The Sum of My Experience: A View to the Future

By Philip S Radcliffe

This is a picture of life in the fifties in the midwest by someone who was really there. Phil went on to learn about technology and use it to solve industrial problems. In the process there were a lot of discoveries about people, economics, politics and faith. A breadth of experience over a dynamic period in US history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475968187

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Copyright © 2008, 2013 by Philip S. Radcliffe.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-6816-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-6817-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-6818-7 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 02/19/2013

CONTENTS

Prologue

EXPERIENCES WITH MY FAMILY

Genealogy

Heirs and Siblings

Images

Football

Family

EXPERIENCES WITH

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Science, Engineering, and Mathematics

Francis Collins: The Language of God

Jared Diamond and Thomas Freidman

Biological Motivation

The Scientific Method

Probability, Determinism, Faith, and Science

Extensions of Science and Technology

EXPERIENCES IN BUSINESS

The Economy

Economic Transition

Innovation

IBM and Westinghouse Electric

The Market

Market Crashes

EXPERIENCES WITH OUR POLITICAL SYSTEM

Conspiracy

Rights and Entitlement

Art Buchwald and John Kenneth Galbraith

Lessons from the Dark Ages and the Renaissance

Some Immediate Reforms

A Mistake

Class Warfare

Powerful People

EXPERIENCES WITH PEOPLE

Compassion

Education

Intent

HIV/AIDS

Hypocrisy

Aging

Influence

EXPERIENCES WITH FAITH

Ideological Wars

Spirituality Under Attack

The Dialectic

Sin and Discipline

Faith

Truth

Theology

Humanity’s Role

God

Death and Grief

Doubt and Faith

EPILOGUE

The Future

Bibliography

PROLOGUE

This book was developed as a series of independent essays written over an eight-year period as subjects occurred to me either through reading, some specific event, or as consequences of conversation. I have written a journal off and on since 1991, with months between entries more often the rule than multiple entries per day.

I was certainly not committed to publication when the effort was initiated, but by this time, I have concluded that for me, examining my life without pressing career or family requirements is of itself a worthwhile endeavor. My hope is that my perspective and conclusions will provide meaning or motivation to others and help them on their journeys through life.

There is an obvious negative consideration when publishing personal memoirs: Are my life and opinions so banal that they are of no interest or consequence? The answer to that issue will be in the eyes of the reader or in overcoming any barriers to publication. I have spent time reading works of others that were more entertaining than this book, and I have read works of others that caused less reflection than this one. In the final analysis the answer is not mine but yours.

I enjoy reading history, philosophy, and religion as well as economics and scientific expositions. At this juncture, I realize something of my ignorance in the face of the mass of data available in the last twenty years, let alone the data since Gutenberg invented the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century.

Our ability to communicate in writing probably began with cave drawings that date from twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand years ago. When an agrarian society developed around ten thousand years ago, there was significant motivation for improved record keeping. With a stable civilization, there was a need to keep track of the things one owned. Somewhere around 1700 BC, or almost four thousand years ago, there are indications of a consonantal alphabet of some thirty symbols in use around the turquoise mines in Serabit-al-Khadim in Egypt. Moses, the reputed author of books of the Torah, apparently did his writing some four hundred years or so later. Unfortunately, we have not found any copies of any original Old Testament—or, for that matter, New Testament—text. My point is that it has been only a little more than five hundred years since humanity has had the printing press available and only about thirty years with the availability of networks, computers, and databases. For approximately thirty-five hundred years we have communicated in writing on a limited basis. The ability to write is the key item enabling humanity to accumulate intelligence over generations.

It is my hope that succeeding generations of my family will have at least some indication that the old man in its midst let them know the outline of its roots and what some of the family’s forefathers did or thought. I am at that stage of life when, quantitatively at least, there is more to look back on than there is to look forward to. I am now beyond midlife but not yet ready to sedately accept my physical limitations of age and hard wear. In a sense this is my railing at the impending resolution that will come to all. It is my attempt to express an interpretation of where we have been and where we might be headed.

I have been a student of history from my early childhood through college and into my adult life. I made my living in the world of computers and industry from 1959 through 2000. Through a unique series of events I have been a systems engineer; sales and marketing manager; CFO of a fully reporting public company we registered as an IPO; and investor, partner, and mentor in other technology ventures. I am presently a director of a company listed on the NYSE. This background has given me technological insight, kept me in sympathy with sophisticated technology consumers, and helped me maintain an intimate familiarity with the economic consequence of fast-moving technology during a unique period of dramatic advances in the state of the art.

Since I have not been on the cover of Forbes or BusinessWeek or even been quoted often as a maven by the press, there are obviously people in the field who have enjoyed greater notoriety, economic success, and technical achievement than me. My participation in all phases of technological enterprises—from development and application through sales, production, executive management, and financial requirements, including raising capital and recording and analyzing results—has given me a unique prospective; consequently, I feel compelled to add my recollections and opinions to the arena of ideas.

Like any writer with a historical perspective, I will expand my range of observation and projection to include more than technology and business. It is the social, moral, and economic impact of these era-shaping events on which I feel compelled to comment. The root of my urge to put my thoughts to paper is my observation of gaps in presentations by others. No doubt there will be gaps in my observations also since no one is prescient, but at least I will have satisfied myself that my observations have been presented.

I am not writing this to prove a point, nor do I have a particular agenda in mind as I begin. However, I am not writing without bias. My format will be a series of separate discussions by topic. Since I tend to be fairly organized in my behavior, I am initiating this effort believing I will arrive at what will be a map of my journey through life, however incomplete and convoluted it turns out to be. Unfortunately, while I admire neatness and organization, they are not always evident in my thought processes or presentations. Keeping on message seems to be a problem for most of humanity but less so for obsessive-compulsive types. I have many faults, but obsessive-compulsiveness has not generally been listed among them. I will be more organized, at least by topic, than a pure stream of consciousness, but as topics generate consideration of related side issues, I will comment as I go rather than chance forgetting the related points. Editing should clarify and if necessary expand these potentially confusing asides.

EXPERIENCES WITH MY FAMILY

GENEALOGY

While I have collected material from our families, spent some time in the library in Douglas on the Isle of Man, and put things together on a software package on my computer, I have not thoroughly researched or attempted to cross-reference all the data I have or have available. However, in keeping with telling my progeny who I am and by inference something of who they are, I will now pass on some family stories and history as I have come to know them. I believe we are all products of the interaction of our environments, traditions, legacies, spiritual truths, and genetics. If any of these factors in my existence were other than what they are, I would unquestionably have been altered in my total reaction to life. In reality, any change in background would probably have resulted in my not having been. However, my point is to share what I have come to learn so my successors and others can reflect on the impact such factors have on their existences and circumstances.

In 1986, my wife and I made a trip to the British Isles with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law. While Ed and Dianne retraced James Herriot’s travels in northwestern England, we traveled to the Isle of Man and retraced some of the reference points from a diary written by my grandfather while travelling with his father in 1888. After several offers of paid guidance in looking into the Radcliffe family genealogy, I wandered into the library in Douglas and found three sources pointing to exactly what I was seeking. I traced the Radcliffe family tree back to one Henry De Radcliffe recorded to have died in 1193. It was unclear whether this Radcliffe was a Norman who had taken Anglo-Saxon property to become the Thane of Radcliffe or a member of the earlier tribe. His successor, William De Radcliffe, was an Anglo-Saxon on at least one side of his family and owned the Red Stone towers near the Red Cliffs of Lancashire in northwest England.

In the more recent past, I remember my grandfather only as an elderly man living on the farm we visited in Hambden, Ohio, in Geauga County. He was approximately seventy when I was born, and I was nine when he died. It was his diary of the trip he made to the Isle of Man with his father that was our guide during our visit. He was around twenty-one then and an eligible bachelor. My great-grandfather was William H. Radcliffe, a builder of wooden ships in Cleveland who emigrated from the Isle of Man sometime around 1850. From his obituary in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1893, He [William] built the first of the dry docks owned by the Cleveland Dry Dock Company. The trip in 1888 was to get updated on the transition to steam-driven iron ships, but apparently it did not take, since he left the management of the Cleveland Dry Dock Company around 1891, when he was sixty-five and his three sons were in their mid—to late twenties.

William commissioned the family monument at Riverside Cemetery on the west side of Cleveland, which in addition to the name contains icons of three significant factors in his life: the three-legged Manx symbol, the familiar Masonic emblem, and a wooden Lake Erie vessel he built. The Manx symbol depicts three legs joined in a circle and I believe it imparts a motto that wherever Manxmen are cast, they will land on their feet.

I know nothing of my great uncles William and Frank or their families. From stories of my mother and father I know that my grandfather apparently had a significant inheritance and participated in several ventures, none related to shipbuilding. My mother’s mother and my grandmother Radcliffe, née Kaiser, were evidently members of the large German-American community in the Ohio region in the late nineteenth century and knew each other at least socially. This friendship between families in Cleveland and Galion, my mother’s hometown, facilitated the marriage between my parents.

My father, Louis Charles Radcliffe, Jr., graduated from West High in Cleveland, in 1914 I believe, and went to Ohio State University for a year, hoping to study animal husbandry while a member of the cadet corps. In his sophomore year he transferred to Baldwin Wallace College in Cleveland, became a leader or perhaps an initiator of a short-lived cadet corps at BW, and graduated in 1918 with a BS in chemistry. In the 1920s, Dad, after service in the Army Corps of Chemical Engineers in Washington, DC, worked for the Harshaw Chemical Company.

Somewhere around 1925, my grandfather started Durvola Mills, a company that manufactured rayon for female clothing and undergarments. I recall some old catalog photos showing my mother and my aunt modeling dresses and slips that could be ordered from the mill. My dad left Harshaw and became the vice president of sales for Durvola Mills. My mother, who subsequently lived with us for ten years from age eighty-six, would occasionally recall her distress with her husband and father-in-law going on promotional trips to meet buyers or bankers in New York complete with tuxedos and occasionally accompanied by models. She mentioned that her mother-in-law, who had seen her own husband of some thirty years by then set off on many such business trips complete with visits to the theater in the East, told her it was just business. In any event, the company was doing quite well, and volume was steadily increasing.

My grandfather got married in 1895 at age twenty-seven, quite late in life for that period. My father was married in 1924, the day before he became twenty-seven. Grandmother Radcliffe was five years younger than her husband, and Mom was but a year younger than Dad. For at least two generations there was an apparent history of enjoying an unencumbered youth and then settling down to marriage and a career, trendsetting for today’s lifestyle.

My mother, whose father had been killed in a hunting accident when she was eleven, was the oldest of four children. She went to a finishing and commercial training school and was subsequently employed in a clerical or secretarial function at the M. A. Hanna Company in Cleveland. While keeping her day job, she sang with the Cleveland Opera Company. While she mentioned specific productions in which she performed, I believe her participation was limited to the chorus.

Mom and Dad both enjoyed active social lives prior to marriage and at some time started dating. I recall one story about one time when they were returning to suburban Cleveland with another couple after an occasion downtown. They were driving along Edgewater Drive near Lake Erie on a stormy night when a wind gust tore the windscreen off the car driven by their friend; they all laughed about it later when they were safe and warm.

In the late 1920s, my parents had two sons, an active social calendar, a rising career, and minority ownership in a growing business. Business was so good that an expansion was in order, and that brought another trip to the bank just before 1930. By 1931, however, my dad was the vice president of a bankrupt company at age thirty-four, and his dad was the president at age sixty-five. I’m not sure what my grandparents did from 1931 until 1945, but I remember that by the time of a dinner at Kaiser’s Restaurant in Lakewood, Ohio, and the following party at my Aunt Leona’s house in celebration of their fiftieth anniversary, we had spent many weekends driving from Lakewood on the northwest side of Cleveland to Hambden on the southeast side, doing chores around my grandparents’ twenty-five-acre farm. They leased out the land to a nearby farmer for some income and operated their residence as a tourist home on the highway of the Grand Army of the Republic, US Route 6. When my paternal grandmother died in 1955 at age ninety-two, she owned the farm clear and had a stock portfolio that was not huge but significant for 1955.

Around 1931, my parents and their two sons moved into a home my mother and her two sisters had recently inherited. My aunts were both married, and their husbands also resided there. My brothers had to be about five and two at that time. Shortly, my youngest aunt had a daughter, our first cousin, so total occupancy grew to nine. The house had a finished attic dormitory with at least three rooms, four bedrooms, and one bath on the second level, and a dining room, a large eat-in kitchen with an icebox indent, a living room, and a parlor on the first floor. The basement was unfinished with a coal bin, a coal-fired furnace, and a hot water heater.

I was born in 1937, and ten people under one roof got very chummy. The three brothers-in-law found work wherever they could during the Depression, and fortunately the father of one of my uncles owned a butcher store at Cleveland’s West Side Market, so unsold meat was brought home and cooked into stock for soup.

Around 1935, my Dad took a competitive exam for management of the state-owned and—operated liquor stores that were to open after repeal of Prohibition, and he became the first full-time employed breadwinner in the household. This enabled my immediate family to get a mortgage in order to compensate mother’s sisters on another house a block away that they had also inherited. We moved on our own when I was three, and my mother lived in the new house for the next forty-three years, from 1940 until 1983. The Radcliffe side of the family was nothing if not tenacious survivors.

I know less of my mother’s family. Jacob Schaefer, Sr., emigrated to Galion, Ohio, from Dusseldorf, Germany, I believe. He and his wife lived above the Jacob Schaefer and Sons grocery store in the center of town. I don’t know how many sons my maternal great-grandfather had, but I have a photograph of the quite impressive Jacob Schaefer, Jr., home in Galion. My mother lived a self-described idyllic life complete with horses and servants until one day her father was brought home by his hunting companion, a doctor, with a leg wound. He bled to death at home, and his family’s life was forever changed. My grandmother Katherine never remarried, and she died early in the year in which I was born. I know that my Uncle Ed, the only male in my mother’s branch of the Schaefer family, was limited physically by an injured back he had received as a boy. For a while he also lived in Lakewood in the home on Bell Avenue that became home to three families during the Depression. He ultimately died a young man, from tuberculosis, I believe. I remember looking at the catalogs of automobiles my uncle sold for a while before he became severely ill—, Packard, as I recall.

My wife’s family history of the Cramers and Whites has been filled in from records my father-in-law kept as well as a maternal family history maintained by my mother-in-law’s cousin, Ruth Stoller, of Dayton, Oregon. According to Harold White’s notebook of September 1976, Jon Alba Witt was a Hollander who immigrated to London’s East End in the time of George II, the second Hanover King of England who ruled from around 1720 to 1760. Jon Witt’s son John William changed his last name to the Anglicized White. John William’s son was John Bosley White, who became involved in the Portland cement business and in turn had a son, Edward White, in 1819. Edward became a well-known Methodist preacher in England.

Rev. White’s son, Ainsley Edward White, came to America in 1871. After brief stays in New York and Chicago, he found work in Cincinnati, where he met Emily Bosley Stevens, whose first husband had been killed in the Civil War. Ainsley and Emily bought a twenty-eight-acre farm in Elyria, Ohio, and had one son, Edward Aldersey White, known to many in the family as Uncle Bob, and one daughter, Rachel, who married Frank Eschtruth. The farm in Elyria became the home of Uncle Bob and Lydia Harriet Winson, and in turn it became the family home in the early years of Harold Aldersey White and his sister, Edith Ainsley White. Harold was my father-in-law and a man of his time and place who, as the dean of school superintendents in Ohio, provided thousands of young people with opportunities they would not otherwise have known.

Louise Cramer, my mother-in-law, was an absolutely wonderful woman. My record of her family tree goes back only to her paternal grandparents, who were born in Germany in the early 1840s. They both came to the United States and the records from Oregon show they died in Cincinnati. They had three sons and a daughter. One of their sons, Friedrich Cramer, was born in 1874. Dr. Friedrich Cramer became head of the religion and philosophy department at Baldwin Wallace College, where from 1916 to 1918 one of his students was Louis Charles Radcliffe, Jr., my father.

Baldwin Wallace College was the result of a union between German Wallace University and John Baldwin College and included many German staff members and Methodist ministers. Esteemed members of the faculty included professors with names such as Remienschneider, Unerwherr, Stieffel, Knautz, Cramer, and Breslich. At that time, most faculty families occupied suites in the college dormitories and served as resident assistants serve on most campuses today. My dad and Walter Deckelmeyer, one of his boyhood friends from Scranton Avenue in Cleveland, lived in the same dormitory the Cramer family proctored. Cramer ultimately required Walter Deckelmeyer and my dad to live off campus after several blown circuits, stink bombs, general hijinks, and finally a major plaster fight using plaster meant for a renovation in progress. It was also a matter of record that my ultrapatriotic father, a leader of the cadet corps, was a vocal opponent of the German Bund, and he was among the rabble promoting the departure of Dr. Breslich, then president of the college and possessor of a heavy German accent, a sure sign of treachery in a naïve America on the eve of World War I. When my girlfriend, Betty White, took me home to Medina, Ohio, one evening to meet her parents, her mother took her aside and calmly asked whether I might be Lou Radcliffe’s son. When that was affirmed, her only reply of the moment was Oh, dear!

The White family of Medina, Ohio, in the 1950s consisted of Harold White, Louise Cramer White, Edward White, and Elizabeth Louise (Betty) White. When Harold graduated from Baldwin Wallace in 1925, he took a position teaching in Valley City High School, and the following year he became the head of the Litchfield School in Litchfield, Ohio, a twelve-year school, grades one through twelve. It was at Litchfield that Harold met Louise Cramer, who taught there for two years prior to going to the University of Chicago for a master’s degree in French and German.

In 1929, Harold was offered the position as superintendent of schools in Lodi, Ohio, on the conditions that he complete a master’s degree at Columbia that summer and report to work as a married man. Harold satisfied both conditions in spite of some objection from Dr. Cramer that Louise be given the opportunity to complete her master’s thesis. In 1943, Harold and Louise moved to Berea, Ohio, where Harold served as the admissions director at Baldwin Wallace until 1947. He admitted Charles H. Radcliffe, my oldest brother, into the class of 1950 as a five-year student in engineering in cooperation with Carnegie Tech. In 1947, Dad White became the county superintendent of schools in Medina County, a post he retired from in 1970, having become the Dean of Superintendents in Ohio.

Medina County in 1947 was a rural area some twenty miles west of Akron and thirty miles southwest of Cleveland. The county included an area around Wooster, Ohio, populated by a significant community of Amish. The rest of the county contained many small, one-room elementary schools and several only slightly larger high schools, Litchfield being among the larger schools since it covered all twelve grades. Dad quickly determined, given his familiarity with the county, that kids were being deprived of opportunities since small districts did not provide a tax base sufficient to build science labs, performance halls, or sports arenas and stadiums as well as compete for quality teachers in short supply in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Consolidation was the only possibility, even though not all citizens or educators found all aspects of that desirable. In the end, the county was consolidated into five brand-new high schools, each with a feeder system of a reduced quantity of elementary schools. The passage to consolidation included lawsuits, threats, strong words, and several newspaper attacks. My wife recalled as a girl attending Medina Methodist church and singing the familiar hymn Jesus I have promised, which contains the text My foes are all around me and having to consciously avoid eye contact with several in the congregation.

Around 1975, after Louise had died of a totally unforeseen and sudden heart attack in 1971, Dad was visiting us at our home in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and we took a day trip to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, home to a large Pennsylvania Dutch or Amish community. We stopped at