The Autobiography of Richard Jeffery Wagner: A quest to understand

By Richard Wagner

From being drafted into the military during the Vietnam war to solving the so-called hard problem of consciousness; from playing in chess tournaments to working on space robots for interplanetary spacecraft; from attending public schools in John Steinbeck’s hometown to teaching computer science at a major university; from riding the big surf at Waimea Bay to inventing the world’s fastest sorting algorithm; from racing model cars as a teenager to mentoring teenagers on high school robotics teams: Dr. Wagner’s debut book, twenty years in the making, chronicles his struggle to live meaningfully in a quest for a coherent understanding of the human condition.

"... an interesting life full of amazing experience ... indeed an extraordinary man.  I am honored to be his friend.  He has been a great inspiration and motivation to my son, Kai, and myself." --Ron Van Clief, the Black Dragon

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662464393

Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner is the former editor of Ad Astra, the journal of the National Space Society. He lives in Northhampton, Massachusetts.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Preschool

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

—Mark Twain

The Beginning

I was born during the baby boom in August 1949 near Salinas,² California. The sun was in Leo and the moon was just past full. My mother, Evelyn, graduated from Salinas High School in 1939 as valedictorian and started at Cal (UC Berkeley) later that year, graduating in 1943. She became a chemist at the Spreckels sugar plant near Salinas during World War II. The Salinas Valley was a sugar-beet growing area at the time, and Spreckels Sugar was shipped all over the world. The Spreckels plant was later shut down due to poor profitability, and the town of Spreckels (four miles south of Salinas) became like a ghost town.

My father, Dr. John Wagner, who had met my mother at Berkeley when he was in medical school, was a physician and surgeon practicing in Salinas, California, where they settled because it was my mother’s hometown. Father had joined the Army as a captain when he graduated as an MD and was discharged soon after the war ended in 1945. Mother became a housewife after marrying my father. My older brother John Donald Jr. was born in 1948. My mother, who enjoyed opera music, named me after the composer, Richard Wagner, and she liked the unusual spelling of my middle name. It was also the spelling of the name of Mr. Jeffery, owner of the Jeffery Hotel in Salinas, where we would occasionally go for Sunday brunch after church. My younger brother Walter Louis was born a year after me, in 1950.

My earliest memory is of my father (whom we children called Daddy, his friends called him Jack) and older brother, John (whom we called Donny until he was about ten years old and wanted to be called John). We were in the front yard of a rented house on Main Street, Salinas, and Daddy was about to take Donny across the street to the produce stand where I could see watermelons for sale. Cars were going by, both ways in the street. I wanted to go with them, but I could hardly walk, being only a year old. Daddy, take me, take me, I said. Daddy said, Okay, Ricky, come on. Excited, I lurched forward and immediately fell on my face and began crying. Daddy changed his mind and told me to stay there at the house while he and Donny went across the street. Mother (we called her Mommy) held me and comforted me, but I was quite disappointed in not being allowed across the street.

I, two, Walter, one, and Mommy at Grandfather Reeves’s house in the country about eight miles south of Salinas on the old Monterey Highway (California 68) at Corral de Tierra Road.

Another early memory is of me with my two brothers. We were sitting in a perambulator in our open garage at the house on San Juan Drive. Donny was on my left, and Walter was on my right. The buggy was near the south wall of the garage and near the opening on the east side. It was winter and somewhat cold. I was wearing a wool shirt and a Levi’s jacket. The air was cold, morning sun was streaming in, and Mommy was talking to a woman. I had a cold. My nose was runny, and I was wiping it on my sleeve, which was scratchy and was irritating my nose. Both sleeves were quite snotty by then, so the sleeve-wiping technique wasn’t working very well. I felt miserable. I must have been a year and a half old, because it was winter; any younger and Walter (about a year younger than I) wouldn’t have been born yet, any older and John (about a year older than I) would have been three and a half, too old for a baby buggy.

I am two years old and standing on the brick planter by the front entrance of our new house on San Juan Drive in Salinas. The house is still there.

I discovered electricity the hard way. I was about two years old when I inserted a hairpin (bobby pin) into the electrical wall socket under the mirror in my parents’ room. There was a pop, a flash of light, smoke, pain, and a black hairpin imprint on the palm of my right hand. I cried. Mommy came running and tried to comfort me. You should not put things into the wall socket! I thought it was a bit redundant as I had just figured that out for myself.

I was three years old and playing in the vacant field next to our house. I was barefoot in the dirt, and the sun was shining. I was sitting on a kiddie car, a push car for little kids that had a steerable wheel in the front on a vertical shaft with a cross bar handlebar. By rotating the wheel completely around, I could augur the front wheel into the soft dirt, boring a shallow hole. It was fun. I thought I’m alive! I exist. I am here! It felt good to be alive. It gave me a feeling of confidence in anticipation of the future. Life was good, and I wanted more.

One day I was riding my little red tricycle on the sidewalk north, away from our house. I must have been about three. I went around the corner west on San Juan Circle. It was all vacant lots. Nothing had been built to the north of our house. I continued until I found a trail through the vacant lot to Pajaro Street. The field had been tilled, the dry grass turned under to suppress fire, leaving the ground soft with big dirt clods, and a tricycle could not be ridden on it. The pedestrian traffic on the trail had packed it hard so I could ride. I was barefooted, wearing only underwear briefs and a T-shirt. I got about halfway across the field when I needed to defecate. I got off my trike and did my business in the middle of the trail. I then turned my tricycle around and got back on it to go home, and then I encountered the turd I had left on the trail. It was covered with dark shiny green flies. The feces did not bother me, but the flies scared me. I had never seen massed flies like that. I could not get the tricycle around the obstacle over the rough ground on either side of the trail. Dejected, I left the tricycle where it was and walked home. I saw my daddy who was home for lunch. Daddy, I said, there’s doo-doo on the trail, and I can’t get my trike past it.

Daddy accompanied me to my tricycle, and when he saw the turd on the trail, he asked, Did you do that?

No, I said. Daddy said nothing further. He picked up my trike and carried it home for me. I had lied about the feces on the trail, and I knew he knew it.

Mommy made occasional trips to go shopping in San Francisco, a hundred miles north of Salinas, on the Daylight Special train. When she would come home, she would often have presents for us. We three would jump up and down when she arrived, saying, What did you bring us? One day when I was three years old, I was in the hallway with my brothers when she returned from a trip. Donny and Walter were both jumping up and down in excitement. I merely stood there with my arms folded, thinking, Whether she brought gifts for us or not, jumping up and down isn’t going to make any difference. That is when I knew I was a philosopher, although I did not know the word for it at the time.

Nursery School

My brothers and I went to nursery school in the old part of Salinas. There was a playground with swings and seesaws and a hall where we could play with blocks and paint pictures on paper on easels with poster paint. Mommy would sometimes stay and help the teachers. One day I had succeeded in covering an entire sheet of paper with yellow paint. I regarded it as my best work yet and was proud of it. I went to get Mommy to see it, and when we returned, the painting was gone, probably destroyed by one of the school helpers. I was heartbroken. How could anyone not have seen what a masterpiece it was? It was then I realized that taste in art is probably not objective.

Sometimes at nursery school, we had pieces of scrap wood and drywall we could put together with hammers and nails. That was a lot of fun. I loved the good feeling of driving a nail and having it hold the pieces firmly. Bam, bam, bam!

Kids run around all the time. I had never seen an adult run, so I figured I should be able to outrun my father because I knew I ran faster than he walked. When he came one day to pick me up at nursery school, I challenged him to a race to the car, Daddy, I can beat you to the car! He shifted to a trot and beat me easily. I was chagrined and disillusioned.

Land snails are mollusks, and the European kind we had in Salinas are eaten by the French and are called escargot. On the loose in gardens, they are considered pests. I didn’t try eating snails until I was grown up and living in Manhattan Beach, where there was a French restaurant on Manhattan Beach Boulevard. Our yard had no snails at all. We kids thought snails were cool, and we knew a house around the corner that had lots of snails in the front yard, so we took our tricycles down there and loaded up the back wheel platform with snails and brought some home and set them loose. Mommy was quite upset when she found out. You should not have done that, she said. She had to buy poisonous snail bait to try to control them after that. From that time on, we had an infestation of garden snails in our yard.

When I was four, I was getting a drink from the sink, and I asked Mommy, What is water made of?

Mommy answered, Water is made from hydrogen and oxygen atoms.³ I was fascinated by that, although it would be many years before I began to understand it. It was cool to know that water was not an element (as, I later learned, the ancients had believed). The slang term cool was coming into use then (middle ’50s) and wouldn’t fall into disuse until the ’60s when it was replaced with terms like far out and groovy. Cool made a comeback in the late ’80s and remains in use today.

We used to take the cushions off the couch in the play hall of our house and jump up and down on the springs as on a trampoline. I remember jumping up and down and thinking that four was the best age to be. I did not know why four was the best age to be, but I was happy to be four.

My brief foray into a life of crime happened at Leidig’s store on Katherine Avenue near Main Street. I used to walk there and buy penny candy like licorice and bubble gum. One day, on impulse, I grabbed an open box of about a hundred bubble gum pieces and ran out the door with it, spilling about half of it on the way. Mrs. Leidig caught me before I had gotten ten steps out the door. No, no, that’s wrong, she said and picked up all the spilled gum. I was not punished for it, and I don’t think Mrs. Leidig ever told my parents. I felt ashamed and embarrassed. I never attempted to steal anything again.

Salinas is fairly dry with only fifteen inches of rainfall a year, on average. That makes it technically nearly a desert. The fertility of the valley is due to the abundance of well water. Because rainfall is rare, rainbows are also rare. The sun has to be shining, and it also has to be low in the sky to get a big dramatic rainbow. My parents’ bedroom had a big floor-to-ceiling picture window looking west into the backyard. One morning after a rain, I was playing in their bedroom, and there was a huge glowing rainbow in the sky when I looked out that window. It was the first rainbow I had ever seen, and I thought it was beautiful. The colors were amazing.

We boys had been taking horseback riding lessons in the English style at the Pattee Ranch in Corral De Tierra, about eight miles south of Salinas, from Mrs. Pattee. When a kid fell off a horse, after he stopped crying, Mrs. Pattee would give him a quarter. My brother Walter once fell into a patch of thistles after little Jimmy Merbs swatted his horse’s rump with a riding crop to make him bolt. Walter cried for a long time and collected his silver quarter. Sometime later I collected a quarter after falling off a horse too, but it wasn’t nearly so bad as falling into a thistle patch.

Every year Mrs. Pattee held a horse show with jumping and other horsemanship contests. I was entered in the five-and-under age group. The judges gave us commands like go forward, turn left, and turn right. Then a lady judge commanded, Reverse! I didn’t know what that meant and hesitated, so one of the mothers said, Back up. This I knew, and I gently pulled the reins back and nudged the horse with my heels simultaneously. The pony then walked backward. I was the only one able to back the horse up, so I won the blue ribbon.

My favorite toys at the time were metal Tonka trucks, road graders, and earth-moving equipment. I loved playing in the dirt with them. I think I was five when I got one of my favorite toys of all time, a fire engine, perhaps for my birthday or Christmas. This fire engine came with a small hydrant that could be connected to a garden hose, and then a small hose connected the fire engine to the hydrant. Then a smaller hose with a nozzle could be used to squirt water, just like actual firemen did. I loved to play with it.

Kindergarten

At the age of five, I started kindergarten at Lincoln School in Salinas in September of 1954. The teacher’s name was Mrs. Bergantz. There was a younger co-teacher too, as it was a large class, probably over thirty kids. We played with toys, blocks, paints, clay, etc. One day the teacher gave a science lesson in which she demonstrated that a dry paper towel, when stuffed into a dry glass, would remain dry when the inverted glass was immersed in a tank of water. This is the ancient principle of the diving bell, and I was totally fascinated with it.

We played with modeling clay in kindergarten sometimes. The oily clay got softer as it warmed in our hands. One kid showed me how to make long ropy cylinders by rolling the clay on a desk.

Kindergarten class at Lincoln School, 1954–1955. I am in the back row, five from Mrs. Bergantz.

That year, 1954, Lincoln School began adding on a multipurpose room in which we would eat cafeteria lunches when I got into first grade. The kindergarten classroom was on the extreme south end of Lincoln school. Most of the classroom windows faced west overlooking the street, but there was one window on the south side of the room that had a view of the construction! I was fascinated with the process of forming, pouring, and smoothing the slab floor. Then the walls went up. Temporary bracing was installed and later removed. I remember thinking that there might be a more efficient way to do it that wouldn’t require the removal of anything (build it once⁴). The teacher thought I was spending too much time looking out the window and that I should be playing with the other children. I disagreed. Ricky, you should be playing with the other children. She forced me away from the window, and I got in trouble when I sneaked back (more than once). This was my first major conflict with authority.

Santa Claus

On Christmas morning, I woke up early before anyone else was awake. It was still dark, and I made my way to the living room to peek in. There must have been a moon because I could see well enough to make out features in the living room by peeking through the crack between the louvered doors between the hall and the living room. There I saw Santa Claus with his white beard, in his red suit, pulling toys out of his big sack. I saw well enough to identify the electric train set I had wanted so much. I was so excited to see that train, but then I got scared that Santa would know I was there watching him, so I hurried back to bed, waiting for the others to get up so we could go and see what Santa brought us. It turned out that the train set was for John. I was quite disappointed, but we all had fun playing with the Lionel train after Daddy got it set up.

Mommy would sometimes take us kids in the car downtown to the train station just to see the train come in. Back in those days, they had coal-fired steam engines, and if you looked exactly right as the engine went by, you could see the glow of the fire in the firebox. The train would go clang, clang, clang with its bell as it approached the station.

Daddy had carved a wooden boat for me out of a block of redwood. It was an open boat, pointed at both ends, and he had sanded it smooth. I loved pushing it through the sand in the sandbox during kindergarten recess. It looked like it was sailing on a raging ocean. About this time, my sister, Christina Lynne, was born.

Daddy used to take us boys out to Grandfather’s (Dr. Wiley Reeves’s) ranch about eight miles south of Salinas on the Monterey Highway at Corral De Tierra Road. We would help him with his various gardening and poultry projects. He eventually built some extensive coops and kept many kinds of fowl. Daddy would sometimes drive the tractor. He would put us boys on the fenders and on his lap (all three of us) and give us rides. One time he took us on the tractor to the highway in the front of the ranch and south along the highway shoulder to the corner store at Corral De Tierra Road and bought us ice cream sandwiches. It was the first time I ever had an ice cream sandwich, and I loved it.

Eye Injury

Sometimes we would play in the barn at Grandfather’s ranch. There was a hayloft upstairs in the barn where Grandfather stored bales of hay. One time my brother John’s friend Mark Lyons was with us, and we were pitching loose hay down and up from a loft. John was only six at the time and cannot be expected to have understood safety. He was pitching hay up, and I was in the loft grabbing it off the pitchfork when a tine caught me in the outer left eye, piercing the sclera and going through the retina and out the back of the eye.

I was temporarily blinded in that eye due to blood in the eyeball. One of the older kids helped me, and I walked back to the house holding a rag over my eye with John apologizing profusely. It seemed like a long walk along the gravel road from the barn to the house, and I was crying all the way. I think John was quite affected by guilt. I know I would be had I been on the other end of the pitchfork. I never blamed John, as I felt I was stupid enough to be in the wrong place.

Needless to say, Grandmother (Mrs. Wiley Reeves) was quite shocked and horrified when we showed up at the house with me holding the bloody rag over my left eye. She called my father to come get me, and I was taken to the newly built Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital where I spent a few days. My eye eventually healed without any degradation of my vision. It was not lost on me that in an earlier era, without antibiotics, I might have died from that wound or lost the eye. Dr. Kraft was my ophthalmologist. Thanks to his care, my eye healed nearly completely. My mother later told me the pitchfork almost penetrated to my brain.

I think that incident, along with most of the unfortunate occurrences in my early life, can be attributed to a lack of adequate supervision or guidance. Human beings have evolved to become dependent on the features of civilization and do not do well in a feral mode.

Grandmother was descended from a cousin of George Washington’s and was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). She used to play bridge with John Steinbeck’s mother. She once told me that Steinbeck was a bum. A bum is lower in social status than a hobo, who is an itinerant worker. Bums will only work if they are forced to. Grandmother, of course, was wrong about Steinbeck, the Nobel Prize for Literature winner, but many in Salinas were offended by his accurate portrayals in books like East of Eden.

Grandmother used to read to me while I sat on her lap in her room upstairs. She read from the collection of Oz books by L. Frank Baum that my mother had read as a child. I especially liked Ozma of Oz in which Dorothy discovers Tik Tok, a mechanical man, and winds him up so that he can help her in her adventures.

We boys liked staying at the ranch because of the creek, the barn, the apples and walnuts, the cattle, riding on the tractor, and so on. I later broke my wrist playing at the barn, but that with the eye injury were the only two injuries that I suffered at Grandfather’s ranch (aside from a bee sting and a wasp nest attack). Grandmother kept some large cardboard boxes of blocks and wooden trains for the grandchildren to play with, and we loved making railroads and buildings. Later we also had Tinkertoys. We had lots of good food there. Grandfather used to smoke his pipe and watch sports on television. Mommy’s brother, Uncle Ed, lived there before he moved up to San Francisco and then got married to Aunt Betty Anne in a big church wedding in Carmel.

Daddy bought me a bicycle at Andersen’s Cycle and Key on Monterey Street in Salinas and taught me how to ride it. John Andersen had impaired hearing from artillery in the War and had survived the Bataan Death March.⁵ He was a wizard with bicycles and locks. Later my friends would accuse me of hero worship when I would talk about him, but that was not the case at all. I regarded him as one of many good men.

Advertisement for Andersen’s Cycle and Key from the Salinas Californian daily newspaper.

Help from a Stranger

At first, I had to stand on a wooden soda crate to mount my bicycle. Soon I was mounting on the fly and riding as far as Leidig’s store on Katherine Avenue. One day, Mommy needed milk. She did not want to make a trip to the store just to buy a quart of milk. I said I could go on my bicycle. I didn’t have a basket on my bike yet, but I convinced her that I could take the paper bag with the quart of milk, bunch it at the top, grab it with my hand, and hold the handlebar at the same time. At the time, I needed two hands to ride my bike. So she gave me some money, and off I went to the store. I purchased the milk, took the bag, and held it as planned and started home. The milk was cold, and condensation started to weep through the paper sack. I was on Pajaro Street when the bag broke and the milk carton tumbled out onto the sidewalk. It was in one of those new waxed paper cartons, so it did not break. However, I was stuck. I could not hold the milk and ride (or even push) my bike at the same time. I did not know what to do. Just then a man in a pickup truck stopped. My bag broke, I said, and just by chance he happened to have a larger and stronger new paper bag with him in the truck. Here, he said, and then he got back in his truck and drove off. I made it home with the milk. That was the first of many interventions by the kindness of strangers in my life.

Hunting

Daddy took John and me dove hunting with some of his friends. They used shotguns, of course, and some of his friends had hunting dogs to flush and then to retrieve any fallen birds. We were trudging over the fields all morning, and finally I had to pee badly, so Daddy helped me unzip my jeans. In attempting to help me get my penis out through the tucked-in flannel shirt and Y-front undershorts, he accidentally pinched me so that I cried out. Frustrated, he finally got me out and I relieved myself right there in the grass. I do not think we did get any birds that day. I do not recall that he ever took us dove hunting again. We were much too young, but I appreciate the experience now.

Brother Reeves

Two years after Christina was born, a fifth child, a boy, was born, named Reeves Wagner. I remember holding him and spoon-feeding him ice cream. Shortly after that, he was taken to the hospital, and I never saw him again. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor at the age of six months. If nothing had been done, he would have died, but the option of surgery left no hope for normal brain functioning. My father wanted an operation to be performed, and my mother did not. His life was saved, but there was little brain left. He lost almost all sense, vision, hearing, etc. Aunt Frieda helped Mom find a care home for him in San Francisco. When he turned eighteen, he became a ward of the State and was transferred to the Porterville State Hospital in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where he remained until he died in his forties. He reached about four feet in length and died never being able to speak, see, feed himself, stand, or walk. Christina visited him a few times. He was in a vegetative state but physically well cared for. The dispute over the decision to operate, I think, became a wedge between my parents that they never fully recovered from.

Illness

In the 1950s, we had no vaccines for most of the childhood illnesses. Polio (infantile paralysis) was endemic, and I would get the Salk vaccine injection in first grade. My childhood friend John Humphries survived polio, but no one in our family got it. However, we children got many of the common diseases. I had three types of measles, chickenpox, mumps, and various kinds of colds and influenzas. Fortunately, the major killers of the nineteenth century, smallpox, cholera, scarlet fever, typhoid, etc., were well controlled. Cholera, spread by contaminated drinking water, was controlled by modern sanitation. Salinas had excellent sewage and water systems. My parents were Republicans, back in the time when Republicans believed in competent government and public infrastructure. Republican President Eisenhower (with the help of the Democratic Congress) was building the Interstate Highway System which led to enormous increases in prosperity for the nation.

Death

One day I found a dead bird in front of the house. It was a largish kind of bird I had not seen before, perhaps a flicker. I went into the house where Mommy was. Mommy, I said, I found a dead bird. What should we do with it?

She said, We can bury it. She got a shoebox for me to put it in as a coffin, and I dug a hole for it and covered it up. It made me sad. I think I got some notion of the irreversibility of death from that experience. Fear of death and love of life are just two sides to the same coin.

When my daughter Rebecca (we called her Becky) was four years old, I heard her crying in bed at night. I went to her room and held her in the dark and asked what was wrong. She said, I don’t want to die! I comforted her by telling her what I had learned: People are all one. We are all alive together, and being a part of everything, we never really die. We are always alive in each other. This may seem rather thin gruel compared to tales of heaven, but I preferred not to lie. It seemed to comfort her. She went back to sleep, and I think it removed an existential worry for her.

Mommy used to read to me in bed at bedtime. My favorite series of stories is the one about the adventures of Raggedy Anne and Raggedy Andy, two dolls that were alive. They were clever and outsmarted an evil witch. One poem I remember is the one about the owl and the pussycat who went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat. Then we would say our prayer, and she would turn out the light. The prayer went like this:

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

She also taught me the Lord’s Prayer, which I learned later is how, in the Bible, Jesus said we should pray.

One day I asked Mommy, What is it like in heaven?

Mommy replied, Some people say that the streets there are paved with gold, but I really don’t know. Why don’t you ask your uncle Jerry? Jerry Politzer, an ordained minister in the Episcopal Church, was married to Mommy’s sister, Aunt Beverly. I never did get around to asking him. The question seemed to lack importance after that. Years later, Uncle Jerry baptized my three children with Andrea at his church in Carmel.

---

². History of Salinas: https://www.cityofsalinas.org/visitors/salinas-history.

³. Oxygen and hydrogen (water-former) were discovered and named by the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier in the eighteenth century. Those elements were later found to be composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons. Protons and neutrons were themselves later found to be composed of quarks.

⁴. Build it once is a concept that became important in my future work in spacecraft integration and test. The idea was to find a way to test a spacecraft that minimized disassembly and reassembly. We realized large savings that way.

⁵. The Bataan Death March was the forcible transfer by the Imperial Japanese Army of sixty thousand to eighty thousand American and Filipino prisoners of war from Saysain Point, Bagac, Bataan, and Mariveles to Camp O’Donnell, Capas, Tarlac, via San Fernando, Pampanga, where the prisoners were forced to march until they died. (Wikipedia)

Chapter 2

Elementary School

The children must be taught how to think, not what to think. And because old errors die slowly, they must be taught tolerance, just as to-day they are taught intolerance. They must be taught that many ways are open to them, no one sanctioned above its alternative, and that upon them and upon them alone lies the burden of choice.

—Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928

First Grade

Mommy drove me to kindergarten every day, but in first grade, I walked to school after the first few days. John was in second grade and had succeeded in convincing Mommy to outfit us in Levi’s (blue jeans) for school. Before, we had worn tan corduroy pants, which I suppose she regarded as more dignified. John thought cords were uncool. I had no opinion on the subject. I was six, and the year was 1955.

After some time of walking to Lincoln School for first grade, probably in winter, after Christmas, all three of us boys started riding our bicycles to school north on Pajaro Street and across Katherine Avenue to Romie Lane and then north on California Street three short blocks to Lincoln School. I remember seeing our breath in the air on cold winter mornings as we rode our bikes.

I learned to read in first grade from a Dick and Jane book. See Spot run. Run Spot run. Spot was Dick and Jane’s pet dog. Ms. Latimore was my teacher. Mommy was occasionally a volunteer room helper. I had a single-shot pirate-style flintlock toy cap pistol that was my pride and joy. Cap guns were not allowed in school and would be confiscated if found. One day I brought it with me by mistake. It must have been in my belt under my jacket, and when, on the playground before school, I realized I had it with me, I panicked. I did not know what to do, so I hid it behind an open door. After school, I went to retrieve it, and