Why Me?: The Luck of the Outlier

By Earle Jones

I call this exposition Why Me? because in a sense, I consider myself just about the luckiest person ever born. Just about everything that has happened to me has been to my benefit. I have made what I thought at the time were just random decisions, yet they almost always turned out to be acts of true genius. I would like to take credit, but in all honesty, most of these were just the events that were determined by local circumstances.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543452938

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Copyright © 2017 by Earle Jones.      765669

Library of Congress Control Number:   2017914625

ISBN:   Softcover     978-1-5434-5292-1

             Hardcover   978-1-5434-5291-4

             EBook           978-1-5434-5293-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 12/18/2017

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Dedication

With great love and appreciation, I dedicate this book to my two beautiful daughters, Andrea Robin Ridl and Eileen Jones Fierro and their families, and to the memory of my wife, Darlene, who put up with me for 47 years.

Contents

Dedication

Chapter 1— Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, June, 1950

First Visit to San Francisco

Chapter 2— Birmingham, Alabama April, 1931

1931 to 1948—The First Seventeen Years—Back Up a Bit

Birmingham, Alabama

My own beginning—goes like this

My twin sister:

My Parents

Roosevelt and the WPA

Chapter 3— My Father—Baseball at Rickwood Field

The Black Barons

Chapter 4— My Mother—Food for the family

Gypsies

Paving Our Street

Food

Chapter 5— The Start of World War II

Elyton Village

World War II

My Big Brother John

Chapter 6— My Preliminary Education

Elementary School

Geography

Music

A Sense of Humor

High School

Chapter 7— Life During the War

Segregation

Rationing

Vaccinations

The Wassermann Test

Tuskegee Syphilis Study

Chapter 8— High School in Birmingham 1944 to 1948

Summer Jobs

Chapter 9— The Twins Graduate:1948 My Twin Sister

1948 to 1952 to 1956

My Twin Sister—Merle Annette Jones—1931-1996

Chapter 10— What’s Next? The US Air Force

High-School Graduation and the US Air Force

Chapter 11— Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio

Chapter 12— Keesler Air Force Base, Biloxi, Mississippi

Chapter 13— By Ship to Kadena, Okinawa

Welcome to Okinawa!

Chapter 14— Amateur Ham Radio on Okinawa—KR6

Chapter 15— Busy Schedule and a History of the Korean War

Mini-History of the Korean War

Chapter 16— The routine on Okinawa, 1950 to 1952

Chapter 17— I Adapt to this New World

Chapter 18— The B-29 and the Change to Night-Bombing

Back to the B-29

Electronic Countermeasures—ECM

Chapter 19— The Sex Life of a Child

Chapter 20— After the Korean War—1952

Discharge in Exactly Four Years—July, 1952

Chapter 21— Off to Georgia Tech

Let us now praise Georgia Tech Football

Chapter 22— Georgia Tech—Junior and Senior Years—Segregation

The B-52—Wow!

Back to Atlanta for my Senior year

Graduation from Georgia Tech, 1956

1956 to 1980

Chapter 23— Stanford Research Institute (later SRI International)

Chapter 24— Darlene Rita Butler—SRI Librarian

Chapter 25— Back Home in Menlo Park—House on Willow Road

Chapter 26— Babies??

Early May, Our First: May 1, 1968

Our Son, Eric Paul, 1971

Chapter 27— Canadian Vacation and Wine Tasting

Chapter 28— Back to the Adoption Agency

Fast-Forward Here

Chapter 29— Animals

Chumley and Wally

Chapter 30— SRI Career Development

Chapter 31— Hiring New Geniuses

Chapter 32— Management of an SRI Division

Advancement Through SRI.

Fallen-Leaf Lake

Chapter 33— Travel with SRI

Travel With SRI

The SRI London Office, 1978

The China trip—1979

Back to Work!

Chapter 34— Thoughts on Leaving SRI

Outside Opportunity—A Startup Company

Chapter 35— Communication Intelligence Corporation (CIC)

1983 to 1994—Off to Asia

Chapter 36— Back to SRI in Tokyo

Chapter 37— Life in Tokyo

Getting Settled in Tokyo

Andrea and Eileen in Tokyo

Chapter 38— SRI Korea 1988

We Move From Tokyo to Seoul

Chapter 39— Back to SRI Menlo Park

Chapter 40— Japanese Publisher SoftBank buys Ziff-Davis

Chapter 41— Official Retirement in 1994

Chapter 42— Exploring the World!

Fifteen Years of Exploring

Chapter 43— How to occupy my time?

Chapter 44— Planned visit to Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia

Cancer—Cholangiocarcinoma

Chapter 45— Monthly Chemotherapy

Chapter 46— Eileen’s Wedding and Darlene’s Memorial

Chapter 47— Continuing Search for a Retirement Community

The Sequoias

Chapter 48— The Sequoias—Apartment 3-E

Chapter 49— I have a New Address

I Move Into The Sequoias

Chapter 50— On the Staff of The Sequoian

Chapter 51— Some Medical Issues

Some Medical Issues—the -omas

Glaucoma

Melanoma

Renal-Cell Carcinoma (My Third -oma)

Surgery and Post-Surgery

Chapter 52— Memoir or Autobiography?

Which is it?

What I did not accomplish

Chapter 53— Why I am the Way I am

My Religion—or Lack Thereof

Religion vs Science

Why I am the way I am

Politics

My Mother and William Faulkner.

Movies

Opera

Broadway Musicals

Jeopardy

Travel in the Future? Probably Not

Marriage

Moving

Chapter 54— Who Made Me the Way I am?

Billy Barnes

Hewitt (Hew) Crane

Hugh F. Frohbach

Ralph M. Heintz

Al Macovski

Lou Schaefer

Chapter 55— Happiness and Well-being

Chapter 56— The Final Chapter

The Final Chapter

Inspiration and Encouragement

Chapter 57— Thank You!

My Luck

A Profitable US Government?

The Meteorological Satellite Program

The World War II GI Bill

A Little Silliness—Numerology

More numerology

What Happened in 1931?

On the International Scene

Civilized Countries

Build it up and tear it down.

Afterthought

Chapter 1

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, June, 1950

At the age of 19, I had just been promoted to the exalted rank of Corporal, having served as a Private First Class (PFC) since my Basic Training in Texas. I was in the US Air Force, now stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. On Saturday, June 24 of 1950 after dinner, having nothing better to do, I went to a movie at the base theater. I don’t remember the name of it but during the movie, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, Come outside. The person who tapped me had a First Lieutenant’s silver bar on his collar and, therefore, outranked me—I was at this time a lowly Corporal with two little stripes on my sleeve—and, without question, I walked out with him. There were three or four people standing outside including another officer, a captain, who said to me, North Korea has just invaded South Korea. I was thinking (but, of course, not saying) What the hell does that have to do with me?

And then the four words that no GI ever wants to hear: Get your stuff together.

I found out later that everyone in the Air Force who had been through the Air Force Radar School and, specifically, anyone who was familiar with the AN/APQ-13 radar, was rounded up to be shipped out to the B-29 bases that were being built in Asia. The roundup began only hours after the North Korean invasion.

The B-29 was the primary heavy bomber used during the Korean War. And the radar APQ-13 was the bombing radar for the B-29.

They gave us an extra day to track down our laundry and write a few letters. Then the order came, Be at the flight line at 0700 tomorrow, bag and baggage.

Each airman has a duffle bag, a huge sack that will hold everything he owns. When stuffed, it weighs 40 or 50 pounds. We boarded a C-47 (the commercial equivalent was a Douglas DC-3, a twin-engine tail-wheel transport.) We flew from Wright-Patterson to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City to refuel and take on new passengers. The temperature there in June was probably 100°. In the non-air-conditioned plane, we were sweating. The next stop was Fort Frances E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. By now the sun had set and the temperature at the 6,000-foot altitude in Cheyenne was probably 40°. We were freezing in the unheated rear bucket seats of the C-47. From Cheyenne, we loaded up more airmen and took off for what is now Travis Air Force Base 50 miles northeast of San Francisco. In those days, it was called Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base. We arrived at a very early hour in the morning. From there we were bussed to a WW II Army base, Camp Stoneman, on the San Francisco Bay near the town of Pittsburgh, CA.

First Visit to San Francisco

After a few days of orientation at Camp Stoneman, we were transferred by bus to Yerba Buena Island in the middle of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. The small Army camp there on the island had served as a replacement depot (GIs called it the repple-depple) for World War II soldiers returning from the Pacific War in 1944 and ‘45. We spent a week there, getting some indoctrination on Korea along with more vaccinations against Japanese B-type encephalitis and God-knows-what-else.

The Bay bridge in those days was, as it is today, a double-deck structure. Today the westbound traffic is on the upper deck and the eastbound on the lower. In 1950, all automobile traffic was on the upper deck and truck traffic on the lower. On the lower deck, there was also a train system, the Key System trains that took passengers back and forth between San Francisco and Oakland.

We wanted to go to San Francisco, of course. Our problem was that the lower deck of the bridge was several hundred feet above our barracks down on Yerba Buena Island. Believe it or not, a group of three or four of us would walk up the 267 steps to the lower deck and catch a train to San Francisco. My first visit to this magnificent city! I was 19 years old.

From the train station in San Francisco, we walked to Market Street with its bars, restaurants, movies and almost anything else we could desire. We would head for a bar to get a beer, and being a group of young GIs in uniform, (of course, the Korean war had just started) the bar customers would line up to buy our drinks. We could not take our wallets out of our pockets.

This happiness lasted only five or six days when we got the word that we would be shipping out. We were taken by bus to Fort Mason to board our ship. Off to the War at the age of 19!

Chapter 2

Birmingham, Alabama April, 1931

1931 to 1948—The First Seventeen Years—Back Up a Bit

I was born in the first third of the year, in a year between baby booms and that makes me, like Malcolm Gladwell’s examples, an outlier. According to Gladwell, outliers are those people, typically born early in the year, in a period of time between baby booms, when the birth rate is lower. Outliers, in general, have a different path to follow in their lives. They have fewer competitors and therefore have an opportunity to achieve more than their average fellow man.

Reference: Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell, 2011

I call this exposition Why Me? because, in a sense, I consider myself the luckiest person ever born. It seems that everything that has happened to me has been to my benefit. I have made what I thought at the time were just random decisions and yet they almost always turned out to be acts of true genius. I would like to take credit, but in all honesty, most of these were just the events that were determined by local circumstances.

My friend, Frohbach, says that his direction in life is determined like a ball on a pool table. He goes in the direction of whatever it was that hit him last. I have sometimes felt that way myself.

Most of the Why Me? books ask the question, Why did it all go wrong? and What the hell happened? and Why did all this happen to me? My title question is How the hell did I get so lucky? …and How is it that everything I did in my life paid off handsomely? Why did everything go so right?

For example, my parents’ family planning:

My parents, Bascom Melvin Jones and Ruth Elizabeth Faulkner, were married in Birmingham, Alabama in June 1915. My father had been born in 1891 in Hayden, Alabama on a farm in Blount County, north of Birmingham. His father was a farmer. My mother was born in 1896 in Birmingham.

My big brother, John Melvin Jones—my sister Annette and I called him Bubba—was born on April 16, 1917. If he were alive today he would be 100. Two years later, my older sister, Dorothy Ruth Elizabeth Jones, was born on March 23, 1919. Then, twelve years later, in 1931, right in the middle of the depression, along comes me—and my twin sister! Now that’s family planning. Do you think they planned it this way?

They are all gone now, even my twin sister, who died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma at the age of 65. My big brother died of congestive heart failure at 68 and my sister Dot lived to be 91 and died recently of heart problems. I am the only one left. Why me?

Birmingham, Alabama

The biggest city in Alabama, Birmingham is located in the north-central part of the state. The population in the 1930s was 350,000. With green rolling hills, Birmingham is situated at the southern end of the Appalachian Mountain chain. Traditionally a coal producing and steel-making center, the area around Birmingham, like the Ruhr Valley in Germany, was one of the few places in the world that had everything needed for the production of iron and steel: iron ore, coal, and limestone. The huge furnaces required large amounts of all three.

Because of the iron ore, the dirt in Birmingham really is red. Growing up, there were three things that were given: The sky was blue, the grass was green, and the dirt was red. Between the grass stains and the dirt marks, our trousers had a Christmas look!

The big iron and steel producers were Sloss-Sheffield Steel Company and the TCI—officially The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company. My streetcar that took me to high school went right past the Sloss-Sheffield works and frequently, on the way to school in the streetcar, we would see the molten iron and slag pouring from the large blast furnaces. The coal and iron ore was brought there by train cars from the mines in places like Ishkooda and Docena, company towns on the outskirts of Birmingham.

While Sloss-Sheffield had big blast furnaces, the TCI, located in the suburbs of Ensley and Fairfield, was noted for its open-hearth furnaces. Blast furnaces make iron from iron ore while open-hearth furnaces convert iron into steel. There were also Bessemer converters in Ensley, some of which were used to make specialty steels for specific usage.

In the late 1800s, the TCI was a listed stock on the NY Stock Exchange and was the second largest steel producer in the US after its big rival, US Steel in Pittsburgh. The TCI was merged with US Steel in 1907 but continued to operate as an independent and profitable subsidiary. At its peak, during WW II, the TCI had 45,000 employees. At one time or another, both my father and my brother-in-law worked for the TCI.

There were dozens of smaller sub-industries that grew in the area, owing to the availability of good quality iron and steel. For example, the American Cast Iron Pipe Company (ACIPCO) was one of the largest manufacturers of iron pipe, fire hydrants, and valves in the world. It is still in business in Birmingham with several thousand employees.

The Sloss-Sheffield Iron Works was in business for almost 90 years, from 1882 through 1971. Since it closed down, it has served as a historical interpretative iron museum and hosts annual metal arts programs.

Is Birmingham a nice town—a nice place to grow up and live? I once saw a short piece in one of the newspapers (probably in 1970 in San Francisco.) It listed the best cities in the US and surveyed all American cities with populations above 200,000. The ratings were based on many variables: educational opportunities, cultural activities, low crime rate, lack of corruption in government, and such. The usual cities were near the top: Boulder, Boise, Colorado Springs, and Madison.

The list included 200 cities. In the last place at No. 200 on the list was Jersey City, NJ. Next to the last on the list at No. 199 was Birmingham. I clipped this out and sent it to my colleague and friend, Hew Crane, who was born in Jersey City. I included a note, My hometown is better than yours!

The other large cities in Alabama are Montgomery, the capital (100 miles south of Birmingham), and Mobile, the seaport city on the Gulf Coast. In the 1930s Huntsville was a sleepy farming town in the northern part of the state, where my brother and I occasionally went fishing on the waters of the Tennessee River. Today, with the US Army’s Redstone Arsenal and the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center dominating the town, Huntsville has become the third or fourth largest population center in the state.

Most of the state was devoted to farming. In the mid-1860s, cotton was king and Alabama became known as The Cotton State. Four million acres were planted to cotton. Today that is down to 1.3 million acres as more and more of the farms are moving toward production of poultry and eggs, peanuts, peach and pecan orchards and greenhouse crops.

For many years, Alabama politics was characterized by a few powerful individuals, who served for long periods of time. William B. Bankhead is a good example. He was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1917. He was re-elected continuously and gained seniority, becoming Majority Leader in 1935 and served as Speaker of the House from 1936 through 1940. (His daughter was actress Tallulah Bankhead.) Texas Congressman Sam Rayburn had an even longer career, serving continuously from 1913 through 1955 when he became Speaker of the House and continued to serve until 1961. It was typical of the South to elect and then re-elect their Congressmen and Senators continuously.

Today you will note that there are many large government-funded projects in the south, including the huge Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), several large NASA centers and especially big military bases. I believe that these location choices were made owing to the seniority and clout of southern congressmen and senators and their ability to steer government projects to their home districts. My friend and Sequoias resident, John Kingdon (Political Science, U of Michigan) remembered that a South Carolina congressman once said, If they put any more military bases here, this state will sink.

My own beginning—goes like this

April 10, 1931—Early on a Friday morning. My pregnant mother tells my father, It’s time.

He runs next door to the Brent’s house (they have a telephone.) He calls his brother–my Uncle Felix–who lives a couple of blocks away (he has a car.) Uncle Felix drives down and picks up my mother and my 12-year-old sister Dorothy and drives them to the Hillman Hospital. My father does not join them—he has to go to work. The Hillman Hospital was the Jefferson County, Alabama charity/emergency hospital on 20th Street in Birmingham. (This hospital first opened in 1887. Later, much later, this would become the Jefferson/Hillman Hospital and serve as the center of operations of the outstanding research hospital complex for the University of Alabama Medical Center in Birmingham.)

My mother is taken into the labor room and starts the process. An hour or so later, the nurse tells her, It’s a girl! Congratulations all around.

Hold on, the nurse says, There’s more! And, ten minutes later, out comes who else but me? Late as usual, but there eventually. Polite as always, a new-born southern gentleman, my first words were, After you.

For the first 20 years or so, my twin sister frequently reminded me that she was older than me. But I noticed that, in our 40s and 50s, that became less of a claim! In fact, when I was 40, my twin sister was only around 35!

Twin births were a big deal in that hospital—I suppose they still are. Today there are really no surprise twins—almost every pregnant mother has had her belly imaged with ultrasound. In those days, twins were unexpected. The excited nurses began thinking up names for the babies. For us, their favorite names were Donald and Doris. My parents had not given much thought to names, not knowing whether they would have a boy or a girl. (Or both!)

Today my original birth certificate has my birth name as Donald Douglas Jones. The Donald is xed out and the name Earle is written in. My understanding is that I was named after my uncle Earle Drennen, and he spelled it with the extra e. Similarly, my twin sister was Doris Annette Jones until the Doris was removed and the name Merle inserted. Earle and Merle (tacky, if you ask me!)

Only my father called her Merle; to the rest of the family, and to all of her friends, she was Annette. My middle name, Douglas, I am told, came from my mother’s admiration of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.—the swashbuckling movie star of the 1920s and ‘30s.

My mother had put together all of the paraphernalia that one child would need: One cradle, one crib, blankets, baby clothes and all those things that the expectant mother accumulates. But now there were two.

Solution: A big drawer in a chest of drawers—a chiffarobe as it was known. Open the drawer, line it with soft pillows and blankets, and it made a perfect bed for the second born, namely, me. (I tell my friends jokingly that for the first ten years of my life, I slept in a drawer! If he cries, just slam the drawer shut!)

We had a great early life. There are pictures of the twins at the age of several months -- bright blond hair, typically in a pageboy cut. (I think they put a bowl on my head and cut whatever stuck out!)

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The twins at eleven months –

(Earle is the blond.)

My twin sister:

Merle Annette Jones, my twin sister, was born ten minutes before me. We grew up together in almost ideal circumstances. Everything you have heard about the close relationship between twins is true. We were good friends and we had many other friends—her girl-friends and my guys were a great source of joy to us both.

Neighbors showed up to see the twins. The family of Harry Gilmer lived around the corner and was among the first to show up. Gilmer was a standout football player at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham and All-American at the U. of Alabama in the 1940s. Later, he was a single-wing quarterback with the Washington Redskins and coached the Detroit Lions for many years. Little Harry was five years old when he came to see me and my twin sister.

Our neighbors the Brents, the Lawleys, the Lugers, Evelyn Wear and her little sister, Annie Sue, my Aunt Matt and cousin Lilly Mae, and many others had to drop in to see the twins. Aunts and uncles, and cousins by the dozens came by to take a look.

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