Getting Through: The Wit, Wisdom, and Ignorance of Robert Newton Taylor

By Robert N. Taylor

Getting Through is the story of an ordinary, undistinguished, retired aeronautical engineer who recounts his experiences from late childhood through an idyllic adolescence, a mediocre public school education, a thwarted flying career, a bitching time in the Air Force, a second-tier now defunct engineering college, a marriage that went bad, and a career of underlying discontent with a few failures and some successes. Included are his fathers life recollections and the authors thoughts on philosophy, religion, nature and nurture, warfare, and the meaning of lifeending with accumulations of lifes journeythings done, places been, best books read, and the distance traveled on planet Earth. Getting Through, replete with wit, wisdom, and ignorance, tells us that no life is ever ordinary and that everyones story is worth telling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493113651

Robert N. Taylor

Robert N. Taylor, MD, PhD is Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY. Previously, he was Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at The University of Utah, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Emory University, and Director of the Center for Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Taylor received his undergraduate education at Stanford University and the combined MD-PhD at Baylor College of Medicine. He is a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and reproductive endocrinologist whose major research foci have included the role of placental angiogenesis and endothelial cell activation in preeclampsia, and the molecular actions of estrogen and progesterone on endometrial differentiation and neuroangiogenesis as they relate to endometriosis. Dr. Taylor served on executive committees of the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology, NIH Reproductive Scientist Development Program, the World Endometriosis Society and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

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Copyright © 2013 by Robert Newton Taylor.

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Rev. date: 11/25/2013

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Journey Begins

Adolescent Memories

The Family

My Brilliant Flying Career

The Four-Year Bitch

Chapter 2: The Middle Distance

A Trade School Education

Love’s Innocence: Letters

The Swift-Flowing River

Love’s Spoilage: Returned Without Comment

A Career of Discontent, Success, and Failure

Chapter 3: The Rest Of The Way

Good-bye, Farewell, and Amen

Free to Read, Think, and Roam

The Process of Degeneration

The Final Departure

Chapter 4: Revelations

Philosophy, Psychology, and Religion

Nature and Nurture

History and the Democratic Social System

Warfare

The Meaning of It All

Chapter 5: Journey’s Accumulations

Things I Have Done and Places I Have Been To

The Best Books I Have Read and The Eleven That Shook My Mind

My Favorite Quotes and Sayings

Life’s Time and Distance in Cosmic Terms

To

Chance and Happenstance.

I could not have done it without you.

History with its flickering lamp stumbles

along the trail of the past,

trying to reconstruct its scenes,

to revive its echoes,

and kindle with pale gleams

the passion of former days.

—Winston Churchill

Preface

Note: As an introduction to this revision of Getting Through, I must explain that the first version was intended solely for the benefit of descendents and selected others as a family legacy. It was never intended for general distribution. It was my first attempt and included some lists and documentation that would be of little interest to the general public reader. These have been modified or deleted altogether. Additionally, there were a lot of obvious errors (apparently not so obvious initially) that begged for correction. The majority of the original text remains essentially intact with some additions and corrections (based on knowledge accrued in the interim) that hopefully improve accuracy and the overall read.

This is a semichronological, anecdotal autobiography with issue-specific essays on philosophy, psychology, religion, nature and nurture, history and democracy, warfare, and the meaning of it all. The anecdotes are arranged in a loose chronological fashion with overlapping references that are hopefully more enlightening than confusing. The general format is that of a journey (what a novel idea!)—the beginning, the middle, and the rest of the way, followed by assorted essays and then by tabulations of some accumulations of that journey to date.

The intent is to present the life of an ordinary, undistinguished, uninspired observer of the human experience (since there is no other choice open to me), primarily to learn more of the nature of human life by examining and documenting my own life and additionally for the entertainment and informative value to others. It would be disingenuous not to mention the personal entertainment factor in the writing and the normal human desire for aggrandizement.

Now, as for background, the idea of developing and documenting my thoughts of wit, wisdom, and ignorance has been incubating since my Air Force service days when I was dramatically exposed to the foibles of human behavior. I initially planned to write only of my service experiences and call it the Four-Year Bitch. I reluctantly concluded that my experiences were (1) altogether all too common and therefore (2) would be of little interest to hardly anyone. And besides, I had little wisdom to present and equally little talent for writing. It could easily be argued that nothing has changed to date. I have not accomplished anything even mildly exciting nor particularly unique or noteworthy. My writing experience has been limited to technical reports, military messages and letters, technical specifications and procedures, and legal contracts and proposals where specificity and clarity was much preferred over elegance (with the exceptions of two articles in the Larson AFB newspaper, a featured letter to the editor in the Virginia Pilot newspaper, and personal letters and poems).

I once thought that I had something intelligent to say that the rest of the world would want to hear. I now know that I have nothing new to add to general knowledge and that, in fact, it is me that wants to hear what I have to say. So perhaps it boils down to only ego and entertainment. So be it!

I have long known that I was born into an animal race with a history of ignorance, hate, cruelty, and destructive drives for power, control, possession, dominance, and basic survival, all kept under tenuous control (with continuously occurring exceptions) by evolving civil societies and a basic goodness (altruism) that seems inherent in most people as long as they benefit in some actual or perceived manner, be it material, social, physical, psychological, or whatever.

The world is a dangerous and pitiless place, it has been said many times I am sure, but yet still beautiful and endlessly amazing, otherwise we would all be in a steady state of combative rage against the inequities constantly encountered.

The universe I find indescribably fascinating. I am awed by the mere fact of existence on this tiny planet revolving around a mediocre sun in a nondescript solar system on the edge of a gigantic galaxy of billions of stars in a universe of billions of galaxies.

The concept of pure free will has always been the forlorn belief of simpleminded spiritual people unwilling to accept that the human animal is formed and driven by a random set of variables and reacts to survive as a function of time and conditions none of which are under our ultimate control. Schopenhauer said, Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills. We are a work in progress. Chance and happenstance (both from nature and nurture) mold personal characteristics, viewpoints, perspectives, attitudes, desires, passions, drives, and motivations. Each human being arrives and lives under a different set of conditions. We are better learning how to recognize, control, and modify damaging and irrational human behavior and thinking, but progress is excruciatingly slow and distribution is random and severely limited.

I had long thought, even before reading Sam Harris’s little red book, appropriately titled Free Will, that the mostly conservative and religious belief in free will to be an illusion. It is an important distinction to make about the degree of freedom in one’s will. Accepting that people act without total free will would dramatically change our society. To replace punishment, incarceration, indifference, and prejudice with deterring, rehabilitating, empathy, and targeted educational and financial opportunities would ameliorate many of the injustices in our treatment of each other. The truth is that individual choices are largely the product of prior events that were not of our choosing; we do not choose our parents, gender, or time or place of birth. We have no control over our inherited physical or mental characteristics, our temperament, or much of our life experiences. Our choices are the result of a confluence of events and everything that made us today from what we were yesterday.

The diversity of life itself, beyond doubt, establishes the fact of natural selection, of endless mutations—an endless free for all—where survival is the driving and fundamental controlling force. Not too successful, you might say—since an estimated 99 percent of all animal species have failed to adapt successfully to the ever-changing environmental conditions for any extended period. We human animals have come to dominance in a relatively brief period. But, be assured, we too will one day join that 99 percent—assuming that there is something then existing of sufficient intelligence to draw that conclusion.

Now don’t blame Darwin—he just reported what he had observed. And we, the current dominant species, are just caught up in the process. We are a newcomer to this role, and if we don’t destroy ourselves, the next major asteroid or significant weather change will.

Don’t look to the Christian god for help or any other religious deity. Monumental failures all! Look instead to Dostoyevsky, who coined the brilliant conclusion that the purpose of life is to be happy. The Dalai Lama shares this view in saying that seeking happiness is the very purpose of life. So, there you have it! I would add that in the seeking that it be done with honor, integrity, and dignity—or at the very least, to paraphrase Hippocrates, Do no harm.

There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, enter like an earthquake into our lives, so said George Eliot. We are all unknowingly (more often than not) molded and formed to endlessly and constantly varying degrees for better or worse by forces both light and small, as well as by great movements of the world like wars and earthquakes. The great movements if not suspected or anticipated beforehand become readily apparent both during and after the fact and thus the effects can be more clearly recognized and analyzed.

It is the subtle, wispy, and ephemeral small movements of the world of an evolutionary nature, as opposed to revolutionary, that also mold and form our character. These movements can unrecognizably sneak in and steal our very self-image. The changes can catch us unawares, and it can be disturbing to discover (if we ever do) that we are not the person we thought or hoped we were. Personal images that we once held in high proud esteem like intelligence, courage, dignity, and physical competency (more readily apparent) can be found to be mere delusion, requiring some degree of serious modification. We have to pay attention! Everyone and everything we see, touch, read about, fantasize about, hear of, and know by wherever means constitute these movements of our world. And we, in turn, occupy a similar position to others! So, even ordinary people with ordinary life experiences and accomplishments influence others—perhaps in even extraordinary ways, hopefully in positive and productive ways. It’s nice to think so anyway.

My basic goal then is to tell my daughters about their father and my grandchildren about their grandfather, for better or worse, because to really know themselves, it’s helpful to know something of their heritage. And, in so doing, I hope to encourage them to do the same. Perhaps I have nothing of much lasting value to pass on, but that alone would be meaningful. The actual happenings may be only trite and commonplace. But perhaps even wit and ignorance alone possess some element of value. What to me may be wisdom may well be absurdity or naiveté to another. To cover myself, I intend to plagiarize, appropriate, and cite from those more intellectually endowed.

In summary, I am doing this so my daughters and grandchildren will hopefully benefit from my life experiences and to perhaps interest them and others sufficiently to encourage and motivate them to do the same. And hopefully, I will have lived long enough to have done it properly.

Apple Canyon Lake (Jo Daviess County, Illinois)

The Summit at Rockton (Winnebago County, Illinois)

INTRODUCTION

It all began on a Sunday morning at 5:30, the twenty-seventh of May in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the year 1934. This was during the Great Depression. My parents had married young at ages 16 and 17 and, by the time of my emergence into this strange existence, already had two other children, Boy, aged 3, and Joy, aged 4. They called me Bobby. My mother was equipped with a ninth-grade education. Her mother had died in 1917 when she was five. My father had failed the seventh grade twice and had lived in an orphanage after his mother had died in the great 1919 flu epidemic when he was seven. At thirteen his father removed him from the orphanage and, a year later, put him to work as an apprentice bricklayer.

In June of 1940, when I was six, we moved to Washington, DC, to a duplex on Conduit Road, later called MacArthur Boulevard after the start of World War II. I went to the neighborhood public elementary school and did all the usual things attendant to that age group. I was a Cub Scout, a School Crossing Guard, a good student, frequently prankish, always talkative, and I played all the usual games. I went to Gordon Junior High School, was a Boy Scout (achieving the rank of Life, two merit badges short of Eagle), hiked and camped, was fairly ordinary at school with average grades, and played all the usual games. I finished at Western High School with below average grades, was fairly nondescript, played most of the usual games at the neighborhood playground and organized sports for the DC Recreational League and the Babe Ruth League, being too small in stature and not good enough for the high school teams. My only passion was aviation, and my only dream was to become a commercial pilot.

I joined the United States Air Force and left home just three days after high school graduation for basic training at Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas, with the singular intent of becoming a transport pilot and then go commercial. I couldn’t afford the tuition for a pilot training school in Florida called Embry-Riddle. The Air Force discovered that I was color-blind only after basic training. I was stuck in the Air Force for four years without hope of ever becoming a pilot or even a flight crew member. Consequently, I became a grounded airman with an occasional bitchy attitude! The Air Force needed jet mechanics for the Korean War, so at their request, I became a crew chief on F-84 fighter aircraft and had grand experiences on two tours to Japan. Little did I know that in the years ahead, I would look back at those bitching years with gratitude for they earned me the GI Bill and subsequently a college education.

I knew absolutely nothing about applying to regular colleges, so I responded to an ad in Flying magazine. Even at Northrop Institute of Technology, basically an aviation trade school started during WWII by Northrop Aircraft Corporation to train their aeronautical engineers and mechanics, I was required to complete a three-month intensive crash course (physics, algebra, and geometry) to get accepted. Backed with a meager 2.2 grade point average in high school, four years of suppressed ambition in the Air Force, and most of all, the fear of failure, I graduated in 1959 with a diploma in aeronautical engineering technology and, in 1963, with a full-fledged bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering with an overall GPA of 3.00. The time between, I returned home to Washington and found work as a technical writer for the Hercules Powder Company on the Polaris missile at a research and development plant outside Cumberland, Maryland, preceded by a short stint with McDonnell Aircraft Corporation at St. Louis, Missouri, as a technical writer on the F-4 aircraft structural repair manual. It was a boring job that I could endure for only six months. There was a month before I got the McDonnell job when in desperation and another car payment due, I sold a home music library door-to-door. I made one sale, turned in my kit, and ended my sales career.

I was married in June of 1963 and took a job in Denver with the Martin Company to work on the Titan II ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile). I had started a relationship over three years previous with Mary Jo Struble, the daughter of my parent’s best and longtime friend. We had dated when I was home (commuting the 125 miles from Cumberland on most weekends) and had corresponded regularly. By the time I returned to Northrop and completed the requirements for my degree, we had exchanged over 120 letters and formed what I thought was a lifetime partnership. Getting my degree and getting married was the height of my life up to that time.

At Denver, we roamed the surrounding mountains, enjoyed our freedom, and I got a taste of being an aerospace engineer. I didn’t like it much! Again the Air Force came unexpectedly to help me out of my predicament by canceling the Titan II contract and forcing a major layoff. I interviewed with the Chrysler Space Division in New Orleans and received an offer as an aerodynamicist. They had just gotten the NASA contract for the Saturn IB stage of the Apollo program. We moved to the land of heat, humidity, mosquitoes, hurricanes, crooked cops, racism, bigotry, the mardi gras, the French Quarter, marshes, bayous, Cajuns, and fabulous food. And we experienced them all!

I spent the first six weeks at Chrysler looking out the windows from the twentieth floor of the tallest building in the city counting boats going up and down the Mississippi. I later heard that Chrysler needed us on the payroll to help win the Saturn contract. If they had not gotten the contract, we would all have been let go. We bought our first house and, within the year, faced another layoff as NASA cut back the order for the Saturn IB stage. Enough of the aerospace industry—we were not called educated gypsies for nothing. Jo was now pregnant, and we wanted some stability, so as luck would have it, an ad in Aviation Week miraculously appeared. We moved to Norfolk, Virginia in March of 1966 where Jo delivered Shannon the next month and I started my twenty-seven-and-a-half-year career with the Navy Department. In July of 1968 we had Audra. In August of 1977, we moved to St. Mary’s County, Maryland, when I was transferred to a new organization at the Naval Air Station, Patuxent River. We did all the usual things attendant to married couples with young children, mortgages and car payments. We even managed an amicable and uncontested divorce.

On the 3rd of September 1993, I retired from the Navy, and my professional thirty-two-and-a-half-year career as an engineer. In between were all the not uncommon happenings of a family (periods of gratitude, joy, and pride terminating in broken commitments, dreams, and vows) and the usual happenings within a career (periods of considerable challenge, moments of personal satisfaction, with occasional major achievements of some lasting value to the Navy, interspersed with seemingly endless days of monotonous routine).

My career has given me a secure and comfortable retirement, and my family has given me two very successful and terrific daughters. I must have done something right along the way.

Someone said that an autobiography is all fiction. And I have discovered that to be true to some extent. Even recollections from yesterday are discolored by the nature and temperament of the recollector. I suspect that some of my remembrances are composites of happenings scattered about over time with ever so slight exaggerations here and there to enhance the telling and to protect the innocent and with also unintended omissions all to brighten the memory. The conscious intend on accurate recall is honest. However, even a daily journal, had I kept one, would assuredly contained errors of omission with favorable interpretations of events, done either deliberately with all good intentions or totally unconsciously. Although I really don’t think, or at least I don’t remember (which is the same thing), that I have any bad things that I would chose to deliberately and consciously omit. I naturally wish to leave the impression of a good, decent, and well-intentioned person, but I will leave the truth (however we choose to see the truth) to be the judge of that.

There are certain things that I know for a fact though on that Sunday morning in 1934. I started that day with nature’s randomized biological endowment ready for exposure to the nurturing side of the equation. One was set in concrete and the other was quicksand.

Now, nature and the nurtured human race had been around for quite some time. Nature, for about thirteen billion years or so, had accomplished some remarkable and astronomically, astonishingly good work albeit at a snail’s pace. The earliest known human ancestors on the 4.7-billion-year-old planet Earth currently date back about 3.7 million years—the Australopithecus afarensis. The modern human, Homo sapiens, for about forty to fifty thousand years, had fought, argued, slaved, suffered, toiled, and destroyed and had progressed technologically at an ever-increasing rate but socially at a snail’s pace.

Life expectancy was around sixty years in the United States in 1934. The total population was about 127 million. It was in the midst of the Great Depression, and unemployment, currently at 22 percent, had peaked the year before at 24.9 percent. FDR was in his first term working through Congress a myriad of New Deal legislation designed to change the operating conditions that allowed the unregulated and uncontrolled capitalistic greed of the rich and powerful to ruin the lives of millions. Social Security was still a year away from reality. It was opposed by most conservative Republicans and businessmen claiming it would destroy initiative and discourage thrift. Old faith-based conservative ideas die hard. Thirteen years of prohibition had just ended with the Twenty-first Amendment repealing the Eighteenth. A victory for human society over wrongheaded Christians. There were only 900,000 public high school graduates that year with less than 10 percent going on to college. College costs less than $1,000 (tuition, room, and board), but not many could afford even that. Only 150,000 coming from both public and private high schools graduated from college in 1934. Just 40 percent of households had telephones and less than 50 percent had radios. A radio could cost $100 while a Chevrolet Roadster sold for under $500. The local movie theater in Charlottesville cost 10 cents for the Saturday afternoon matinee. A public school teacher’s annual salary was less than $1,500. A gallon of gas costs 10 cents, a loaf of bread 8 cents, and the average annual salary was $1,600.

This was America in the year of my birth. I know this for a fact because I was there. I just don’t know for a fact how I felt about it all. I have several faded, small pictures showing the house and the family I inherited by random selection. In retrospect, I would have preferred, if given a choice, a wealthy landowning family in England where I would be looking forward to Eton and Oxford. But you deal with what you get. In one picture, the mother looks healthy and happy and the other two children look like, well, healthy and happy children. The house is an old weatherworn stucco with the ubiquitous privy out back common to that part of town known as The Bottom. The mother and children are new, innocent, untried, and unsuspecting. The children a little more so than the mother. The father is behind the camera—healthy and happy, but probably worried and even apprehensive about the future and his ability to support his family. Welcome to my world.

CHAPTER 1

The Journey Begins

Adolescent Memories

The public school experience. My father had moved the family to Washington in June of 1940. Not Washington State, as I later often had to explain when I was in the Air Force where guys always ask, Hey, where you from? but the District of Columbia Washington. We settled in a Northwest section called the Palisades out along then Conduit Road (later changed to MacArthur Boulevard) situated along bluffs overlooking the Potomac River. We had come up the main road from Charlottesville, Route 29; that would have taken us across Key Bridge into Georgetown, but by accident or design, Pop cut off at Falls Church onto Route 120 that led us over Chain Bridge into the Palisades. This turned out to be a stroke of good fortune because the Palisades was almost like a suburb of Washington with a small-town atmosphere with a playground park and an elementary school within walking distance.

I was six at the time and I can’t credibly recall nor personally visualize any prior events. I know from two grade cards from the Peter Pan School that I attended a preschool kindergarten class in the fall of 1939 when I was five. I got all As and Bs in everything, from reading and writing to perseverance and obedience. I don’t recall any of that. It’s like my real life began in June of 1940 in Washington, DC. What I do recall were very probably prompted by accounts overheard from my parents combined with my own imaginary flashbacks—things like (1) cutting my left thumb on a coffee can; the kind that had the key that rolls up a thin strip of metal to remove the top-five stitches. I know it happened because I still have the scar; (2) packing myself in a snowdrift on the front porch and yelling bloody murder when I found I couldn’t get out; (3) jumping down into a drainage ditch filled with mud and snow and again yelling bloody murder when I couldn’t get up the slippery muddy sides; (4) stepping on a yellow jackets nest at the local swimming pool with Pop trying to pull down my shorts in front of everyone as the bees stung me up inside and on my thing while I screamed bloody murder and then spending the afternoon soaking in a tub of Epsom salts; and (5) playing the part of the baby bear in Goldilocks and the Three Bears on live radio. All the rest I know from photographs—the Hopalong Cassidy cowboy suit, the Tom Mix cap pistol, the big new red tricycle, a birthday party sitting on the front steps of my friend, Patten Teal’s house.

So across Chain Bridge, along Canal Road, up Arizona Avenue to Conduit Road and down to 5135 where a For Rent sign was hanging on the railings above a fifteen-foot stone wall. 5135 was one half of a two-story duplex of a dozen or more exact copies all fronted with a stone wall of changing height running for almost two blocks starting from the corner service station, convenience store, and barbershop. Across the street at the corner were a grocery store and a drugstore with a laundry shop farther down the street directly across from 5135. I lived there for the next twelve years. My parents sold out in 1960 (they had brought the house many years previous for ten thousand dollars). During that period, I had a stable and secure childhood completing (barely) the prescribed public education in comfortable surroundings that I will never forget.

An alley ran down the back of my house, and across the alley was another row of identical duplexes. The way to the elementary school was through the yard of anyone of these row houses. I tried several that first fall and finally settled on the one that always had an open gate and no one yelled at me to get out of their yard.

Within weeks, Pop created neighborhood attention that first year and got an introduction to civilized society. Pop cut the head off of a live chicken in the backyard, and within minutes, a city police car showed up. A friendly discussion followed. Pop was dismayed to learn that a district ordinance prohibited live chickens in residential areas and clearly prohibited beheadings. Ignorance of the law was accepted since we were newcomers to the big city and country folk to boot. On the Fourth of July, the policeman showed up again when Pop set off celebratory fireworks in the backyard—again not allowed within city limits. He had brought them across the river in Virginia (where he had gotten the live chicken).

I started that fall in the first grade at Francis Scott Key Elementary School. My first report card shows satisfactory growth in all areas except speech and reading to others. I apparently had a speech defect referred to as immature speech. And I needed to improve my behavior on the playground. By the end of the year, my speech had much improved, but my behavior on the playground was still considered a bit unruly. I remember no such problem, although I do remember an embarrassing moment in the third grade when reading before the class, I couldn’t pronounce the word pure. It came out more like purr. The teacher kept insisting, and I kept saying purr while the class laughed. Throughout elementary school, I was a fairly average student consistently rated as satisfactory. There were no letter grades, just three categories: (1) needs much improvement, (2) shows satisfactory progress, and (3) shows outstanding progress. I was always written up in the letter report to the parents that I should be more serious, less talkative, and do away with silly playful periods. I did enough punishment time sitting in the principal’s office for general classroom misbehavior (usually talking too much) that my mother and Mrs. Hickman, the principal, became good friends. The best prank I clearly remember was bringing a large three-foot black snake to school under my shirt. I had found it at the city playground the day before and I had hidden it in a clothes bag in the basement overnight so mother wouldn’t find it. The desks were the kind that hinged at the top to lift up for books and stuff. I came in before class started and put the snake in the desk of a girl I wanted to impress. When discovered, she screamed, and every girl in the class screamed. The only ones I impressed were the boys. The teacher was not impressed, but Mrs. Hickman had a hard time not laughing out loud while telling my mother on the phone what I had done this time. I am sure that she had a strong suspicion just who was involved in the three-alarm Christmas tree fire that next year.

I was pretty good at playground activities, however unruly, which usually consisted of boys softball, swinging on the monkey bars, random pushing, shoving, and running, and stealing the girls volleyball. I did manage to break my arm when I slipped (or was pushed by a girl) off the monkey bars. In my last year, I was a lieutenant in the School Safety Patrol with a white Sam Browne belt and a silver-and-red badge with AAA embossed in the center. I don’t know that I ever questioned the AAA (obviously for the American Automobile Association), but that badge was a symbol of power. Being a street crossing guard was serious business particularly if you were assigned at Dana Place and MacArthur Boulevard. MacArthur Boulevard was a dual-lane road with a grassy median strip and the traffic was often heavy. Stopping traffic was my favorite thing.

I got a ride up the school’s front terrace before the entire school in a new army jeep because I had brought two twenty-five dollar war bonds with money from my paper route delivering the Washington Times-Herald. I later cashed them in to buy a new Schwinn bicycle.

During those years I did the usual things that elementary school kids did. I played baseball, football, tennis, and horseshoes at the district playground. I disliked basketball since I lacked the seemingly basic requirement—height. I collected match covers, bottle caps, baseball cards, and military insignias. I listened to the Lone Ranger, Gang Busters, Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy, Terry and the Pirates, and others on the radio.

And I was a Cub Scout. My mother was a Den Mother, and she held meetings in our basement that consisted mostly of arts and crafts and how being a Cub Scout was special and challenging. The Cub Scouts taught twelve core values, as they were called, that like the Boy Scout oath and pledge were meant to instill good moral values and proper behavior. This was my first exposure to strong and meaningful words like compassion (be kind and considerate to others), courage (do what is right), honesty (tell the truth), perseverance (never give up), responsibility (accept responsibility and don’t blame others for your mistakes), resourcefulness (being creative in solving problems), and faith (believing that things will work out for the best).

The thing I loved the most during those years was my bicycle—a thing of pure freedom. I even rode it downtown to Washington to the Capitol Building with my friend Steven who was from Montana. We walked right into an open office and met the senator from Montana. I think he knew Steven’s father. We then went and ran up and down the Washington Monument. This was a grand adventure for two twelve-year-old kids.

This idyllic existence for these happy and carefree years started to crumble when I turned thirteen and progressed to the next level in the District of Columbia school system—Gordon Junior High—grades 7 through 9 with letter grade report cards and a thirty-minute commute by bus into upper Georgetown. No more short walks to school and back home for lunch. By any reasonable measurement, I was ill prepared by way of knowledge (limited), study habits (none), and maturity (lagging). Self-esteem was high. I knew none of this at the time—and a good thing; otherwise I should have been properly scared of measuring up to my classmates. I continued with minimal effort to maintain my barely satisfactory performance, now graded mostly Cs and occasional Bs with the usual A in mechanical drawing. The home environment was essentially devoid of academic support what with long hours for my parents: My father had often worked two jobs during the war and now back in construction work would leave the house at 5:30 a.m. and wouldn’t get back before five in the evening often dead tired. Mother had housekeeping work for now five children (the fourth child in 1944 and then the fifth and last in 1947). They both were active in civic activities: the PTA, the civic association, the Cub and Boy Scouts, and church affairs. In a small house with one bathroom, quiet time and location for homework was nonexistent. This situation, and later the first television set in the neighborhood in 1948, contributed heavily to my progressively poorer school performance. It didn’t help much either that in eighth grade, I contracted a case of nephritis and missed most of the first semester. A nice old lady came by the house three times a week for about an hour each. I did practically no homework, and that was apparently acceptable. I occasionally spent time during the day at the little local library with random readings with no connection to school subjects. I graduated in June of 1949 without much academic effort and, not surprisingly, was more ill prepared for Western High than I was for Gordon Junior High. My only academic goal was to finish high school and become a commercial pilot. Somehow the two goals seemed unrelated other than the necessary sequence. I had not yet learned that the greatest thing you learn from education is how little you know.

During the years attending Gordon, which had no after-hour activities since most students commuted like me, I played all the usual sports at the community playground. Baseball in the Babe Ruth League (before Little League) and football in local makeup leagues (where I broke my foot on the opening kickoff in the opening game of the season). But my major activities and interest was now the Boy Scouts: hiking and camping on many weekends, a two-week summer camp at Camp Roosevelt on the Chesapeake Bay, working on merit badges, and Friday night meetings in the big Presbyterian church off M. Street east of Georgetown. The Boy Scouts gave me invaluable experiences and taught me more about being a good person and molded my character more than anything I learned at home or at school. The scout law is full of wisdom expressed in simple terms: be honest, be trustworthy, be concerned about others, play by the rules, pay your own way, protect nature, and stand up for what you believe to be right. Mr. Tucker, the scoutmaster, exemplified the scout laws without question in my mind and I revered the man. He gave me self-confidence and values that have lasted a lifetime.

Western High was just off of Reservoir Road in Georgetown, the same bus commute as to Gordon Junior High. It was recognized as a college preparatory school and even had a United States senator’s son for a student. It could be argued that there were two distinct classes of students in Western: those known and expected to be going on to college and then all the rest. I don’t know about all the rest, but I never talked to a student counselor until a month before the end of my senior year. All she wanted to know was what I planned to do after graduation. I told her, To go to Embry-Riddle to be a commercial pilot. She said, Good, that’s fine. And that’s what got written up in the class yearbook of 1952. The only reason I graduated at all was extra credit for two semesters working in the book room, arranged by my mother’s best friend and my future mother-in-law who worked in the school office. I could have used some actual counseling earlier on in the high school process. I failed geometry in my first year (actually I got a complimentary D− when the teacher thought I was not going on to algebra—which he also taught) and then was assigned to algebra class the next year (no one asked) when geometry was a prerequisite. Not unexpectedly, failure was guaranteed. I had received a previous complimentary D grade in Gordon Junior High. There, I promised the teacher I would drop French—no great sacrifice. I graduated ninety-ninth out of a class of 141 with a 2.2 GPA—largely because of mostly As in mechanical drawing and a two-semester aviation class. I got mostly Bs in radio, general science, history, and office practices (working in the book room). It’s depressing to think that forty-two others finished below me. When I went to college four years later, I took a three-month crash course covering high school level geometry, algebra, and physics to get accepted into the aeronautical engineering course. I caught on fairly quickly with no particular problems, probably because it was taught in practical terms vice theoretical. At Western, I often felt that I didn’t really belong there and was in over my head. I seldom was able to complete homework and I dreaded being called on in class where my mind usually went blank. I did badly on many tests even when I thought I knew the material. Years later when I went back to Western to get a transcript of my grades, I accidentally caught sight of a form in my folder left on the counter when the office clerk went to make a copy of my grades. One block was labeled Intelligence quotient. It read 127. Right or wrong, that bit of information helped me considerably in college—I had the capability! Wish I had known that earlier—it might have helped at Western.

I wanted to play school sports at Western, but at 135 pounds and 5' 5", the football coach laughed me out of the meeting. I continued to play football and baseball in makeup games at the district playground. But all the good players were on high school teams.

My grades in mechanical drawing (ink drawings when copies were actually and literally blueprints) got me into a fraternity called the Cog (like cogs in a gear). Members of the Cog