It showed on Wednesday and Thursday evenings at 7:30 and conflicted with the first half of Lost In Space. Since Batman ended with a cliff-hanger on Wednesday, with the resolution on Thursday evening, I decided not to get tangled up in the Batman phenomenon at all, at least initially. Since I’d heard about Batman from Bruce originally, I asked, during my next going home weekend, if he’d seen the new show and got a quite enthusiastic response.

Shortly thereafter, Lost In Space was preempted one week due to something or other and I told Greg I thought I’d try out Batman just once, to see what the furor was all about. Everyone else in the cottage seemed wild about it! Greg counseled against the plan, saying I’d be in danger of getting hooked on Batman then would have a conflict over what to watch. I think Greg was, understandably enough, fearful of losing his L.I.S. buddy. As I’ve said, these episodes were of great importance to us and we shared them with an almost religious fervor.

Against Greg’s good advice, I sat in on a Wednesday session of Batman, then against on Thursday, and I fell pretty hard for the show. It was intended as a comedy, but for us kids, it seemed like pretty serious drama. What really fascinated me was the string of criminals, each one of them a famous actor and with each displaying characteristic personae, expressions, laughs costumes and weapons. For two or three weeks I watched Batman on Thursdays only, but that didn’t last long. Pretty soon I was sliding into Greg’s room at 8:00, relying on him to catch me up with the episode. I was at least faithful to that extent.

As it happens, I don’t remember most of our Science class content but there was a unit on electricity and magnetism, which was fascinating. Influenced by Rocketship Galileo, I read a book about nuclear energy and influenced by our class, I read a book on electricity. I also consumed books on chemistry, the Planet Mars and whatever else I could find on rockets.

In our Reading book we had a number of stories about inventors, such as Cyrus McCormick, Elias Howe, (the sewing machine guy) and Marconi. In these stories and in personal reading I noted numerous references to the American Centennial in Philadelphia, 1876. I made a promise to myself that when a Bicentennial should be held, a decade or so hence, I would be there, displaying a product of my own creativity. I imagined myself showing up with a motorized flying saucer or some other fairly high tech offering. I didn’t quite, but I was in Philadelphia on July 4, 1976, with something original to display, in spite of a city-worker strike, traffic gridlock and a bomb scare.

Greg and I were groused at a fair amount by house parents, because we spent so much time together. Besides our obligatory TV (watching) on the radio, we were together after school for a book reading program on a local station and for Theatre Of The Mind from KGO San Francisco on Sunday night. There were religious programs before and after Church and we spent a lot of time just listening to music or talking. We both had tape recorders now and we cold put in a lot of time dramatizing comic horror stories or simulating space flights, usually with me squeezed into the closet.

Since much of our conversation was about science or engineering and many of the books we read were on scientific subjects, we pretty much assumed that anything we did together couldn’t help but have a positive effect on the future. House parents countered that we needed more fresh air and should mix with other kids. This was somewhat silly because we had nine or ten gym periods per week not counting field trips and Greg and I were frequently with Chris, Stan McGovern and some other kids. Still we were together a lot.

Chris Keppler had snatched a large number of those premoistened towelettes from the Portland Airport and given them to Greg. We used these for a while instead of washing for dinner. When basically just out to irritate her, I told Mrs. Howgan that Greg and I could wash our hands without leaving his room, she said "Oh my land sakes alive! All you boys need is some kind of Toilet and you’d never have to come out of there!!"

Sometimes Greg and I did go outside, taking his big transistor radio with us, then Science and Fresh Air could mix. Nothing like it!

There were some other reasons Greg and I tended to come under fire. We tended to avoid certain activities, notably a fund-raising effort which was an annual event. Each year, a local band would give a benefit dance, for which tickets were sold. What the proceeds were specifically used for we were never told. "It is for your school’s PT.A", teachers or house parents said sharply should we ask the question. Since few of the parents could be all that involved in the PTA it seemed to me it should be a TA. Of course the students were the ones who got to sell the tickets. Teachers and other volunteers would drop totally blind and partially sighted teams by car on strategic street corners and the teams would fan out around the neighborhoods, doorbelling. Participants who sold an acceptable minimum of tickets would be rewarded by a day long fun outing at Jansen Beach, a nearby amusement park. They were given a number of tickets for rides and even a couple dollars of spending money. There would be special prizes for the top salespersons.

The selling went on for several weeks and most kids jumped at the chance to go to a carnival. I thought the whole thing smelled rather badly. It was clear to me that blind students were being used to make sympathy sales and I wasn’t sure what the PTA. needed with the money. I didn’t feel good about participating in this sort of thing and Greg, influenced partly by me I think, opted not to join in either.

I guess for some reason they couldn’t quite order us to go out selling, but Mrs. Howgan asked me rather threateningly what my parents would say if they were told I was refusing to participate in a school activity. Since I knew how much my mother disliked selling for any reason, I answered with considerable confidence that my parents would leave the matter up to me. "If it was something to help your school maybe," Mrs. Howgan retorted as if to say they’d probably force me if asked. Well, they weren’t and I wasn’t. Later it was suggested that we might be given a great deal of homework to fill in our day that could have been occupied at Jansen beach, but I believe Greg and I spend our time working on regular assignments and reading.

There was another event that upset the authorities where I was concerned. Each March, a field trip was taken to Mount Hood so students could play in the snow. This trip conflicted with a trip I meant to make up to Lois’s and the bus would be returning in the evening, after my train would have left for Seattle. Mrs. Pettit, one of the house parents, tried to sell me on the idea of taking a Saturday morning train, which would’ve cut my time in Seattle to about 28 hours, (sleep included.) I said I’d rather go to my sister’s on Friday. She was unhappy, but there evidently wasn’t anything they could do about that either. Danny Lander and I spent the day in Mrs. Rinquist’s room, talking, reading and writing stories. He read two complete novels in the space of one class day.

Someone evidently told my parents I wasn’t adjusting well to school, "just hanging on from going-home-weekend to going-home-weekend" as Mom put it, and not conforming to the school routine. This was basically, crap. I valued my time at Lois’s, sure, but I wasn’t moping around on other weekends and was doing credibly in school. I wasn’t willing to disturb my weekend plans for a snow trip, because I’d already had sufficient experience with school field trips to know what to expect; lines forming, teachers haranguing, bullies pushing and prodding. I did participate the following year, and that’s exactly how things were.

Officials at The State School tended to get very upset when their decisions were questioned. They had been known to threaten the parents or blind-retarded children, (especially blind parents), to have their children taken away for noncompliance with school-originated plans. The administration was good at communicating half of an issue to parents and doing it in such a way as to discredit whatever the student might have to say. Mr. Donaldson read our outgoing mail, "In case anyone should happen to get involved with something illegal," I believe was the first excuse we were given. Later it was explained that the stamp machine wouldn’t work properly on a sealed envelope. That was true enough, but we weren’t told that our letters were no longer being read. It could take as long as two weeks for a letter to get from school to home, and even in those days, this was extreme.

Some of us found sighted kids or older friends to mail our letters for us. It was interesting that my letters from home always seemed to be opened by the time I was notified of their arrival. The house parent usually read the mail to me and most of the other totally blind residents, but it was often, "I just thought I’d check through it first, in case there was something I should know."

My refusal to go to Mount Hood was, I think, a major factor in my parents’ decision to cancel my trip to Michigan for Spring Vacation. Mom sent me a letter by way of Mr. Burhow, the Superintendent, telling me they couldn’t afford my plane fare, but acting as if my problems with homesickness was a factor too. Mr. Burhow gave me a fatherly talk about getting out and mingling more with the kids. (Later in this chapter, the reader can judge for self whether finances were a considerable factor in Mom’s decision.)

Trip to Michigan or no, the spirit of innovation was yet strong. Danny and I were discussing atomic and solar-powered rockets as well as equipment for exploring the moon. Greg had read that the lunar surface would likely have the consistency of snow, so he suggested we wear snowshoes on the moon. We also had read about astronauts using a special sort of walking stick to help them keep their balance when eventually, they landed on the moon and this seemed like a good idea too. I designed a machine pistol with a stock that could be attached for shoulder-firing. The stock held extra clips of ammunition so reloading would be made easier while wearing a space suit.

I like to think of these days as the time when imagination was rampant and knowledge not yet sufficient to temper it. On one single afternoon I designed an electric robot and a matter transfer device. The robot was supposed to have a simple electric motor in its trunk, powered by an automobile battery. The motor could be geared to arms, gripper hands and wheeled undercarriage. The arms and hands could be moved puppet-style though I didn’t say precisely how. The programming of the robot was to be handled by connecting strings or wires, via the motor, leading to the various members to be moved and from a clock mechanism, which would initiate and terminate various actions as a mechanical sweep hand made its way around the clock face. Not very elegant and difficult to see how such a robot could do useful work, but this was a mere Programming Problem!

The bot had a single sense organ, which though as silly as the rest of it, was somewhat interesting. A small fan would direct a stream of air out of the robot’s face. When the bot neared an obstacle, the air would be deflected back The air would push on a shutter which would move inward and set the clock ahead to a program segment which turned the undercarriage.

For a long time I seriously intended to build a robot of some sort. I wish I’d had more experience working with moving parts before entering college. The mere process of planning something and putting it together, no matter how impractical, even regardless of the original purpose is enormously helpful in honing problem-solving abilities as well as imparting a healthy respect for the laws of Saint Murphy.

My matter transfer device was more a delving into magic and wishful thinking than anything else but was also interesting from a science fiction perspective. Greg and I had read a long article on the many things ultra-sonic waves could do, from drilling teeth to providing a mobility guide for the blind. I thought that a suitably-tuned source of ultrasonic noise could vibrate a body into its constituent atoms, perhaps even into protons, neutrons and electrons. I also thought that a large enough laser could push this cloud of particles from place to place, even from planet to planet, at or about the speed of light.

Reconstructing things at the other end might be a bit of a problem, but perhaps a magnetic field or even a metal surface might cause things just coincidentally to reassemble themselves. Or perhaps a small re assembly module could be sent to in a small rocket, then the crew could be transmitted directly from earth. If matter transfer units turned out to be small and easy to operate, perhaps a one way rocket could carry the transmitter to Mars, and with the crew in a one-way rocket and the return stages of the space craft would be unnecessary. There were many possibilities.

There was another idea involving big lasers, with which I was having some fun, which had grown out of a conversation with Ruth Johnson on a visit home sometime in the Spring. She’d said she had read in an article somewhere, about a laser beam being able to push a craft through space. I’m not sure of specifically which sort of application she might have been referring but I thought perhaps a large laser beam could push a steam of magnetic particles through space. I further envisioned a dirigible up in the stratosphere, with a pressurized crew cabin and a large electromagnet suspended below. A "Magnetic laser" would be directed on a course at a suitable angle to push the dirigible out of earth’s atmosphere and toward the moon, hopefully letting it down easy on the lunar surface, later pushing it back into space and guiding it toward the earth once more. For a time, our Science Club’s moon expedition was based on the concept of the space going balloon and lasers seemed an integral part of space navigation.

In Social Studies we were now studying the countries of South America and learning to write formal reports. I’d gotten the idea that it would be beneficial to shoot rockets or lasers from the Equator, a more direct route to the moon I thought. I was mining our geography book therefore, for suitable places near the Equator, where our rocket base might be situated. I eventually settled upon the Galapagos Islands, six hundred miles off the coast of Equador. Someday the Science Club or an organization like it, would relocate there and set up a camp village with shops labs and an observatory. Greg would start a radio station to provide local entertainment and would operate that until it was time for him to serve as communications officer on our first space mission.

Meanwhile Mrs. Barns was teaching us to assemble bibleographies and to take systematic notes from reference sources. We stapled each set of notes together, keeping the stabled pages of notes; each set with its bibliography attached, in a large manila envelope. When it was time to write the report, we were to sit at our desk with only our Braillewriter and the sets of notes spread in front of us. Reading alternately from one set of source notes, to the next and eventually returning to the first again, we could generate our report paragraph by paragraph, using the rule "two agreeing source beats a descenting source." I was so impressed by the technique that I even began writing a formal report on nuclear rockets.

Danny Lander had read Jules Verne’s From The Earth To The Moon and had thought well of it. Toward the end of the year I was able to find a copy on talking book and read it for myself, which I’d been itching to do for months now. There was some interesting material in From Earth to Moon, the generalities of gucotton manufacture, some 19^th-centruy concepts of gunnery and the rudiments of atmospheric restoration through chemical means. I also I also picked up a gambit I would later use in writing This Book. For Chapter 5. of F.E.T.M. Mr. Verne chose the engaging title "Which Lady readers are asked to skip. I tore into that chapter quite eagerly only to find it full of orbital parameters and other astronomical data. My own readers may notice a certain similarity here to some of my Dangerous Paragraph sequences.

For a number of years I assumed that Verne’s 900-foot cannon with it’s 400,000 pounds of gun cotton, throwing a 20,000 projectile was necessarily sound, since his mathematician brother-in-law had helped him with this book project. In college however, I heard this notion challenged and did some numbers myself, to find that not even in theory was Verne’s cannon powerful enough to hit the moon.

D.P.#1. According to the figures I’ve been able to find, guncotton, which is made by treating ordinary cotton with nitric and sulfuric acid, has an energy content of about 85,000 foot pounds per pound of explosive. This means that a pound of guncotton contains enough energy to lift its own weight seventeen miles into the air or to raise 42 and a half tons a foot off the ground. Four hundred thousand pounds of the stuff would contain 13 megawatt-hours of energy, sufficient to heat a family’s dwelling for a year. (sort of amazing that three tons of fire wood and a few more tons of air could accomplish the same trick as 200 tons of explosive!)

D.P.#2. Such are the energy requirements of high velocity flight, that Mr. Verne’s cannon, with it’s 200 tons of guncotton, could at best, impart to it’s ten-ton bullet a velocity of 1050 feet per second, less than a third of the 36,000 feet per second specified in the book, as necessary to reach the moon. That doesn’t mean that space gun-type launchers are inherently ridiculous. It just means they won’t likely be deep holes in the ground charged with low-grade explosive.

I finished reading From The Earth To The Moon just in time to go to camp. Each year, students from grades Four and up, along with several teachers and other staff persons, went to Camp Magruder. Several hours drive down the Oregon Coast. The typically stay from Wednesday to Friday, of some week in early April. The camp had riding mules, rowboats, beach frontage and access to extensive woodland. Before leaving school, we were all given green or gold ribbons that divided us up into teams. Through the next few days we’d compete at every opportunity for the sake of our teams, through races, beach combing, tug-of-war, cabin cleanliness, sticking with ones buddy, singing louder than the other group, whatever. On the second evening of our stay, at the Campfire, we’d have initiations for Green Feathers, (having nothing to do with Green Team.) For a week or so prior to camp, first-timers, like myself, had to wear on our heads, cottage cheese containers with elastic chin straps and a single green feather taped on the front. We were threatened with a group paddling if we didn’t keep our hats on. I never saw that happen, but some campers were rumored to wear their green feathers even to bed.

Come to think about it, I was required to swear not to divulge what the initiation was, so I can’t in good conscience tell you, but I survived. After the initiation, Mr. Olson told a story about The Beasty, concerning a loathsome monster which seemed to be part dragon and part slug. The story varied from year to year and usually managed to include thinly-veiled references to campers present this year, especially newcomers.

After we’d emerged intact from our initiation, former novices were crowned with full headdresses made of scarves and multi-colored feathers. Then other awards were passed out. These awards were mostly verbal in nature. I was chosen camp Batman because of my enthusiastic and haphazard manner of crossing a field of driftwood, separating the camp proper and the beach. I was also named camp philosopher with a specialty in giving lectures on vanity. In the interteam heckling, which went along with the competition, I’d decreed that anyone having gold as a team color, must be inherently vain and arrogant. (Dad’s term Plutocrat would have fit here.)

Though the golds triumphed, I remember my first year at camp, (unlike the next,) to be quite a lot of fun and even validating for me. The session was made even more exciting because I was falling in love.

As we were leaving the bus on our first afternoon at camp, I noticed an unclaimed duffle bag next to me with a Braille tag, reading Ellen F. And no, I didn’t rifle it or even feel inside. Still I thought of it as a sort of omen. On another occasion, when members of several classes were involved in a school performance rehearsal, some of we Sixth graders were sent to Mrs. Rinquist’s room to do our studying. I found by feeling the heading on a paper in the desk that I was using, I found that I was in Ellen Flourie’s seat.

Ellen was part Mexican and came from California. I don’t know exactly what first attracted me to her. Perhaps it was her slight accent. Perhaps curiosity. There were rumors about boys asking her questions about sex and related subjects which she would evidently answer. No, I didn’t participate in any of these sessions. I knew Ellen was several years older than me, but she behaved pretty much like a fifth-grade girl would be expected to.

One very special evening, Ellen and I found ourselves alone together back behind the stacks of books in study hall. We talked through the entire period. As an older girl, she lived in cottage One and Ellen asked me to walk home with her that evening. It would be several months before I’d have an adequate opportunity to tell her how I felt about her, but I’d at least made a fair introduction.

Jim Eccles, who was one of our day students, meaning his family lived in Vancouver and he went home every night, had a birthday dance and invited a bunch of us from Cottage Three to the party. Originally we were supposed to bring dates, but I think house parents intervened and girls from Grades Five through Seven were selected according to some dubious formula to attend also. Ellen was not there, but all of the girls in my class were, together with most of them in our PE category.

This was the first time I’d danced with anyone while not in a class exercise of some kind and I found it was quite a lot of fun. Cheryl Walker and I danced seven or eight dances together and I had multiple dances with several other girls. I made sure before leaving, that I’d danced at least once with every girl there, including Jimmy’s older sister and with Audrey Jacques, with whom I run the ill-fated melon race in Fifth Grade. Audrey was something like fourteen inches taller than me. "I hope this isn’t a fast song," she commented, "or this is going to look pretty cute!"

The Lions Club, which collectively devotes a lot of its effort to blind and deaf children, had organized that Spring, a performance tour by bus, for a group of students from W.S.B. who were gifted in tumbling and gymnastics, singing and instrumental music. I wasn’t much in any of these categories. I did okay in Chorus but wasn’t outstanding. I’d been taking piano all year, under protest, but had unintentionally botched my only recital so far. In Gym I was just passable, being smaller than all but one of the girls and though strong enough in my hands and wrists, not very coordinated and quite fearful of falling.

All of this is several ways of saying that I would not be part of an elite team of tumblers, dancers, Singers and musicians who would tour the State under the Auspices of Washington Lions Clubs toward the end of this year. As their time of departure drew nearer, music and PE classes for the rest of us grew sparser. Sometimes classes were canceled outright. Sometimes we were left on our own and told in effect to just keep busy. Such was the case one Tuesday night, when we should normally have been at Wrestling Practice. Mr. Anderson, the only Gym teacher on duty that night, was working with gymnists in the outer practice area where dancing, trampolining and high bar exercises were done. Our wrestling team was told to go into the mat room where we always worked out and competed, and to do something. I don’t believe the Something was ever specified.

One of the big guys, Gary Thomas or Earl Writsma, proposed that we play with one of the cage balls. Now a cage ball was something I’d never seen or heard of before coming to Vancouver. It is a rubber ball, three to four feet in diameter, inflated with air and covered with a canvas outer layer or sheath. At a guess, a cage ball would weigh about 20 pounds. On my first visit to the school, I asked what one did with such a ball and was playfully told by one of the instructors, "When one of the little kids like you gets smart with us, we put you in there, pump it up again and bounce you around the gym."

There was a number of engaging games we played with the big balls, for the sake of visitors, such as rolling them in relays, setting up obstacle courses with them or passing them from player to player while laying on our backs. When sent bouncing by testosterone-ridden adolescents however, a cage ball could turn into an object fully capable of knocking one to the ground or causing serious neck injury.

On the Tuesday night in Question, someone had decreed that most of us were to crawl under the wrestling mat, while a few of the boys took turns throwing the ball at the mat and onto us. I guess it was somebody’s idea of fun. Even under the covering mat, being slammed by the huge ball wasn’t any picnic.

I had a considerable degree of claustrophobia as a child. I still don’t relish over tight confinements but in those days I would panic even in close wrestling holds. Laying under a heavy mat, crowded in with a lot of other sweaty bodies, presented a similarly problematic situation. No consideration was taken of ventilation and I was urged to crawl ever further under the mat as others crowded in behind me. I became very conscious of the odor of everyone’s feet and the overall impression was like being in a common, premature grave. I started to freak and said I had to get out.

"Stop you guys," Gary Thomas yelled. "David’s coming out." Whether they hadn’t heard or just didn’t want to listen, the two boys who were currently It, kept throwing cage balls. By now there were two or more balls in the play. I was struck and knocked down several times. (We recall of course, that everyone in our class was of sufficiently limited vision to be attending a school for the blind, and there was no adult supervision present.) I knew I’d get in trouble if I left the wrestling room. There was a little side chamber where equipment was kept and I was heading for that, but the balls kept hitting me. In desperation, I lay down against the base of the cinderblock wall, trying to protect my head from the on rushing cage ball. Almost at once I realized my mistake. I’d lain down with my face to the wall. The ball bounced off my back a couple of times, then hit me squarely in the back of the head, driving my nose into the wall.

This was the last time in my life I’ve cried aloud because of pain and since it was going to be my last crack at it, I turned on the sirens good. The whole building heard me! Within seconds, Mr. Anderson was very much in charge, washing my face in the office sink and phoning the nurse at home to say that I probably had a broken nose. It turned out I hadn’t but that diagnosis waited upon a visit with the Dr. on call and subsequent X-rays.

In reliving this incident, which I just have, unfortunately I’m feeling again the frustrated anger that always comes upon me when reviewing this memory and others like it. Nowadays I can imagine myself calling out the name of the instructor in a sharp, strident voice, declaring that the game is getting too dangerous. Now I would simply absent myself from the vacinity, threatening to talk with police, an attorney and the local papers if things aren’t brought under control immediately and permanently. Back then, such wasn’t an option. You didn’t challenge authority in that fashion, especially there. If a game was too dangerous, it usually turned out there was something wrong with you for not being able to stand up to it. At the moment, the paramount concern for everyone was not to disturb Mr. Anderson who was whipping our team into shape so they could impress the Lions, then Maybe the Lions would buy more stuff for our school. Not that I wanted anything particularly, but the school definitely did.

I’d been injured in gym before. Once when wrestling with Terry Atwater, I’d come down hard on my left elbow, making one of those purplish eggs which result from pooled blood under the skin. Mrs. Barns, seeing my elbow, remarked that if I were her kid, she’d raise hell with the school. Next morning I told her if she disliked my elbow, she should take a look at my knee!

I was trying to turn a cartwheel, at which I was inept and never have learned, though I can do forward and backward flips well enough. Mr. Anderson gave me a sideways shove to help my impetus and I came down with full force on my left knee, which became a wonder to behold, according to the guys in the locker room.

Now that he’d told me I probably had a broken nose, Mr. Anderson, rather than taking any responsibility for the event, merely recited a litany of other kids who’d been injured over the last couple of years and who’d taken it better than me. Chief among these was a multiple accident two winters previous at Mount Hood, when four students, all of them totally blind, had been sent down a snowy hill on a tobogan sled. Donna Boddington from my class, who was in front, broke her nose against the ski Lodge wall when the sled veered into it. Jim Eccles had suffered two broken legs and the others had sustained less notable injuries.

Mrs. Beusistoe and Dr. Vaughan examined me for about an hour, concluding that X-rays were in order. Mrs. Beausistoe took out my plastic eye and put it in her cupboard, because the eye might stretch the skin of my nose too much? So I went around for three days without an eye and no patch or anything to cover the socket, (though the lid did droop over it.) Dr. Vaughan gave me a quarter for being good, telling me not to put it in my mouth. For once, the nurse came to my defense, saying I was "what? In Sixth Grade now?" Surely I was old enough to keep money out of my mouth.

Mrs. Beausistoe called Lois the next day, saying that I’d been wandering around the gym and had sort of bumped into this big ball and had hurt my nose. She said "We need to take bring him in and take some pictures of his nose." Lois felt talked down to and was furious.

I went in for X-rays the following day and had a fascinating conversation with the technician who told me about all aspects of the process I was undergoing and about the discovery of X-rays by the physicist Roentken. She suggested that I find out all I could about lead, since it was such a fascinating metal in so many ways, including being a shield against radiation. I followed up her suggestion, reading what I could on the subject and went on to study about other metals, such as tungsten, zinc, and titanium, because of their uses in rockets or rocket fuels.

Though my nose was unbroken, I came away with a deviated septum. My nose being permanently out of joint so to speak, gives me a rakish rather piratical aspect, but doesn’t do much for breathing!

Dr. Vaughan wrote in his report that my right eye had been removed shortly after birth and my left eye was obviously going to need to be removed eventually as well. Since I still had some light perception in my left eye, Mom was understandably panicked and I was rushed to Seattle to be seen by Dr. Topinka, who’d done my surgeries several years before. He found no evidence to indicate that Dr. Vaughan had any concept of what he was talking about.

Since those of us who had our own sleeping bags had brought them to school to use at camp, Greg, myself and some of the other kids, sometimes prevailed upon the reigning house parent to let us sleep out on the lawn, sometimes even on school nights. This gave more opportunities to share ideas, confidential talk, books and late night radio shows. By now I’d pretty well decided the best way to get to the moon would be by using solar-electric panels to vaporize mercury, at very high pressure and temperature, exhausting it as rocket thrust. I considered that an airplane fuselage might be made into a spaceship hull.

About the last of my fantasy spaceship ideas was Pinotinum, a mythical radioactive element, refined from the wine of the fictional Duchy of Grand Fenwick. In his delightful book, The Mouse On The Moon, Albert Wibberley posited such an element, able to generate high-velocity rocket thrust at low temperatures. A Scrap Jupiter C. rocket from the U.S. is converted into a spaceship and Grand Genwick, whose army still used longbows, beats Russia and America to the moon, (though just barely.) This book left me still fascinated with chemical reactions which might produce phenomenal and unexpected results, but I’d pretty much given up on antigravity of the Wellsian variety. I’d resigned myself to the notion that rockets would be the way to space for the foreseeable future.

Greg, Dan and I had been making plans to visit during the summer and I’d called John Zimmerman on the phone from Ruth’s house to discuss when I might see him again. Ron had paid for the call since John was long distance from Both Lois’s and Ruth’s, and this was the first time I’d talked to my school chum for quite a while.

It seemed only a couple of weeks before school was out, when I got a letter from Mom, saying plans had changed. Though we’d been planning to return to Seattle this year, it had been decided to remain another year in Ann Arbor. My family would be coming west for a visit, toward the end of June and would stay a couple of weeks. Then I could have the choice of going to Aunt Margaret’s with Mom and Chris for the next few weeks, or going to Michigan with Dad. Mom stated that I’d probably choose to go to Michigan, because we’d bought a 30-foot trailer which was parked on a lake outside Ann Arbor. A very nice neighbor lady named Mrs. Clark had agreed to watch me, so I could swim all day if I wanted. (As if I had nothing better to do with my time than swim all day.)

Lois gave me a very nice birthday party with cake and ice cream, then Deanne Belleman, (then Lois’s best girlfriend,) gave me another party. I received Flubber, a delightful modeling compound from Lois as well as a James Bond pistol which shot plastic bullets by means of a spring mechanism. Deanne gave me one of those cutely ugly troll dolls which I had for many years.

Mom sent me a Gemini Space Craft model. Tony, one of the boys across the street, who’d given me the Treasure Island Record when I was Ten, helped me put it together. The ship had hatches which opened and astronauts in space suits to lay on the little contour couches. Keith Hackett, Lois’s dad, came for a visit shortly thereafter and we had a good talk about rockets and spaceships.

I went to the Library and got some Braille books to occupy myself. One of these, Locky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter, was my first meeting with Dr. Isaac Asimov.

The family arrived eventually as promised and it turned out Dad’s stay would be extended somewhat. There was an airline attendants’ strike that summer and American passenger flights were effectively grounded for several weeks. Since I’ve had a great deal to do with feminists since the time of my becoming nominally an adult, it’s interesting to recall that according to some authorities, the modern wave of the women’s movement, began among flight stewardesses, in the early sixties. These women were forbidden to marry, ordered to wear girdles, selected for physical attractiveness and dismissed because of age. I got to know quite a few of them during my years of jetting back and forth from Michigan to Washington and a movement couldn’t ask for finer foremothers!

At last, Dad and I caught an Air Canada flight out of Vancouver B.C. We flew by night, across Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba. A man sitting next to us, asked if this was the first time I’d flown. I explained I’d been across the country several times. He said, "Sounds like you live the life of Riley." I didn’t think that having to be away from my family much of the year was all that much fun, and said as much.

We switched to bus in Toronto, Ontario and I was fascinated by the bilingual announcements over the P.A. in the terminal and bus depot. We rode to Windsor, where Uncle Bob met us and drove us through the Detroit River Tunnel, to his house.

Here began one of the most interesting parts of my later childhood, if not the most well considered. After about the first day, I decided that Mrs. Clark was an over controlling shrew with an irritating kid. Joey was three or so I believe. I didn’t need a summer with supervision like that. The next day I drove the thirty miles into Ann Arbor with Dad and spent that day and most of the rest of my summer at the dry cleaners, hobnobbing with Jean, our presser, Al, our dry cleaner, Ken our assistant manager and Sharon, our counter clerk. Many of the songs from that summer are engraved upon my memory from endless repetitions over our plant radio. Downtown, Summer in the City, Sweet Pea, Petticoats Wide, Wild Thing!

I had some flirty conversations on the phone with Cathy Roberts from fifth Grade, she of the Braille lessons and magic tricks. Hal and I got together several times. Likewise I met with some of the other Science Club members and we renewed our plans to build a rocket, even if not a manned one.

Dad and I drove on weekends to see Bob, Verne and the relatives in Ohio. My cousin by marriage, Eddie Middleton, gave me my first whole beer. Beer in Michigan and Ohio was about twice as potent as that sold then in Washington and I still love Strose and Old Dutch.

Dad had bought a new Mustang ragtop that year and we’d get it up to 100 MPH on the freeway outside of town. After work we’d often stop off at the Stadium Tavern in Ann Arbor, for cheeseburgers and cold drinks. A burger was a big bun with a generous grilled patty and a glob of melted cheese. You could have a huge slice of red Bermuda onion if you wanted and squirt on your own mustard and catsup. Pop in the bottle. If you wanted anything fancier, go to a restaurant!

As in Ohio, kids could enter Michigan taverns if accompanied. Dad of course, always drank beer. He told me once, not without self satisfaction, that he’d been known to put away an entire case in a day. I drank three entire beers while I was with Dad that summer, none of them given me by him. My intake was pretty well limited though and I never became drunk. It was so hot back there though, that I was constantly drinking pop, Koolade, water, whatever I could get my mouth on. At Cunningham’s Drug, seven doors down from our business, you could get a foot-long hotdog for a quarter and a double chocolate coke for 24-cents. Some days I recorded as much as two gallons of various liquids going down my parched gullet.

Evenings we’d often go to visit Marty and Ruth Selle, a couple of Dad’s drinking buddies basically, though we’d met Ruth when she worked in the laundrymat next to our plant. Marty Lent Dad and me a lot of Country albums which we’d play after arriving home. Around midnight or later, we’d often go swimming, or in Dad’s case, wading, in the bathtub-like lake.

Sometimes we’d stay late in town and play poker. I sat in on some games, once splitting a $5.00 pot with a guy who wanted to help me buy model rocket materials. When I told Jean, our presser about this, she said "You’re playin’ poker now? Looks like you’re gettin’ to be a regular little man."

There was a Gay-nineties-style (1890s), pizza restaurant in town called Bimbo’s. They sold square pizzas and peanuts in the shell, encouraging patrons to throw the shells on the floor. They hosted some of the loudest, live ragtime music I’d ever heard. Bimbo’s also served Bach beer, which looked like coke. One of the waitresses liked me and always gave me extra cokes for free when I came in. Generally I enjoyed the place, but one night when Dad and I were there with the Selles, we just stayed on and on. Ruth thought it was funny to pour beer in my glass when my coke was gone and if I didn’t drink it, my waitress friend wondered what was wrong with the coke? Unlike now, I used to be able to hold a tremendous amount of liquid in my bladder and the fluids didn’t bother me, but the noise was beginning to take a toll.

I’ve never been one for loud rock music or loud much of anything. In those days my ears seemed to be even more delicate I guess and the noise seemed to have gone on for hours! I kept saying I wanted to get out of there and the adults kept saying "just a little while" and "just a little while more."

Finally I grew hysterical and we got up to leave. I had to stand by the cash register, blubbering my eyes out while we paid up, then we went over to Jean’s birthday party. I had to parade through her house, still bawling my head off, then hid in the bathroom with people tapping on the door every so often, until I regained control. This was one of the most humiliating things I’d ever endured, even as a child.

I emerged eventually though and began having a rather good time, dancing with a couple of the women at the party and exchanging dirty jokes. Everybody else were drinking like fishes.

On the way back to Marty and Ruth’s, Dad ran the Mustang into a fire hydrant, then into a tree. No great damage, though I believe he had to have the fender pulled out again to keep the tire from scraping every time he turned left. Mercifully, we stayed that night at the Selles’.

I liked Marty a lot. We made some model rockets together, one of paper and match heads, another a spent rifle shell with a couple of firecrackers in it. Marty and I had a running joke that we were going to fly to the moon by eating ten pounds of beans then going out and sitting on a board. (As someone who holds a degree in Aerospace Engineering, I can now state authoritatively that strictly speaking, the board is unnecessary, though ground effect would provide some slight assistance at take-off.)

Dad hit me once that summer. I’d been telling people I was a genius, which was so of course, but impolite to state publicly. (My analysis, not Dad’s.)

Mom and Chris arrived in mid-August, effectively putting an end to fun, rowdy evenings, stops at the tavern and Midnight swims. One of the first things Mom asked me when she got home was whether Dad had been drunk when he dented his car. Dad drank most of the time after work and I didn’t know when he was drunk or not. Besides, a question like that can have unfortunate consequences however one answers it, so I said no. Everyone else she questioned seemed to disagree with me, so I was now lying and covering up for my dad. Well, maybe I was.

We were spending more evening hours at home now and we met several of the families who lived near us in the Shady Lake Trailer Park. There was a boy named Gordie with whom I worked on augmented model cars made to look like something Bond or Batman might drive. There was a girl named Cindy, a year or so older than Christine, who was the only sighted person I’d met so far who talked about reading A Wrinkle In Time. Cindy and her parents turned out to be my family’s next door neighbors in the Fall. Michigan law allowed trailers to be occupied only May through October and all the residents of our lakeside community also kept houses in town.

One night, not long before Summer’s end, I was laying in my bed on the trailer floor. Chris had the couch. She had it first and would feel insecure if made to alternate, I slept therefore on two cushions which Mom pinned together every night, but never stayed so till morning. My legs hung over the thing and it was uncomfortable as hell. I said I’d just as soon put blankets directly on the floor, but of course, this was a ridiculous suggestion. Mom was this evening, feeling lonely or playful or something. I’m not inferring anything sinister in this. She got under the covers with me, which wasn’t all that unusual for this time of my life. She remarked that there was a large hole in the side of her panties, which she showed me for some silly reason. Still there wasn’t anything all that notable. She’d been preparing for bed herself and may have been missing me in advance since I’d be leaving again in only a few days. I hadn’t had a

huge amount of privacy in the years I’d been growing up. Mom had occasionally shown me night gowns she’d bought, sometimes jerking my underwear down when I was climbing the ladder to the top bunk of the bed Chris and I had used. Until this year she’d taken me into the women’s Restroom occasionally when we were travelling together. Not so much I think, that she feared perverts in the men’s can, but she was terrified that I’d put my hand on an unclean surface in a public facility. We’d recently shared a bed when visiting relatives

Mom started talking about how pretty soon I’d be back at school and in Seventh Grade. I said the only reason I wanted to go back to Vancouver was because of my girlfriend. She asked me how old Ellen was and I said I thought she was 19. Mom said categorically, that she couldn’t attend a State School if she was that old. Then she told me that Mexican people were sneaky and often dangerous and looked greasy. (Mother-son intimacies--.)

Having lived more or less as an adult for the past several weeks, it was difficult for me to return to the rather smothering, exaggerated strictures of artificially prolonged childhood that Mom tried to impose. I’d started sweating under my arms and insisted on a can of Right Guard to take back to school with me. I used the stuff to a ridiculous degree. This would be my last time of innocence when I could slip from an almost infantile protectedness to the strivings after cosmetic adolescence.

Sometime toward the later part of this summer I’d had a dream about a planned stay alone on an island and how I’d abandoned the place, leaving behind that which I’d found there, unopened.

There’d been a large box, like my toy chest, but big enough to hold a sleeping bag and a pillow on its lid. People in my dream who’d come along to help me ashore, said a woman had lived here for a while and had considered her self to be the queen of the island. About a year ago, I wrote the following poem about this dream.

Island In The Dream

By Glynda Shaw

Jutting from the waves, more castelade than beach;

Yet clutching Crusoe dreams I strove to reach her summit plain,

By dint of toe and clawing fingertip, .

At last, my vision gained, her lofts attained

and space on which to stand,

I found her desolate and empty-seeming,

Save for a wooden chest, Exposed to my dream-mind’s eye,

With length to hold dry bedding and breadth on which to lie.

Yet no fields at hand, no flocks or hidden caves

About which island tales are writ

So quitting thence, most sorrowfully, I cursed ill winds that carried me

so near to cherished fantasy, yet left me

Lacking where with all to try my hand at schemes I’d long possessed.

Now, decades having passed, when I, my memories gleaning,

Revisit this locale of childhood dreaming,

I can’t but wonder how differently I’d be deeming

this dream-scape exile, so dreary and unblest’

If I’d but sought for truer meaning

And found out what was hid within the chest!

Another poet who heard me read this, suggested the rather psycho-analytic message my dream appeared to hold. There was something, perhaps several things which I was not yet ready to accept.

Summer was at an end and I took leave of my family for the first time without weeping. Mom said I was an angel. That almost turned on the waterworks, but not quite. We said good-bye and see you at Christmas. Once again I was winging my way back across the country.