My first memory is of standing with my parents on an outdoor landing at the top of some worn and dirty wooden steps. It was a gloomy Chicago day in December 1934, when I was two years and four months old. Even wearing my only set of winter pants and a jacket with a hood, it was cold. Black and leafless, the trees stood out above the snow-covered ground. From inside the house a woman was telling my parents, “No, we don’t rent to people with children.” Their faces fell and they turned away. Had I done something wrong? Why was I a problem? This image from the depths of the Great Depression has stayed with me always.
I next recall being taken at age two and a half to our beloved family physician, Dr. Dailey. My alarmed parents explained that I had yet to speak a single word. What was wrong? The doctor smiled and asked me to point to the ball on his desk. I did so, and he asked me to pick up his pencil. After I had done this and a few more tasks he said, “Don’t worry, he’ll talk when he’s ready.” We left, my parents relieved and a little mystified.
After this, the campaign to get me to talk intensified. About the time of my third birthday, my mother and two of her friends, Charlotte and Estelle, took me along with them to Chicago’s then famous Montgomery Ward department store. As we sat on a bench near an elevator, two women and a man got off. Charlotte, keen to tempt me into speech, asked, “Where are the people going?” I said clearly and distinctly, “The man is going to buy something and the two women are going to the bathroom to do pee-pee.” Charlotte and Estelle both blushed deeply at the mention of pee-pee. Far too young to have learned conventional embarrassment, I noticed this but didn’t understand why they reacted that way. I also was puzzled by the sensation I had caused with my sudden change from silence to talkativeness.
From then on I spoke largely in complete sentences, delighting my parents and their friends, who now plied me with questions and often received surprising answers. My father set out to see what I could learn.
Born in Iowa in 1898, my father, Oakley Glenn Thorp, was the second of three children, with his brother two years older and sister two years younger. When he was six his family broke up. His father took him and his brother to settle in the state of Washington. His mother and sister remained in Iowa. In 1915 my grandfather died from the flu, three years before the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918–19, which killed between twenty and forty million people worldwide. The two boys lived with an uncle until 1917. Then my father, at age eighteen, went to France to join World War I as part of the great American Expeditionary Force. He fought with the infantry in the trenches, rose from private to sergeant, and was awarded the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, and two Purple Hearts for heroism in places like Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, and the Battles of the Marne. As a very small boy I remember sitting in his lap on a humid afternoon examining the shrapnel scars on his chest and the minor mutilation of some of his fingers.
Following his discharge from the army after the war, my father enrolled at Oklahoma A&M. He completed a year and a half before he had to leave for lack of funds, but his hunger and respect for education endured and he instilled them in me, along with his unspoken hope that I would achieve more. Sensing this and hoping it would bring us closer, I welcomed his efforts to teach me.
As soon as I began to talk, he introduced me to numbers. I found it easy to count first to a hundred, then to a thousand. Next I learned how to increase any number by adding one to get the next number, which meant I could count forever if I only knew the names of the numbers. I soon learned how to count to a million. Adults seemed to think this was a very big number so I sat down to do it one morning. I knew I could eventually get there but I had no idea how long it was going to take. To get started, I chose a Sears catalog the size of a big-city telephone book because it seemed to have the most things to count. The pages were filled with pictures of merchandise labeled with the letters A, B, C…, which I recall appeared as black letters in white circles. I started at the beginning of the catalog and counted all the circled letters, one for each item, page after page. After a few hours I fell asleep at something like 32,576. My mother reported that when I awoke I resumed with “32,577…”
A trait that showed up at about this time was my tendency not to accept anything I was told until I had checked it for myself. This had consequences. When I was three, my mother told me not to touch the hot stove because it would burn me. I brought my finger close enough to feel the warmth, then pressed the stove with my hand. Burned. Never again.
Another time, I was warned that fresh eggs would crack if they were squeezed just a little bit. Wondering what “a little bit” meant, I squeezed an egg very slowly until it cracked, then practiced squeezing another, stopping just before it would crack, to see exactly how far I could go. From the beginning, I loved learning through experimentation and exploration how my world worked.
After teaching me counting, my father’s next project for me was reading. We started with See Spot, See Spot Run, and See Jane. I was puzzled and disoriented for a couple of days; then I saw that the groups of letters stood for the words we spoke. In the next few weeks I went through all of our simple beginner books and developed a small vocabulary. Now it got exciting. I saw printed words everywhere and realized that if I could figure out how to pronounce them I might recognize them and know what they meant. Phonics came naturally, and I learned to sound out words so I could say them aloud. Next was the reverse process—hear a word and say the letters—spelling. By the time I turned five I was reading at the level of a ten-year-old, gobbling up everything I could find.
Our family dynamics also changed then, with the birth of my brother. My father, fortunate to be employed in the midst of the Great Depression, worked longer hours to support us. My mother was fully occupied by the new baby and was even more focused on him when, at six months of age, he caught pneumonia and nearly died. This left me much more on my own and I responded by exploring endless worlds, both real and imagined, to be found in the books my father gave me.
Over the next couple of years I read books including Gulliver’s Travels, Treasure Island, and Stanley and Livingstone in Africa. When, after an eight-month arduous and dangerous search, Stanley found his quarry, the only European known to be in Central Africa, I thrilled to his incredible understatement, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” and I discussed the splendor of the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River with my father, who assured me (correctly) that they far surpassed our own Niagara Falls.
Gulliver’s Travels was a special favorite, with its tiny Lilliputians, giant Brobdingnagians, talking horses, and finally the mysterious Laputa, a flying island in the sky supported by magnetic forces. I enjoyed the vivid pictures it created in my mind and the fantastical notions that spurred me to imagine for myself further wonders that might be. But at the time Swift’s historical allusions and social satire mostly escaped me, despite explanations by my father.
From Malory’s story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, I learned about heroes and villains, romance, justice, and retribution. I admired the heroes who, through extraordinary abilities and resourcefulness, achieved great things. Introverted and thoughtful, I may have been inspired to mirror this in the future by using my mind to overcome intellectual obstacles, instead of my body to defeat human opponents. The books helped establish lifelong values of fair play, a level playing field for everyone, and treating others as I myself wish to be treated.
The words and adventures were largely in my head; I didn’t really have anyone to discuss them with, except sometimes my tired father after work or on weekends. This led to an occasional unique pronunciation. For instance, for a couple of years I thought misled (miss-LED) was pronounced MYE-zzled, and for years afterward when I saw the word in print I would hesitate for a beat as I mentally corrected my pronunciation.
When I was reading or just thinking, my concentration was so complete that I lost all awareness of my surroundings. My mother would call me, with no response. Thinking I was willfully ignoring her, the shout would became a yell, then she would bring her flushed face right up to me. Only when she appeared in my visual field did I snap back into the here and now and respond. She had a hard time deciding whether her son was stubborn and badly behaved or was really as unaware as he claimed.
Though we were poor, my parents valued books and managed to buy me one occasionally. My father made challenging choices. As a result, between the ages of five and seven I carried around adult-looking books and strangers wondered if I actually knew what was in them. One man put me to an unexpected and potentially embarrassing test.
It happened because my parents became friends with the Kesters, who lived on a farm in Crete, Illinois, about forty-five miles from our home. They invited us out for two weeks every summer, starting in 1937 when I was turning five. These special days were what I most looked forward to each year. For a city boy from the outskirts of Chicago, it was sheer joy to watch “water spiders” scoot over the surface of a slowly meandering creek, to play hide-and-seek in the fields of tall corn, to catch butterflies and display them arrayed and mounted on boards, and to wander through the fields and among the cottonwood trees and orchards. The Kesters’ oldest boy, strapping twentysomething Marvin, would carry me around on his shoulders. My mother, along with the women of the household, Marvin’s pretty sister Edna Mae, their mother, and their aunt May, would preserve massive quantities of fruits and vegetables. In our basement back home my father built racks for the rubber-sealed mason jars of corn, peaches, and apricots that we brought back. Then there were the rows of fruit jellies, jams, and preserves in glasses sealed with a layer of paraffin on top. This cornucopia would last us well into the next year.
My father helped Marvin and his father, Old Man Kester, with the work of the farm, and sometimes I tagged along. One sunny forenoon during the second summer of our two weeks in Crete, my father took me to pick up supplies at a local store. I was just turning six, tall and thin with a mop of curly brown hair, lightly tanned, pants too short, the bare ankles ending in a pair of tennis shoes with frayed laces. I was carrying A Child’s History of England by Charles Dickens.
A stranger chatting with my father took the volume I was holding, written at the tenth-grade level, thumbed through it, then told my father, “That kid can’t read this book.” My father replied proudly, “He’s already read it. Ask him a question and you’ll see.”
With a smirk the man said, “Okay, kid, name all the kings and queens of England in order and tell me the years that they reigned.” My father’s face fell but to me this seemed to be just another routine request to look into my head to see if the information was there.
I did and then recited, “Alfred the Great, began 871, ended 901, Edward the Elder, began 901, ended 925,” and so on. As I finished the list of fifty or so rulers with “Victoria, began in 1837 and it doesn’t say when she ended,” the man’s smirk had long vanished. Silently he handed me back the book. My father’s eyes were shining.
My father was a sad and lonely man who didn’t express his feelings and who rarely touched us, but I loved him. I felt that this stranger was using me to put him down and I realized that I had stopped it. Whenever I remember my dad’s happiness at this, it echoes in me with a force that still seems undiminished.
My unusual retention of information was pronounced until I was about nine or ten, when it faded into a memory that is very good for what I’m interested in and, with exceptions, not especially remarkable for much else. I still remember facts from this time such as my phone number (Lackawanna 1123) and address (3627 North Oriole; 7600 W, 3600 N) in Chicago and Chicago’s seven-digit population (3,376,438), cited in the old green 1930 Rand McNally Atlas and Gazetteer that’s still on my bookshelf.
Between the ages of three and five I learned to add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers of any size. I also learned the US version of the prefixes million, billion, trillion, and so on, up to decillion. I found that I could add columns of figures quickly by either seeing them or hearing them. One day when I was five or six I was in the neighborhood grocery store with my mother and overheard the owner calling out the prices as he totaled up the customer’s bill on his adding machine. When he announced the answer, I said no, and gave him my number. He laughed good-naturedly, added the numbers again, and found I was right. To my delight he rewarded me with an ice-cream cone. After that I dropped by when I could and checked his totals. On the rare occasions when we disagreed, I was usually correct and would get another cone.
My father taught me to compute the square root of a number. I learned to do it with pencil and paper as well as to work out the answer in my head. Then I learned to do cube roots.
Before the advent of writing and books, human knowledge was memorized and transmitted down the generations by storytellers; but when this skill wasn’t necessary it declined. Similarly, in our time with the ubiquity of computers and hand calculators, the ability to carry out mental calculations has largely disappeared. Yet a person who knows just grammar school arithmetic can learn to do mental calculations comfortably and habitually.
This skill, especially to make rapid approximate calculations, remains valuable, particularly for assessing the quantitative statements that one continually encounters. For instance, listening to the business news on the way to my office one morning, I heard the reporter say, “The Dow Jones Industrial Average [DJIA] is down 9 points to 11,075 on fears of a further interest rate rise to quell an overheated economy.” I mentally estimated a typical (one standard deviation ) DJIA change from the previous close, by an hour after the open, at about 0.6 percent or about sixty-six points. The probability of the reported move of “at least” nine points, or less than a seventh of this, was about 90 percent, so the market action was, contrary to the report, very quiet and hardly indicative of any fearful response to the news. There was nothing to worry about. Simple math allowed me to separate hype from reality.
Another time, a well-known and respected mutual fund manager reported that Warren Buffett, since he took over Berkshire Hathaway, had compounded money after taxes at 23 to 24 percent annually. Then he said, “Those kind of numbers will not be achieved in the next ten years—he’d own the world.” A quick mental estimate of what $1 grows to in ten years compounded at 24 percent gave me a little over $8. (A calculator gives $8.59.) Since, at the time, Berkshire had a market cap of about $100 billion, this rate of growth would bring the company to a market value of roughly $859 billion. This falls far short of my guesstimate of $400 trillion for the present market value of the world. The notion of a market value for the whole world reminds me of a sign I saw on an office door in the Physics Department of the University of California, Irvine. It read EARTH PEOPLE, THIS IS GOD. YOU HAVE THIRTY DAYS TO LEAVE. I HAVE A BUYER FOR THE PROPERTY.
Just after I turned five I started kindergarten at Dever Grammar School in northwest Chicago. I was immediately puzzled by why everything we were asked to do was so easy. One day our teacher gave us all blank paper and told us to draw a copy of an outline of a horse from a picture she had given us. I put little dots on the picture and used a ruler to measure the distance from one to the next. Then I reproduced the dots on my piece of paper, using the ruler to make the distance between them the same as they were on the picture and with my eye estimating the proper angles. Next, I connected up the new dots smoothly, matching the curves as well as I could. The result was a close copy of the original sketch.
My father had shown me this method and also how to use it to draw magnified or reduced versions of a figure. For example, to draw at double scale, just double the distance between the dots on the original drawing, keeping angles the same when placing the new dots. To triple the scale, triple the distance between dots, and so on. I called the other kids over, showed them what I had done and how to do it, and they set to work. We all handed in copies using my method instead of the freehand sketches the teacher expected, and she wasn’t happy.
A few days later the teacher had to leave the room for a few minutes. We were told to entertain ourselves with some giant (to us) one-foot-sized hollow wooden blocks. I thought it would be fun to build a great wall so I organized the other kids and we quickly assembled a large terraced mass of blocks. Unfortunately my project totally blocked the rear door—and that was the one the teacher chose when she attempted to reenter the classroom.
The last straw came a few days later. I sat on one of the school’s tiny chairs meant for five-year-olds and discovered that one of the two vertical back struts was broken. A sharp splintered shard stuck up from the seat where it had separated from the rest of the strut, so the whole back was now fragilely supported only by the one remaining upright. The hazard was obvious, and something needed to be done. I found a small saw and quietly cut off both struts flush with the chair’s seat, neatly converting it into a perfect little stool. At this, the teacher sent me to the principal’s office and my parents were called in for a serious conference.
The principal interviewed me and immediately recommended that I be moved up to first grade. After a few days in my new class, it was clear that the work there also was much too easy. What to do? Another parent–teacher conference. The principal suggested skipping me again into second grade. But I had barely been old enough to qualify for kindergarten: I was a year and a half younger on average than my first-grade classmates. My parents felt that skipping another grade would leave me at an extreme social, emotional, and physical disadvantage. Looking back on twelve years of pre-college schooling, where I was among the smallest and always the youngest in my class, I think they were right.
As we were barely managing on my father’s Depression-era wages, an academically advanced private school was never an option. We were fortunate that he had found work as a security guard at the Harris Trust and Savings Bank. His battlefield medals from World War I may have helped.
The Depression permeated every facet of our lives. Living on my father’s $25-a-week salary, we never wasted food, and we wore our clothes until they fell apart. I treasured objects such as the Smith Corona typewriter my father had won in a writing contest and the military binoculars he used in World War I. Eventually both became part of my tiny collection of possessions and followed me for the next thirty years. For the rest of my life I would meet Depression-era survivors who retained a compulsive, often irrational frugality and an economically inefficient tendency to hoard.
Money was scarce and no one scorned pennies. Seeing the perspiring WPA workers in the streets (created by presidential order in 1935, “Works Progress Administration” was the largest of FDR’s New Deal programs to provide useful work for the unemployed), I borrowed a nickel and bought a packet of Kool-Aid, from which I made six glasses that I sold to them for a penny each. I continued to do this and found that it took a lot of work to earn a few cents. But the next winter, when my father gave me a nickel to shovel the snow from our sidewalk, I hit a bonanza. I offered the same deal to our neighbors and, after an exhausting day of snow removal, returned home soaked in sweat and bearing the huge sum of a couple of dollars, almost half of what my father was paid per day. Soon lots of the kids were out following my lead and the bonanza ended—an early lesson in how competition can drive down profits.
The Christmas I was eight, my father gave me a chess set. A friend of his made the board by gluing squares of light and dark wood on a piece of felt, so I could fold the board in half or even roll it up. The pieces were the classic Staunton-style, the kind I have ever after preferred, with ebony-black chessmen opposing a pine-colored white force. After I had learned the basics from my father, our neighbor across the back alley, “Smitty” Smittle, decided to entertain himself by playing against me. I was often at his house to use his pool table, having recently been granted the privilege. Smitty won our first two chess games easily, but then it got tougher. A few games later, I won. Smitty never won again, and after increasingly one-sided routs, he abruptly refused to play me. That evening my father told me I was no longer welcome at Smitty’s pool table.
“But why?” I asked.
“Because he’s afraid you’ll tear the felt with the cue.”
“But that makes no sense. I’ve been playing there for a while and he can see how careful I’ve been.”
“I know, but that’s what he wants.”
I was disappointed and indignant at this treatment. In my world of books, ability, hard work, and resourcefulness were rewarded. Smitty should have been pleased that I was doing well, and if he wanted to do better, he should practice and study, rather than penalize me.
Before another Christmas, this miniature war on the chessboard would be followed by the United States’ entry into the already raging World War II.
My last prewar spring of 1941 I got the measles. As it was widely believed that bright light could ruin my eyes, I was confined in a shaded room. To keep me from straining my eyes, books were removed. Not allowed to read, and bored, I discovered an atlas that had been mistakenly left in the room. For the next two weeks I studied the maps, read the write-ups on all the individual countries, and gave myself an education in geography and a facility with maps that would serve me well for a lifetime. Then I used the atlas to follow the battles around the world. I became interested in the military strategy of the antagonists. How were they deploying their forces? Why? What were they thinking? From daily radio and newspaper reports of the fighting, I used a pencil to shade in on the maps, step by step, the frightening, ever-expanding area under Axis control. I did this throughout the war, using an eraser when the Allies reclaimed territory.
That summer while we wondered whether the United States would, as we expected, enter the war, my mother’s brother Edward came to visit. Chief engineer on a ship in the merchant marine, he was classically tall, dark, and handsome with his uniform, his mustache, and a slight Spanish accent giving him the persona and appearance of a Latin Clark Gable. My parents and teacher thought I spent too much time in my head (I’m afraid I still do), and that it would be healthy for me to learn to do things with my hands. After initial resistance on my part, I was lured with Uncle Ed’s help into the world of model airplanes, and we spent several wonderful weeks making our own air force.
The boxed kits came with lots of fragile balsa-wood sticks and some sheets with other plane parts to be carefully cut from outlines. We taped the large sheet of plans onto a piece of cardboard and glued balsa-wood pieces together after laying them on the plan and holding them in place with pins. When we had completed the wings, the fuselage top, bottom, and sides, and the tail sections, we assembled them into a completed skeleton and covered it by gluing on tissue paper. I remember the pervasive acetone smell from drying glue, like that of some brands of nail polish remover. My first propeller-driven planes, powered by rubber band motors, didn’t fly well. They were too heavy because I had used excessive amounts of glue to be sure everything would hold together. When I learned to use glue more judiciously, I had some satisfying flights. The skills from model building and using tools were a valuable prequel to the science experiments that would occupy me during the next few years, and my introduction to planes helped me follow the details of the great air battles of World War II. I was sorry to see Uncle Ed go and worried about what would happen to him if war came.
Later in that pre–Pearl Harbor summer of 1941 my parents bought their first car, a new Ford sedan, for $800. We drove “America’s mother route,” historic Highway 66, from Chicago to California, where we visited friends from the Philippines who had settled in the picturesque art colony of Laguna Beach. Each year they had mailed us a little box of candy oranges, which my brother and I eagerly awaited. Now we saw groves of real orange trees.
Then the great world war that was consuming Europe and Asia struck the United States. Late on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, we were listening to music on the radio and decorating our Christmas tree when an authoritative voice broke in: “We interrupt this program to bring you a special announcement. The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor.” A frisson ran through me. Suddenly the world had changed in a momentous way for all of us.
“The president will address the nation shortly. Stay tuned.”
The next morning (California time), Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the nation asking Congress to declare war, uttering the phrase that electrified me, and the millions of others listening, “a date which will live in infamy…” When we had recess at school the next day, I was astonished to see the other children playing and laughing as usual. They seemed wholly unaware of what was to come. As I had been following the war closely, I stood alone off to one side, silent and grave.
Our immediate concern was for my mother’s family in the Philippine Islands. My mother’s father had left Germany and gone to work as an accountant for the Rockefellers in the Philippines. There he met and married my grandmother. They, along with six of my mother’s siblings and their children, were trapped in Manila when the Japanese invaded the islands just ten hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. We heard nothing further from them. As the eldest of five sisters and three brothers, all fluent in both English and Spanish, my mother was a life-of-the-party extrovert. She was a head-turner, too, as evidenced by a picture I found decades later of her aged forty, with a black one-piece bathing suit showing off her dark hair and five-foot-two, 108-pound movie-star figure against the background of the Pacific Ocean. Her parents, along with the other siblings and their families, except for Uncle Ed, were living in Manila, the capital. We would not learn their varied fates for more than three years, until after the islands were liberated near the end of the war in the Pacific. Meanwhile, my nine-year-old eyes followed in detail the Battle of Bataan, reports of the horrors of the Bataan Death March, and the heroic resistance by the island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay.
For this I had my own father as a living guide. He had been stationed on Corregidor as a member of the Philippine constabulary, which the United States created, and he accurately foretold that Corregidor would fall only when the troops, weapons, ammunition, and food were exhausted. It became a twentieth-century version of the Alamo. After leaving Oklahoma A&M in order to support himself, my father went back to the Pacific Northwest, where he worked as a lumberman and became a member of the International Workers of the World, or IWW. Fleeing the fierce persecution of that union, he went to Manila, where his military credentials led him to join the constabulary. While there he met and married my mother. Fortunately they moved to Chicago in 1931, so my younger brother and I were born in America and our family spent the war in safety, unlike many among my mother’s family, who we later learned spent it in Japanese prison camps.
The war drastically transformed the lives of everyone. The Great Depression’s twelve years of persistent widespread unemployment, peaking at 25 percent, were suddenly ended by the greatest government jobs program ever, World War II. Millions of fit young men went off to war. Mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters poured from homes into factories, building planes, tanks, and ships. The “arsenal of democracy” would eventually build ships faster than U-boats could sink them and fill the skies with planes on a scale never known before and not foreseen by the Axis powers. To support our troops and allies, gasoline, meat, butter, sugar, rubber, and much else was rationed. Lights were blacked out at night. Neighborhoods were patrolled by air raid wardens and warned of possible danger with sirens. Barrage balloons, which were tethered blimps, were anchored over critical regions such as oil refineries to deter attacks by hostile aircraft.
Our earlier trip to Southern California made it easier for our family to move there after the United States went to war; my parents hoped to find jobs in the expanding war industries. While we spent a few weeks with our friends in Laguna Beach, I hung out on the seashore watching artists paint, examining tide pools and marine life, and marveling at the heaps of abalone shells (today an endangered species) in the front yards of so many of the beach cottages.
My parents soon bought a house in the small town of Lomita, located at the base of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. My mother was a riveter on the swing shift (4 P.M. until midnight) at Douglas Aircraft. Diligent and dexterous, she was nicknamed “Josie the riveter” by her co-workers after famous World War II posters of the bandanna-clad heroine. Meanwhile, my father worked the graveyard shift at Todd Shipyards in nearby San Pedro as a security guard. My parents were usually gone or sleeping, seldom seeing us or each other. They left my brother and me to raise ourselves. We served ourselves cereal and milk in the mornings. I stuffed peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches into brown bags for our lunches.
I enrolled in the sixth grade at the Orange Street school. As I was a year and a half younger than my classmates and had also missed the first half of the school year, I was condemned to repeat the sixth grade the following year. My new school was at least two grade levels behind my school in Chicago. Faced with the horror of years of boredom, I protested. My parents met with the principal and as a result I was asked to take a supervised test one afternoon after school. Unaware of the purpose of the test and eager to play, after answering most of the 130 questions, I looked at the last twenty True–False questions and simply drew a line through the Trues so I could leave earlier. When I later learned that this was a test to see if I could avoid repeating grade six I was very upset. Yet after the test was scored, there was no further problem. Although an achievement test was appropriate, showing that I was at grade level, I eventually found out that, oddly, I had instead been given the California Test of Mental Maturity, an IQ test. Years later, I learned why I was allowed to proceed to grade seven. It was the highest score they had ever seen, one that the high school I would enter could statistically expect from a student less than once in a hundred years.
Although they were behind scholastically, my California classmates were bigger than their Chicago contemporaries and much more athletic. As a smaller, thinner, brainy kid, it looked like I might be in for hard times. Luckily I hit it off with the “alpha dog” and helped him with his homework. He was the biggest, strongest kid in our class, as well as the best athlete. Under his protection, I safely finished the sixth grade. Decades later I especially appreciated the 1980 movie My Bodyguard.
I started grade seven at nearby Narbonne High School in the fall of 1943. Over the next six years I’d face the difficulties of coping with being an extreme misfit at a school where muscles were important and brains were not. Fortunately, my test score attracted a gifted and dedicated English teacher, Jack Chasson, who would become a mentor and act in loco parentis. Jack was twenty-seven then, with wavy brown hair and the classic good looks of a Greek god. He had a ready, warm smile and a way of saying something that boosted the self-esteem of everyone he met. With a background in English and psychology from UCLA, he was an idealistic new teacher who wanted his students not only to succeed but also to work for the social good while respecting the achievements of the past. He was my first great teacher, and we would remain friends for life.
As there was no spare money, my parents encouraged me to save some so I could go on one day to college. So in the fall of 1943, at age eleven, I signed up to become a newspaper boy. I rose every morning between two thirty and three and pedaled my used bike (one speed was all we had then) about two miles to an alley behind a strip of stores. I and the classmate who told me about the job, along with a few others, would throw ourselves onto a pile of baling wire left over from previous bundles of newspapers and talk. When the Los Angeles Examiner truck finally pulled up and dumped a dozen packets of a hundred newspapers each onto the ground, we each took one, folding the papers individually for throwing and stuffing them into canvas saddlebags carried on racks over the rear wheels of our bikes.
Because of the wartime blackout the lights were out and the darkness was complete except for the headlights of an occasional early-morning driver. As we were at the base of the Palos Verdes Peninsula just a few miles from the ocean, on many nights, especially in winter, a marine layer of overcast blotted out the moon and stars, intensifying the blackness and seeming to mute the tiny background sounds from nature. As I floated along the streets, a lonely ghost tossing papers from my bicycle, the one sound I heard was the soft cooing of pigeons. Forever after, the gentle voices of the pigeons in the dark of early morning evoke memories of those paperboy days.
Getting about five hours of sleep each night, I was perpetually tired. One morning, rolling down a steep thirty-foot hill near the end of my route, I fell asleep. I awoke in pain sprawled on a front lawn, papers scattered everywhere, my bike bent, and a mailbox, its four-by-four wooden post snapped off by my impact, askew on the grass nearby. I gathered my papers and managed to make the bike ridable. Aching and bruised, I finished my route and headed for school.
About a quarter mile beyond our backyard was the Lomita Flight Strip, a small municipal airport that had become a military base. Lockheed P-38 Lightning twin-engine fighter-bombers routinely buzzed our treetops as they landed. Since I was given a couple of extra papers for contingencies—a poor throw might land a paper on a roof or in a puddle—I took to biking over to the base to sell my extras for a few cents apiece. Before long I was invited to join the soldiers for breakfast in the mess. I stuffed the bounty of ham, eggs, toast, and pancakes into my skinny frame while the soldiers read the papers I sold them. They often gave them back, encouraging me to sell them again. But selling papers on the base was too good to last. After a few weeks, the base commander called me into his office one morning and explained, sadly and considerately, that because of wartime security I was no longer allowed entry. I missed the satisfying hot breakfasts, the camaraderie with the soldiers, and the extra income.
The base, which later became Torrance Airport, was dedicated as Zamperini Field for Louis Zamperini, while he was a Japanese war prisoner. He grew up just a couple of miles from where I lived. The famous Torrance High School and Olympic track star, hero of Laura Hillenbrand’s bestseller Unbroken, had gone to war as a B-24 bombardier just a couple of months before my family arrived in adjacent Lomita.
Each newspaper route had about a hundred stops, for which we were paid about $25 per month. (Multiply by twelve to convert to 2014 dollars.) This was an astonishing amount of money for an eleven-year-old. However, our take-home pay was usually less, because we had to collect payment from our customers and any shortfall was deducted from what we received. Since subscriptions were something like $1.25 or $1.50 per month, and there were deadbeats who moved away owing money, others who refused to pay, and some who paid only part because of missed papers, our pay was often reduced significantly. We collected after school in the afternoons and early evenings and often had to come back many times for people who weren’t home or didn’t have the money. I gave most of what I earned to my mother so she could buy savings stamps for me at the post office. My booklets, when they reached $18.75, were exchanged for war bonds that would mature in several years for $25 each. As my pile of bonds grew, college began to seem possible. But then my area supervisor gradually cut our paper-route wages so he could keep more for himself.
We understood when we signed on that if we continued to do our jobs well, we would get our full pay and eventually maybe get a small raise. Now the boss was taking part of our pay simply because he could get away with it. This was unfair but what could a bunch of kids do? Would King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table tolerate this? No! We took action.
My friends and I went on strike against the Examiner. Our supervisor, an ever-perspiring obese man of about fifty, with thinning black hair and rumpled clothing, was forced to deliver newspapers to ten routes in his aging black Cadillac. After a few months of this, his car wore out, papers were not delivered, and he was replaced. Meanwhile, I had already signed on with the Los Angeles Daily News. Unlike the Examiner, it was an afternoon paper, so I could start catching up on my years of sleep deprivation. As I was delivering newspapers on the beautiful summer afternoon of Tuesday, August 14, 1945, people suddenly erupted from their houses, cheering wildly. World War II had ended. It was my thirteenth birthday and that was its only celebration.