In the 1940s, graduates of Narbonne High School were not expected to go on to college. The course requirements reflected this. In the seventh and eighth grades, though hungry for academic learning, I was required to take practical subjects, including wood shop, metal shop, drafting, typing, print shop, and electric shop.
I wanted to pursue my interest in radio and electronics, which was sparked a couple of years earlier when I got one of the first simple radios, a crystal set. Made with a rectifier of galena, which was a shiny black crystal, a wire called a cat’s whisker for touching it in the right spot, and a coil of wire, it had earphones, an antenna wire, and a variable capacitor for tuning in different stations. Then like magic: Through my earphones came voices from the air!
The mechanical world of wheels, pulleys, pendulums, and gears was ordinary. I could see, touch, and watch it in action. But this new world was one of invisible waves that traveled through space. You had to figure out through experiments that it was actually there and then use logic to grasp how it worked.
It was no surprise that the required course that caught my interest was electric shop, where we each had to build a small operational electric motor. The teacher, Mr. Carver, was a universally liked, plump, avuncular man whom the other teachers called Bunny. I suspect that Jack Chasson had a word with him, for somehow he learned of my interest in electronics and told me about the world of amateur radio. At that time there already was a web of do-it-yourselfers who built or bought their own radio transmitters and receivers and talked night and day by voice or by Morse code all over the globe. It was in effect the first Internet. With less electricity than it takes to power a lightbulb, I could talk to people around the world. I asked Mr. Carver how I could be part of it. He told me that all I needed to do was pass what was then a rather difficult examination.
In those days the exam began with a series of written questions on radio theory. Next was a test on Morse code. That hurdle, since relaxed, was a major obstacle for most, and Mr. Carver warned me about the long, tedious hours of practice needed for proficiency. We had to copy code as well as send it with a telegrapher’s key at an error-free rate of thirteen words per minute. A word meant any five characters, so this was sixty-five characters a minute, or a little faster than one per second. I thought about it, then went out and bought a used “tape machine” for what was then the enormous sum of $15, almost three weeks’ income from delivering newspapers. The machine looked like a stubby black shoe box. The lid unclipped to reveal two spindles. It came with a collection of reels of pale-yellow paper tapes. These tapes had short holes for the “dots” and long holes for the “dashes.” You could look at them and read off the code for letters, and thus “read” the tape. The machine wound the tape from one spindle to the other, like the old reel-to-reel high-fidelity music tape players and the later cassette-tape machines. For power, you simply wound up the machine with a crank. It was simple, low-tech, and effective. When a hole moved past a spring contact, the circuit closed for the length of time its journey took. Long holes gave dashes, and short holes gave dots. The box was hooked to a simple device, an “audio oscillator,” that emitted a fixed tone such as the piano middle C. As the tape ran, the contact in the box switched the oscillator alternately on and off, sending dots and dashes.
The great thing about the machine as a teaching aid was that its speed was adjustable, from the slow rate of one word per minute up to fast rates like twenty-five words per minute. My plan was to understand every tape at a slow rate, then speed the tapes up slightly and master them again. To motivate our class and give us a benchmark, Mr. Carver showed us a chart of the rate of progress of World War II army trainees in radio code. These students were at least a few years older than we were and under wartime pressure to learn quickly. Previous classes found it a difficult standard to match. So did our class—but my plan worked for me. I drew a graph of the hours I spent versus my speed and found that using my method I learned four times as fast per hour spent as did the army trainees.
I brought my code speed up to twenty-one words a minute to give myself a margin of safety. The American Radio Relay League, an organization of amateurs, provided guidance on preparing for the theory part of the exam. Feeling ready, I signed up for the test and, one summer Saturday morning, took the twenty-mile bus ride to a federal building in downtown Los Angeles. A twelve-year-old in an old flannel shirt and worn jeans, I nervously joined a group of about fifty adults. We sat at long wooden tables on hard chairs in a room with bare painted walls. Closely supervised and monitored, we worked for two hours in library-like silence, broken only by the sounds of Morse code during that part of the exam. On the bus ride home, as I ate my bag lunch, I speculated that I probably had passed but, not knowing how harshly they graded, couldn’t be sure.
For the next few weeks I expectantly checked the mail until, a few days after the war ended, I got an official government envelope with the results. I was now amateur radio operator W6VVM. I was one of the youngest amateurs, or “hams,” the age record at the time being eleven years and some months. There were then about two hundred thousand amateurs in the United States and a comparable number in the rest of the world. I was thrilled to know that I could talk to people in this web who might be anywhere on earth.
Meanwhile American troops had liberated the survivors of my mother’s family from a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines. Now my grandmother, my mother’s youngest brother, and two of her sisters and their families came over from the Philippines to stay with us. They told us that my aunt Nona and her husband had been beheaded in front of their children by the Japanese and that my grandfather had died painfully of prostate cancer in the camp just a week before liberation. My uncle Sam, a pre-med student before the war, told us how he could do nothing but offer comfort to my dying grandfather, denied both medicine and surgical facilities.
To house everyone, my father, in between graveyard shifts at work, built out the attic, adding two bedrooms and a stairway. I shared one bedroom with my brother, James (Jimmy); the other was Sam’s. Having ten extra residents packed into the house along with our family of four brought difficulties in addition to overcrowding and the economic burden of supporting them. One aunt, with her husband and three-year-old son, had contracted tuberculosis while they were prisoners of the Japanese. To protect the rest of us from catching the disease, they ate from a separate set of tableware, with possible severe penalties for us if they made a mistake. Of course, we shared the same air, so we still risked infection from their coughs and sneezes. Decades later, my first lung X-rays showed a small lesion, which remained stable. My doctor thought it came from my earlier tuberculosis exposure.
The other aunt staying with us brought her spouse and three children. The husband, a fascistic martinet who abused his compliant wife, required that she and the children obey his every command. It may have been this, as well as everything the family experienced at the hands of the Japanese, that turned the oldest boy into what I viewed as a sociopath. He told my brother that he wanted to kill me. I had no clue then or later as to why. Though Frank, as I’ll call him, was older and larger, I had no intention of backing down if we had a confrontation. As a precaution, I kept with me a squirt bottle of full-strength household ammonia, the most benign of my array of chemical weapons. We never met again after his family moved out, but our relatives told me he later went to war in Korea. They said he enjoyed killing so much that he reenlisted. Another first cousin who saw him years later with his seven-year-old son was shocked to see the little fellow ordered about in military fashion. When Frank died in 2012, his obituary mentioned that he had become a well-known practitioner and teacher of martial arts.
Seeing what World War II had done to my relatives, and how World War I plus the Great Depression had limited my father’s future, I determined to do better for myself and the children I hoped to have.
Despite the horrors my relatives suffered it never occurred to me, then or later, to blame or discriminate against Japanese Americans. I only became aware of the US government’s treatment of them after they were interned in isolated special camps, their land and homes expropriated and sold by the authorities, their children disappearing from my classes. Jack Chasson educated my close friends Dick Clair and Jim Hart and me, along with other students and faculty, about this injustice. After the war, when some of the imprisoned students returned to school, Jack told me about one whose IQ score was 71, ranking him in the lowest 3 percent. But Jack, who had a degree in psychology, said he could see that this student was unusually smart, attributing his low score to difficulty understanding English. Would I tutor him during lunch hours? Of course. He was retested after a semester and scored 140, extremely gifted, in the upper 1 percent, and well above the threshold for the IQ society Mensa.
My focus on science developed rapidly as I used some of my paper-route money for electronic parts to build ham radio equipment, to buy chemicals by mail and from the local druggist, and to purchase lenses to build a cheap telescope from cardboard tubes.
Then, in November 1946, as a high school sophomore, I saw an advertisement by the Edmund Scientific Company for war-surplus weather balloons. Ever since I had been building model airplanes I had been thinking about ways to achieve my fantasy of a personal flying machine. One of my ideas was to construct the tiniest possible airplane, small, compact, and yet able to carry me. I also thought about building a little blimp, a one-person helicopter, and its variant, the flying platform. My plan was to build scale models as an easy and less costly way both to prove feasibility and to solve some of the practical problems. All this was beyond my financial capability, but flying with balloons was not. I visualized how to complete every step needed to succeed.
Imagining myself drifting up into the sky, I ordered ten balloons, each eight feet tall, for a total cost of $29.95, which is like $360 today. I knew, from the chemistry I was teaching myself, that each eight-footer, filled with hydrogen, would lift about fourteen pounds. Since I weighed 95 pounds, eight of the balloons, with a total lifting power of 112 pounds, should carry me plus a harness and ballast. I didn’t know how to get the hydrogen I needed at a price I could afford, so I turned to the family stove: It was powered by natural gas, whose main constituent was methane, with a little less than half the lifting power of hydrogen. If my tests succeeded I could always buy more balloons. I imagined myself tethered to sixteen or more eight-foot balloons, slowly ascending over my house and looking out first over my neighborhood and then miles in all directions over Southern California. I planned to carry bags of sand to use as ballast. When I wanted to go higher, I’d just lighten up by spilling a little sand, which wouldn’t injure anyone below. If I wanted to go lower or land, I had designed a valve system for each balloon that would let me release its gas in a controlled manner.
After a wait that seemed endless, but was only a couple of weeks, the balloons arrived and I set to work. One quiet Saturday when my family wasn’t around, I connected the gas line for the stove to my balloon and blew it up to about four feet in diameter, which was the largest size I could squash through the kitchen door to get it outside. As predicted, it had a lifting power of nearly one pound. I went to an open field and sent the balloon up to about fifteen hundred feet tethered to strong kite string. Everything was working as expected, and I enjoyed watching a small plane from the nearby local airport “buzz” my balloon. About forty-five minutes later the plane returned, flew near my balloon, and then the balloon suddenly popped. The plane appeared to have shot it down, although I had no idea how or why.
This gave me pause. I pictured myself tied to a flock of eight-foot balloons, making an irresistible target, and being shot down by the local kids who owned air rifles (then known as BB guns). Too risky, I decided. However, that original balloon ad must have been wonderfully successful, for I saw it many times down through the years and it was still running under the banner PROFESSIONAL WEATHER BALLOONS fifty-four years later, with much the same wording. Almost forty years after my experiment, “Lawnchair Larry” tied a cluster of four-foot helium-filled balloons to a chair and ascended several thousand feet.
Disappointed, I wondered what else I could do with the balloons. The first idea came one day when my father brought home some wartime parachute flares from surplus lifeboats. They came in metal canisters that looked like shell casings, and could be fired high into the sky by a special gun. The blazing flare illuminated a large area as it slowly drifted down on its parachute. One night I attached a homemade slow-burning fuse to one of these flares. Then I hung the flare with its fuse on one of my giant balloons and went to a quiet intersection near our house. I lit the fuse and sent the gas-filled balloon up on several hundred feet of cord. I loosely noosed the cord around a telephone pole so, as the balloon rose, the noose slid up the pole, causing the apparatus to be tethered from the top, well out of reach. Then I backed off a block or so and waited. In a few minutes the sky lit up with a dazzling brilliance. A crowd gathered and police cars converged on the telephone pole. A few minutes later the light in the sky went out. The police cars left, the crowd dispersed, and all was as before. A second slow-burning fuse then severed the cord and balloon, so the evidence leapt into the sky, traveling off to I know not where.
Pranks and experiments were part of learning science my way. As I came to understand the theory, I tested it by doing experiments, many of which were fun things I invented. I was learning to work things out for myself, not limited by prompting from teachers, parents, or the school curriculum. I relished the power of pure thought combined with the logic and predictability of science. I loved visualizing an idea, and then making it happen.
In the upstairs bedroom I shared with my brother, I set up a two-meter (wavelength) amateur radio station, complete with a rotating directional beam antenna in the area not filled with beds. I also had created a laboratory space at the far end of a narrow laundry room attached to the rear of the garage. This was where I did many of my investigations in chemistry, some of which went awry. For instance, having read that hydrogen gas would burn in air with a pale-bluish flame, I decided to see for myself. To generate the gas, I poured hydrochloric acid onto zinc metal in a glass flask, sealing it with a rubber stopper that had a tube through it from which the gas would be emitted. I hoped there would be so much hydrogen produced that it would “wash” all the air out of the system before I attempted to ignite the hydrogen coming out the end of the tube. Otherwise—boom. With safety goggles and protective clothing, I was just attempting to ignite the hydrogen as my brother burst in. Unable to stop my hand with the match I screamed “DOWN” as he ducked and the apparatus blew apart. After this, I painted a white “no trespassing” line across the floor to mark off my zone, about five feet wide and ten feet long, lined with shelves I built and stocked with chemicals and glassware. The frequent fumes and explosions ensured voluntary compliance.
I had plenty of other enthusiasms. For instance, at thirteen I was seriously exploring explosives. My experiments had begun a couple of years earlier when I found a recipe for gunpowder in an old Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia. The ingredients were a mixture of potassium nitrate (commonly known as saltpeter), charcoal, and sulfur (which we were told to put in our dog’s food to make his coat shiny). A batch ignited accidentally while I was working on it, burning the skin of my entire left hand to a gray-black, brittle crust. My father soaked my hand in cold tea, after which I wore a tea-soaked bandage for a week. The healing liquid worked: When we removed the bandage and the crusted skin came off, I was overjoyed to see total recovery.
With my well-stocked homemade chemistry lab as a base, I made large quantities of gunpowder and used it either to launch homemade rockets or to shoot model rocket cars down the street in front of my house. The cars had balsa-wood bodies, lightweight wheels from a hobby shop, and a “motor” that consisted of a carbon dioxide or CO2 cartridge like the ones used nowadays to carbonate drinks or power air rifles. These cartridges were being discarded as war surplus, so my father brought them home from the shipyard. Only I didn’t use the CO2 to propel my cars. I drilled out the seal at the end of the cartridge, to the rush of escaping gas. A cold white powder of solid CO2 would collect as the gas expanded and cooled. Once emptied, I filled the cartridge with my homemade gunpowder, inserted a fuse, and tucked my new supermotor into a slot in the back of the tiny vehicle. As the motors sometimes exploded, casting shrapnel, I wore safety goggles and kept myself and the neighborhood kids well back. When it all worked, the cars were astonishingly fast. One moment they would be there, then they weren’t, reappearing after a second or so a couple of blocks away. Noting the motors’ tendency to blow up, I built and tested bigger versions designed to explode, bombs made from short lengths of steel plumbing pipes, which I used to blow craters in cliff faces at the nearby undeveloped Palos Verdes Peninsula.
The next challenge was guncotton, or nitrocellulose. It’s the basis for the so-called smokeless powder. The encyclopedia again gave me the recipe: Slowly add one part of cold concentrated sulfuric acid to two parts of cold concentrated nitric acid. Whenever the mixture becomes warm, chill everything before continuing. Into the brew I added ordinary surgical cotton, again chilling the mixture as it became warm. Then I let it stew in our refrigerator with a DON’T TOUCH sign attached. By now my family knew such signs meant serious business, so I could rely on them to keep away from my projects. After twenty-four hours I removed the cotton, rinsing and drying it. I verified that it was no longer ordinary cotton by dissolving some in acetone. I continued to make more guncotton in my refrigerator “factory” and began a series of experiments. Guncotton explodes, but not easily, and typically requires a detonator. I didn’t have one, so I put a small wad on the sidewalk and whacked it with a sledgehammer. There was a whum-m-p and the sledgehammer leapt up and back over my shoulder while I hung on. The sidewalk now sported a palm-sized crater. After blowing a few more craters in the sidewalk, I used guncotton in rockets and pipe bombs, where it was more predictable and more effective than gunpowder.
Finally I felt ready to try “the big one,” nitroglycerine. The recipe and procedure followed that for guncotton, with just one seemingly minor change, the substitution of ordinary glycerine for the cotton. The result was a pale, almost colorless liquid that floated on top, which I removed carefully, since it was a violent and treacherous explosive that had killed many people in the past.
One quiet Saturday I bundled myself up, put on a safety visor, and moistened the tip of a glass tube with nitro. Using far less than a drop, surely a safe amount, I heated it over the gas flame and suddenly there came a CRACK!—with a duration much shorter than and violently different from all my other slower-acting explosives. Tiny bits of glass were embedded in my hand and arm, blood seeping from the myriad holes. I picked the bits out with a needle over the next few days as I found them. Next I put some nitro on the sidewalk and used the sledgehammer to blow another crater. But nitroglycerine’s dangerous instability worried me and I discarded the rest of my stockpile.
Where did a fourteen-year-old get such powerful and dangerous chemicals? From my local pharmacist, who sold them to me privately at a nice markup. My parents worked long hours and when they were home they were either seeing to the needs of the ten refugee relatives who were staying with us, taking care of household logistics, or falling into an exhausted sleep. I and my brother were left to manage on our own. I didn’t volunteer any information about my experiments. If they had realized the full extent of what I was up to, they would have shut it down.
By the time I took chemistry in the eleventh grade, I had been doing experiments for a couple of years. Enjoying the theory as well as having fun, I read a high school chemistry book from cover to cover. I fell asleep at night mentally reviewing the material, a habit that proved, both then and later, remarkably effective for understanding and permanently remembering what I had learned. Our teacher was Mr. Stump, a short bespectacled man in his fifties. He loved his subject and wanted us to learn it properly. Moreover, he had always longed to produce a student good enough to be one of the fifteen winners in the annual Southern California American Chemical Society high school chemistry contest. This was a three-hour examination given in the spring, and typically attracted about two hundred of the top high school chemistry students from all over Southern California. But after twenty or so years at our academically impoverished working-class school—that year it ranked thirty-first out of the thirty-two schools in the Los Angeles district on standardized achievement tests—he had given up hope of ever realizing his dream.
Among the thirty or so students that showed up for class, Mr. Stump saw a thin younger student with dark curly hair who volunteered to answer every question. He had heard about this kid before from other teachers—the smart ones who enjoyed him and the dull ones whom he filled with dread. Sure, the kid might have picked up a little chemistry and could answer the easy questions during the first couple of weeks, but Mr. Stump had seen others start strong and quickly fade. He warned us about the first exam and how hard it was going to be. When he returned our tests the other students’ scores ranged from zero to thirty-three out of one hundred. My score was ninety-nine. I had his attention now.
I went to talk to him about the chemistry contest. Mr. Stump had saved every old exam for the last twenty years. I wanted to borrow them to study for the contest. He was reluctant to give them up and pointed out the huge odds against me: I was taking the exam in my junior year, whereas most others waited until they were seniors. I’d skipped a grade, which meant I’d be a fifteen-year-old up against a field of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. And I had only five months to prepare. Besides, our school’s facilities were inferior and I had no peers to study with or to push me to a higher level. Few from our school had ever been audacious enough to enter and none of them had placed. “Why not wait a year?” suggested Mr. Stump.
But I was determined. The winners usually got scholarships to the California college or university of their choice. An academic life was becoming my dream. I liked all the science experiments I was doing and the knowledge they led to. If I could have a career continuing this kind of playing, I would be very happy. And the way to have that kind of life was by joining the academic world where they had the laboratories, the kinds of experiments and projects I enjoyed, and maybe the chance to work with other people like me. But I couldn’t afford the education I needed for an advanced degree. Here was a way.
After Mr. Stump talked with English teacher Jack Chasson, he agreed to lend me ten of the tests from alternate years, from which I could determine their range and difficulty, and any trend toward changes that had occurred over the years. Mr. Stump held back the other ten so he could check my level of preparedness.
Alongside my high school chemistry book, I worked through two college chemistry texts. When a concept wasn’t clear in one of them, it was generally clarified in another. With my background in experiments and my previous reading, the subject sang to me. Every night I spent an hour on theory, then fell asleep mentally reviewing the periodic table, valences, allowable chemical reactions, Gay-Lussac’s law, Charles’s law, Avogadro’s number, and so on. I also continued my experiments—and my pranks.
One great trick began when I read about a powerful dye called aniline red. It turned water a deep blood color in the astonishing ratio of six million grams of water for each gram of dye! I obtained twenty grams of the dye for experiments.
My homemade chemistry lab, as I’ve mentioned, was located in the laundry room tacked onto the back of our garage, which in turn opened onto our backyard. And in the middle of that yard was our kidney-shaped goldfish pool, about ten feet by five feet and a foot deep. That’s a little less than one and a half cubic meters. Now, one gram of this dye would color six cubic meters of water a deep red, so a mere pinch, one-quarter of a gram of dye, ought to do the job on the pool.
To be sure, I put in four times that much, a whole gram, stirring the water vigorously as I scattered it, and the goldfish pool turned a satisfying blood red. The color was so dense that plants could no longer be seen except where they broke the surface. The only sign of the fish was when they stuck their mouths up to feed.
I returned to work in my lab. Several minutes passed before I heard my mother scream and scream and scream. She thought someone, probably me, was in the pool bleeding to death. It took a long time to calm her down.
I was sorry to have scared my mother, but it gave me an idea. Eight miles away in the city of Long Beach was an enormous swimming pool open to the public. The Long Beach Plunge was part of the Long Beach Pike, an old established amusement complex. A World War II “orphan” who more or less raised myself while my parents toiled in war factories, I had bused to the pike and had used the plunge many times.
The largest heated indoor pool in Southern California, it was 120 feet long and 60 feet wide, with an average depth of 5 feet. That’s a volume of about a thousand cubic meters. My remaining nineteen grams of aniline red would intensely color only about an eighth of that. I decided to go ahead anyhow. To help me with my plan, I picked a thin, pale, nerdy classmate with thick glasses and a shock of straight light-blond hair who liked to hang out during my experiments. Making a pouch out of waxed paper and filling it with all of the dye, I sealed it with candle wax and fastened two strings to the top in such a way that when they were pulled in opposite directions the pouch would open into a flat sheet and dump out all the dye.
On a beautiful summer Saturday morning we boarded a bus for Long Beach. Arriving at the plunge, we bought our tickets and went to our lockers, changed into our suits, then made our way to the pool, with the dye pouch hidden under my bathing trunks. A hundred or so swimmers were already enjoying themselves in and around the pool.
I put the pouch in the water, then we each took a string. We walked to opposite ends of the pool and drew the lines tight, but not so tight as to release the dye. Whimsically, I wanted a swimmer to do that for us. Soon one obliged. He hit a string unawares. The pouch opened, released the dye, and created a tiny red cloud no bigger than a man’s hand.
All was quiet. We raced to our lockers and changed. With alarm my “assistant” noted a red dye smudge that somehow had appeared on his bathing suit: evidence of the crime. As we sped to the viewing balcony above the main pool and deck, I urged him not to worry.
Now the opaque red cloud was the size of a basketball. It was still quiet. Then another swimmer churned it up to about three feet in diameter. The deep blood-red irregular cloud was still so thick you could not see into it. Then the first scream came, followed by cries of alarm and more screams. A hero dove into the cloud, stirring it and expanding it.
The pool emptied in a panic. Within minutes everyone was out. They were given free passes to return. Entranced by the commotion, we neglected to collect ours. As the plunge employees searched through the crimson cloud, it eventually grew large enough to become semi-transparent. Meanwhile, someone held up the waxed paper and strings, looked puzzled, and discarded it as meaningless debris.
That afternoon, after a pleasant day in the surrounding amusement park, we checked the plunge from the viewing balcony. About half of it was the color of strawberry Kool-Aid. A few swimmers had returned and it was quiet—quieter than usual, because so few people wanted to swim in the red water.
The next day the Long Beach paper carried a small article: “Unknown Pranksters Dye Long Beach Plunge Red.” Sixty years later my son-in-law, Judge Richard Goul, was chatting about local history with a retired judge who happened to mention reading about that incident at the time, never knowing of Rich’s current relation to “the perp.”
With ten weeks to go before the American Chemical Society exam, as I practiced taking old tests, I was scoring 990 or more out of 1,000. I told Mr. Stump I was ready to try the ten he had held back. I got over 99 percent on the first two of these as well, so we went directly to the exam from the previous year, on which I did equally well. I was ready.
On the day of the exam my father drove me twenty miles to the El Camino Junior College, where I followed the crowd among the one-story barracks-like buildings to the test room. We had been told that slide rules would be allowed for the first time this year but that they weren’t necessary. As an afterthought I brought along a ten-cent toy slide rule—all I felt I could afford—thinking I could always do a quick rough check of my calculations if I had any extra time.
As I worked through the test I knew every answer. But then the last section of the test was distributed. This part of the exam required many more calculations than I could do by hand in the time allowed. My cheap tiny slide rule was worthless. Out came the full-sized well-machined slide rules all around me. Surprise! Slide rules were not merely optional—they were necessary for anyone who wanted to win. There was no credit given for showing the correct method, only credit for a numerical answer, to a specified level of “slide rule accuracy.” I was sickened by the realization I would likely not place high enough to get the scholarship I needed and unhappy with myself for not preparing by purchasing a hard-to-afford top-of-the-line slide rule. It seemed so unfair to convert a test about chemistry into one about slide rule arithmetic.
Be that as it may, I set to calculating by hand as quickly as I could. In the end, I was only able to complete 873 of the entire exam’s 1,000 points’ worth of questions, so this was the most I could possibly score. I knew the top winner typically got 925 to 935, so I had no chance at first place.
When my father picked me up I was forcing myself not to cry and could barely talk. In class Mr. Stump could see that I was chastened and obviously had done badly. We didn’t talk about it. I wrote the episode off to my own naïveté. But I did go out and buy the best slide rule I could afford. A couple of weeks after the test, Mr. Stump called me aside to tell me the results. My score was 869 points out of the 873 points I had answered. First place was far ahead at about 930, but second and third place were just a few points ahead of my fourth-place finish. With a good slide rule I could have been first. Expecting to win, I had no backup plan for getting the rest of the money I needed for college. Although I had the satisfaction of confirming to myself my judgment of my ability, I was devastated.
Mr. Stump, on the other hand, was elated. After twenty frustrating years of teaching chemistry at one of the academically worst high schools in Los Angeles, finally he had a winner. Ashamed at how poorly I had done, I tried to beg off attending the awards dinner, explaining I had no transportation all the way to Los Angeles, but Mr. Stump insisted on taking me himself. At the dinner, the winners, in order of their finish, picked from a list of scholarships offered, one from each, by various colleges and universities. As I expected, numbers one and two picked Caltech and UC–Berkeley. As I believed them to be the two best places for science in the state back then, these were the only schools I wanted. It would have been wise to have a backup school in mind when my turn came, but I didn’t know enough to choose, so I passed. The winners’ high schools were the same elite clubby list that won every year: Beverly Hills, Fairfax, Hollywood, and so on. My evening brightened a little when they were startled at the mention of my “nobody” high school, Narbonne. Sadly, I learned that I was not allowed to take the test again the next year.
About this time I became interested in the measurement of intelligence, wanting to see how I stacked up. One Saturday morning I took the twenty-mile bus ride from Lomita to the Los Angeles Public Library to browse and learn about interesting topics (as people do now with Google or Wikipedia). I discovered several IQ tests along with answer keys, so, to measure myself, I took one test on each of nine different Saturdays, then graded them to get my scores.
Pleased with the results, I was curious to see how I had done years earlier when a test, which I now knew was an IQ exam, had allowed me to avoid repeating the sixth grade. The school wouldn’t disclose this information, so I decided on self-help. I noticed that a flat L-shaped metal measuring tool that I had at home ought to allow me to open all the locked doors in the school. Late one night I rode over, hid my bike in the bushes, and nervously approached a locked entry door. Sliding my flat angled device through the crack between the door and the jamb, I hooked it behind the curved tongue of the lock and pulled. The bolt slid back and I entered the strangely darkened and deserted hallways of my high school. As the building creaked spookily and I worried about whether there was a night watchman to fear, I tiptoed silently up the stairs to the second-floor office of the school psychologist. Easily opening all the additional locks I encountered using the same technique, I was soon searching by flashlight through the records of the IQ tests for me and my classmates. I spent hours scanning hundreds of scores. Mostly I verified what I had already guessed, including the fact that the girl I found most talented and interesting in school had an IQ of 148.
Narbonne High School then had about eight hundred students spread over grades seven through twelve. It also had a class social structure that became more entrenched as the grades advanced. About 20 percent of the students were “sochies” who held all the class and student government offices, and planned all the dances and proms to their own satisfaction. These insiders included most of the better athletes, the prettier cheerleaders, and students from the wealthier families. Since the surrounding cities of Lomita and Harbor City were mostly working-class people, “wealthier” meant small-business owners. The “ins” could afford to buy lunch and eat together in the cafeteria. The brown-baggers like me were “outs,” and ate lunch wherever. The “ins” had access to cars, which they were eligible to drive at sixteen; many of them were already driving in the tenth grade. I wouldn’t be old enough to drive until my senior year and then wouldn’t be able to afford a car. Car access was a must for dating, beach parties, and travel to athletic events.
With my own tiny circle of “outs,” I launched a chess club, and the ever-helpful Mr. Chasson found a room where we could play during lunch. I also started a science club that attracted a few of the academically inclined. I spent some lunches at handball, hitting old tennis balls off outdoor wooden backboards, or playing keep-away. When I had the ball, pursued by a horde of bigger kids, I was hard to catch, partly because of my strong legs from lots of biking and partly from alarm at what would happen if they caught me.
I viewed everyone I met as my equal, due the same respect I wanted, unless their behavior showed me otherwise. Many of the “ins,” on the other hand, believed they and their clique were due special treatment by everyone else. From their entitled perch, the “outs” were to be excluded and ignored.
My clash with the “ins” began when I got a B in ninth-grade physical education (PE). To my astonishment, I learned that my grades in this academically irrelevant subject would be counted when I applied for college. Further investigation showed that those who went out for a sport like football or track got an automatic A in PE. This used up the quota of A’s, leaving the others, like me, with B’s, C’s, or worse. I was fast for my age but physically a year and a half younger. Track was a stretch and football was out. What to do?
At Jack Chasson’s urging, I took tennis for my physical education requirement, which meant I was automatically trying out for the team. The so-called coach was a history teacher who knew nothing about tennis and simply organized and monitored us. There was no instruction, so I learned by playing. I somehow was chosen for the junior varsity, and then I was advanced to the varsity for my junior and senior years.
One of the school’s star football players, an “in,” of course, expressed what several of the “sochies” thought of this effrontery: “Tennis is a sissy sport.” I invited the hero to show me on the courts after school. He was better than I expected, and could return the ball fairly consistently if I hit it to him, so I ran him from side to side until, after about twenty minutes, he quit from exhaustion.
Shortly after this, in the spring of my junior year, and after the ill-fated chemistry exam, my irritation with the “ins” led me to a plan, inspired by excitement over the concurrent 1948 presidential campaign (Truman versus Dewey and Wallace). I recruited about a dozen others, including my pals Dick Clair and Jim Hart, and formed the Student Betterment Committee. Our goal was to make student government more than ceremonial—to work for the best interests of the students and to structure activities so they would include all the students, not just the “ins.” The plan was to run a slate of candidates for every student body office; the family of one of our Japanese members had a lettuce farm with a one-room building where we met in the evenings to organize and strategize.
The night before the election we hoisted two huge banners over the school saying VOTE STUDENT BETTERMENT COMMITTEE. The signs were carried aloft by my weather balloons, which in turn were attached to inaccessibly high branches of trees using the telephone pole loop trick that had worked so well for me the evening I hoisted the aerial flare. Overnight winds moved the balloons around somewhat, leaving the banners droopy but still clearly readable when day broke.
As students streamed into the auditorium to hear the candidates speak, we handed them literature explaining our platform and sample ballots showing votes for our candidates. It was the first organized student political party that anyone could remember in the twenty-five-year history of the school. Taken by surprise, the “ins” had no time to counterpunch. A couple of their candidates realized I must be behind it and spent their campaign speech time attacking me personally. The social clique had always run student government. They were entitled. Change meant I was a troublemaker, a radical, a threat to the status quo. Though I narrowly lost my bid for student council, when the ballots were counted we had swept thirteen of fifteen positions. My friend Dick Clair was elected student body president.
Forty-six years later, when I stopped by our high school reunion for a couple of hours, the “ins” seemed the same as they had so long ago, only older and mellower. High school had been the apex of their lives. Many had married one another and lived locally ever since, whereas for me high school was a launching pad for life’s great adventure.
In the summer of 1948, following my junior year at Narbonne, I sat on the beach and read my way through a list of about sixty great novels, mostly from American literature, by authors such as Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. There were foreign authors as well, such as Dostoyevski and Stendhal. Jack Chasson had given me the list and lent me the books from his personal library. I punctuated my hours of reading with body-surfing and with thoughts about who I was and where I was going.
That summer, three years after the war ended, was especially difficult for me. My parents filed for divorce. At the time I thought the household stress of the past few years was the cause. Working different shifts during the war, probably so one of them would, even though sleeping, be nominally present at the house, they drifted apart. In addition, the little village packing our house was often filled with conflict during the three years it took for the last of our ten guests to move out.
My father moved to Los Angeles. During my senior year in high school, I saw him only on Sunday mornings. He drove the twenty miles from Los Angeles and parked a block or so away, where I could see him from my second-story bedroom. I’d come out and spend several hours with him, practicing for my driving test, going to lunch, talking, whatever. Meanwhile my mother was preparing to sell the house when I left for the university, although I didn’t know it at the time. The situation with the divorce was confusing, as neither parent offered any explanation. What was going on only became clear years later. My mother had been carrying on an affair with the husband of the family with whom we had originally stayed when we visited California for the first time during the summer before Pearl Harbor. Only recently did I learn from my brother that the affair started then, and that when my father eventually discovered it, this led to the divorce.
As my senior year began I still faced the problem of how to scrape together the money I needed to attend a university. I hadn’t gotten the scholarship I expected to win from the chemistry exam and I couldn’t expect help from home. I learned that the Physics Teachers Association had an all–Southern California high school physics test similar to the chemistry exam. But I hadn’t studied physics intensely yet and had only a few months to prepare. Our physics teacher was an athletics coach who babysat the class and knew nothing of the subject. I taught myself. With no old tests to practice on, all I had to judge the exam by was a brief printed announcement. However, my experiments with electricity, mechanics, magnetism, and electronics over the years helped me with the theory. And of course, learning these subjects my way, I devised new pranks.
As part of my study of optics and astronomy, I bought some cheap mail-order lenses from Edmund Scientific (my balloon supplier) and made a refracting telescope. Besides the stars, I noticed that there was a direct view from my second-story window to a hilltop about half a mile away where teenagers often parked at night to neck. Coincidentally I acquired an old twelve-volt auto headlight, which I used as a compact and powerful searchlight.
The idea was immediate: mount the headlight on my telescope so it could illuminate whatever the telescope pointed at. I lined up the scope on “Lover’s Lookout” and waited for nightfall. Once several cars had been parked for a while, I looked through the eyepiece and hit the switch. Blam! The cars were brightly lit and the stunned teenagers, caught in various states of entanglement, drove away in a panic. Since I didn’t want to be identified, I kept the light on only for seconds at a time. I tried this trick just a couple of times, stopping once I realized the distress it must have caused the courting couples.
The day of the great physics exam came, but seemed anticlimactic after the chemistry test. I knew how to answer questions worth about 860 of the 1,000 points and, with my new super slide rule, rolled through the calculations. But two questions, together worth about 140 points, came from material I hadn’t covered. Was I doomed again to fourth place? I asked myself, What can I do about this? In the time left, I used a notion called dimensional analysis to reason out what I hoped was the correct formula for solving one of them, and made a stab at the other. As with the chemistry exam, the fifteen top scorers attended an awards banquet. Again, the finalists came mainly from the top academic schools in the Los Angeles city school system. There was general astonishment when the top spot went to someone from where? Narbonne High School? Some trade school out in the sticks? The scoring pattern of the chemistry exam was repeated, only this time I was first with 931 points. The second-place winner was fifty or sixty points behind. Surpassing the smug and privileged, I had first pick of the scholarships that were offered, wavering between Caltech and UC–Berkeley. Caltech, my first choice, offered full tuition, but I did not have an extra $2,000 per year for the dormitories and expenses. Pasadena was expensive and I knew of no place nearby within my budget. I simply couldn’t afford Caltech.
My UC–Berkeley scholarship, the largest they then gave, was for $300 a year. Tuition, which was $70 a year, was covered separately for me by a scholarship for children of World War I veterans. Berkeley also had low-cost room and board just off campus. Cheaper yet was the Student Cooperative Housing Association, with room and board for $35 per month and four hours of work a week. When I picked Berkeley, I consoled myself with the hope that at least there would be plenty of girls and my social life might bloom.
Some years earlier, my interest in radio and electronics came to the attention of Mr. Hodge, a retired electrical engineer whose spacious California property, with its subtropical garden, palm trees, Spanish-style stucco and tile, and elaborate goldfish-filled pools, adjoined our back fence. From twenty-five feet up in my tree house, which consisted of a board platform I nailed onto a huge horizontal forked branch, I peered through a stand of bamboo and saw a mysterious tower. The slim conical building, wrapped in green asphalt roofing material, had once supported a windmill. One day Mr. Hodge invited me inside, where we ascended thirty feet on a tiny central spiral staircase. As we passed each level, I saw new treasure troves of radio components. Wisely, Mr. Hodge let me choose as a gift from him just one item that I could use, a magnificently crafted air spaced variable capacitor. This device was an essential part of the radio receivers and transmitters of the time. Built with a set of fixed metal plates, it had a dial to bring another set of moving plates nearer to or farther from them, changing the frequency to which the radio responded. Incorporating this into my homemade radio allowed me to tune in stations sharply and crisply. Every few weeks Mr. Hodge fed my hunger with another of his treasures. As my facility with, and interest in, radio grew, I began to speculate about what I thought were possible remarkable technological future uses.
One idea was about how I could open or close a door just by thinking that it be so. I could use the fact that thought was known to produce electrical activity in the brain and faint but detectable electrical currents in the scalp. I considered shaving my scalp and attaching wires to pick up these currents. I expected to be able to vary the currents by varying my thoughts. Feeding these currents into a radio transmitter I wore would cause the appropriate signal to be sent to a radio receiver by the door, in turn activating motors to open or close the door. In principle, I could send information that was equivalent to the dots and dashes of Morse code (or, more up to date, the zeros and ones of binary code) and so send instructions of any degree of complexity. I never built this gadget, but the idea of a wearable electronic device with which I could wirelessly control objects stayed with me.
Mr. Hodge also bought me a subscription to a magazine called Science News-Letter (now Science News), and told me about the annual Westinghouse Science Talent Search. (Later it was sponsored by Intel and then by Regeneron.) No one in my high school had ever heard of this contest, including the teachers. Along with more than sixteen thousand high school students from all over the United States, I entered the Eighth Annual Search in 1949, my senior year. We all took a written exam in science, and the knowledge I gained from Science News-Letter was valuable preparation.
In addition to teachers’ recommendations, I needed to submit an essay on science. With no guidance available, I went to the library and began a scholarly write-up on the metal beryllium. It was drudgery. I stopped and thought about the fun things I had figured out for myself. Choosing from them gave me my essay: “Some Original Calculations.” In the first of these, I showed how to approximate the positions of the planets in the sky by assuming their orbits were circles instead of the more exact Keplerian ellipses. My second calculation showed how to find the index of refraction of a glass prism (and hence the relative speed of light in it) merely by moving it on a tabletop until it half reflected, half transmitted light at its lower face. A few simple measurements with a meter stick and trigonometry then gave the answer.
I believed I did well on the test, but the teachers’ letters and the essay were of major importance and I had no sense of how I rated on either of these. As weeks passed with no word, I figured I was an also-ran and would find that out once the winners were announced.
Having put the talent search out of mind I was astonished one spring morning to find a telegram at our doorstep. Not realizing it was for me, I brought it inside. As we had never received a telegram, thinking it might be an emergency, I opened it.
It was from Westinghouse. Excited and astonished, I read, “Congratulations, you are one of forty finalists.” A few weeks later I took my first train trip, traveling together with the two other finalists from California, for a five-day all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, DC, where we joined the rest. The forty of us were treated to an audience with Nobel Prize–winning physicist I. I. Rabi and a visit to the local sixty-inch cyclotron. No one was allowed to wear magnetizable material when entering the cyclotron room, for the device’s electromagnet was so powerful it would rip loose watches, buttons, and belt buckles, turning them into deadly missiles flying to the device.
At a public evening exhibition, we each presented some aspect of our scientific work. These exhibits would play an important role in ranking the forty of us for cash awards. I displayed the small radio station I had built, complete with a remote-controlled rotating antenna. Unfortunately, as there was no electric power for our booths, my planned live demonstration became a collection of lifeless objects. The top ten finalists got cash awards ranging from $10,000 to $1,000, according to the rankings by the judges. The remaining thirty of us got $100 each. Nonetheless, we were all sought after by science departments of leading universities. As a highlight we were greeted in the White House Oval Office by President Harry S. Truman. I remember the feel of his hand as we shook: firm, compact, and with the sensation of a leather chair lightly dusted with talcum powder.
Throughout high school no one else had much of an interest in the physical sciences, so I studied and experimented on my own, teaching myself. But I shared other interests with my friends. Dick Clair, Jim Hart, and I were especially close from the eighth grade on. We talked about school politics and discussed national and world issues, among them elections, the Cold War, the rebuilding of Western Europe, and racial discrimination. We read literature and pondered morality and ethics. Jim was a poet, writer, and gifted cartoonist. Dick was a writer and philosopher. Though we led very different lives, we would stay in touch for a lifetime.
The only game I played was chess. At this point, I had no interest in or experience with cards or gambling. However, one of the physics ideas I thought about briefly during this year was the analogy between a circling roulette ball and an orbiting planet. Since planetary positions were accurately predictable, I thought I might be able to forecast the outcome of a roulette spin. I was over at Jack Chasson’s house for dinner just after he and his wife had come back from a trip to Las Vegas. When he said that there was no way to beat the casinos, I said with rash teenage hubris, encouraged by my idea about roulette, that someday I was going to do just that. Jack said, “Oh, come on, Eddie,” and I let it drop.
But the idea lay dormant, waiting to come to life.