Time Stops

By Robert Linhardt

This book, Time Stops, was written a follow up to Linhardt's 2021 memoir, Time, the Essence of a Man. Much has occurred in the brief period since his first book was published including a personal diagnosis of terminal spinal cancer, a pandemic, the fallout from a failed U.S. presidency and an insurrection. These remarkable personal and national occurrences, in addition to international events including breakeven nuclear fusion, remarkable advances in artificial intelligence, and climate disaster has motivated this second work. In the current work, Linhardt includes additional vignettes on his childhood and adult life. This book also includes his personal views on life and the major scientific advances over the past seventy-five years and makes predictions about what to expect from science in the next twenty-five years. Linhardt also provides his personal views on the state of the 'modern world' as he prepares for his departure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350906783

Book preview

South Jersey Stories—Childhood

Bugs

The summer of my fifth year was one of pestilence and discovery. Two plagues of insects had begun to overrun our neighborhood, Japanese beetles, and gypsy moths (now known by the more politically correct name, spongy moths). We alternated between pitched battles with these garden enemies and abject defeat.

Mom hated the Japanese beetles as they ate the leaves from all her plants and rose bushes. Every time she turned over a leaf, there were a couple of beetles on the underside chewing away. When you picked them off the leaves, they would tightly pinch your fingers with their little legs.

In the end, the only way to get rid of the beetles was to pull off all the half-eaten beetle covered leaves from the plant and stomp on them. Unfortunately, this was a lost cause because the beetles ate day and night. So, by the end of the summer, Mom had no flowers and no vegetables left in her garden.

One way to control these pests was by using chemicals and there were plenty of chemicals in New Jersey. It took several tries to figure out the best product with which to spray the leaves, but it miraculously kept the beetles away from our plants. Unfortunately, the plants grew poorly because their coated leaves were opaque with white powder. We eventually just had to wait out the invasion.

That same summer we were also plagued by spongy moths. We discovered the most vulnerable stage in the life of a moth was before it emerged as a caterpillar. During this stage, they could be found in white cocoon-like nests between the branches of virtually every tree and bush. We gathered long sticks to break up these nests so the moth’s eggs would fall to the ground and after we covered these with dirt they would never hatch. Unfortunately, there were so many of these nests and some were so high up they were out of reach. Thus, the caterpillars still came and chowed down on the leaves from the plants and the vegetables in our garden and, alas, no chemicals could defeat them.

I ended up putting them in cans and milk bottles and sometimes even in my pockets. When I came home from the hunt, Mom would throw my dirty clothes in the hamper. But before doing the wash later that night, she would reach into my pockets and pull-out wads of caterpillars, some still squirming their hairy bodies and some quite dead with their green guts oozing out. Mom would scream at the awful sight. The caterpillars might escape drowning in the washing machine or burning up in the dryer but not the wrath of Mom. She never failed to tell Dad the story of how many caterpillars she found in my pockets each day.

We just waited out the summer of pestilence until the spongy moths disappeared to richer feeding grounds.

In the front of our Sunnyfield tract house there was a row of shrubs planted in the sandy soil along the foundation. This was an ideal hiding place for an active child. In the sand were some odd cone-shaped depressions. One day I observed an ant stumble into one of these depressions, and as it tried without success to escape, a pair of pinchers grabbed it from below and pulled it under the sand. This was my first introduction to antlions. Like any young boy, I had no love for ants and would often cruelly use my magnifying glass on sunny days to immolate them. But this new ant-eating insect was an important discovery. I dug up a few anteaters and put them into a jar filled with sand. I fed them daily and watched as my first pets dragged their ant victims under the sand.

Forbidden fruit

I was free to wander as a five-year old in our new tract-home in semi-rural Sunnyfield, New Jersey as Mom was busy taking care of her new baby, Laurie, and my three-year old sister, Sue. Beyond our backyard fence was a farmer’s field planted with watermelons that were ripening in the late summer sunshine. What an attractive nuisance for an energetic five-year old.

I climbed over our fence and wandered into the field and sat down in a furrow next to a watermelon. Searching the field, I saw a large rock, picked it up and smashed the melon. Then I ate, and I ate, and I ate, until out of the corner of my eye I saw my mother angerly marching towards me with Sue and the baby.

Bobby, what have you done. She demanded.

Looking down at my feet she saw a small green box and screamed, Rat poison!

Bending down, taking my head into her hand and, turning my eyes towards the green box, she urgently asked, Did you eat any of this?

No. I said as I started to cry.

Mom picked up the green box and marched us across the field to the farmer’s barn. As we arrived, the farmer was coming out of the barn.

Mom turned to him and said, My son wandered into your field and ate one of your watermelons. I found this empty box of rat poison next to him and am afraid he might have eaten this as well.

The farmer smiled and said, I haven’t put any rat poison out since they built your development two years ago. I am sure that the box was empty.

As Mom dragged us home, she scolded me saying, You scared the life out of me. Don’t you ever eat anything from that field again.

I never again ventured into the field of forbidden fruit.

Stutter

Mind your speech a little lest you should mar your fortunes. – King Lear, Shakespeare.

Mom, in a cool summer sundress, sat across from me at the dining room table, reading aloud from a book with a light blue cover.

Mom’s voice sang out the rhyme, She sells seashells by the seashore.

Now you try, Mom said.

We worked together every day that summer, on this and similar tongue twisting rhymes, with an intensity needed to rehabilitate a stroke victim. Before starting first grade, my speech impediment needed to be resolved. Mom was adamant that no child of hers would fail to make themselves heard.

Thanks to my mother, by the time I entered school I spoke clearly and continuously with perfect diction.

Tongue

What would we do when Mom went into the hospital to deliver her second son? The Fromm family had left for Ship Bottom to close their house for the season so Mom’s best friend, Joan, could not mind us. How could Dad take care of his three kids? Dad never cooked. He didn’t even barbecue since he hated having food outside.

I went to school that Thursday and by the time I returned, we had a new brother named Paul Michael, Dad was in the kitchen, and dinner was in the oven. We three children spent the afternoon playing in the backyard only to be called in for dinner at 5 p.m. Once seated around the table, we were presented first with canned green beans served out of a saucepan, then frozen French fry potatoes cooked to a near char on a baking sheet and finally, the pièce de résistance was taken out of the oven and placed on a wooden cutting board. It was pinkish brown and the size of a shoe, but what was it?

As he brandished a carving knife, Dad asked. Who wants the first slice of cow’s tongue?

Since no one spoke, he exclaimed. Bobbie gets the first slice, the taste buds.

We struggled through dinner. The house rules were that we finished everything dished on our plates. We survived Dad’s cooking that day and he enjoyed tongue sandwiches the next week at work. Mom’s arrival home that weekend with our new brother was a great relief.

The bishop’s limo and the young priest

In 1962, I was nine years old and was serving at the 7 a.m. weekday mass in a small mission church, with a dozen pews, built during the Civil War. There was never more than a handful of parishioners at morning mass. Catholic mass was still in Latin with the servers’ backs to the congregation. Dressed in my black and white cassock and surplice, I knelt towards the altar giving responses in Latin and swinging the censer with its smoldering incense while the other altar boy rang the bells during consecration.

A new church was being built about a mile away from the-soon-to-be-deconsecrated mission church, to serve the growing Catholic population of our rural South Jersey parish. This large, modern facility, with an attached auditorium, could easily accommodate over a hundred parishioners.

By the time I was in training for confirmation in 1964, the mass was in English, despite my years of Latin studies, and the priest faced the congregants. The bishop visited us during our instruction. He rode in a chauffeur driven car with a portable television set in the rear. All the boys pushed up against the windows of the bishop’s limo to admire this accessory before being shooed away by his driver.

It was in autumn when a young, energetic, new priest joined the parish and organized a youth group with a basketball team of those of us to be confirmed. At first, we enthusiastically practiced basketball for the parish team in the church auditorium, but as the season wore on, we started losing boys. The talk among us was that the boys who dropped off the team didn’t like the young priest. Then the parish abruptly closed the basketball program and the new priest departed before the bishop arrived again. The confirmation ceremony was solemn, and no one ever spoke about the sudden departure of our new priest or the dismantling of our parish youth group. It was only twenty years later, as the Church gained notoriety for the molestation of young boys, that I began to wonder whether I had been naïve and simply lucky not to have been a victim.

The one-armed boy and The Fugitive

We first met at basketball practice at Saint Andrew’s Church. He went to public school and I to Catholic school. He lived in Gibbsboro near the Campbell’s Soup factory, and I lived, a long bike ride away, in Sunnyfield. He was introduced as the one-armed boy, and it was weeks before I learned his name was Bill. He played baseball, basketball, and football as well as the rest of us, but he played one-handed. When he went to school he harnessed up and strapped on his prosthetic arm with its hooked claw hand.

We never thought of Bill being handicapped as he was just another kid with an interest in sports. Through the year we became good friends. At the time the most popular show on television was The Fugitive. The innocent protagonist, Richard Kimble, proven guilty of murdering his wife, sees a mysterious one-armed man running from his home as he discovered the body. While we never saw the show, as it was on after our bedtimes, we were all intensely interested in the mysterious one-armed man. My curiosity was satiated when Bill taught me how his arm worked and let me feel his stump as I explored this mystery. Unfortunately, his family moved the next year and our budding friendship ended.

Spearing blowfish

We spent the morning oceanside until the beach crowds became too large and the sand too hot for walking barefoot. Our friend’s house was on the bay side of Ship Bottom, a shelter island on the Jersey Shore. After eating a sandwich made by our mothers and washing it down with a glass of Drink Atoast, we grabbed our bait bag from the fridge, the oars from the back porch, and ran out to an old green wooden rowboat, intent on checking our traps. Throwing our bag of raw chicken necks into the boat and dropping the oars into the oarlocks, the boat gently rocked back and forth as we took our seats. I was on the middle seat facing astern with oars in hands and Ricky was in the bow. He untied the line from the small dock and pushed off, and