Worlds' Fair - A Space-Time Travel Tale

By Jeff Maurer

A life-journey through time, space, and spirit during which the son remembers his father's stories while trying to work out his own story. His attempts to impose rational order on both outrageous cosmic and peculiar personal experience are often frustrating. A child of his times, his embrace of sixties idealism takes him from optimism to disappointment to a scientific inquiry into the possibility of using space-time travel to find a better world. The unforseen results of that inquiry prove to be even stranger than the culture shock he endured upon finding himself immersed in a truly alien Hippy culture after moving to the San Francisco Bay area. It is a story of loss, hope, and unexpected strangeness where weighty considerations of Good versus Evil are balanced by simpler pleasures like catching a fly ball - or trying to.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Maurer
• Release date: Apr 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301480197

Jeff Maurer

Born in western Pennsylvania, raised in the 60s in the sarcasm belt of north-central New Jersey (yes, you can take the boy out of Jersey but you can not take the Jersey out of the boy), graduated from the University of Delaware with a degree in Education, I moved to San Francisco in 1977 (partly to see what it might be like to live someplace where the people wore flowers in their hair - someplace very different from what I had so far been accustomed to). After surviving significant initial culture shock, I spent most of the next two decades in various parts of the pacific northwest, and loved it. But in order to be closer to family, I then moved back east to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains where I was employed as a Respiratory Therapist in a children's hospital until I retired. I am now thankfully living on the Oregon coast.

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Worlds' Fair

A Space-Time Travel Tale

By

Jeff Maurer

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Jeff Maurer

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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CHAPTER ONE

I remember my father’s stories. And yes, some of them were just stories. But others were true. And even those that were just stories had their roots in truth. I know because I looked it up - some of it anyway. That’s how I know Willie Mays really did make that catch, just as my father described it. Dad said we were all there to see it - me, my dad, and my mom. I wish I could remember that. I was seven years old at the time – old enough that it seems I ought to be able to remember it. Sadly though, apart from my dad’s stories of it, I simply do not have any memories of that day. So I can’t say for sure if I really saw it. But the catch was made. On September 29, 1954 during the first game of the World Series between the Cleveland Indians and the New York Giants, with the score tied 2-2 in the top of the eighth inning and with runners on first and second, the Indians’ Vic Wertz smashed a drive to deep center field - and I mean DEEP. The game was being played at the Giants’ home stadium, the Polo Grounds - a cavernous ballpark (and some say haunted) which first opened in 1911, having been built on the same site as a prior Polo Grounds that had burned down just two and a half months earlier. Though shallow down both lines, the outfield at the Polo Grounds stretched to almost 500 feet in center field. Because Mays knew that his pitcher’s curve ball tended to get hitters to hit the ball into the ground, he was playing very shallow, hoping to prevent the runner on second from scoring on a grounder that made it through the infield. But Wertz’s mighty swing sent the ball soaring like a cannon ball. Mays had no chance – or so it seemed. In addition to having been hit hard and deep, the ball’s trajectory took it straight over Willie’s head. Anyone who has played outfield (as I have) knows that when a ball is hit straight at you, it can be extremely difficult to tell how deep it is going to go. Not for Willie, though. At the crack of the bat, he turned and sped, with head down and with arms and legs churning, to where he knew the ball was headed. At the last possible moment Mays turned his head, extended his glove, and in full stride at the warning track made the seemingly impossible over-the-shoulder catch of Wertz’s nearly 500 foot drive. The Giants went on to win that game in the tenth inning on a home run by Dusty Rhodes that went only 260 feet down the line. Miracle piled on top of miracle as the Giants went on to win the World Series, sweeping the heavily favored Indians four games to none. That year, Willie Mays hit .345 with 41 Home Runs and a .985 fielding percentage. His salary for that heroic, record-breaking year was $12,500. I looked it up.

My dad had plenty of other stories too. A lot of them were influenced by the Great Depression, which is understandable since he was an impressionable twelve-year-old when the stock market crashed in 1929. The economic situation after the crash created desperate times for a lot of people. But, my dad would say, for a young teen in New York City things could have been worse. Though people were hungry, often struggling to imagine a hopeful tomorrow, nobody (at least nobody he knew) had their lives cut brutally short. He had his family, he had his friends, and he had some fun. How many times did I hear about my father and his buddy Scotty Zinn climbing the fence at the Polo Grounds (a fence that was FOUR STORIES TALL) two hours before game time just to avoid paying the fifty cent admission price? So yes, there were fun times. There were also hard times. My dad told of seeing soup lines stretching for blocks where people waited in line for hours to endure a fifteen minute sermon before getting a bowl of watered down, luke-warm soup and maybe (if they were lucky) a hunk of stale bread.

I also remember my father talking about paying 25 cents to get a haircut from one of the down-on-his-luck guys living in Hooverville. Herbert Hoover was president of the United States at the start of the Depression, so he got a lot of the blame for people’s hard times. And his approach to dealing with the situation did not improve his reputation in the eyes of many of those who suffered the most. He did not believe in direct U.S. government intervention in the economy, preferring to rely on local and private rather than federal efforts to provide relief for the newly impoverished. Hoover believed in volunteerism, encouraged charity. And the American people responded. But the charities depended on contributions from a public unable to give enough to meet the growing need. Within four years of the crash, unemployment rose from 5% to 25%. And in some parts of the country it reached 80%. Between 1929 and 1932, industrial production fell nearly 45% and the average family income fell by 40%. My dad told stories of hoboes knocking on his family’s door asking for food, and of other knocks on their door from neighborhood families who were asking for a dollar to help them out because they’d just been suddenly evicted, their meager possessions tossed to the curb. My dad’s family did what they could, as did so many others. But charitable efforts were overwhelmed by reality, like tears in a downpour. Growing numbers of the unemployed and homeless joined together in public parks and vacant lots, building shacks out of old tires, apple crates, or whatever they could find, organizing themselves into cooperative communities which they sarcastically named for their president: Hooverville. There were Hoovervilles everywhere. Hoover’s reliance on the private sector to relieve public suffering made him seem out-of-touch to many common people who blamed the private sector (especially banks, industrialists, and financiers) for both causing and deepening the crisis. Some have debated the validity of that viewpoint, but it is hard to argue with what people were seeing every day. It was the banks that were so obviously throwing people out of their homes. I have often heard my father and others of his generation say, on a bitterly frigid day, It’s as cold as a banker’s heart.

After just one term as president, Hoover was voted out of office. In 1933, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in. According to my dad, hope is what keeps people going. And Hoover, he said, simply did not inspire hope. Growing up in New York City, my dad witnessed the construction of the Empire State Building, which was completed in 1931 after just 14 months of construction. It was a remarkable and beautiful accomplishment - the tallest building in the world. One would think it should have been a source of pride and a testament to possibility. Instead, however, it became a joke to New Yorkers who called it the Empty State Building due to its lack of tenants.

Wretched times had made the struggle to find hope ever more difficult, creating a sort of emptiness in the American spirit. FDR stepped into that void. Or, as my dad once said, the American need to fill that emptiness sucked FDR into the vacuum, which subsequently provided the American spirit with a desperately desired excuse for optimism. The return of hope was in some ways more important than the realistic chances for success of FDR’s policies. As it turned out, though FDR’s presidency would improve the lives of many disadvantaged Americans, the general recovery was slow. FDR was reelected in 1936. But in 1938, unemployment remained an issue and depression still challenged the American spirit.

To what extent do the words of a parent influence the thoughts, even the future of a child? I wonder. Though some of my father’s stories were neither very pleasant nor even necessarily believable, others inspired my imagination. Worlds of Tomorrow was the theme of the 1939 New York World’s Fair - a subject which always (or so I remember it) brightened my father’s features. The 1939 World’s Fair was designed to revitalize the hopes and dreams of America. And so, according to my dad, it did - at least for a time, at least for some. My father, the first of his family to even attend college, was about to receive his bachelor’s degree in chemistry. One of his professors owned a television set - still a relatively rare and miraculous item in those days. My dad and some of his classmates were invited to the professor’s home to view the opening ceremonies of the World’s Fair, which was scheduled on the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration and was a very big deal at the time. My father (or so he said) was therefore able to witness one of the earliest television broadcasts in the United States, which featured an address by FDR and then a speech by Albert Einstein discussing Cosmic Rays. My father also attended, as part of the Fair, the first World Science Fiction Convention.

At the opposite end of the country (running concurrently with the New York World’s Fair so that the celebration and motivation could be extended from sea to shining sea) was its Pacific counterpart, the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco - the World’s Fair on the Pacific. My dad claimed he was on site at the fair in New York when officials from the San Francisco World’s Fair, having lit a fire there, called the New York World’s Fair so that a fire engine could be dispatched from New York to put out the fire. The fire truck then set out across the country, making stops all along the way to publicize the fairs and to foster fire prevention awareness.

Though the fair itself provided little tangible relief from the larger, still somewhat depressed American Economy, its promises of a brighter tomorrow inspired an America anxious to embrace any reason for optimism, just as my father’s stories inspired me.

But sobering events in other parts of the world quickly diverted America’s attention to more immediate and deadly concerns. At the start of World War II my dad was drafted into the army and then quickly got a series of seat of his pants promotions which landed him a first lieutenant commission and a desk job. He was fortunate enough to remain stationed in New York City where he worked in (as he said, though I would later wonder if he’d been joking) Military Intelligence. Some of his friends met their death in that war, and others suffered for years from battle fatigue. He didn’t talk much about that, though. I don’t know if that’s just the way people were then, or if that’s just the way my dad was.

Being stationed in New York, he was able to attend an occasional major league baseball game: preferably at the Polo Grounds to see the Giants, once or twice at Ebbets Field to see the Brooklyn Dodgers. If he ever went to Yankee Stadium, he did not admit to it. Whereas both the Giants and the Dodgers played in the National League, the Yankees played in the American League. My dad would say, If it isn’t the National League, it isn’t baseball.

Though the only action my dad saw during the war was at the Ballpark, that did not stop him from telling war stories. In my dad’s case, however, those stories were baseball stories. They were generally amusing, sometimes hilarious, and he invariably told them with a smile on his face. As I grew older, however, I began to detect from the look in his eyes a somewhat different emotion than the cheerfulness he attempted to convey with his smile. The innocent exuberance which so animated my dad’s pre-war tall tales was somehow missing from the tales he told of his wartime and later years.

I remember when dad finally talked about how the war affected his best boyhood buddy. Scotty Zinn survived the war - sort of. When the Allied forces fire bombed the German city of Dresden in February of 1945, Scotty was one of the bombardiers who collectively dropped 3,300 tons of bombs on the city. At the time, the war was all but over and Dresden was filled with refugees fleeing the advance of the Russian army. Estimates put the number of casualties caused by the bombs Scotty and his compatriots dropped on the city that day at around 100,000 people killed. Scotty was never the same. Eventually, when I was about ten years old, he killed himself. I don’t really remember him. But I remember the funeral. It was perhaps the only time I ever saw my dad cry. Except for that day, he did not talk very much about anything specifically related to World War II. His view of the world, however, was understandably influenced by the tragic realities of warfare.

I should be clear that my father loved his country and thought of himself as a patriot. He was deservedly proud to have served and proud as well of all the brave, selfless Americans both abroad and at home who had willingly sacrificed so much in their united effort to uphold the ideals of freedom and justice. But war is hell, and it troubled him to see something so horrible portrayed as romantic and glorious. My father reluctantly came to accept that Evil was a tangible force in the world. And war, it seemed to him, was part of that Evil. World War II has been called a people’s war, a popular war. But there had been voices of dissent. In fact, one of every six Americans in federal prison during World War II had been imprisoned simply because of their conscientious objections to the war. World War II has been called the good war. Certainly the genocidal racism of Nazi fascism was an evil that the world would be better off without. But throughout the 1930s, America had tolerated both fascist Japanese aggressions in Asia and fascist German racism and aggression in Europe. It was only when American diplomatic, strategic, and (perhaps most persuasively) future economic expansion interests were directly challenged that America committed itself to the good war abroad - all while racism still flourished at home.

My father believed in fighting the good fight. But throughout his life the voices of dissent troubled him. He came to suspect that the values Americans clung to (the virtues of freedom, justice, and truth which motivated and justified their sacrifices) were not necessarily the same values which motivated the government to convince Americans to go to war. From his study of History, my father knew that at least sometimes, the push to war comes most vigorously from those who anticipate a financial profit from its result while simultaneously expecting others to pay its bloody price. Such a war, he thought, must surely be evil. In retrospect, he saw some similarities between what he had read in the history books, and what he witnessed in World War II. He also knew, however, that not all who argued in favor of war against the fascists did so for selfish reasons. Many had altruistic, honorable reasons for pursuing that conflict. And yet... what became of those honorable values? To what purpose was that altruism used? Can the horrors of Nazi butchery justify or excuse the slaughter of 100,000 in Dresden, and 100,000 in Hiroshima, and...? War, by its very nature, is evil - a tool which necessarily corrupts even those whose intentions may have initially been honorable, requiring as a price for its use the selling of one’s soul. Some have justified paying that price by claiming it was necessary to fight off an even greater evil. But there can be no such thing as the lesser of two evils. Evil is Evil, not good. At least so went one of the arguments which troubled my father until the day he died.

The war in Europe officially ended on May 8, 1945. But in New York City, news of the German surrender had leaked early. So on the 7th, the streets of New York filled with celebration. Office workers and garment workers joyously tossed ticker tape, scrap paper, and fabric remnants out of skyscraper windows, showering the cheering crowds below. Kisses were giddily exchanged between complete strangers. One of those kisses ultimately led to my father marrying a lovely young army nurse named Amelia in 1946, and then to my birth nine months later (almost to the day) on January 3, 1947.

By the end of World War II, the Great Depression had also ended. In 1946, the unemployment rate in the United States had fallen from the Depression peak of 25 percent to less than 4 percent. People had jobs - and money to spend. U.S. factories were once again busily producing goods for both domestic consumption and for expport. America had been victorious in both Europe and the Pacific. The Giants would win the National League Pennant in 1951 and the World Series in 1954. In 1952, the well loved hero of World War II, General Dwight David Ike Eisenhower, was elected in a landslide to the presidency of the United States with cheering crowds everywhere happily shouting, I like Ike! America’s can do spirit had been decidedly reestablished, along with her position as the wealthiest, most powerful, most envied nation on Earth.

As times go, my father would one day say, those times were, or at least seemed, really, really, good.

Perhaps it is the fond memories of other places and distant times such as those, longingly recounted in the stories of men like my father, which helps to explain my later obsession with the possibility of space-time travel.

CHAPTER TWO

In 1971, I was working one of those anonymous number crunching jobs in San Francisco’s financial district, and feeling really out of place. I had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1968 with a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics. Actually, I’d graduated with a double major: mathematics and physics. And I had done it in three years, having graduated from High School in 1965. People always said I was smart. And I suppose they were correct, at least in some ways. I mean, not everybody can graduate from Berkeley with a double major in three years, right? It’s just that I haven’t always FELT smart. Sure, there have been times when I knew I understood things in ways others simply did not. But there have also been other times...

Anyway, there I was, rubbing shoulders with all those too straight-laced financial district types with their three-piece suits, starched shirts, gaudy cuff links, and professionally manicured nails, all smugly satisfied with their success and nauseatingly confident that all was right with the cosmos. Though the profoundly disturbing issues and turmoil of the Sixties were but a blink in time behind us (and in much of San Francisco would remain ever-present), these guys seemed content to live in their own little world, oblivious to the revolutionary spirit which still tugged at our nation’s soul. Their satisfaction with the status quo seemed shallow, selfish, and, at the time, befuddled me. It may well be that they understood something I did not. But even now, after all that has happened, I still have difficulty wrapping my brain around that way of being. Still, there I was. My academic resume, along with the fact that I interviewed well, had made it easy for me to get the job. And I was good at it. But in the bigger picture it felt menial to me, pointless. The only reason I endured it was that it paid well. My experiments were expensive, and I needed the money.

When I’d dropped out of graduate school my father had, of course, been disappointed. But he understood, or at least pretended to understand, my frustrations with institutionalized research and the constraints I felt it placed on true innovation. So he had been helpful, financially anyway, in supporting my work - at least to a degree. Emotionally, however... well, he cared, obviously, but I never had the sense that he believed in what I was trying to do. He may have had the finances to fully fund my experiments, had he so chosen, for he had considerable wealth (the source of which was a mystery to me then). But we both agreed I should, at least to some extent, pay my own way. So it was necessary for me to hold down a real world job.

I love you, he said.