A Height Reviewed 17.

I finished Fall Semester, 10^th Grade with five As and One C, the C in French. Madame Dannonmiller was a fine person and a credible teacher, who didn’t give away easy grades. Near the beginning of Spring Semester, I’d been invited to join The Honor Society. By mid-term I’d pulled my French grade up to a B.

The second half of Tenth Grade followed along as the early fall had promised. The major difference was that I’d tired of Ceramics Class, which had turned out to be a holding pen for half the Juvenile Delinquents in school. Though I still loved working with ceramics, I dropped the class and enrolled with Mrs. Steinhauser in Writing Lab, a class usually reserved for juniors. Mrs. Steinhauser encouraged us to read a good deal, both in and out of class and held discussion groups on current events during the first portion of each period. A girl named Margot took minutes and read those from the previous day at the beginning of each new meeting. Afterward we worked our way from reexperiencing essay to formal essay to short story and play; via aphorism and Haiku to poetry. Everybody had to try everything and we critiqued one another’s work with a follow-up from Mrs. S.

I’d entered the class mostly interested in submitting essays on science and science fiction stories. My reexperiencing essay was fairly well received. It was about the day Marty; Stan and I were sent to the Principal’s office in Fourth Grade, told in my nine-year-old voice. I still tend to get high marks for stories about children, from their viewpoints. Most of the rest of my prose though, weren’t all that well accepted. My essays appeared to be stilted.

My short story concerned a colony aboard an asteroid made from an asteroid. This was an idea used by several authors, including A. Bertram Chandler, Frederick Pohl and Poul Anderson. It was original to me though even if not predating these folks. The maguffin of my story was a rebellious younger generation growing up in space and desirous of staying there. They didn’t desire to colonize the destination planet as per mission design, but to go wandering through the galaxy, picking up new asteroids as needed. The vigilant Ship’s Police foiled the revolution.

Though my story earned me an A from Mr. Foulk, my other English Teacher, who liked everything I wrote, Mrs. Steinhauster felt my story line was underdeveloped, dialogue weak and technical details overabundant. She was not a science fiction person, (though she’d tried it! having read one book by Arthur C. Clarke and another by Ray Bradbury.) She thought all SF stories were supposed to have an eerie quality about them.

My play was subject to similar criticism. It was so thin that I don’t even remember exactly what it was about, something concerning a boy, a girl and a contrived and very silly flirtation.

Surprisingly enough, at least to me, my poem was quite well received. Surprising because the examples of poetry Mrs. Steinhauser had been showing us as good examples were very different from the structured, usually rhyming verses I’d been writing for years. I found out almost by accident, that I could write the image-rich, cliche-avoidant free verse that most of the older students produced.

The Naked Cross was a critique of over-ritualized religion, using the metaphor of a dress that is being stripped of frills and ornamentation, washed clean of wine stains, but allowed to retain a celluloid brooch which has sentimental value. The cross, now sanded free of "gilt", remains like two bones bleaching in the sun. The exhortation "Don’t ask me for advice about your clothing," ends the poem, giving it that sardonic, rather cynical touch so characteristic of the late ‘60s-early ‘70s.

Even while I flushed with pride over the A Grade my poem had earned me, along with the invitation to submit of to Pawprints, our 32-page literary Mag. I was a little irked at myself. I was not a cynical person. I was quite passionate actually I looked dimly on the Nixon’s-in-charge-so-the-world’s-going-to-hell! banter of most classmates. The bluster often hid, and not too well, a sort of childish Naivete that if a sufficient outcry could be raised, everyone would learn just to be nice to one another. I was pro-Vietnam, highly patriotic, a self-labeled Conservative. Though I valued most of what Mrs. Steinhauser taught, I did get irritated with her avowed leftist views and her arrogant, (I thought,) assumption that all truly-educated persons and decent students, must necessarily subscribe to rather knee-jerk liberal doctrines.

One of the reasons Mrs. Steinhauser valued me was my success in helping to get the 800 copies of Pawprints we printed each year, sold to students, teachers and the general public. In all I’d spend five semesters in Writing Lab, much of this time probably wasted I suppose, but at the time it seemed crucial to pick up every writing course I could. I pulled an A in W.L.#1 and kept the record through to number Five.

The other major strand of my school experience was Mr. Hall’s Physical Science class, that high-interest, low-difficulty course that ran the gamut from physics to psychology. I think most of my new friends actually came out of this class. There was Link, from Florida, who was an SF buff, like me, and gave me my first handful of Dorito chips. Link planned to build a concrete boat with his uncle and sail around the world. Afterward he intended to build his own plane and be a bush pilot in Alaska. He was already taking flying lessons and the forms for the boat had evidently been built. Jeff sat next to me. He was half-Japanese, a police scout and would later go to Vietnam and even worked for a time as a mercenary.

Caesar was Russian-born and came to us from Istanbul. He spoke with a very heavy accent but tried to make me think he was someone else. "How dit you know it vas me, Dafe?" Caesar went on to study Architecture at the University of Washington.

Probably my best friend in class was Ernie Langley. He was great fun! Ernie was very much interested in drama and had even played a girl’s part once, that being somewhat of a milestone it seemed, for boys interested in acting. He was also skilled in karate and had a great sense of humor and sense of harmless mischief, like me.

Ernie agreed to help me launch a rocket I’d made. It was a foil-lined paper cone with a smaller cone inserted, small end backward, as a nozzle. The bigger end of the cone which was the body, was crimped, folded, stapled and taped to form four fins around the base of the rocket. The fins also held the nozzle in place. The rocket was packed with 300 matchheads for fuel. It was the last explosive-powered rocket I’ve built to date and flew about 25 feet.

Ernie and I both had a crush on Cathy Roberts, a rather lofty but friendly Junior. I brought Cathy candy and flowers to class. Ernie said he’d have to pick a lot of dandelions to catch up! The rivalry was friendly and all in fun.

For a while I kept in touch with Cathy’s friend, Martha, who gave me her phone number. At the Puyallup Fair, just after my junior year began, I won a sawdust-stuffed doggy by throwing darts. The booth-keeper slapped the balloons for me and I actually popped enough to win. Martha was impressed when I presented the dog to her.

In class, Mr. Hall encouraged us to do at least one project per semester. One of these involved reading a book that questioned social conventions or mores. One such book was Lord Of The Flies by William Golding. Another was Crime and Punishment by Dostievsky. The option I selected was Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. This book antedated The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, but was much more radical in concept. I was very much under the influence of Stranger for several years. Even today the insights of mars-tutored Michael Valentine Smith and Jubal Harshaw are still of value to me.

The second semester project was to involve a report on some area of science or technology of particular interest. Mine was a pencil and paper study of fuel requirements for various interstellar flights at different mean velocities and with different payloads and mission plans. I didn’t yet know as much about relativity as I thought I did, but no one checked my calculations. Mr. Hall thought my project was creative.

Several lifetime interests began in or as a result of this class. One day I asked Mr. Hall what you got when you burned alcohol with oxygen. He told me "Carbon dioxide and water." Then he asked if I’d been reading some organic chemistry. I said I had not but had been wondering if one were in a spacecraft, using alcohol and liquid oxygen as propellants, what else could one use the propellants for, besides propelling the craft? Mr. Hall said "Ah—" in a wise, professorial way, then went on to the next issue.

What I had in mind was an idea incomplete and even incorrect so far as it went. I’d heard talk of devices astronauts used to "turn carbon dioxide back into breathable air." Of course nothing of the kind is done. Carbon dioxide is chemically removed from cabin air and replaced by liquid oxygen of some other source. I didn’t know this however. I thought there might be some efficient way to remove carbon from all ready-breathed cabin air and use the oxygen over, by feeding it to the engines. Another option might be to burn alcohol and oxygen, generate power, use the water resulting from the reaction for drinking and bathing and turn the carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen. In either case, the propellant might do double duty I thought. None of these ideas would have worked. The seed of an idea was forming however about a life-support/propulsion combination. Perhaps a system could start with a fuel and oxidizer, possibly with other chemicals added, to generate energy, provide for life support needs, then put the energy back into waste products, such as spent air and gray water, to produce rocket thrust. I thought further about a spacecraft that was part machine and part living organism, which might use chemicals necessary for cleaning air, or even products of human metabolism to re grow and repair damaged portions of it’s hull, countering erosion by meteors. It would be a couple of years before I could make the first tentative designs for such a system. It would be much longer before the concept looked very practical, but the Biodyne, my name for the life-support/propulsion system,) could significantly reduce the cost of Earth Mars or Earth-asteroid missions in the near future.

Mr. Hall read to us a good deal as well. One day we heard a fascinating story about a strange infestation aboard a Soviet spacecraft, of insects of a strange, alternative biology. Another day he read us the highly suspenseful prologue to Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain. He also recommended to me, a book called The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon Ratray Taylor.

Both of these later books were significant to me in specific ways. Andromeda Strain was an exciting story, bearing all the earmarks of a good scientific adventure, including interesting and informative asides concerning present and future technology. In one of these asides a project proposal (evidently under consideration by NASA) was discussed, to build artificial analogs of biological functions, including the ability to reproduce. Arthur Clarke in Profiles Of The Future, had mentioned that the first man to prove that a machine could reproduce itself, had committed suicide. This presumably was British mathematician and early AI authority, Alan Turing who was subjected to government-mandated hormone therapy in an effort to cure his homosexuality. The idea of machines, which could copy themselves, was a very powerful one. Self-replicating systems form the basis of much speculative space studies and may be a critical link in interstellar colonization. If a comparatively small Seed Device could be landed upon a planet or asteroid to extract elements from local rock, soil or seawater and make copies of itself, we might grow energy or transportation grids, mining systems or a ready-made robotic labor force. If the system worked at all, a worst case scenario would give us an endless supply of spare parts.

The biological Time Bomb, published around 1969, was a survey of the far-reaching developments on the horizon of biomedical research. Included were clones, genetic engineering, artificial organs, brain enhancement, robots, human-machine hybrids such as cyborgs. All of the furor over human cloning, genetically tailored organisms and much more was anticipated in the stimulating and sometimes frightening volume.

For me, one of the most fascinating suggestions, though merely a general remark, concerning human amplifiers, (devices worn to enhance human strength speed or sensitivity,) was the following. Mr. Taylor pointed out that it seemed unreasonable to ask an astronaut to get into a cumbersome spacesuit, then climb into a cramped spacecraft. It might be possible to make the spacecraft also the astronaut’s space suit. What he presumably meant by this, was a small spacecraft might be provided with mechanical limbs, controlled by the limbs of the astronaut inside. electro-mechanical legs or other motive apparatuses could move the craft about on the surface of the moon while sensor-implanted gloves on artificial arms could transmit tactile information back to the hands of the astronaut operator. What this looked like to me, was my Fifth-Grade concept of a spacesuit used as a spacecraft. A human-shaped capsule I reasoned, would allow an astronaut to avoid claustrophobia, since arms and legs could move quite freely. The astronaut would be "wearing" about the lightest and most compact space capsule it would be possible to build for human occupancy. The amount of fuel and hardware necessary to land it on the moon, or even launch it from earth, would be minimal. I’d develop this concept quite a bit over the years.

At home, things seemed to have settled down to a considerable degree. Dad was often drunk, but this was nothing new. Though Mom kept threatening to leave Dad, Nobody really believed her. I don’t really think Mom did herself, except as a long-range possibility.

Our dry cleaning plant eventually failed, leaving us in quite a lot of debt. Dad went back to driving truck sometime around the end of my Ninth-grade year. I believe he was driving swing shift for a while. I recall a time when Mom, Chris and myself were at home together in the evenings, while Dad had the only car. Once every couple weeks or so, the three of us took the bus to Lake City, for dinner at a little bakery-restaurant. I enjoyed buying a half pound or so of jelly beans or redhots, or horehound candy to eat while reading or writing. Mom and I would check out books for both of us. She checked out mainly gardening books. I went through the card catalogues, searching for books by Asimov, Clarke or Heinlein. These later books generally went largely unread. Perhaps I’d get Mom to read two or three chapters out of a given volume and sometimes she found the material interesting. She was quite proud of learning what a catalyst was, for example. I have very fond memories of these trips. I of course, had plenty of talking books as well as books and magazines in Braille, but titles were always popping up, which the library for the Blind couldn’t supply.

Chris was in Sixth Grade this year and terribly anxious about getting a bra. I think it was about a year later when Mom finally bought Chris her first training bras. Mom figured Chris didn’t have enough to put in one. I’ve never seen the sense in this attitude. If a young girl feels better about wearing a bra instead of an undershirt, who gets hurt? I remembered poignantly wanting to wear a belt! (Chapter 2.)

Chris got a friendship ring from one of the boys in her class. Lois declared that she was quite the social butterfly. Chris was doing well in school and seemed to have a lot of friends. Several of her girlfriends hung around the house with fair frequency, sometimes calling up boys on the phone and giggling their heads off.

We were again hearing from some of our relatives who’d been absent for a while, due to our travels to Michigan and back. Uncle Tick was still in Vietnam, but flew across the Pacific every few months, by military transport. I started noticing that he tended to tell the same stories each time he came around and he had a pretty laborious way of explaining things. Still he was a cheerful and pleasant houseguest.

We journeyed to Southern Oregon to visit Chuck Ogden and his family. I’ve discussed them in Chapter 2. I discovered Chuck was a science fiction reader. This gave us even more material to discuss. Kaye was as self-righteous and snotty as ever, though not so openly threatening. She was a High School Senior now, interested in bookkeeping and talked constantly about the various boys who were allegedly vying for her attentions.

A pleasant counterpoint was struck by Vikki, a first cousin to Kaye and 3^rd cousin to me. Vikki was second daughter of Harold, Chuck’s brother, who’d lived in Alaska for the last ten years or so. Harold owned his own airplane and flew it down to Seattle from time to time, for medical appointments or other business. I met Vikki when she and her dad were staying with some other cousins, related both to them and Mom, who lived in Seattle. Vikki and I started talking about school and books, then about science and several hours went by nearly unnoticed. Vikki and I exchanged letters for a couple of years, asking one another’s advice on romantic issues, discussing things we’d read, sharing things we’d written. Mom thought Vikki chattered too much but I suspect Vikki gave her too much competition in that department.

Grandma Seat, who’d lived in Hayden Lake, Idaho most of the years I’d known her, had now relocated to Seattle and was staying with Aunt Katherine and Uncle Lyle. Grandma visited with us fairly often and was very impressed that I could type letters to her and was doing so well in school. She said I was the only boy she had left, the majority of her family having scattered. I spent a lot of time talking to Grandma, learning about the things she’d done when she was young, her nursing work in the mining and logging camps, the early days in the Idaho Territory. I also found out how bossy Grandma could be; though we forgave her a lot because she was so indomitable. She insisted on hanging out laundry and picking blackberries in 90-degree heat.

Once a roll of toilet paper fell in the toilet and Mom set it on the side of the sink to dry. Grandma went into the bathroom a while later and was in there for the longest time--. Presently Mom said, "I wonder if she’s trying to wring out that toilet paper." We both had hysterics!

An interlinked pair of examples of how our family operated generally, involved a debt crisis, simultaneous with the purchase of vacation property. Mom and Dad went to Consumer Credit for help with a mountain of bills they had. Our debt-consolidation counselor placed us on $20 per week grocery money. I recall owning only two pairs of school jeans. Right then, Mom and Dad decided to buy a lot at Lake Cushman, near Hood’s Canal where we’d had so much fun with the Alan’s and the Wards in years past.

Our lot was wooded and within easy walk of both fresh and salt water. Mom and Dad found ways of not reporting all the money Dad made to the credit counselor. Mom’s rationale was that they got along so much better when they were travelling or out camping. Dad still drank but wasn’t quite so obnoxious at such times. It turned out that the credit lady, Mrs. Zito, knew Dan Tonge, one of my blind friends at school. I was directed by my parents not to talk about our lot to Dan, since he might go home and tell his parents and it might get back to Mrs. Zito. Again we were keeping secrets about things that had no business being secret. I think we kept our property for a year or so, then resold it, probably at a loss. The developers sold so many of the lots that pretty soon we felt a lot less crowded just staying home.

Back at school, several significant things were happening, though I didn’t know at the time how significant they’d be. There was the Environmental Movement for instance. The first Earth Day took place during my sophomore year. Unlike the drug scene, anti-Vietnam protests and a lot of other beatup-on-America activities, environmentalism was something behind which I could get. As a young scientist with a strong interest in life-support systems, it was quite apparent to me that continued pollution of air and water, coupled with over use of scarcening resources could lead only to a disastrous end. I wasn’t one of the folks who felt we should dispense with all modern technologies. It seemed to me that the same technologies which were being developed in space R&D should be able to solve earth side problems. I still feel that way. Then as now, I saw fuel cell development as a clean, viable source of electricity and motive power. I envisioned biological methods of producing fuels and materials as well as recycling already used items. I had a dream about Dad and some of his friends, collecting newspapers to redeem for cash. I also thought it reasonable to reuse the metal in aluminum and steel cans. Mom said these ideas were ridiculous, since nobody would bother to gather the garbage items for reuse. That is a problem obviously, but today, many of us are recycling a good deal of the materials we use.

Though I’ve never seen exactly eye to eye with the sociological variety of environmentalists, I hope I’ve never done anything in an engineering way, without considering the environment from which my materials, energy and labor must come and in which my proposed device or system must operate.

Elsewhere it happened earlier perhaps, but it was early in 1970 when I first became aware of the Women’s Movement. Women’s Lib we called it then. This was a time when white, middle class America seemed to be taking a pounding from a number of quarters. Militant Blacks had alienated many Whites who’d started out quite sympathetic to their cause. Youth was criticizing parents and forebears. Hippies were ridiculing the work ethic. Environmentalists were blasting the technology upon which Corporate America depended. Now white, affluent, middle class women seemed to be laying the country’s woes at the door of men specifically, especially white men, and there seemed to be a whole list of additional things wrong with America.

As with most fledgling movements, One heard about feminism first from the hotheads. The media was not very sympathetic to the Women’s Liberation Front and loved to carry stories about bra burnings and lewd behavior of women, proving that they too could be sexually uninhibited.

It’s inappropriate of me really, to describe Feminism in America as a fledgling movement. It actually wove a thread all through United States history and even in the Colonies. It seemed like a new phenomenon though, because like much else, Feminism tends to ride the tide of social radicalism in America which periodically waxes and wanes, peaking in the sixties, Troughing in the mid-eighties. A period of experimentation and revolutionary though gives way to a more reserved, self-conscious period wherein older values are sought. Still there is nothing new about either tendency. Emerson and Thoreau talked about the same stuff as the Hippies. Nineteenth-century industrialists would be echoed by 1960s conservatives. In the same way, Suffragettes of the Teens and Twenties, (post World War I,) would have a lot, though not everything, in common with Women’s libbers of the ‘70s. There seemed however, to be no continuous connection between the two movements in the same way that there seemed to have been a steady build-up of Marx/communist or the interest in space exploration, which had developed slowly in the public mind since world War II and peaked with America'’ landing on the moon. With Feminism of the '‘0s, it was as if a whole collection of new ideas suddenly came from nowhere. Girls were more likely to accept feminist notions than boys, not too surprisingly, but most women I heard speak on the subject at the time, thought of the Movement as rather extreme. When I had the opportunity to hear feminism discussed by two local proponents, the basic platform seemed to me to be quite reasonable, still there was publicly a lot of emotionalizing on both sides of the issues, bordering on hysteria. Feminists were assumed by many to be Lesbians. Antifeminists, (men) were assumed to be woman haters, likely even latent homosexuals.

As a young conservative male, I certainly was not going to embrace any movement which added to the outcry against the Military-Industrial Establishment. I felt the war in Viet Nam was essentially just, if problematic and I felt scientific and industrial progress to be essential for a stable future. Though I found it easy enough to despise anti-war protesters or even unreasonable environmentalists, it was much less easy for me to despise women or girls in general or even in large numbers.

I guess my first connection with the Feminist Movement was related to my own interest in science and space flight. I admitted that I wasn’t all that attracted to the idea of female loggers, firefighters or infantry solders, but I’d had a taste of what it would be like to be told I couldn’t be a scientist. I liked girls generally and liked talking about science. I was therefore, always on the lookout for girls with scientific interests. Science fiction novels of the Forties and Fifties, in which spaceships were crewed entirely by men, rang less and less true or desirable. Spending months or years on an interplanetary voyage, with a same-sex crew, seemed uncomfortable. I wasn’t considering only sex as such. To me, social groups should have both sexes in them.

Some people, notably my mother, have waved away my objections to all-male groups, saying that it has to due with my anxiety about homosexuality, due to my experiences with Paul. This may be so, but I don’t see that it’s particularly relevant. In fact, I was breaking rules to spend time with girls before I ever met Paul. I don’t happen to enjoy all-male companionship in the majority of cases and I see no reason to change that. If Science labs and spaceship crews were my first association with Feminism, it would be a long time before I came to think of myself as a Feminist as such. Changes would occur along that line, but they’d be a while happening.

I experienced a lot of the contemporary political debating in microcosm. Marty Lancer and myself were quite conservative. Pandy Pierce was about as far left as she could figure out how to be. Pandy was extremely outspoken about Vietnam, racial issues, and just about any other sort. I first heard the term Male Chauvinist Pig from Pandy, though not directed at me. Pam Kenny was generally in favor of anything that had to do with drugs, rebellion, acid rock music—and drugs. John Zimmerman generally tried to sit where things seemed the most cool and comfortable, (cool not in a temperature sense.) In our group, that was sometimes hard to judge. We had some good quarrels but generally managed to keep things fairly light, usually by finding someone outside the bus to pick on, or by harassing Mary, the bus driver.

Once we sang Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall, all the way down to zero. By the time we were done with this performance, Mary was sitting on a neighbor’s porch while we finished up in the parked bus. "We’re Done!" we chorused when zero had been reached. Growling angrily Mary climbed back behind the wheel and drove on.

Some other things had come into my life which were quite significant. In January of 1970 I began receiving a Braille subscription to Galaxy Magazine. This was almost my first opportunity to read current science fiction. At this time there usually was a lag of several years between the publication of a new book and it’s transcription into Braille or recording on talking book. Though there was a fair amount of alternative-format science fiction around, the preponderance of it seemed to be anthologies which might bear fairly recent publication dates, but the stories within were much older. The science fiction I’d been reading was typically seven to ten years out of date.

This was a handicap in trying to break into the writing field, in the same way that a fashion designer, frozen in the ‘50s would have difficulty designing clothes for the ‘60s or ‘70s. After my brief by dramatic adventure the November past, I resolved to put the same energy and creativity previously poured into writing for the probably fictitious Billy Holder, into submitting to magazines and anyone else whom I could get to stop and listen.

Galaxy was a steppingstone to upgrading my writing, if not an avenue to immediate publication. I guess most people who’ve been around the SF field for very long, have some notion of a Golden Age. For some it was the Forties, for some the Fifties. Others would pick time periods earlier or later. For me, some of the most interesting stories I ever read were written from about 1969-75. There was still quite a lot of the old-fashioned gadgety writing, so beloved by Editor John W. Campbell. There was also a lot of experimental, controversial stuff going on.

My December, ’69 issue of Galaxy contained the first part of a serialization by a guy named Bass, (possibly William,) called Half Past Human. It was about a far future time when humanity had evolved into a hive-dwelling collective of four-toed nebbishes with a minority of five-toed, altruistic, Real Hujans. Fortunately, the R.H.s had built one or more starships before the four-toes took over. One of these turns up to rescue our heroes. The ending of this story was pleasing to me since my major vision of the future was the building of spaceships in order to get away from the stupidity and detritus of Earth.

I also stepped into the middle of a series of stories by A. Bertram Chandler, about the adventures of Captains John Grimes and his crew. The space yacht commanded by Captain Grimes, featured imaginative and original propulsion, life support and communications equipment. The crew kept being drawn into fascinating analogs of the old days of sail. One such adventure was an encounter with Vanderdecken, the Flying Dutchman of legend, now in command of a light-jamming space schooner.

Robert Silverberg was at this time, writing a series of experimental stories with lots of sex, four-letter words and challenging of contemporary social norms. Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil, about an aged male brain being transplanted into a voluptuous female body was serialized about this time as well. Engaging, thought-provoking stuff. I collected rejection slips for my own stories and articles, but kept trying.

Algis Budrys used to do a book review column for Galaxy. I wrote him a fanish letter, asking his advice about getting starting in the writing business. Mr. Budrys sent me a very thoughtful, two-page letter in which he answered my questions and gave me some good advice. For instance, some comment on one’s manuscript from an editor is better than nothing at all. Also, if one couldn’t write enough, and well enough to derive sufficient income from ones writing, ones writing must suffer from whatever else one must do to earn a living. I noted at the time that Algis was a P.R. man for a Chicago truck dealership.

I also wrote letters to Isaac Asmiov, Vincent Mateka, Editor of Current Science Magazine and other book and periodical editors. By and large I got very kind responses from the folks I thus addressed, though most of my correspondents seemed to feel I’d go through college before publishing much.

I’d pretty much decided by now, to major in Physics or Engineering and minor in English or Journalism. I’d be a scientist-writer, publicizing my own stuff presumably, but able to earn a living in a couple different ways.

What I was after and what I verbalized under the prodding of Mark Johnson, now a superior-acting, low-vision Senior, was to write stories articles and books for a living, investing discretionary funds in projects of a scientific or technical nature. I wanted to work with rockets and hoped to do so in some way that had to do with space travel, but I knew I could start out with toy rockets, model rockets, signaling rockets, small rocket thrusters. Several of the teachers I’d known while growing up, had given the impression that there was a crying need out there for new writers and new inventors. I intended to be both.

Not all of the learning I did during Sophomore year was in my own classes. Three grades took tests in room 110, with the help of Mr. Conroy and several paid student helpers. One might hear a whole range of things going on at a given time, especially during Exam Week. Seniors had a mandatory Health Class, which covered drugs and alcohol, smoking, pregnancy and emergency child-birth, birth-control, marriage issues, death and burial; other topics depending on the teacher. A unit on sexual deviations was common. The single lecture usually covered homosexuality, incest, sex with animals, dead persons, cruel or unusual forms of intercourse, rape. Also covered were transexuality, transvestitism and fetishism. A fair amount of sniggering accompanied the oral adminstration of the test on this unit. I joined in with everybody else, but I learned a couple of things. There was a name for people like me, perhaps more than one. The names were those belonging to sexual deviants.

Through Ninth and Tenth Grades, I’d continued to borrow items of apparel from Mom and my sisters. A friend of mine, who played on the school football team, told me about going to his girlfriend’s house and wearing her underclothes. TV episodes were peppered with half-witty sketches about men or boys needing to disguise themselves as females for a whole range of reasons, or left with female garments as only alternative to nakedness. These ruses were used on programs as dissimilar as Mr. Ed, Mission Impossible, Wagon Train, Red Skelton, Leave It to Beaver and Loredo.

Mr. Hall dealt with a lot of psychological ideas in our class and he was always available to talk about whatever we wanted to discuss. After class one day, (he usually dismissed class early,) I went up to his desk and asked about fetishism and transvestism. Were these things manifestations of homosexuality? Were people like that dangerous? Mr. Hall said he didn’t think a man who liked women’s clothes, even liked to wear women’s clothes was necessarily homosexual, and he might otherwise be a quite normal person. He said he wasn’t sure we’d ever know what caused behaviors like these. He didn’t ask why I came to be interested in this area of human behavior. I’d ask the same questions to a number of other people over the next few years. Most of the time I’d get the information repeated, that homosexuality need not accompany transvestism. At this time, most of us were highly homophobic and it seemed as if even a slight tendency to be attracted to one’s own sex would turn one eventually into a raging queen or dike. My introduction to homosexuality had been very unpleasant and I wanted nothing more to do with it. Still the idea of being somehow different, even set apart, was somehow appealing.

Sometime toward the end of my sophomore and her senior year, Pam Kenny confided to me that she was a Lesbian and I was one of the four or so boys at school whom she liked. The others were studious, well-mannered folks, so I was in good company. I figured Pam’s secret was somewhat bigger than mine, so I mentioned that I might confide a private matter of my own, sometime. She asked me a couple of times over the next week or so, when I was going to tell her whatever it was. One afternoon on the bus, when most of the other kids were gone, Pam and I had a hushed discussion in which I told her I always tried to act like a man but I had transvestite tendencies. She said she thought it was something like that. I tended to joke a fair amount and I think Pam saw through some of my humor. Pam hated dresses and had even said, (jokingly,) that she was going to give me one of hers.

Our family was in the process of selling the dry cleaning plant, but we still had a lot of extra clothing around. Most of these were women’s garments that had come home as alteration projects for Mom to undertake. I found a couple of dresses that fit me quite well. I remember one warm, May evening, after we’d returned from camping, when I tried on a knee-length cotton dress and was nearly caught. I even let Christine see me in several feminine costumes at various times this year. She was somewhat surprised, though not astounded or particularly disturbed. My actions often seemed more significant to me than they did to others. It wasn’t long before Chris was using this new material to taunt me. "Oh, there’s the red dress that David wore." Mom assumed it was just a new form of ribbing, since the whole thing was so different than anything I’d have normally let anyone see me doing.

It wasn’t the naming and defining of transvestism though, which started me trying on dresses for limited periods of time. I’d been intending to do that since after Seventh Grade, but the outer garments available had been either too large or too small. I started writing a novella about a government scientist who returned for a mission in the field, to find his wife at dalliance with a strange man. The scientist killed the interloper and then became a fugitive. Being slim and fair and rather small, he undertook to disguise himself as a woman, in which guise he would spend much of his life. The story never really went anywhere, but was the first of several projects in this general vein.

Early in my sophomore year I met Joe Marshall, who worked with the school district and placed blind and partially sighted graduates in various sorts of employment situations, generally sheltered workshops. As the year progressed I got to know Joe fairly well and he seemed impressed by my writing and my pottery. He asked me if I thought I could teach ceramics. I said I thought so. Joe said they were setting up a summer crafts and recreation program at Community Services for the Blind and were looking for a teacher. Of course I was flattered, though not particularly surprised.

Marty, Jane Pedden, Pandy and several other students also applied for jobs with C.S.B. I was interviewed by Stan Briller, the agency’s assistant Director, who didn’t impress me much. The job I was offered was not a teaching position per se, but more of an all-around, entry level trainee experience. I was offended by this and considered not taking the job. Both my parents were quite work oriented though and said it wouldn’t hurt me to try the job. I agreed. Mom got off some shots about how my family couldn’t tell me anything and they couldn’t change me. Perhaps Mr. Briller was the person who could. This was really a nonproductive thing to say. Though Mom had a point about the work experience itself, she never knew when to let well enough alone. Dad said if I didn’t have anything to do with my summer I’d just sit around the house, wishing I had. Summer for me was a period of intense study as well as writing. The sitting around the house, moping argument might apply to Chris. It never did to me.

I’d work three days a week. During the two-week probationary period, I’d be paid $1.00 per hour, getting a raise to $1.40 after that. Toward the end of our 10-week employment stint, we might get $1.60 per hour. That raise never materialized.

We worked from Nine to Five, with a lunch-hour at twelve, unpaid if we didn’t work through it, so I worked with a sandwich in one hand, to retain the buck forty. They started us with menial chores, cutting wire twisters in half, sealing envelopes, wrapping packages. There were about a dozen of us, some blind, some sighted kids from other summer work programs. There really didn’t seem to be enough to keep all of us busy, though they invented several projects to keep us occupied, or partially so.

For some reason, still not clear to me, they had us Braille the Driver’s Manual, with a sighted kid reading from the print copy, a blind kid on the Brailler. We learned to run the Braille Thermoform machine, running off copies of the C.S.B. Bulletin. Several musically inclined students, including Pandy Pierce and Mary Rita Ohearne, planned a folk Fest, 90 minutes or so of singing and playing, tickets 50-cents a head.

Sometime during the first day or so, Mr. Briller allowed that he remembered I wanted to start a ceramics class. Marty would be running a Braille games class. An elder sister of one of our coworkers gave dance lessons and she volunteered to come up a couple times per week to run a class.

I was given custody of the agency’s ceramic supplies, as well as the potter’s wheel and kiln. I made an appointment with the proprietor of Dobi Depot, a nearby crafts studio. He taught me how to load and operate the type of kiln we had at C.S.B. A slender ceramic cone was set in a switch arrangement in the interior of the kiln. When this melted at the deserved firing temperature, the switch would turn off the power to the kiln. After loading the batch to be fired and setting the cone, it remained for me to advance the power switches and prescribed intervals, place ceramic plugs in air holes at the front of the kiln and close the lid. Yes, I did all of these things myself; waiting until every thing was well cooled again before opening the kiln.

We gathered a group of student and adult participants for the program, each of them enrolling in one or more of our classes. I had several blind students, most of them blind-retarded, as well as a few sighted kids. There was also Ed Foscue, a newly blinded adult. Ed had lost his vision to diabetes and was currently looking for anything at all with which to occupy his time.

I started out teaching pinch-pots and coil method construction, together with some techniques I’d worked out for making human and four-legged animal shapes. Mostly though, students did pretty much what they wanted too.

I had to exercise some quality control after the first kiln load blew up, due to clumsily-made pieces with air pockets in them, but all in all, we got along fairly well. Toward the end of the ten weeks, I organized an art contest, with blind and sighted judges to select the three best sculptures, for which prizes were awarded.

Two of my winners were mentally retarded girls, also blind, who had not only created pleasing shapes but had glazed their pieces in a manner which impressed sighted judges.

I was meanwhile, learning as well. Twice a week I went to a handwriting class, in which we first learned to write our names, then if we felt like it, we could progress through the rest of the alphabet. I did reasonably well, but didn’t keep up my practicing after ward. I still print my signature, but no one ever rejects my checks.

As part of my work training I was also learning mobility, the use of the cane to find ones way around. I’d met Tom Specht at Queen Anne, where he’d been giving lessons to juniors and seniors. Tom started me off without a cane, using hands and arms as mobility aids, to find my way around the building’s upstairs areas. Later, he gave me a four-foot cane to use and I started walking around the residential blocks near the agency. I wasn’t up to taking the bus unaided by summer’s end, but had made a start.

Another of the Brailling projects I undertook was a manual for blind people, on eating. The pamphlet covered mealtime issues of specific concern to blind people. How did one tell the difference between the salt and peppershakers? (size of holes, and smell.) How to set a place at the table, How to serve from a common dish, how to butter bread and cut meat.

The matter of cutting up food, particularly meat, loomed as an especial hobgoblin in my life. Someday I’d go off to college, on a date, to a dinner party, have a steak set before me and not know what to do. My parents had been no help whatever. Every night, someone, usually my dad, would lean over my plate, breathing in my face, sawing away at my meat, vegetables, spuds, etc. It wasn’t as if everyone had just forgotten to teach me. I’d brought up the subject several times and it seemed to be an irritant to Mom and Dad. I don’t know that the pamphlet gave me a step-by-step instruction on how to cut meat but it made the process seem a lot more possible. It got me thinking in problem-solving mode. I’d cut wood with a saw and had been whittling since I was Six. What was so tough about cutting meat?

I don’t recall exactly how I got Dad out of my plate, but eventually I did. I still use the Continental method with cutlery, the fork held in my left hand, cutting a single bite at a time.

My first date occurred this summer when I’d turned Sixteen. June Claflan and I had fish and chips at Skipper’s restaurant on Queen Anne Hill. I acquired a life-long fondness for malt vinegar. By the time my Senior Prom occurred though, I was buying steaks and demolishing them unaided.

The occasion of our date was the Folk Fest at work. June and I met at Queen Anne and Blaine, a few blocks from C.S.B. She came up to where I was standing, waiting for her and asked "Do you want a Walneto?" This was one of Artie Johnson’s Dirty Old Man lines from Laugh-in. Skippers had a Braille menu, the first I’d ever seen.

Marty Lancer and Debby Valatin, Mark Schmidt, a helper-reader from school and Val Paynton met June and I after dinner to go to the performance in the auditorium/playroom at work. Mark commented dryly that there were more people playing than listening. Alas it was true. The music and singing was quite good. Most of these kids had been playing instruments since Fourth Grade or earlier, but our advertising had been inadequate or perhaps the program wasn’t interesting to our target audience.

After the performance proper, Mary Rita Ohearne, June and I lingered behind for a while. While Mary played on the piano, I sang The Long Black Veil, one of Lefty Frizel’s songs, later done by Johnny Cash. (No, I wasn’t part of the show.)

It’s fascinating to me, how a simple coincidence can turn into something quite significant, even profound. In this case, it was a chance visit to a Safeway store on our way to the designated pick-up point for our rides home. I think Mark and Marty wanted something in the store and June and I had some time to kill. June remarked that there was a rack of science fiction books near the front of the store. I asked her to read some titles and authors for me.

I don’t recall what else was there, but I fixed on Worlds of Tomorrow, Edited by Damon Knight. I’d enjoyed his anthologies previously. This one contained stories by Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Algis Budrys, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, along with several I’d not met yet. I asked Mark if he’d be interested in reading the book for me on tape, and offered to pay him. Mark agreed tentatively and took the book home with him.

Mom and Dad picked June and me up near Safeway and we talked some on the way home. I had no idea what to expect when June got out of the car. I never seemed to pick girls of which my family approved, but Mom thought June was a beautiful girl. She was Chinese, was she not? No actually, June was half-Japanese. Later it turned out that June was too tall for me and she was half-Japanese, but she was a nice girl. June and I never were all that serious about one another, but we did go out a fair amount over the next couple of years.

The first story in Worlds of Tomorrow was Sentinel by Arthur Clarke, on which 2001 was based. The Asimov Novella was about a water-poor Mars and a tight-fisted earth administration which begrudged Martian colonists the metals and water needed to operate their shipping and industry. Water was used not only for life support and bating, but also as propellant for spaceships. Terran bureaucrats were threatening to cut off all supplies to Mars as absurd wasters of resources. (Earth had 400 million cubic miles of water and couldn’t afford to spare a miniscule fraction of it for their Martian neighbors!)

The Martian settlers assembled a fleet of little salvage ships and set out to the rings of Saturn. These are water storage zones, dwarfing even earth’s oceans, being composed of swarms of iceberg like bodies. The Martians locate a suitable mountain of ice, dig their spaceships in, nose first, and using the ice to supply their water propellant, fly, mountain and all, back to Mars. (If Earth is short of water, we can sell them all they can use!) Martian culture is secure.

The thing that interested me most about the story was the idea of using frozen reaction mass to feed a ship’s nuclear engine. I’d envisioned an asteroid starship, but solid rock contained little if any hydrogen to supply the fusion fuel I wanted. Water was 11% hydrogen though, and if a ship could make it’s fuel from water, all one would need to do in building a starship is to fly habitat modules and engines out to a suitably large chunk of ice, in Saturn’s rings or elsewhere, hook on and take off. No tanks needed. The ice would provide both structure and self-containment.

Later I developed the idea of using frozen water, methane, and ammonia in combination. With chemical techniques that could be anticipated within the next few decades, starfarers could synthesize their own food, air, water, clothing and other supplies en route. Garbage would simply become reaction mass. No recycling would be required, no vast stores of life support material, except the iceberg or comet ship itself.

The C. M. Kornbluth story, That share of Glory, was my other favorite in the volume. It concerned a planet on which there was no free metal. The planet’s industries depended upon clay, glaze, glass, wood, leather, plant fibers, coal, charcoal, stone. A Stoneage culture, right? Well, not exactly. Technology here had proceeded to the Machine Age, and what machines! Pottery turbines running on coal dust, a semaphore system for communication, hand-pumped coal dust blowtorches, glass throwing knives, a pistol using coal dust suspended in air for explosive power to fire darts, a slow match igniting the explosion. Ever since, I’ve loved, from time to time, to play the no-metals game. What cold we accomplish if we had no ductile, conductive, high-strength, nonbrittle alloys?

At Summer’s end, I bought my own school clothes and a pair of Texas brand; Western boots in simulated alligator hide. I wore cowboy boots for the next 15 years or so. Though I was well rid of Paul, I wasn’t done with thinking of myself as a sort of adopted Texan, as a rebel and a Maverick, however conservative my politics. In fact, I’d begun to see Seattle as a sort of hotbed of northern liberalism. Being a rebel therefore would be consistent with a conservative bent.

Junior Year started auspiciously and ended that way too. I had U.S. History, American Literature, Physics; PE advanced Writing Lab. and Geometry. Spring quarter I’d have pretty much the same, but with Journalism instead of Lit.

Bruce Dong taught my U.S. History course. Most of the history classes I’d had up till now had focused on what happened, perhaps why, but didn’t get much into the underlying historical trends or into alternate views of history. Mr. Dong’s class was the first rigorous social science course I ever had. A year or so after I graduated, Mr. Dong was elected to the Seattle City Council.

Probably my favorite teacher this year was Dr. Anna Majors, my Lit. Instructor. I was surprised to be liking her, since she’d been painted as some kind of ogress. She was very conservative politically. She had an old-school outlook on culture and courtesy and stuff like that. Very well, so did I. We got along famously. I was the sort of upstanding, intellectual student she prized. Dr. Majors didn’t bend every which way because someone was a minority or labeled as superficially disadvantaged. I do think though that she made a great effort to teach everyone fairly and thoroughly. It was actually interested to observe how well she got along with students generally labeled as hoods.

In Dr. Majors’ class we read The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, some shorter works, as well as some books of our own choosing, which in my case included Red Badge of Courage by Crane and The Seawolf by London. I would stay in touch with Dr. Majors for a number of years and was even at her house once or twice.

After a seven-year-fascination with the subject, I was glad to be finally taking Physics. I had Mr. Hall again. I’d been used to his overly easygoing ways in Physical Science. In Physics he was more demanding, but not necessarily specific or explicit. I asked him at the outset of the class what I needed to do in order to prepare. Should I have the book put on tape? He said not to worry about that. Should I have diagrams made or was there any equipment I should get? He said no. Mr. Hall promised on many occasions to come down to the resource room to see what we had there which might help me in Physics, but he never showed. That is not to say that I did not like Physics or find it interesting.

Jim Paynton, a guy I’d known the year before, was now a Senior and in the class with me. We sat together. He helped me with drawings and reiterations of formulae. We also did an enormous amount of cutting up. I got Bs in Physics, but Mr. Hall never really let me know what I could do to get an A. A description of the content of a Physics course is liable to be unnecessary for a person who’s taken it and dry for someone who never has. In brief then, we began by studying motion, acceleration, forces, momentum, kinetic energy, heat and pressure. We proceeded to electricity and magnetism, ending up in the spring with sound, light and radiation.

Mr. Hall enriched our class with films that sometimes seemed to me, to be irrelevant to the course content. Once I asked him what a film on Soul Music had to do with Physics. He said Physics was basically a way of describing experience. So was soul music. Mr. Hall also offered opportunities for reports on subjects of individual interest.

My own interests were broadening. At one time an opportunity to do a Physics report would have meant a speculation on rocketry or at least a paper on extraterrestrial life. I surprised myself by what I did choose this time as my report topic. I think the Physical Science course had awakened in me an interest in Psychology as well as the other social sciences. The gender-related stuff I’d heard the Seniors discussing the year previous had determined me to find out what the Psych. text had to say about sexuality. I didn’t find much. At the beginning of Junior Year however, I subscribed to Scientific American and Psychology Today on tape, from Science For The Blind in Pennsylvania.

Psychology Today mentioned transvestism perhaps twice in all the time I read it and had one article about Electro-shock therapy to cure a lingerie fetish. In reading the magazine though, I found my interest in psych was much broader than I’d suspected. I thought seriously about taking two Doctorates, one in Physics and one in Psychology. This seemed like a great combination. Rockets were frightfully expensive while people were plentiful. Psychology experiments should it seemed, be dirt-cheap. They aren’t, but they should have been!

I think it was sometime in my Sophomore year when reading about Battleships or some such, I ran across an article in the World Book Encyclopedia called Battles, Fifteen Decisive. This had to do with a Military tome written by the historian, Edmund Creasey, around 1850. He considered that there had been to date, fifteen battles, which had truly shaped history. They began with the Battle of Marathon, between the Greeks and Persians around 490 BC and ended with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. I filed the article away in a mental cubbyhole somewhere, but reading about methods of quantifying emotional responses, social patterns and other human phenomena caused the Fifteen Decisive Battles to jump out at me one morning when I was in bed. When I got to school, I yanked out the volume of the World Book and reread the article carefully. I’d expected to find some obvious pattern in the occurrences of the battles, to allow me to calculate the next decisive conflict. There was no easy formula readily apparent, but it did seem that as history progressed, battles became relatively more frequent.

I did some more number crunching, all by hand and Braillewriter. It seemed as if the period of history from 500 BC to 500 AD had about 2/3 as many battles in it as the period from 500 to 1500 AD. I made a chart describing the time intervals between decisive battles and made some predictions of future battles after 1850. I achieved a fair amount of near matching between my simplistic chart and actual occurrence of battles in the later 19^th and early 20^th Centuries. I went ahead to do some speculating about world events and the universe in general. Perhaps major battles and other significant world events constituted switching points in the flow of the time stream. We might not be able to calculate a precise future state, but we might be able to predict when the next world-changing event should be due. I thought of this as a new science that I dubbed Chronological Physics, the study of the Time Stream. I later came to believe that predictable events, if they existed, were more an outcome of the workings of society and not something intrinsic about the fabric of time.

This essentially was what Isaac Asimov was saying in his Foundation Series in which Psychohistory was used as a plot device. Psychohistory, modeled on the kinetic theory of gases, dealt with the behavior of people in large numbers. I Read Foundation, the first book in the original series, several months after I presented my Chronological Physics report. My talk was well-received in the sense that it aroused interest, consternation, argumentation, all in good enough spirit, and generally I think, gave people something to think about.

By the Time Jim Paynton’s birthday came around, in the late Fall, I’d met his sister Valerie several times and now asked her at Jim’s party if she’d go with me to a football game between our school and Cleveland High where my friend Randy Alan attended. Randy was the son of Fred and Marie Alan, who were in my parent’s Pinochle club and with whom we’d done a lot of camping over the years. Randy and I had been planing for some time, to double date. This turned out to be a bit amusing, since Randy was on their pep squad while Val was in our marching band. Randy’s date, Linda and I sat together over on the Cleveland side, during the game. I kept rooting for Queen Anne and Linda kept slapping me, (more or less in fun.)

After the game, we went for pizza, then over to the Alan’s. Not a really inspiring date, but Val and I went out off and on for the next seven years or so.

Vikki and I kept up our correspondence, apprising one another of the significant events in our lives. I spent a lot of time sharing ideas with Vikki, scientific speculations, theories, writing projects. I guess I’d never really had anybody my own age with whom to correspond, at least for several years, especially someone with an interest in science. The fact that she was a girl helped a lot too. Vikki agreed to keep copies of things I wanted held safe, just in case something happened to my drafts. I sent Vikki a lot of stuff. I haven’t heard from her for a lot of years now and sometimes I wonder where all my speculations, poems, story ideas ended up. I had a stack of her letters, tied up with a shoestring, for over a decade and a half, until they, with much else, were destroyed in a house fire.

On New Years Day, 1971 I started a tradition I’d carry on with for quite a few years. This was a retrospective of the things I felt I’d accomplished over the last year. Most of the summing up of 1970 had to do with my ideas on starships. I’d conceived of two ways of getting to the stars which might possibly be available within a century; the asteroid or iceberg ship and the supply line ship. The asteroid ship being merely a huge chunk of ice or some other hydrogen-containing compound in frozen state, it could have enormous mass ratios, fuel compared to everything else. Big fusion engines would feed on the hydrogen portion of the ice, ejecting helium and whatever else was contained in the iceberg as reaction mass.

The supply line concept involved accelerating and decelerating a fusion-powered starship by means of a succession of booster tanks containing fuel and travelling on carefully timed trajectories to be at the correct time, place and velocity for the next stage of speed-up or slowdown. The final fuel tank must decelerate the starship from the minimum velocity at which the tank could be allowed to make the interstellar crossing. For example, is a starship was journeying to Alpha Centauri at an average speed of light velocity. The trip would take about forty years. If the final-stage deceleration fuel tank were travelling at 5% the speed of light, it must be launched about forty years before the commencement of the journey proper, since Alpha Centauri is a little over 4 light years from our sun. The largest part of the starship system would therefore be a rather large, comparatively slow booster. The starship could be accelerated and partially decelerated by smaller, relatively small tankers, possibly launched by catapult from the moon or an asteroid. The object of the design concept was to minimize the size of the fuel tanks needed to accomplish an interstellar mission. A great deal of fuel would be saved in such a plan, over a single huge starship accelerating all the way up to maximum velocity, then back down to zero. Both the asteroid and supply line concepts were designed for one-way transportation. I’d lowered my sights since Ninth Grade, accepting journeys at 1/10 to 1/5 the speed of light as reasonable, not recommended for folks intending to return home again. First make sure you really want to go, then stay there.

A little nearer to home I was spending a lot of time thinking about a space station concept, which was probably the first of my Growable plans, based around fairly small building blocks, with considerable growth potential. I figured that a reasonable minimum size for a space station would be 3000 pounds. It would be essentially a big can filled with air. If made of quarter-inch aluminum, a cylinder twelve feet long and twelve feet in diameter, might weigh between 1500 and 1800 pounds. Add a hundred pounds of air, a few hundred pounds of life support eqipment and a space hut for two or three persons, weighing 3000 pounds seemed quite reasonable. The cylinder would be the liquid fuel tank for it’s own booster. Put engines on the bottom of the can, put a big conical tank of liquid hydrogen on top and you could get the can in orbit with a very modest launch assembly. People might climb into orbit using something like a Gemini capsule, possibly with a stack of solid-fuelled rockets to thrust it into space. (A fairly small beginning.)

Later, we’d do it again, possibly nine or ten times. Cylinders would be designed to connect end to end. Most of the drumhead walls would be taken out to provide a fairly continuous tube nearly 12feet in diameter and perhaps 120 feet long. There’d be rocket engines in orbit already. Some of the chambers could be used for liquid fuel and oxygen, closed off hermetically as desired. We’d have an earth to moon shuttle that could make regular trips to the lunar surface and back. Both the space stations and the moon shuttle would have become moneymakers presumably.

When sufficient revenue had accrued from these operations, the ship could be reparked in earth orbit and a large cylindrical section built about part of its length. This outer drum would be partially filled with water and when spun, the water would collect in a thick layer against the outer wall of the drum section, making a cylindrical swimming pool. Swimmers could breathe air in the area within the curved inner surface of the water.

Individual hotel suites would be built within cylinders somewhat larger than the original station canisters. These would be positioned on radial arms reaching out from the station core. Sliding in and out on the arms as the station spun, the centrifugal gravity of each suite could be individually adjusted, perhaps to earth normal or beyond at the outer extent of an arm, moon gravity or less nearest the station.

When the space hotel had brought in sufficient profits, a larger ring-shaped section could be built around one end, accommodating greenhouse, and observation deck community center. The station would have considerable living volume now and quite a few tourist attractions.

Eventually an atomic engine could be retrofitted to the entire structure, using some of the water in the swimming pool for reaction mass. We’d now have a large deep-space liner, possibly even a starship. It was a lovely dream, one well worth revisiting. It has occurred to me that a credible project would have been a detailed design for cylindroid fueltank/spacestation modules pressure-tested at two atmospheres to simulate one atmosphere internal pressure in space, with precise docking and sealing procedures included. I’d have learned a great deal about structures, materials, fabrication and the like. I could probably have even tested one of the tank sections in a model rocket flight.

Late in my sophomore year I began speaking with my academic counselor, Ethel Smith, concerning universities I might attend. I’d heard of Texas Tech., which was in Lubbock. This would be an opportunity to investigate whether there really was a Company that owed me several hundred thousand dollars. I also just liked the idea of studying in Texas.

Early in my Junior year I attended a presentation from Princeton University, where Einstein, Goddard, Dyson and other men I respected had worked or were yet teaching and doing research. One of the Princeton reps was an engineer and he gave me strong, almost truculent council to go into engineering instead of physics. Engineers did all the space design work, he said. An engineer might be involved in designing "a little experimental package to be dropped on the moon," that was all. I still saw physicists as being the superior scientists and technocrats so I told him I intended to end up as a physicist anyway. He told me to go ahead and take an engineering degree, then do my graduate work in physics. I’ll discuss this strategy a few chapters from now. The advice was good enough, though not necessarily for someone wanting to be a research scientist with a Ph.D.

For the next year and a half Texas Tech. and Princeton vied in my imagination as my college destination. I’ve not made it to either place, but as you’ve seen by now, much of my life has been response to surprises.

Not all of my life was studying. Toward the beginning of Junior Year, Mr. Briller from C.S.B. called me, wanting to know if I’d like to work during the school year. I told him I was pretty busy, but he was quite insistent, saying I had a good recommendation from the agency. If I could think of something I might do which was of service to other blind students or even the school generally, I could be paid to do that.

I thought it over and decided a good project would be to render some of the material written at Queen Anne High, by students, for students in Braille. I thought perhaps excerpts from The KUAY Weekly, our school paper and the Pawprints literary Magazine would be a reasonable goal.

I called Stan Briller, telling him my proposal. He said a lot of other guys and gals wanted to work. He’d have to think things over. (Funny, I hadn’t heard about the competition before.) We should get together and discuss matters.

When we met a couple of days later, Mr. Briller said he had an idea. Perhaps we could start a magazine for blind teens, which I could edit. It would deal with issues of interest and concern to its readership and could contain exerpts from the KUAY, the literary magazine, and even the underground newspaper at school. I was to think this over and come back with ideas about title, format, content, and distribution.

Since this would be an outlook for the blind, I proposed calling it Periscope Magazine. Mr. Briller liked that idea but suggested to make it more regional we might call it Puget Sound Periscope. There were several school systems in the greater Seattle area with enrollment of blind adolescents. I called or wrote all of them and compiled a mailing list. We’d run copies off on the Agency’s thermoform Braille reproduction machine, send them free matter for the blind, offer subscriptions free of charge.

In my first issue I started with an editorial introducing the paper. The meat of the issue was led off by an editorial by Chris Gray, about documentary films used in high school social studies classes. I included some announcements and news articles from the Seattle area and elsewhere. U.S. News And World Report had just become available on tape, Playboy Magazine (without centerfold) in Braille. Marty Lancer and John Zimmerman had asked to try out for Queen Anne’s Swim Team. They were refused. Some administrative action had reversed the coach’s decision. They tried out, failed to make the team, but rules of fairness had presumably been followed.

At the same time, Isaac Pough had made the school football team. Isaac had quite a bit of sight though he used large print and Braille, and detested being called The Blind Football Player.

I ended the issue with one of my poems, one under consideration for Pawprints, about a young boy, coming into adolescence. It hearkened back to when I was about thirteen.

Transition

From March to April.

From one travel-worn volume to another.

I gave up my trophies and gaudy garb

For a simple coat of mail.

I must face our foes unhorsed

And without my sword,

But my razor is sharp and ready.

Girls are more fun than frogs!

All in all it was a fairly brave try at a new magazine. I’d been promised a dollar an hour, which was silly, but I accepted for the sake of the work experience. When the first paychecks came in though, it turned out I was making 50-cents an hour. I was allowed ten hours of paid work per week and was actually putting in more like twenty. Mr. Briller had said nothing until the checks showed up and people complained. He said we needed to stick with him. We’d get a larger grant and could be paid more. For the time being, we just needed to work hard and make a good impression. I tried.

The trouble was, Mr. Briller read no Braille and I hadn’t represented myself as an expert copy editor. There were very finicky, very subtle rules about which contractions or letter-grouping symbols to use where and also about spacing and the like. Mr. Hale, a blind social worker for C.S.B. who seemed mostly to operate the agency store, was given the job of proofreading my copy. It would take him a couple of weeks to get the four or five print-page-equivalents corrected and back to me. I started with an October issue, which became a November then a December issue. I rebrailled the entire magazine about four times. The objections grew more and more finicky. The night before the final day of school prior to Christmas Vacation, Mr. Briller called me at home, saying Mr. Hale wanted the issued rebrailled still again. I told him I’d be on vacation, so it would need to wait till January. He said not to wait that long. I was to get in and talk things over with Mr. Hale on my vacation, (this for fifty cents an hour.)

I talked things over with Dad and we decided I didn’t need any more of this. It took me a long time to nerve myself next day, but I called Mr. Briller from school, told him I quit and Merry Christmas. I offered to put out magazine on my own, read on tape and using reusable mailers like Science For The Blind did. I still felt very responsible for Periscope. He said I shouldn’t worry about it. (I later found out Mr. Briller was Jewish.)

Come January and Joe Marshall showed up in the middle of my PE class to tell me it was important to be able to take criticism and didn’t I think I should give the job another chance? No, I didn’t.

The issue finally came out in February Brailled by Jackie Redinger, a blind woman who was trying to get a job as an English teacher. Chris Gray cataloged something like 23 Braille mistakes in it.

Later, Dave Mollet, a self-professed screw-off took the job of editor. His girlfriend, Debby actually did most of the work and I think a professional brailist turned out the master copies for thermoforming. The first issue was written up in a Seattle newspaper by a well-known feature-writer. I got a fair amount of credit for the work I’d done. By now the grant had come in and it was decided that contributors to Periscope could be paid somewhat for their writings. The rate was $2.00 for anything forty words or under, five cents a word for anything over forty words and up to 200 words. No more than $10.00 paid to any person in an issue. Checks had withholding taken out and still said Sheltered Workshop on them, but most months of my Junior and Senior years, I had a $9.40 check in the mail. I never stopped working for periscope, just didn’t want Briller as my boss again.

I got my first science fiction publication in Periscope, a story about a man on vacation, being teleported to a resort planet, but a wrong number is dialed. He ends up in a strange, planetary backwater, married to a headstrong princess who is being nagged by her royal father to marry, so she grabs the first man to step out of the transfer booth. There were also other poems, editorials, and a couple of how-to articles of potential interest to blind persons.

By second semester, I was taking Journalism as well as Creative Writing, getting my first introduction to Advertising sales. I was also in mobility again. I was supposed to have started up in the fall, but the instructor hadn’t time for me till January or so. Soon, I’d be taking the bus home.

Things on our school bus had stayed fairly active. Pandy Pierce, now Mara, she’d changed her name legally and who could blame her, (too many box jokes,) continued to paint herself into the middle of controversies. Mara had a habit of taking on cultures like some people took on hairstyles. With each new nationality she’d somehow learn a great many words from the language, espouse the religion, affect an accent. When I’d first reacquainted with her back in my 8^th Grade year, she’d been into Australia. She supposedly had several friends in Australia. She intended to move there to live.

One day I said something about Australia and she acted as if I’d uttered a nonsequitor. "What’s wrong?" I asked. "I thought you wanted to live in Australia.

Pandy remarked in a haughty voice "I couldn’t live there. They are race prejudiced."

After that, Pandy decided she was Indian, (Asian, and not Native American.) Now she listened to Ravi Shankar, meditated, ate yogurt, got a sitar someplace, and forgot she ever knew anyone in Australia, accumulated Indian friends.

That went on until about the end of my 9^th Grade year then Pandy got interested in Beafra, (now Bangladesh.) She started going to Black Power rallies, had a black boyfriend, spoke with an acquired Afro-American patois, hung out mostly with Black or African people.

By the time I was in 11^th Grade, Mara was Japanese, with all that implied. Most of her cultures seem to encourage her toward drug use at one level or another and she was in a lot of trouble for that.

Mary, our bus driver, saw several syringes in Mara’s notebook one afternoon. Mary went back into the school building to tell Mr. Conroy, who called Mara’s parents. She was out of school for a couple of days, and into therapy, but didn’t seem to change her lifestyle very much.

Mara remained in the thick of political discord at school. Vietnam protests were about at white heat just about now. Some students got the idea that attacking our school would somehow hasten withdrawal of U.s. forces from Southeast Asia. On two occasions, toward the end of my sophomore year, firebombs were thrown through the Vice-Principal’s office window.

Both attacks occurred at night. Quart beer bottles filled with gasoline and grease did minimal damage to the office, but created sufficient heat to activate the sprinkler system. Water soaked through the floor of the office showering down into the resource room for blind students just below. Loosened plaster from the ceiling fell on everything and water soaked the Braille and large print books.

We came in next morning to gather chunks of ceiling off our desks and equipment. Fortunately, Braille books don’t perish as easily as people often imagine and we spread encyclopedia volumes on desks and counters to dry.

Mara started laughing raucously when she came in to find what had happened. Mr. Conroy told her to shut up or get the hell out of his room as he picked plaster out of our Braillewriters. Mara held forth about who must have done this and how he’d acted without the consensus of the group, (a chapter of the S.D.S. or some such,) and how he should have waited till the time had been right. I was struck by how perilous it would be to work in a secret organization with Mara in it.

Mr. Conroy and some of the helpers moved some tables out in the hall with Braillers for study periods. Of course reporters were prowling the school I sat down at one of the tables and did math with a Braille slate and stylus, which for anyone who hasn’t done this, is a bit of a trick. I wanted to send the message that the hoodlums weren’t going to deprive me of an education.

About a month later, the whole thing repeated. Another bomb, another dowsing. I don’t recall anyone ever being prosecuted or even expelled for the crimes. The whole affair pushed me even more to the Right and resolved me to do what I could to fight the rowdyism at school and elsewhere.

I was very much in this frame of mind when I entered Mr. Charland’s Journalism Class. I was the first blind student at our school to take the subject. Mr. Charland, who was about to retire and was now teaching his fiftieth consecutive semester of Journalism One had, according to school scuttlebutt, staunchly refused in the past to admit blind students to his class. Anne Grant, who was the only other blind student I knew personally who’d tried to get in, had wanted to be excused from selling advertising.

I’d been selling stuff for the last year and more, activity cards, team booster buttons, Pawprints, magazine subscriptions, my own ceramics. Selling wasn’t a problem for me. In spite of his reputation for bigotry, Mr. Charland and I got along from the start. He appreciated my God and Country attitude and we both enjoyed puns.

During quiet spells in class, Mr. Charland read me brief pieces from newspapers, asked me about my cat, or just made small talk. By the time the year was over it was understood that I’d have a column in the Kuay Weekly next year.

I kept up my creative writing in Mrs. Steinhauser’s advanced Writing Lab, making some forays into prose with stories and essays, but mostly doing poetry. My science fiction was too technical for some of the students, even when they were not at all technical. In one story I used the phrase ‘The airlock sighed open’. One girl protested that she entirely lost the thread of my story when I kept throwing in math and engineering stuff. She was of course totally at liberty to throw in abstruse social, political or literary allusions and had I complained I’d have been labeled uneducated.

I had an interesting if distressing and fairly brief relationship with one of my classmates in Writing Lab. I became quite infatuated with Norene Smith, who with her friend Sherry Quintan, wrote hilarious satirical essays and spoofs. I was reputed to be quite funny myself and I enjoyed creative, funny people much more than those who merely bitched about things on paper, throwing in some dark imagery and calling it poetry. I told Norene privately, that I’d been quite taken with her and I’d like her to consider me a very special friend. Norene said she was very flattered by my feelings and when I asked if she’d go out with me sometime, she said she would, but (embarrassedly,) that she’d never been on a date before. We talked on the phone fairly frequently and walked together sometimes, between classes.

One day, more or less by way of making conversation, I mentioned our upcoming date. Norene started, then began back-pedaling, telling me almost in a single breath that her parents wouldn’t let her date, then that there was another boy then that she had too much work to do with Sherry. She didn’t have time for dating. Now I began to understand Sherry’s recent hostility toward me.

I’m not saying that Norene and Sherry had a truly Lesbian relationship, but I know that they felt others thought they had. I suspect Sherry was gay, but I don’t think either girl had quite decided what they were or would for some time to come.

By the end of the year I’d fallen in love with Marcia Caldirola, another Writing Lab poet, the daughter of an Anglo social worker Mom and an Italian onetime prisoner of War from WWII. Mr. Caldirola sent his children to Italy to do part of their college education. At least it had been that way for the first two kids.

Marcie was one of those people who is attractive to nearly everyone belonging to the opposite sex. I’m not saying her morals were questionable. She was a very nice person, just very used to being popular. She wore perfumes like taboo, which drove me up the wall. Marcie said she’d go out with me and wrote her phone number on the box holding the cake Mrs. Steinhauser had bought me for selling the most copies of Pawprints, (most of them to people who’d probably never read them.) She wrote right next to First Prize, which seemed very appropriate. By this time I was able to carry my cake home proudly on the city bus.

Mobility is the science of finding one’s way around home or out in the community, without sight. It depends on use of sounds, direction sense, some basic knowledge of streets, sidewalks, intersections and buildings; a dog or a cane. I was never very interested in having a Seeing Eye Dog and cane travel was the only form of mobility available to me through the Seattle Public School system, which had a contract with C.S.B. Lessons were to be provided to all blind high school students, but there was only one instructor to teach all of us. I was well into the winter of ’71 before I really got under way.

Cane travel uses basically two techniques. In the Diagonal Technique the cane is held slantwise in front of the body, with the tip forward and to one side, gliding across the floor. This is primarily for use indoors, in familiar areas and while ascending stairs. The Touch Technique was developed by the Veteran’s Administration in response to the demands of thousands of blinded servicemen returning home from World War II. The cane is held at a comfortable arm’s length and traverses back and forth in front of the traveler. As the left foot advances, the cane swings to the right. As the right foot comes forward, the cane arcs back to the left. The cane is held loosely in the hand, with the cane tip swishes across the surface being negotiated. The experienced cane traveler can easily tell changes of terrain and texture. Sidewalks and other pavements give characteristic sounds and feel. Grass of course, is much different, as is dirt or gravel. By noting the texture under the cane tip, a traveler can stay on a sidewalk or off a road, following curbs or other edging. If the cane drops suddenly it indicates that a drop off or the top of stairs has been reached. Where the drop-off is can be discerned by where the cane happens to be in its arc when it dips. If the cane kicks backward toward the user’s abdomen, a barrier or up flight of stairs is being approached.

With proper technique and a suitably long cane, a couple of strides can be allowed between detecting a drop off or barrier and having to deal with it.

A lot of mobility training consists of breaking bad habits. For instance, it is very easy, when crossing a street, to subconsciously square off with your heels against the down curb; assuming that by walking at right angles to the curb you’ll travel directly across the street. Not all curbs are straight or parallel to the opposite side and you can find yourself walking diagonally through an intersection. You’re much better off keeping the direction the sidewalk has given you and listening to the traffic, which parallels the direction, you want to go.

Our mobility instructor, Tom Specht, had been with the Veteran’s Hospital in Tacoma before he taught civilian kids and adults. He and I had been discussing science and science fiction since early in my Sophomore year. Tom was an interesting guy and I liked him, though I think I’d have more trouble with him now. He was a young man of about 27, who thought himself quite the psychologist and judge of human character. He was prone to scolding in a fairly denigrating manner and acted as if it was some huge privilege for us to have the use of his very valuable time.

Mom and I felt that mobility should have been available since Junior High or earlier. Today, as a fairly experienced traveler, I can say with some authority that kids could be given rudimentary training at a quite young age. Enough to avoid falling over things and help them negotiate sidewalks around home. Tom likened a blind student taking mobility to a sighted student getting a driver’s license. This is bunk. A blind student taking mobility is precisely in the position of a sighted student being allowed out of the yard.

By the time Junior Year ended I could catch the city bus, cross the quite busy two-lane highway near my home and walk around unaided in the vicinity of my school. I hadn’t yet learned to handle intersections, so some places I could go, others I could not. I would progress.

My horizons were broadening in another way as well. I reread a book by Isaac Asimov, The View From a Height, finding or retaining, something I’d passed lightly over in Ninth Grade. This time I paid special attention to the preface of this book about various aspects of the sciences. Dr. Asimov wrote that as a child he tried to read everything he could, but there being so much to read, he found himself concentrating on Science and History. By the time college had come along, science had definitely crowded out all competitors, then it was Chemistry specifically, then in graduate school, biochemistry. At some point he had rebelled.

Dr. Asimov, decided that he was not content to perch atop a single scientific pinnacle, but would much rather go soaring over the fields of science, drawing near to a bright or shiny spot here and there. Of course he became a science popularizer instead of a scientist as such, exchanging breadth for depth. I still desired depth, but decided that one day, when I’d won my academic spurs, would like Dr. Asimov, level off and generalize rather than specializing. This was still but a germ of an idea, having yet to put out sprouts let alone branches and leaves, but I’d revisit the easy hovering, low-flying heights many times in the years to come and still fly mainly on the level, with my radars tuned for new interests.

Now came the beginning of a controversy with which I’d deal off and on, for many years to come. State Services for the Blind, (as opposed to Community Services,) did and still does, under a slightly different name, provide services to newly blinded persons and blind persons going to college or seeking employment. This has meant different things at different times. Money has many years, been made available to qualifying disabled high school graduates to go to college. The money, allocated by the Washington State Legislature, was administered by State Services for the Blind. In order to get funding for college, it was insinuated that a student must satisfy various program requirements of that agency. I say Insinuated because there was actually no legal mandate that one must interact at all with State Services in order to get funding. One must simply get accepted somewhere and let the agency know that s/he was interested in going to college.

What I objected to was a summer course, attended by most students after their Junior year in high school, in which various living skills were taught, cooking, cleaning, laundering, some mobility, advanced Braille, essentially shorthand for college. I couldn’t see why I should spend my summer doing this. For one thing I had other plans. For another, officials of the agency couldn’t even decide how long the course would last this particular summer. Estimates ranged from two to twelve weeks. The whole idea smelled!

I wanted to get a jump-start on my advanced Math studies, so I signed up for a summer trigonometry course and arranged to get a Braille textbook out of storage. I was the first blind student to take Algebra-Trig in quite some time as well as having a year of Physics under my belt. I was willing to pay the entire $35 course fee, but Mom said that since Christine was taking a guitar course, I need only pay twenty. With the math course arranged and paid for, the State Services people of course got back in touch and said they’d decided when and for how long the course would be offered. Naturally it overlapped the Trig course.

You’ve really outsmarted yourself this time, haven’t you?" Mom scolded. "You’ve gotten involved with this Math course, now you can’t take the classes at State Services!" (That was exactly how I’d intended things to turn out. What I needed for living on my own, I could learn. Much of it I had learned. I’d likely be spending my first couple of years away from home in dormitories anyway. Besides, this summer I had a novel to write.)