Stan’s first step toward becoming a machinist was a job for the summer of 1940, before his senior year of high school. Through Ben’s connections, he was hired at a company that made molds for automobile tires. Not yet eighteen, he lied about his age to obtain his work permit.1
Akron Standard Mold
The machine shop at Akron Standard Mold was primitive compared with others where Stan would work later, but its belt-driven machines included a drill press and other basic tools that he was eager to learn to use. Stan’s pay was minimal, and came to even less because he needed to buy his own tools. But he was nevertheless very proud that at seventeen he was already being paid for serious shop work. And he loved buying his own tools, which were his to use for whatever he wanted. Paying Stan his two dollars at the end of the week, the foreman would caution him: “Don’t spend it all in one place.” Stan recalled, “I’d take the two dollars, find a bookstore with the prettiest girl as a clerk and go in and buy a book. So I had two pleasures from the money.”
He had to begin with the shop’s most humble tasks. “You had to file, you had to make sure the belts ran, all the things an apprentice does.” Stan enjoyed the work, but he found that learning new skills required help that was not easy to get. “Nobody wanted to help you,” Stan said, “because your accomplishments threatened their job security.” When Stan asked a Russian friend of Ben’s who was then working at Akron Standard Mold to show him how to grind drills, the fellow at first refused to share his expertise, explaining, “we don’t get paid much. And everybody’s job here is very precious.” As it turned out, the Russian made an exception for Ben’s son, and he agreed to show Stan just once how to grind drills. Stan recalled breaking into a cold sweat because he felt sure he’d lose his job if he didn’t learn the skill. But he practiced repeatedly until at last, “I could improve on what he showed me, and I got a much better drill.”
Stan’s growing experience fed his intuitions about materials and machines, which in turn enhanced his experience. “I had these hunches,” he explained, and guided by them “I could go and learn.” For example, in working with cutting tools for lathes, Stan figured out an improved design involving a change of angle that made the chip roll off before it could heat up. This was a significant improvement, the first of several ways Stan found to machine metal more efficiently that eventually led to the invention of his novel center drive lathe (see chapter 3).
Stan also learned, however, that such resourcefulness would not enhance his popularity in the shop, where “busting ass” was frowned upon. The older workers resisted changes that increased productivity because they had learned from hard experience that they would not be rewarded. The higher rate would become the new norm, effectively reducing their wages.2 Stan recognized that this was an abuse, and he started to get involved with issues of justice in the workplace.
Following in Ben’s footsteps, Stan agreed to represent his fellow workers in the Akron Central Industrial Union Council, which represented the CIO industrial unions in town. Their choice recognized Stan’s earlier experience giving lectures on labor issues and helping to organize picket lines when he was leading the Young People’s Socialist League. But while Stan often supported the work of the unions, he never wore an official union pin, nor did he ever run for union office, because he resisted its organizational constraints. “I just wanted to be a worker, doing my job and being able to believe in what I believed in. I was really inherently a Wobbly who hated bureaucracy anywhere, including in the unions, and they did things I didn’t like.”3
Late that summer, Stan came home from work and shocked his parents. “I’mquitting school,” he said. He had had a conversation that day with Fitzpatrick, the shop superintendent at Akron Standard Mold. This demanding man, known only by his last name, was famous throughout Akron for his toughness. Stan later compared him to J. R. Williams’s well-known 1940s cartoon character “Bull of the Woods.”4 The term, Stan explained, was used in that period to describe a “tough son of a bitch foreman.”
Fitzpatrick had gained considerable respect for Stan and his work over the course of the summer, and that day he had asked Stan to consider not going back to school. “You’re going to be a very good machinist,” he told Stan. “I like what you’re doing and your attitude. And I think you know I never went beyond the third grade and look at me. You’ve got the stuff. You don’t need school.” Stan’s goal at that time was to become a great machinist, so his immediate response to Fitzpatrick was “sounds good.” Ben and Bertha did not, however, allow Stan to quit high school. As a compromise they let him work part-time at Akron Standard Mold during the fall semester.
Senior Year
When high school began again in the fall, Stan planned to study art and develop his gift for drawing. But when he found that the art class mainly consisted of rote exercises, he switched to shop class, where he was able to practice some of the skills he had recently learned at Akron Standard Mold, such as cutting threads and making tapers. He also learned new skills. “I loved forge work,” Stan recalled, learning to tell the heat of metal by its color and how to temper it, “whether you quench it or anneal it to get different properties.” Stan’s understanding of materials deepened in this period. He learned about the properties of different steels, and how and why they differed from other metals like cast iron. This fueled his growing interest in metallurgy, and, he recalled, “one of the first things I did back in those days was I would make powdered materials solid.” Years later, he would draw on this metallurgical experience in creating the new glassy materials that became the basis of his groundbreaking inventions (see chapter 5).
Stan enjoyed the high school shop courses so much that he decided to attend a public trade school (Hower Trade School) at night to learn how to operate all the machines then typically found in a tool-making shop. For the trade school course he bought more tools: “micrometers, Johansson blocks, calipers, different scales with steel rollers, and thread gauges.” Stan recognized that making and using tools is an art, and he became “very disciplined about studying and working and thinking about tools.”
When Stan learned that he was short a course needed for graduation, he approached the mechanical drawing teacher, Mr. Wetzel, and asked what he could do to get the semester’s credit he needed. Like several other teachers, Mr. Wetzel considered Stan a trouble-making socialist, but he respected his abilities. He asked Stan whether he knew anything about diesel engines. Stan replied, “I know about gas engines, but I never really got interested in diesels.” Mr. Wetzel told Stan that on Friday afternoon he would give him a demanding take-home exam on diesels and on Monday morning would give him the credit he needed if he passed. “Are you ready to take the challenge?” Stan answered, “Sure.” He realized from the teacher’s mischievous smile that he did not expect him to succeed, but he went home and studied “a little of this and that,” putting things together for himself as he wrote the exam. On Monday he had answered the questions, and Mr. Wetzel kept his promise to give Stan the credit.
Figure 2.1 Stan’s high school graduation photo, June 1941.
Goodrich Rubber
After his bad experiences in grade and high school, the idea of attending college didn’t even enter Stan’s mind at the time he graduated in June 1941. (And in any case, his teachers didn’t consider him “college material.”) Had he wanted to, his parents would probably not have stood in his way, though “I think they would have thought it was peculiar,” Stan remarked. “My father would have said something like, ‘How can you make a living doing that?’”
Stan began looking for a job. Although the United States was not yet at war, military production was already building up, and the increased demand worked to Stan’s advantage. First, however, he had to overcome some predictable anti-Semitism. (Stan’s job at Akron Standard Mold had been possible only because Ben was highly respected there.) When he applied for a tool-making post at B. F. Goodrich’s Miller Plant 2, the hiring officer told him, “We don’t hire Jews.” Stan asked, “Under what condition would you ever hire me?” “I’d hire you if you had a recommendation from Fitzpatrick,” the officer responded. “That tough son of a bitch would never give anybody a recommendation.” As it happened, Stan had a recommendation from Fitzpatrick in his pocket, for when Stan left he had had the presence of mind to ask for the reference. On seeing the letter from Fitzpatrick, the hiring officer said, “You’ve got the job.” When Stan told his mother that he would be working at the Miller plant, she said, “Oh, that’s where I worked too.” She had been employed there during World War I, when workers were so badly needed that being both Jewish and a woman did not keep her from being hired.
Figure 2.2 Nineteenth-century factory with belt-driven machines.
The Miller plant was one of the oldest buildings Stan had seen, and the machines, all belt-run, were also extremely old fashioned. But Stan threw himself into his work, making “anything that required precision machining, out of cast iron, bronze, steel.” He gained a sense of pride in his trade, especially in doing things the way the old-timers had. In his first assignment, Stan machined special parts using enormous no-frills machines in a large maintenance and repair shop. With a gigantic belt-driven nineteenth-century lathe, he was expected to make or remake huge threaded parts. The machine had no attachment for cutting threads; “all they gave you was big calipers,” he said, so Stan had to improvise. “I would take a piece of chalk and put marks on the slide of the machine, and control it by just the chalk marks to cut the threads I wanted. Everybody was very impressed.” Such experience, Stan reflected, “gave me the self-confidence I needed to be a real inventor.” Improvising control methods would also help Stan to think more generally about intelligence, setting him on a path that led in time to his invention of smart, self-regulating machines (see chapter 3).
Stan’s time at Goodrich allowed him to attend the night school offered there for staff, gaining knowledge that later fed his inventions in unpredictable ways. What he learned about polymers from a class on the chemistry of rubber, for instance, later contributed to his breakthrough creation of chalcogenide switches (see chapter 5). More immediately, working at Goodrich gave him powerfully formative experiences of class conflict. Although he took no official role in the union, he eagerly joined in collective efforts to improve conditions for his fellow workers. Becoming known as an activist marked him as a target for violent reprisals that endangered his life several times, but those struggles also helped him gain the toughness he needed in later struggles as an independent inventor and scientist.
A dramatic confrontation came early in October 1941, when Stan helped to organize a one-day strike to protest recent violence at another Goodrich plant in Oaks, Pennsylvania. Thugs hired by the company had attacked Joseph Feineison, an organizer who was passing out leaflets, beating not only him but also his pregnant wife. “We were all of us very upset that the company would be so cruel as to beat up a pregnant lady,” Stan recalled. Stan offered to help by disconnecting drive belts and cutting off power to close the plant in protest.5
On the day of the strike, Stan rose early, as usual. As he was leaving home, Ben came out and said, uncharacteristically, “We’re worried about you.” Stan was confused. “Look,” he replied, “you’ve been in more dangerous situations. Did you ever not go?” Ben said no. When Stan saw the tears in his mother’s eyes, he knew that she was the one who was worrying. On arriving at Miller, Stan knocked the belts off the pulleys, shut the plant down, and organized the picket line for a nonviolent general strike that lasted about twenty-four hours. But violence arose in the evening as Stan walked out of the plant. He noticed a spotlight from a tower following him around. When a car without headlights drove straight toward him in the dark, he feared for his life. Stan recalled, “The light was still on me, and I heard a whirr. Then I heard just a roar from our picketers, and they grabbed that car, these coalminer guys from West Virginia. Nobody said anything; they all grabbed a hold of the car spontaneously.” The picketers stopped the car, started to shake it and were about to overturn it when Stan stepped in to prevent the men inside from being killed and thanked the workers warmly. “They went back in the picket line. They were used to that kind of thing.”
After that incident, Goodrich moved Stan over to its main plant, Plant 1. “There was no reason except the fact that I was an active member of the union, and that I was on the industrial union council.” He was there by early December 1941, when “we were having a union meeting on Sunday, and the chairman stopped the meeting and said, ‘The Japs are bombing Pearl Harbor. Meeting adjourned.’” In Plant 1 Stan was put in a big machine area and given a number of jobs that proved to be life-threatening. One required inserting a huge key about five inches in diameter into a big machine to lock the shaft. He was sent to help the man who hammered the key into place, who “looked like a poster of a Soviet worker, built very strongly.” Stan’s job was to kneel and hold the key while the huge man hit it with a sledgehammer. “Now I’m on my knees and he said, ‘Stan, I want to talk to you. I know why you’re here.’” He had heard through the grapevine that the management wanted to get rid of Stan. His previous helper had been killed. Stan recalled his account: “‘I told him, don’t look at me. Keep your eyes focused on that shaft, and hold like hell, but he kept looking back, and when I see that, bang. Hit his face. So that’s what you’re here for, they kill you that way.’” Stan followed instructions. “I never moved; I didn’t look at him.”
Afterward, Stan spoke more with this powerful man. He was a German and turned out to be a Social Democrat who had been part of the Kiel mutiny at the end of World War I that helped end the German Empire. As fellow socialists they discovered they had much in common. As Stan explained, “The Workmen’s Circle, the Yiddish labor movement, copied what the German Social Democrats had,” including singing groups and theater. So instead of getting rid of Stan, the company had helped him find a new ally.
There were several more such attempts. The most dramatic came when a group of managers in suits came and told Stan they had a special job for him. “They knew I liked special jobs.” They took him to the powerhouse and told him to climb up to a higher level, where he would find a piece to machine. When he got there, it was very dark, and, as Stan soon discovered, the floor was just wire mesh. “When I got out on the floor, my foot went through a huge hole. It’d have been the end of me when I hit the bottom. I reached over and grabbed the wires and pulled myself with great difficulty out of the hole.” When Stan went back down, the men were still there. “‘You know, fellas,’ he said, ‘I could have been killed up there.’ And they said, ‘Well, you’re getting the idea, Stan.’”
Stan realized that he would not last long at Goodrich. A union representative told him, “They’re out to get you. It’s not worth your life.” Early in 1942, the union helped Stan find a job in another union shop, working in the tool room at Imperial Electric, a company that made motors.
Imperial Electric
Imperial Electric was located in a very poor “red light” section of Akron. Stan remembered the scene on Saturday nights when he worked alone in the tool room on special jobs. “The cops would go up and down the street, calling out the names of these quite unattractive women carrying screaming children.” The choice for these poor women was between paying off the cops and going to jail. The building at Imperial Electric was shabby, too. Stan described it as “a terrible place, with rats.” When there were blackouts the “rats would come walking across our feet.”
But despite the dilapidated setting, Stan enjoyed his tool-making work there, learning from the challenging assignments. “They’d give me things that I didn’t know I could do, because nobody else could do it.” One major project involved machining a new part for a gigantic generator that the company was about to ship. Something was wrong with it, and Stan “had to figure out a way to get inside that huge thing” and machine the part. Working for an hour or two, he succeeded. Stan got great pleasure from such problem solving, but as at Akron Standard Mold, Stan’s ideas for improvements were not welcomed at Imperial Electric. “It was put to me very squarely” by Frenchy, the shop foreman, “a very nice guy. He came over and said, ‘I got to give you my advice for friends. You got to remember you’re paid to work, not think.’ That’s when I first started thinking that I would end up going on my own. I love my work, but if I can’t be creative it’s not what I want.” By discouraging such creativity on the job, Frenchy “was the one who caused me to first think that I ought to set up my own shop.”
But if Frenchy discouraged thought, the workers at Imperial Electric were receptive to Stan’s efforts to get them to think. In the Jewish labor tradition of the Workmen’s Circle, Stan organized cultural activities, including a reading group for which workers were to write book reviews. Being more widely read than the others, he agreed to choose readings, “books that made you think,” and to help the others learn how to write reviews. At the union meeting where this idea was discussed, Stan suggested that the workers draw lots to go first. As it happened, the first person chosen to present a book review was “this big brute of a guy” who had what was probably the worst job in the plant, dipping pieces in strong acids. Nobody in the plant paid any attention or even talked to the man who drew the lot, and the others were surprised when he said he would try. Stan then worked with him, explaining, “You read this and then you say to yourself, ‘What did I learn from this?’ And you do the best you can.” Stan had tears in his eyes when this man managed to present his review. It was not the best possible book review, but “for the first time he was thinking about something, reading something. It opened his mind.” In addition, “this fellow was so proud, and he got respect.” Stan felt that his most important work in the shop was to help raise consciousness in such ways. He wanted his fellow workers to “understand why you would want to change the world, not just be mad at it.”
The owner at Imperial Electric was “a one-armed guy who was a follower of Mussolini” and “treated people very badly.” At one point, he replaced the congenial Frenchy with a new, hostile foreman, probably to combat the union. To agitate Stan, a known union activist, this new foreman used a Jewish slur. Stan’s instinct was to hit him, but the other workers shouted, “Don’t hit him! That’s what they want you to do! They’ll fire you immediately.” So instead, Stan pointed his finger at him and said, “I’ll see you outside tonight, and we’ll see whether you can repeat that to me.” But when the time came, the other workers kept Stan late. When he finally went outside, he didn’t see anyone, and after waiting for a time went home. About forty-five minutes later he got a phone call and learned what had happened. When the new foreman had come out, some of the other workers had grabbed him. They had planned to simply scare him so that he would not try it again, but when a large ball-peen hammer dropped from his jacket, clearly meant for attacking Stan, they beat him up. “How bad off is he?” Stan asked. “Pretty bad off,” he was told. “Call the ambulance, but give a few minutes for Tony or whoever it was to get out of there, and tell him he can’t go home tonight, that we’ll sort this thing out tomorrow.” The next day, Stan and a union representative went to see the owner and threatened him with a strike if he tried to prosecute the attackers. The owner fired the new foreman, and Frenchy returned. Stan was pleased, he said, that at both Imperial Electric and Goodrich “I was protected by workers. I saw that real solidarity.”
Attempts to Enlist
Meanwhile, the country was mobilizing for the war effort, and Stan was eager to help in the fight against fascism. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when Stan was still at Goodrich but preparing to leave, he tried to enlist in the navy, thinking that would be a better place for a machinist than the army. Not until he had moved to Imperial Electric did he get his physical exam; to prepare, “I got me a military haircut.” But both the navy and the army rejected Stan because of his asthma, which had by then become serious.
Stan’s asthma had started to trouble him when he was in his teens and would bring home stray dogs and cats. When the family kept one of the cats to deal with mice in their house, Stan’s asthma worsened, flaring up when he was exposed not only to animals but also to dust. No consistent steps were taken to treat this problem, and he became so sick at times that he “couldn’t even walk.” During high school and during his first year of working he was unable to breathe through his nose. “That was a tough time in my teens,” he recalled. At Goodrich and Imperial Electric he had to work in settings filled with fumes, sawdust, and metal chips, which aggravated his asthma. He was also smoking and chewing tobacco, but strangely, cigarette or pipe smoke didn’t begin to bother him until much later, after he gave up smoking. “I didn’t like smoking cigarettes, actually. But to me it was a bonding thing with my father. He’d smoke and hand it to me.”
Stan had had several nasal surgeries “just to breathe.” The military examiners could see the scar tissue and rejected him. In retrospect, Stan recognized that he would have been rejected in any case because he was “a well-known agitator.” He also realized that his severe allergies would have made it unbearable for him to wear the rough woolen uniforms. Throughout the rest of his life he had to avoid wearing wool or other coarse fabrics, which were extremely irritating to his skin.
Stan next thought he would go west to Sacramento, where positions for machinists were being advertised. When he was rejected without explanation, he realized that he had been blacklisted in Akron for his organizing work. He decided instead to try Arizona, which for Stan was an exotic place that he had read about as a child, with good weather, Indians, and mesas. Its dry climate also promised to help his asthma. This time he didn’t try to arrange a job in advance. He was nineteen, and adventurous.
Marriage to Norma Rifkin
Some months before leaving for Arizona, Stan married his beautiful high school sweetheart Norma Rifkin. Born on January 18, 1924, she was Jewish, and her parents came from the working class. Her father, Abe, from Ukraine, began by repairing umbrellas and rose to owning a furniture store. Her mother, Ida Moon, was the daughter of a German-Jewish immigrant. When Ida later left Abe, Norma, at the age of twelve, took responsibility for her younger brother Jerry. Norma was not religious, but she socialized as a teenager at the Akron Jewish Center and probably met Stan there.6
Stan recalled that Norma’s family had cautioned her against marrying him because he was “a troublemaker” who carried a lunch pail. They had hoped she would rise in status and marry an accountant or a doctor. But as soldiers left for war, “everybody was getting married,” and so did they. He was nineteen, she eighteen. At that age, Stan was too young to realize that while the two were physically attracted they were poorly matched in their values and interests. Norma was artistic, creative, and levelheaded, but she cared little about Stan’s political and intellectual interests, which she would eventually come to resent as a diversion from his family life.
Figure 2.3 Stan and Norma, c. 1942.
Several dozen friends and relatives witnessed their Jewish wedding ritual on August 9, 1942, at the Akron Jewish Center.7 Stan wore a yarmulke and performed the symbolic act of stepping on a glass. A small party followed. After the wedding, Stan was dismayed when Bertha presented him with all the money he had brought home from his job at Akron Standard Mold, which she had lovingly saved for him. “She had a sweet heart,” Stan said.
Arizona
In the cold of winter, probably in December 1942, Stan and Norma boarded the train to Phoenix, taking only several changes of clothes. Phoenix was a small city at that time, and its climate was indeed beneficial: “I actually did feel better with my asthma,” Stan recalled. After staying for a few days with a cousin, they rented a room at 733 West Portland and found jobs.8 Stan took the first job he found, in a small machine shop housed in an open-ended garage, a very hot place to work. The job was but a temporary stopgap, however. Not only was the pay inadequate, but the owner also wanted him to run the machine that Stan had been hired to set up. Stan knew that he could not do repetitive work. When the owner told him he didn’t want union guys in his place, it was even clearer to Stan that he had to leave.9
He then found an excellent job in the tool room of the Goodyear Aircraft bomber plant in Litchfield Park, which was in the desert about 30 miles outside Phoenix. Much bigger than the shops Stan had worked in earlier, and far more modern, its “really good all around tool room didn’t have belts. It had real lathes, real milling machines, big planers, and some very good toolmakers.” Stan enjoyed the variety of the job’s demands. “Unlike a machinist who becomes a specialist on one machine, I had to run every machine in the shop.” He also gained valuable experience working with materials that were not in common use before then, such as titanium, used in making airframes. Stan was also pleased that in making tools for manufacturing airplanes “I was doing my patriotic duty.”
Although he enjoyed his work, Stan found many practices at the Litchfield plant upsetting. He hated the waste: the workers would routinely bury both their scrap and imperfectly made parts. More important, because it was virtually impossible to get good inspectors, many airplanes had defects and sometimes crashed. Stan felt the underlying problem was that Goodyear received a fixed profit of 10 percent no matter what the actual production was. Stan criticized this policy at meetings where workers were asked for suggestions, but the management ignored his views.
The wartime need for workers, heightened by the diversion of many young men into the military, meant that those hired in the tool room were often unskilled and had to be trained on the job. Back in Ohio the men who worked with Stan came off the farm, but they had also done machine work. In Arizona, however, many were itinerant workers who showed up without a toolbox. They had “just come back from building mine equipment in South America or a railroad shop somewhere,” said Stan, who was glad to help train them.
Meanwhile, Stan learned much about prejudice and racism. Since he did not then own a car, he usually took the bus from Phoenix to the plant. During his forty-five-minute daily commute he regularly encountered badly treated American Indians, African Americans, and Mexicans. He also found prejudice between groups that were themselves the targets of discrimination, as in a hot dog place run by a Mexican that refused to serve a nicely dressed black soldier. Even though Stan had lived in a mostly black neighborhood of Akron, he had not before then encountered this degree of prejudice. He advised a black sweeper at the plant to go north where he might have a better chance but later learned that even the union didn’t accept black members.
Stan did not have to deal with anti-Semitism toward himself in Arizona: “Nobody could believe I was a Jew.” Many thought he was an American Indian because of his dark tan, black hair, high cheekbones, and aquiline nose, so he sometimes experienced racism on that count. He also found it awkward when he would have to tell Mexicans that he didn’t speak Spanish. “It was sometimes quite dicey,” he recalled, when members of zoot suit gangs would stop him, thinking he was one of them. “When I couldn’t answer,” he remembered, “they would say, ‘You are ashamed to be a Mexican.’”
Stan admired the resourcefulness of one American Indian in the shop who was denied the use of a surface gauge. “He just went up to this big piece of work, took out a rule, marked it off and did a perfect job of machining with a piece of chalk. That’s a thing I used to do.” But the racism in the shop was so severe that Stan’s own position was threatened when he tried to teach skills to American Indians who were interested in getting into the tool room. He was told, “You can’t work with those people. They’re animals.” One racist came to see Stan to tell him, “You’ve got to stop working with Indians and showing them. They’re not any good.” Stan asked him how he knew that, and was shocked when told, “Before I came here I was a teacher at an Indian school.” Stan found racism and prejudice even between different tribes. An Apache man spat when Stan spoke with him about a friend of his who was a Pima. “The Pima are dog eaters,” muttered the Apache.
Herb’s Visit to Stan and Norma
During the fall of 1943, Stan’s brother Herb, accompanied by Bertha, took the train to Phoenix. Sleeping two nights on the train and eating the foods that Bertha had packed for the trip remain among Herb’s fond memories. The fifteen-year-old really enjoyed “seeing the United States through the window. I just could not get over the mountains and desert.”
When they arrived in Phoenix, Bertha and Herb slept on the pullout couch in Stan and Norma’s living room. After Bertha went on to California to visit other family members, Herb stayed for two more months, the entire fall of his sophomore year of high school. During the visit Herb and Norma spent much time together and became very close. Herb’s relationship to Stan also developed, changing from kid brother to younger brother: “I finally got his attention.” The two talked “about everything from life, death, sex, to science, technology, work, and certainly politics.” On the weekends, they played chess. At the beginning, Stan was so much better than Herb that he could read the New York Times while he played. But Herb recalled that after some time, Stan “finally had to put down the paper to beat me.” In Herb’s view, Stan’s transition from craftsman to inventor and entrepreneur also “happened in Phoenix during the time that we spent on weekends sunbathing.” Among the many topics of their conversations was Stan’s evolving idea for a center-drive lathe.
Stan’s Return to Akron
Soon after Herb left Arizona, Stan received a letter from home reporting that his father was very ill. After a large meal with much to drink at a Labor Zionists party at the Workmen’s Circle, and then vigorously dancing the kazatzka (which calls for kicking out the legs alternately while in a low squat), Ben had had a heart attack. By this time Stan had already been investigating other possible jobs, including one in a machine shop with Mormon friends in Salt Lake City. “They called themselves Black Mormons because they drank and did other things you’re not supposed to do as Mormons.” But when he heard that Ben was sick, he decided to return to Akron as soon as he could.
It was spring 1944 by the time he and Norma again boarded the train and traveled back to Akron via Chicago. When they arrived, he immediately went to see Ben.
Figure 2.5 Bertha and Ben, c. 1944. Photo by Herb Ovshinsky.
