"Anonymous" posted a long thoughtful comment to the piece on The Jewish Question. I think Anonymous meant to post the comment to the piece entitled Is Religion A Crutch? In any event, the comment deserves a chance to be read, so here it is.
"Hardy devoted his poetry to laying out his magnificently sombre, completely disillusioned view of the world. The central fact of that world was the disappearance of God, and with it any reason for believing in providence or justice. Hardy’s most famous poem on this theme is “God’s Funeral,” which describes a procession carrying the corpse of the “man-projected Figure … whom we can no longer keep alive.” Yet this poem is perhaps too monumental, too self-consciously a “statement,” to capture the complex flavor of Hardy’s godlessness. For it is not only the absence of God that Hardy reckons with; it is the way that absence changes how we think about ethics, mortality, and value, the way it challenges all our traditions and aspirations."
Hardy was one thinker who established the groundwork for the "death of God" school of thought, popular in the 60s, as well as the development of new bases for theories on ethics, altruism, and the like.
Meanwhile, help and perhaps even hope, is coming from the opposite direction: from systems theory, as applied to biology.
In time, this approach to biological processes, given the recent emergence of the "postgenomic" world, may connect the dots between enzyme, hormones, et al., to the phenomenon of human consciousness--and from there to the emergence of religon. Religion, on this basis, is neither genetically determined, or a "crutch," but, instead, a linking mechanism--a sine qua non--between the physical (five senses) world and the realm of abstractions that are the operators for the neural processes of the human brain.
Meanwhile, the methods and assumptions for systems theory as applied to biology have been the focus of a series of seminars at Harvard.
Here is the abstract for one of the presentations at Harvard:
Evelyn Fox Keller
Program in Science, Technology and Society
MIT
Abstract
Recently, I was obliged to choose between only two alternatives—either it is or is not possible to reduce biological explanations to explanations in chemistry and/or physics—and I opted for the positive response. But I could as easily have gone the other way. For the question is in fact not well posed. Do I believe that there is something beyond physical and chemical processes involved in the formation of living beings? No, I do not. In this sense, I am an unambivalent materialist. But if by that question one means, can biological explanations be reduced to the theories of matter currently available in physics and chemistry, then my answer is no. And not, as Nils Bohr once argued, because the study of biology can be expected to bring the discovery of new laws (1932), but rather, because (and here, I paraphrase the arguments put forth by Nancy Cartwright (1983)) laws of physics—in effect, by definition—have been developed with reference to a narrow range of possible physical and chemical phenomena, and, one might say, necessarily so. For that is the way with laws—they are developed to describe (or explain) the lowest common denominator of physical and chemical processes, that which is said to 'underlie' the manifest variety of these processes.
October 31, 2007 9:38 AM
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Book Review: How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else
You must read this book, at least the jacket and the first chapter. Why? To fully appreciate the laugh out loud parodies that will inevitably follow. The book is nicely wrapped in a Starbucks Green and White trimmed dust jacket over a solid Starbucks green hardcover with white spine(has Dutch Boy officially named the color combo yet?). It has been promoted by the possibility that Tom Hanks will play the protagonist son of privilege brought face-to-face with desperate poverty (Prince and the Pauper, Trading Places). It is a riches to rags saga that goes down smooth and pre-packaged like a light latte. It reads like one of those fast paced first person stories that Readers' Digest kindly condensed for its mass market readership in the 50's and 60's.
Each chapter begins with an inspiring quote lifted, with full credit, from various sizes of Starbucks coffee cups. "The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating -- in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hestiation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life. -- a quote from Anne Morriss, a Starbucks Guest from New York City, published on the side of a Grande Caramel Macchiato Thus begins chapter 7, "Turning Losers into Winners". This could also be Exhibit 1 in the case for smaller sized drinks or a return to one-line fortune cookies as the only acceptable medium for such sentiments. Is this the spawn of Ben and Jerry's?
Just imagine what Mad Magazine will do with this! And of course those mainstream types who channel Mad Magazine for the illiterate masses -- John Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
The jacket gives you all you need to know, and just about everything said in the reviews:
"In his fifties, Michael Gates Gill had it all: a big house int he suburbs, a loving family, and a top job at an ad agency with a six-figure salary. By the time he had turned sixty, he had lost everything except his Ivy League education and his sense of entitlement. First, he was downsized at work. Next, an affair ended his twenty year marriage. Then he was diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor, prognosis undetermined. Around the same time, his girlfriend gave birth to a son. Gill had no money, no health insurance, and no prospects."
Nice set-up, and it could be, with a few minor changes, the beginning of a tent revival meeting. But this former J. Walter Thompson advertising executive finds Starbucks, not God, on the road to salvation. Hmmm, he also seems to have found a lucrative book and movie rights deal even before he finished living, much less writing, the story. Is this the product of forty years of Madison Avenue marketing savvy? Seems more likely than satori emerging from one year cleaning grout under the beneficent guidance of an earth mother guru, the Karate Kid's Mr. Miyagi transformed into the very attractive African American Starbucks manager, Crystal, the only black woman Gill had ever had a relationship with of any kind after his beloved nanny was abruptly let go for being too old to go up and down the four flights of his parents' Manhattan brownstone. [Fade away dissolve from flashback during first day on the job with Crystal, work some allusion to Citizen Kane into the shot.]
Somewhere beneath all of the sap, self-actualization crap and PC frappe, a real human story may have taken place. Perhaps Hanks can find and channel it.
Don't get me wrong. I like my Fourbucks served up as much or more than Michael Gill; and I appreciate the service and courtesy that goes with it. But I like it extra hot and no foam, please. I can also do without the whip on a mocha frappicino, thank you. Twice blessed are we that Starbucks did not see fit to feature and promote this book in its stores. It might have been the end of a beautiful, though somewhat addictive, relationship.
I do not begrudge Gill his royalties or his movie deal. Nor, I hope, did I read of his fall from grace filled with schadenfreude.
Starbucks has a place in our world, nearly ubiquitous, because it delivers a service and a product excceptionally and consistently well. Starbucks has also assumed a role as a major entry level employer, exceptionally adept at training, motivating and elevating its employees. That is quite enough; the Salvation Army it is not, and should never aspire to be.
Each chapter begins with an inspiring quote lifted, with full credit, from various sizes of Starbucks coffee cups. "The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating -- in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hestiation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life. -- a quote from Anne Morriss, a Starbucks Guest from New York City, published on the side of a Grande Caramel Macchiato Thus begins chapter 7, "Turning Losers into Winners". This could also be Exhibit 1 in the case for smaller sized drinks or a return to one-line fortune cookies as the only acceptable medium for such sentiments. Is this the spawn of Ben and Jerry's?
Just imagine what Mad Magazine will do with this! And of course those mainstream types who channel Mad Magazine for the illiterate masses -- John Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
The jacket gives you all you need to know, and just about everything said in the reviews:
"In his fifties, Michael Gates Gill had it all: a big house int he suburbs, a loving family, and a top job at an ad agency with a six-figure salary. By the time he had turned sixty, he had lost everything except his Ivy League education and his sense of entitlement. First, he was downsized at work. Next, an affair ended his twenty year marriage. Then he was diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor, prognosis undetermined. Around the same time, his girlfriend gave birth to a son. Gill had no money, no health insurance, and no prospects."
Nice set-up, and it could be, with a few minor changes, the beginning of a tent revival meeting. But this former J. Walter Thompson advertising executive finds Starbucks, not God, on the road to salvation. Hmmm, he also seems to have found a lucrative book and movie rights deal even before he finished living, much less writing, the story. Is this the product of forty years of Madison Avenue marketing savvy? Seems more likely than satori emerging from one year cleaning grout under the beneficent guidance of an earth mother guru, the Karate Kid's Mr. Miyagi transformed into the very attractive African American Starbucks manager, Crystal, the only black woman Gill had ever had a relationship with of any kind after his beloved nanny was abruptly let go for being too old to go up and down the four flights of his parents' Manhattan brownstone. [Fade away dissolve from flashback during first day on the job with Crystal, work some allusion to Citizen Kane into the shot.]
Somewhere beneath all of the sap, self-actualization crap and PC frappe, a real human story may have taken place. Perhaps Hanks can find and channel it.
Don't get me wrong. I like my Fourbucks served up as much or more than Michael Gill; and I appreciate the service and courtesy that goes with it. But I like it extra hot and no foam, please. I can also do without the whip on a mocha frappicino, thank you. Twice blessed are we that Starbucks did not see fit to feature and promote this book in its stores. It might have been the end of a beautiful, though somewhat addictive, relationship.
I do not begrudge Gill his royalties or his movie deal. Nor, I hope, did I read of his fall from grace filled with schadenfreude.
Starbucks has a place in our world, nearly ubiquitous, because it delivers a service and a product excceptionally and consistently well. Starbucks has also assumed a role as a major entry level employer, exceptionally adept at training, motivating and elevating its employees. That is quite enough; the Salvation Army it is not, and should never aspire to be.
Monday, September 24, 2007
The Parent Epiphany
Lord knows that parenting, like getting old, is not a job for the faint of heart. When they are just born, and ever so-adorable, life seems full of promise, carefree and joyful. But within the first 72 hours, even before recovery from the exhaustion and exhilaration of childbirth, a tiny seed of worry sends out its first little shoot. Why? Because you are now fully aware of the enormous responsibility that you have for a life that you cannot, even then, fully protect. At the same time, you know in advance all of the dangers and worries that this little being does not know, and will not for a long, long, long time fully appreciate and avoid.
So begins the lengthy process of weaning the child from the parent and the much longer and difficult process of weaning the parent from the child. It starts with a "snuggly" firmly strapped to your chest, graduates to a "cozy coupe" pushed at first from behind then shifted into the higher gear of Fred Flintstone flapping feet, then the scarier balancing act of a "beginner's bicycle" before advancing to the two ton death machines we call cars. Of course, each one of these vehicular milestones maps one-to-one with equally frightening advances in food, drink, drugs, friends, music and other social and cultural choices.
All of those formerly dreaded childhood diseases have long since been removed from the equation by vaccines or, in most cases, highly effective medical treatments. This leaves the parent free to worry about other things, for nature abhors a vacuum. So the parent becomes obsessed with the latest fads in education, social adjustment and other such things, at least in the larger urban areas. My recollection of a halcyon time in a more rural community suggests that this particular disease of mind is not so prevalent in the Big Sky country, though I suspect that some insidious version of it has been carried there by Big Sky wannabees escaping from the clogged arteries of the left and right coasts.
So when does all the fussing end, for parent or for child? Maybe never; maybe when the care taking and care giving roles reverse; maybe for the lucky sometime in the transition to early adulthood. Few read, much less quote, Rudyard Kipling anymore. Too much Imperial Britain in the prose, too optimistic a sensibility for these times. Something one will undoubtedly find in William Bennett's The Book of Virtues and either reject or embrace it for that reason alone. Nevertheless, here it is:
IF
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!
--Rudyard Kipling
With the possible exceptions of Elijah, Jesus of Nazareth, Mohammed, Ghandi and the Buddha, who is qualified as a "man" to set this standard for his son? Apart from what the poem suggests about the self-delusional nature of the poet, or the perfectibility of man, a discerning parent may find in it a kernel of wisdom . Somewhere along the pot-holed road to manhood, a time may come, as it came for me last summer, when I knew my son was a man, and I could stop being the worrying parent.
It happened in a raft on the Toulomne River, just outside Yosemite, on the first of a series of Class V rapids. The hour before this event recaptured 20 years of parental anxiety as I went through the usual checklist of things to be taken, things to be left behind and things to be left alone. My son and I signed in and filed on to the 50 year old yellow school bus, which could have been used in the filming of a memorable scene from Romancing the Stone on location in some Central American banana republic. Only the chickens were missing.
The bus rattled away from the starting point and soon turned on to a narrow, rutted decommissioned logging road carved from the face of the gorge for the 2000 foot descent down to the site of the raft launch. The driver ground the stick into first gear, possibly because the brakes were not entirely adequate, and cheerfully boomed over the noise: "How many of you have done this before?" Two of eighteen raised hands. "So the rest of you have never been on a Class V logging road?" Nervous laughter; some hands white knuckled the armrests; those on the downhill side began to lean toward the uphill side; a few compulsive chatterboxes chattered; the rest stared ahead.
Thirty minutes later, the bus sputtered to a stop. Tension drained and the gallant eighteen marched off the bus, not to the sound of the rapids, but directly to the restrooms. It seemed that the most dangerous part of the adventure, at least until the pick-up at the end of the day, had passed. The three guides quickly called out names to form three groups, one for each of the rafts waiting for us. Equipment included a helmet, life vest and a paddle. Each guide then conducted a twenty minute session on what happens when -- not if -- one of the crew goes into the river. That held our collective attention for about five of the twenty minutes, but some started fidgeting and were eager to get into the rafts.
A practice session in relatively calm water then followed with the guide barking out commands. After a few trials, the crew began to get the drill though the six rookie paddlers were always a bit out of sync, especially on the turning maneuvers. Ours was the lead raft, and off we went, the white water crashing off the midstream boulders on both sides. We were through the most difficult part when my son yelled out from his position immediately behind, "Man overboard!" From the last seat in the raft came the piercing scream of the newly wed wife of the man overboard. Contrary to the on-shore drill, the groom started to swim away from the raft toward the shoals. My son shouted out, "Come back to the raft!" and, as though he had done this many times before, extended his paddle for the swimmer to grab hold. The guide, meanwhile, tried to steady the raft while calming the nearly hysterical bride. The swimmer came next to the raft. My 125 pound son (when soaking wet, and he was) reached over the edge, grabbed him by the vest, leaned back and flipped the much larger and heavier man into the raft with such leverage that he nearly went out again over the other side.
So, I thought to myself, "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs" and a whole lot of other things "you'll be a Man, my son."
ADDENDUM
One week after this piece first posted, Joni Mitchell's new release "Shine" shows up in the kiosk at Starbucks. She titles the last track of the CD "If", with an attribution an acknowledgement to the Kipling Estate. "If" serves as the coda, on an uplifting note, to what otherwise could only be characterized as a Jeremiadic collection in an octave lower than what we remember from the 60's and 70's. She takes a few modest liberties with some lines and neuters the Kipling thrust at the end with:
If you can fill the journey
Of a minute
With sixty seconds of wonder and delight
Then
The Earth is yours
And everything that's in it
But more than that
I know
You'll be alright
You'll be alright.
Cause you've got the fight
You've got the insight
Tou've got the fight
You've got the insight.
Like the aging Sinatra, the phrasing still exhibits exquisite artistry, although the range and purity of the voice faintly echoes the past. She gets credit for nerve, but not verve, in making the comeback; it lacks energy and conviction, a kind of tired resignation, a musak of her former self.
So begins the lengthy process of weaning the child from the parent and the much longer and difficult process of weaning the parent from the child. It starts with a "snuggly" firmly strapped to your chest, graduates to a "cozy coupe" pushed at first from behind then shifted into the higher gear of Fred Flintstone flapping feet, then the scarier balancing act of a "beginner's bicycle" before advancing to the two ton death machines we call cars. Of course, each one of these vehicular milestones maps one-to-one with equally frightening advances in food, drink, drugs, friends, music and other social and cultural choices.
All of those formerly dreaded childhood diseases have long since been removed from the equation by vaccines or, in most cases, highly effective medical treatments. This leaves the parent free to worry about other things, for nature abhors a vacuum. So the parent becomes obsessed with the latest fads in education, social adjustment and other such things, at least in the larger urban areas. My recollection of a halcyon time in a more rural community suggests that this particular disease of mind is not so prevalent in the Big Sky country, though I suspect that some insidious version of it has been carried there by Big Sky wannabees escaping from the clogged arteries of the left and right coasts.
So when does all the fussing end, for parent or for child? Maybe never; maybe when the care taking and care giving roles reverse; maybe for the lucky sometime in the transition to early adulthood. Few read, much less quote, Rudyard Kipling anymore. Too much Imperial Britain in the prose, too optimistic a sensibility for these times. Something one will undoubtedly find in William Bennett's The Book of Virtues and either reject or embrace it for that reason alone. Nevertheless, here it is:
IF
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!
--Rudyard Kipling
With the possible exceptions of Elijah, Jesus of Nazareth, Mohammed, Ghandi and the Buddha, who is qualified as a "man" to set this standard for his son? Apart from what the poem suggests about the self-delusional nature of the poet, or the perfectibility of man, a discerning parent may find in it a kernel of wisdom . Somewhere along the pot-holed road to manhood, a time may come, as it came for me last summer, when I knew my son was a man, and I could stop being the worrying parent.
It happened in a raft on the Toulomne River, just outside Yosemite, on the first of a series of Class V rapids. The hour before this event recaptured 20 years of parental anxiety as I went through the usual checklist of things to be taken, things to be left behind and things to be left alone. My son and I signed in and filed on to the 50 year old yellow school bus, which could have been used in the filming of a memorable scene from Romancing the Stone on location in some Central American banana republic. Only the chickens were missing.
The bus rattled away from the starting point and soon turned on to a narrow, rutted decommissioned logging road carved from the face of the gorge for the 2000 foot descent down to the site of the raft launch. The driver ground the stick into first gear, possibly because the brakes were not entirely adequate, and cheerfully boomed over the noise: "How many of you have done this before?" Two of eighteen raised hands. "So the rest of you have never been on a Class V logging road?" Nervous laughter; some hands white knuckled the armrests; those on the downhill side began to lean toward the uphill side; a few compulsive chatterboxes chattered; the rest stared ahead.
Thirty minutes later, the bus sputtered to a stop. Tension drained and the gallant eighteen marched off the bus, not to the sound of the rapids, but directly to the restrooms. It seemed that the most dangerous part of the adventure, at least until the pick-up at the end of the day, had passed. The three guides quickly called out names to form three groups, one for each of the rafts waiting for us. Equipment included a helmet, life vest and a paddle. Each guide then conducted a twenty minute session on what happens when -- not if -- one of the crew goes into the river. That held our collective attention for about five of the twenty minutes, but some started fidgeting and were eager to get into the rafts.
A practice session in relatively calm water then followed with the guide barking out commands. After a few trials, the crew began to get the drill though the six rookie paddlers were always a bit out of sync, especially on the turning maneuvers. Ours was the lead raft, and off we went, the white water crashing off the midstream boulders on both sides. We were through the most difficult part when my son yelled out from his position immediately behind, "Man overboard!" From the last seat in the raft came the piercing scream of the newly wed wife of the man overboard. Contrary to the on-shore drill, the groom started to swim away from the raft toward the shoals. My son shouted out, "Come back to the raft!" and, as though he had done this many times before, extended his paddle for the swimmer to grab hold. The guide, meanwhile, tried to steady the raft while calming the nearly hysterical bride. The swimmer came next to the raft. My 125 pound son (when soaking wet, and he was) reached over the edge, grabbed him by the vest, leaned back and flipped the much larger and heavier man into the raft with such leverage that he nearly went out again over the other side.
So, I thought to myself, "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs" and a whole lot of other things "you'll be a Man, my son."
ADDENDUM
One week after this piece first posted, Joni Mitchell's new release "Shine" shows up in the kiosk at Starbucks. She titles the last track of the CD "If", with an attribution an acknowledgement to the Kipling Estate. "If" serves as the coda, on an uplifting note, to what otherwise could only be characterized as a Jeremiadic collection in an octave lower than what we remember from the 60's and 70's. She takes a few modest liberties with some lines and neuters the Kipling thrust at the end with:
If you can fill the journey
Of a minute
With sixty seconds of wonder and delight
Then
The Earth is yours
And everything that's in it
But more than that
I know
You'll be alright
You'll be alright.
Cause you've got the fight
You've got the insight
Tou've got the fight
You've got the insight.
Like the aging Sinatra, the phrasing still exhibits exquisite artistry, although the range and purity of the voice faintly echoes the past. She gets credit for nerve, but not verve, in making the comeback; it lacks energy and conviction, a kind of tired resignation, a musak of her former self.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
THE JEWISH QUESTION
This essay is not about the integration of Jews into the societies of 19th Century Europe; it is also not about Karl Marx and his essay On the Jewish Question; and it is emphatically not about Jean Paul Sartre’s Semite and Anti-Semite. It is, however, to a certain extent about the Seinfeld episode with the dentist who converted to Judaism so he could tell Jewish jokes to his patients.
This is the Jewish question: Have you met any nice Jewish girls? I have been asked this question many times, but only on the coasts, far away from where I grew up in the high plateau and Rocky Mountain regions of Montana, Wyoming and Utah. The question contains the implicit assumption that I am Jewish, and I have only been asked the Jewish question by people who are Jewish, usually someone who knows some nice Jewish girl and has also seen Fiddler on the Roof. Very few Jews live in the regions where I grew up, so I suppose it would not be surprising if all of the nice Jewish girls had already met and married someone by the time I became a logical suspect suitable for interrogation. How few you ask? One family of four and one bachelor diner owner in my hometown of Helena, as far as I know.
Although I have never been asked the Jewish question by a non-Jew, I have observed some behavior by non-Jews that clearly indicated, in retrospect, that they also assumed that I was Jewish, which brings me back to Fiddler on the Roof. Norm Jewison, a nice Canadian goy, directed of the movie version of Fiddler. A syndicate of Jewish backers bought the movie rights and asked Jewison, assuming that he was Jewish, to direct it. In his Turner Classic Movies interview, Jewison gives a side-splitting account of the jaw-dropping reaction to his response, “You know that I am not Jewish, right?”
In Jewison’s case, at least in the instance of being offered the job to direct Fiddler, the assumption embedded in the Jewish question worked in his favor. For the most part, in my life, the assumption has also worked in my favor, and sometimes produced similarly comical results. Shortly after arriving at Williams College, my small freshman political science class, in keeping with the college ethic, went to dinner at the professor’s house. During the usual get to know you chit-chat the professor asked in his thick ex-patriate Austrian accent, where I had gone to prep school, guessing a predominantly Jewish suburb of Chicago. “Prep school? I went to Helena Senior High School in Helena, Montana.” “Really?” he said in obvious amazement and some disbelief, “You seem to have a well-trained mind.” That comment can tell you a whole lot about the then prevailing stereotype of Montana on the east coast.
A few years later, while considering the possibility of graduate school, the chairman of the philosophy department called me into his office to talk about schools, and also about academics as a profession generally. At one point the conversation took a strange turn. Out of the blue, he put the question: “What do you make of the fact that all of the professors in the department that you have worked with come from Christian backgrounds and two are Catholic?” I was tempted to say, well my grandmother was Catholic and I learned a lot from her, so what would you expect me to make of it? My Spidey sense counseled silence, so I waited for him to answer his own question, which he had a history of doing. It was not all that usual for this professor, who had a degree in theology as well as philosophy, to come at something sideways, but this question was a little more sideways than most, so I said, not committing to anything, “I hadn’t really thought about it”, just to see where he was going. He then went into a kind of confessional mode and said that, because of the way he was raised, he only recently was able to stop categorizing people by their last names. After that brief statement, this professor from a starchy New England family who had, perhaps, the biggest influence on my thinking at college and afterwards, went on to write a glowing letter of reference that assured my acceptance to all the law schools and graduate schools to which I had applied. Not until many years later did I realize that he also had assumed that I was Jewish. Did his interest in my career somehow assuage guilt over a self-discovered latent anti-semitism?
In law school, students and professors alike continued to assume that I was Jewish. In general, this worked in my favor because they all assumed, in keeping with stereotypes, that I was smarter and more capable because of it. Professor Kaplan, who recruited me to be a research and teaching assistant for his undergraduate course, was quite surprised by my German Lutheran upbringing, but then became fascinated by the cultural differences and similarities. He grew up in Brooklyn a few blocks from Woody Allen, with some of the same neuroses and sense of humor and exactly the same accent. Kaplan eventually paved the way for work at the Hoover Institute on the Stanford Campus, and then a position at the Department of Justice that I declined in favor of a better offer, economically, at private law firm, the most prominent partners of which --- were Jews.
My first and best mentor in the firm was a semi-observant Jew. At the first firm function his wife turned to me and asked, “Have you met any nice Jewish girls yet?” I felt it necessary, at this point, to make full disclosure. She was obviously disappointed, but then brightened and said, “But have you met any nice Jewish girls yet?”
Oddly enough, she did turn out to have a connection to the woman I married a few years later. Her mother taught English Literature at the University of Illinois. One of her best students, a descendant of Mayflower era Puritans and recently arrived Irish Catholics, later became my wife.
Several years later, on a business trip to Chile, one of the larger vineyard owners of Palestinian extraction hosted a relaxing afternoon at one of the best restaurants on a hillside near his plantations. After a pleasant afternoon enjoying the view and some very good Chilean wines, my gracious host put his hand on my shoulder, leaned toward me and said in his broken English, “We are brothers.” I said, in my less than adequate Spanish “We are brothers?” He said, “Yes we are brothers. Your people and my people come from the same place and the same tradition.” I said, “The same place? You came from Montana?” He said, “No, not from the mountains. My people come from Palestine. Your people come from Israel. We are brothers.” After I explained and we had a good laugh at the misunderstanding, my host said, “Well, it’s too bad. We know the Jewish lawyers are the best ones, so maybe we need somebody else.”
Perhaps fate predestined a second marriage to a nice Jewish girl, which came about in 2000. With some trepidation, I prepared to meet her conservative-orthodox parents, not sure at all what the reaction would be. They turned out to be wonderfully warm people with pretty much the same basic values as the parents that raised me. At the end of that first meeting, my future mother-in-law took my future wife aside, smiled mischievously and said, “He looks Jewish." I believe that she was thinking, "He could be Jewish.”
My mother and siblings connected immediately with Roslyn, seeing what I saw, and universally concluded that I was “marrying up.” Mom, in particular, liked the match. A year or two after the wedding, inspired by the Friday at sundown prayers that Roslyn and her father did every week by telephone, I started having long distance Sunday at noon “services” with Mom. She was pleased, but kept asking why I was suddenly doing this. Eventually, I told her about the Friday prayers. With no sense of irony, she said, “That Roslyn! I really like her! She will make a good Christian out of you yet!” And she just might. And maybe there is a place in the afterlife where both mothers will get their wish.
This is the Jewish question: Have you met any nice Jewish girls? I have been asked this question many times, but only on the coasts, far away from where I grew up in the high plateau and Rocky Mountain regions of Montana, Wyoming and Utah. The question contains the implicit assumption that I am Jewish, and I have only been asked the Jewish question by people who are Jewish, usually someone who knows some nice Jewish girl and has also seen Fiddler on the Roof. Very few Jews live in the regions where I grew up, so I suppose it would not be surprising if all of the nice Jewish girls had already met and married someone by the time I became a logical suspect suitable for interrogation. How few you ask? One family of four and one bachelor diner owner in my hometown of Helena, as far as I know.
Although I have never been asked the Jewish question by a non-Jew, I have observed some behavior by non-Jews that clearly indicated, in retrospect, that they also assumed that I was Jewish, which brings me back to Fiddler on the Roof. Norm Jewison, a nice Canadian goy, directed of the movie version of Fiddler. A syndicate of Jewish backers bought the movie rights and asked Jewison, assuming that he was Jewish, to direct it. In his Turner Classic Movies interview, Jewison gives a side-splitting account of the jaw-dropping reaction to his response, “You know that I am not Jewish, right?”
In Jewison’s case, at least in the instance of being offered the job to direct Fiddler, the assumption embedded in the Jewish question worked in his favor. For the most part, in my life, the assumption has also worked in my favor, and sometimes produced similarly comical results. Shortly after arriving at Williams College, my small freshman political science class, in keeping with the college ethic, went to dinner at the professor’s house. During the usual get to know you chit-chat the professor asked in his thick ex-patriate Austrian accent, where I had gone to prep school, guessing a predominantly Jewish suburb of Chicago. “Prep school? I went to Helena Senior High School in Helena, Montana.” “Really?” he said in obvious amazement and some disbelief, “You seem to have a well-trained mind.” That comment can tell you a whole lot about the then prevailing stereotype of Montana on the east coast.
A few years later, while considering the possibility of graduate school, the chairman of the philosophy department called me into his office to talk about schools, and also about academics as a profession generally. At one point the conversation took a strange turn. Out of the blue, he put the question: “What do you make of the fact that all of the professors in the department that you have worked with come from Christian backgrounds and two are Catholic?” I was tempted to say, well my grandmother was Catholic and I learned a lot from her, so what would you expect me to make of it? My Spidey sense counseled silence, so I waited for him to answer his own question, which he had a history of doing. It was not all that usual for this professor, who had a degree in theology as well as philosophy, to come at something sideways, but this question was a little more sideways than most, so I said, not committing to anything, “I hadn’t really thought about it”, just to see where he was going. He then went into a kind of confessional mode and said that, because of the way he was raised, he only recently was able to stop categorizing people by their last names. After that brief statement, this professor from a starchy New England family who had, perhaps, the biggest influence on my thinking at college and afterwards, went on to write a glowing letter of reference that assured my acceptance to all the law schools and graduate schools to which I had applied. Not until many years later did I realize that he also had assumed that I was Jewish. Did his interest in my career somehow assuage guilt over a self-discovered latent anti-semitism?
In law school, students and professors alike continued to assume that I was Jewish. In general, this worked in my favor because they all assumed, in keeping with stereotypes, that I was smarter and more capable because of it. Professor Kaplan, who recruited me to be a research and teaching assistant for his undergraduate course, was quite surprised by my German Lutheran upbringing, but then became fascinated by the cultural differences and similarities. He grew up in Brooklyn a few blocks from Woody Allen, with some of the same neuroses and sense of humor and exactly the same accent. Kaplan eventually paved the way for work at the Hoover Institute on the Stanford Campus, and then a position at the Department of Justice that I declined in favor of a better offer, economically, at private law firm, the most prominent partners of which --- were Jews.
My first and best mentor in the firm was a semi-observant Jew. At the first firm function his wife turned to me and asked, “Have you met any nice Jewish girls yet?” I felt it necessary, at this point, to make full disclosure. She was obviously disappointed, but then brightened and said, “But have you met any nice Jewish girls yet?”
Oddly enough, she did turn out to have a connection to the woman I married a few years later. Her mother taught English Literature at the University of Illinois. One of her best students, a descendant of Mayflower era Puritans and recently arrived Irish Catholics, later became my wife.
Several years later, on a business trip to Chile, one of the larger vineyard owners of Palestinian extraction hosted a relaxing afternoon at one of the best restaurants on a hillside near his plantations. After a pleasant afternoon enjoying the view and some very good Chilean wines, my gracious host put his hand on my shoulder, leaned toward me and said in his broken English, “We are brothers.” I said, in my less than adequate Spanish “We are brothers?” He said, “Yes we are brothers. Your people and my people come from the same place and the same tradition.” I said, “The same place? You came from Montana?” He said, “No, not from the mountains. My people come from Palestine. Your people come from Israel. We are brothers.” After I explained and we had a good laugh at the misunderstanding, my host said, “Well, it’s too bad. We know the Jewish lawyers are the best ones, so maybe we need somebody else.”
Perhaps fate predestined a second marriage to a nice Jewish girl, which came about in 2000. With some trepidation, I prepared to meet her conservative-orthodox parents, not sure at all what the reaction would be. They turned out to be wonderfully warm people with pretty much the same basic values as the parents that raised me. At the end of that first meeting, my future mother-in-law took my future wife aside, smiled mischievously and said, “He looks Jewish." I believe that she was thinking, "He could be Jewish.”
My mother and siblings connected immediately with Roslyn, seeing what I saw, and universally concluded that I was “marrying up.” Mom, in particular, liked the match. A year or two after the wedding, inspired by the Friday at sundown prayers that Roslyn and her father did every week by telephone, I started having long distance Sunday at noon “services” with Mom. She was pleased, but kept asking why I was suddenly doing this. Eventually, I told her about the Friday prayers. With no sense of irony, she said, “That Roslyn! I really like her! She will make a good Christian out of you yet!” And she just might. And maybe there is a place in the afterlife where both mothers will get their wish.
Friday, September 14, 2007
A HORSE NAMED DORIS ADDENDUM
Some additional information has emerged on the activities of the Holzworth clan during the dam building segment of the early years in and around Glendive. I cannot improve on the story as reported, so what you see is what I got from Pat:
I remember one Spring or Fall in Whitlock Crossing (SD?), probably stands out for me because Terry & V were school age and had to stay home with Grandma so I was an only child for a month or so. We lived in the longer blue trailer with silver roof.
Ken, Doris and Judy lived in one like in this photo, if not this very trailer.
I almost put "Dad always wore that hat" on this photo, but like you wasn't sure because of build - but it is the kind he wore until well past when other men gave up wearing the 'Dick Tracy' hat. This guy is slightly slouched and leaning, so could very well be Dad.
Seems the Leonards were there, too, but I'm not sure - a boy (I think Niles) and I found a dead snake near a well and skinned it out. Mom about had a heart attack, since the poison can still be lethal if we had open sores or 'scratched' ourselves on the fangs. One of the crew had killed it and tossed it - he thought - where it wouldn't bother anyone.
I remember one Spring or Fall in Whitlock Crossing (SD?), probably stands out for me because Terry & V were school age and had to stay home with Grandma so I was an only child for a month or so. We lived in the longer blue trailer with silver roof.
Ken, Doris and Judy lived in one like in this photo, if not this very trailer.
I almost put "Dad always wore that hat" on this photo, but like you wasn't sure because of build - but it is the kind he wore until well past when other men gave up wearing the 'Dick Tracy' hat. This guy is slightly slouched and leaning, so could very well be Dad.
Seems the Leonards were there, too, but I'm not sure - a boy (I think Niles) and I found a dead snake near a well and skinned it out. Mom about had a heart attack, since the poison can still be lethal if we had open sores or 'scratched' ourselves on the fangs. One of the crew had killed it and tossed it - he thought - where it wouldn't bother anyone.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
The Archimedes Codex
From time to time this blog will get into the thicket of where science and religion collide. By purest happenstance, such a collision has taken place that touches on the genealogical tour of the last several postings.
You will recall that Dick Holzworth was born on a farm near Eureka, South Dakota. You will also recall that Dick quickly learned practical applications for many of the physical principles discovered and applied by Archimedes, particularly those involving levers and pulleys. It seemed too obvious to me to point out earlier that the name of Dick's place of birth was conferred by someone who did know about Archimedes and also must have had a sense of humor.
As might have been taught by those eminent authorities on classical antiquity, Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman, if they had had a longer and well-deserved run Archimedes shouted out the word "Eureka!" Greek for "I found it!" All this noise he made because he discovered that a body immersed in a fluid experiences a buoyant force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid while stepping into or out of a bathtub. As legend has it, he then went running and shouting naked into the street. He also invented various catapults, anticipated integral calculus, screws for moving water uphill, but the Greek baths were the only thing, apparently, that got him really excited.
Many scholars doubt the accuracy of the street scene, but it seems to me, based on the statuary that has survived, the Greeks were not all that particular about being clothed, quite unlike that statuary drapist, former Attorney General Ashcroft. And the Greeks also had that guy Diogenes, an odd duck who walked around dressed only in a barrel holding a lantern to look for an honest man. But I digress.
I say that the founder of Eureka must have had a sense of humor (shared no doubt by Brigham Young who looked at the Salt Lake Valley and said "This is the place") because neither locale looks much like paradise as ordinary mortals would imagine it. God's Country is actually further west from Eureka and further north from Salt Lake City.
Now to the point. The September October issue of Stanford, a publication of the Stanford Alumni Association, has this cover story:
What a gift! What delicious irony! I won't recount all the details of how this came to be. Suffice it say, like most people, I file most offerings from my Alma Mater in the circular cabinet next to my desk along with the carcass of my Four Bucks morning coffee hit and the crumbs left from lunch. I am especially suspicious of Greeks bearing gifts in the guise of a slick four color propaganda rag supporting the marketing efforts of an over funded institution. Nevertheless, the hook set and I flipped open the cover and learned a few things.
The prayer book turned out to be a palimpsest, a manuscript in Greek written over another manuscript also in Greek on parchment that had been scrubbed clean with a pumice stone and natural acid (citrus?). In the 13th Century a Greek Orthodox priest cut apart Archimedes's original parchment codex, turned it sideways to make the smaller prayer book, and wrote the prayers at a right angle to the original manuscript. Apparently writing medium was in short supply, otherwise why all the bother?
After much travel and long periods unread and unused in various libraries, the prayer book surfaced briefly after World War I when a Jewish book dealer living in Paris acquired it from someplace in Turkey. He tried to sell it, but without success, probably because the book was old, moldy and ugly and the price too high. Then Nazi tanks began to roll across Europe. Possibly to raise money to escape from the Nazi's, he "illuminated" four pages of the book with icon-like forgeries of the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. He then sold the book to the Nazis who were buying and/or stealing illuminated manuscripts.
Eventually the book resurfaced at a Christie's auction in 1999 and an anonymous benefactor known as "Mr. B" snapped it up for the very reasonable used book price of $2,000,000. Mr. B made additional funds available to restore and reveal the underlying Archimedean manuscript using some whiz-bang imagining technology and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. The SSRL revealed the residue iron in the ink underlying the icon forgeries. You can read all about this in the book The Archimedes Codex by Reviel Netz and William Noel or a much shorter account in the on-line version of Stanford. (I cannot say if your bank account will be automatically debited and funds transferred to the Robber Baron trust fund if you click on the link.)
The Codex also reveals Archimede's fascination with a type of geometry game known as a stomachion, Greek for stomach-ache. Those who struggled with Euclid and his ilk will immediately get the idea from the name of the game. A square is divided up into number of geometrical shapes. The problem then becomes one of determining how many different arrangements of the shapes can also be formed into a square. A word of caution: don't try to figure this out at home. It took two Stanford mathematicians who teamed up with two unnamed colleagues from UC-San Diego. Independently, a Chicago-area computer scientist wrote a program to crunch the numbers. I am assuming that the Stanford led group did not win the prize because the article cryptically reports: "Several weeks later, Netz had his answer: there were 17,152 different ways of arranging the pieces into a square." As far as I can tell, unless Oliver Stone acquires the movie rights or Dan Brown writes a novel about this, Archimedes acted alone using only a reed stylus and parchment.
Coming full circle back to Dick Holzworth, you can see from the picture below that he had his own methods for divining the secret engines of nature, substantially less expensive than the synchrotron, but no less effective.
You will recall that Dick Holzworth was born on a farm near Eureka, South Dakota. You will also recall that Dick quickly learned practical applications for many of the physical principles discovered and applied by Archimedes, particularly those involving levers and pulleys. It seemed too obvious to me to point out earlier that the name of Dick's place of birth was conferred by someone who did know about Archimedes and also must have had a sense of humor.
As might have been taught by those eminent authorities on classical antiquity, Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman, if they had had a longer and well-deserved run Archimedes shouted out the word "Eureka!" Greek for "I found it!" All this noise he made because he discovered that a body immersed in a fluid experiences a buoyant force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid while stepping into or out of a bathtub. As legend has it, he then went running and shouting naked into the street. He also invented various catapults, anticipated integral calculus, screws for moving water uphill, but the Greek baths were the only thing, apparently, that got him really excited.
Many scholars doubt the accuracy of the street scene, but it seems to me, based on the statuary that has survived, the Greeks were not all that particular about being clothed, quite unlike that statuary drapist, former Attorney General Ashcroft. And the Greeks also had that guy Diogenes, an odd duck who walked around dressed only in a barrel holding a lantern to look for an honest man. But I digress.
I say that the founder of Eureka must have had a sense of humor (shared no doubt by Brigham Young who looked at the Salt Lake Valley and said "This is the place") because neither locale looks much like paradise as ordinary mortals would imagine it. God's Country is actually further west from Eureka and further north from Salt Lake City.
Now to the point. The September October issue of Stanford, a publication of the Stanford Alumni Association, has this cover story:
What a gift! What delicious irony! I won't recount all the details of how this came to be. Suffice it say, like most people, I file most offerings from my Alma Mater in the circular cabinet next to my desk along with the carcass of my Four Bucks morning coffee hit and the crumbs left from lunch. I am especially suspicious of Greeks bearing gifts in the guise of a slick four color propaganda rag supporting the marketing efforts of an over funded institution. Nevertheless, the hook set and I flipped open the cover and learned a few things.
The prayer book turned out to be a palimpsest, a manuscript in Greek written over another manuscript also in Greek on parchment that had been scrubbed clean with a pumice stone and natural acid (citrus?). In the 13th Century a Greek Orthodox priest cut apart Archimedes's original parchment codex, turned it sideways to make the smaller prayer book, and wrote the prayers at a right angle to the original manuscript. Apparently writing medium was in short supply, otherwise why all the bother?
After much travel and long periods unread and unused in various libraries, the prayer book surfaced briefly after World War I when a Jewish book dealer living in Paris acquired it from someplace in Turkey. He tried to sell it, but without success, probably because the book was old, moldy and ugly and the price too high. Then Nazi tanks began to roll across Europe. Possibly to raise money to escape from the Nazi's, he "illuminated" four pages of the book with icon-like forgeries of the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. He then sold the book to the Nazis who were buying and/or stealing illuminated manuscripts.
Eventually the book resurfaced at a Christie's auction in 1999 and an anonymous benefactor known as "Mr. B" snapped it up for the very reasonable used book price of $2,000,000. Mr. B made additional funds available to restore and reveal the underlying Archimedean manuscript using some whiz-bang imagining technology and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. The SSRL revealed the residue iron in the ink underlying the icon forgeries. You can read all about this in the book The Archimedes Codex by Reviel Netz and William Noel or a much shorter account in the on-line version of Stanford. (I cannot say if your bank account will be automatically debited and funds transferred to the Robber Baron trust fund if you click on the link.)
The Codex also reveals Archimede's fascination with a type of geometry game known as a stomachion, Greek for stomach-ache. Those who struggled with Euclid and his ilk will immediately get the idea from the name of the game. A square is divided up into number of geometrical shapes. The problem then becomes one of determining how many different arrangements of the shapes can also be formed into a square. A word of caution: don't try to figure this out at home. It took two Stanford mathematicians who teamed up with two unnamed colleagues from UC-San Diego. Independently, a Chicago-area computer scientist wrote a program to crunch the numbers. I am assuming that the Stanford led group did not win the prize because the article cryptically reports: "Several weeks later, Netz had his answer: there were 17,152 different ways of arranging the pieces into a square." As far as I can tell, unless Oliver Stone acquires the movie rights or Dan Brown writes a novel about this, Archimedes acted alone using only a reed stylus and parchment.
Coming full circle back to Dick Holzworth, you can see from the picture below that he had his own methods for divining the secret engines of nature, substantially less expensive than the synchrotron, but no less effective.
Saturday, September 8, 2007
THREE WEDDINGS AND A MOVE
A whole lot of sparking and courting went on before and after the family returned to Miles City.
Virginia and Gene got married December 13, 1958. At the rehearsal, Dad boomed out a loud warning to Gene when he stumbled going up to the altar: "Watch that first step. It's a sonofabitch." Mom cringed, everyone else laughed including Reverend Hunter. A little over nine months later, on August 18, 1959, two things happened. An earthquake registering 7.3 on the Richter scale, the largest recorded earthquake in the history of Montana, caused an 80 million ton landslide that dammed the Madison River. The landslide traveled down the south flank of Sheep Mountain, at an estimated 100 miles per hour (160 km/h), killing and permanently entombing 28 people who were camping along the shores of Hebgen Lake and downstream along the Madison River. Upstream the faulting caused by the earthquake forced the waters of Hebgen Lake to shift violently, crest over Hebgen Dam, causing cracks and erosion.
Four hundred miles away, in Miles City, Virginia gave birth to her oldest child while the delivery table and the gurneys rolled back and forth in the hospital hallway. The following summer, Donna and David stayed with Virginia and Gene at the Hersch farm where Gene was working. They lived in that same 45 foot trailer house that was home in Salt Lake City. Mom and Dad had given it to them as a wedding present.
Gene parked the trailer on one side of an irrigation ditch; on the other side stood the main farmhouse. A narrow wooden bridge spanned the ditch. David and Donna went back and forth over the bridge, sometimes to play with the younger Hersch children, sometimes to help out with chores like using the hand crank cream separator, collecting the eggs from the nests in the chicken coup or riding one of the horses to bring in the cows. On one trip over the bridge, David was startled from his daydream by a baby rattle sound. A diamond back rattlesnake coiled in the center of the bridge a couple yards away. He turned and ran back toward the trailer, and had nightmares for the next several nights.
Terry got married to Perrylee in Salt Lake City. The family drove down for the occasion and returned through Yellowstone Park. There was still enough snow on Monida Pass for Donna, David and Pat to have a snowball fight. On the drive through the park, the family started counting wildlife and tallied a phenomenal 48 bears, a large number even in those days when bears were not automatically trapped and removed to areas away from the main tourist routes. Pat also occasionally fed the bears through the no draft until one deftly re-opened it after she had closed, sending an adrenaline rush through the entire car. David preferred the companionship and better manners of the chipmunks.
Pat got married to Ed, but not before he was vetted, in a sense, by David. Ed was headed for the Navy and was unusually proud of his peak physical condition coming out of boot camp. To demonstrate, Ed would tighten his abs and challenge the little boy named David to hit him as hard as he could. After several of these challenges, which David found very impressive, Ed came over to the house and was watching the TV, lying on the floor alongside the couch where David was sitting with his cowboy boots on. No doubt inspired by something Gorgeous George once did, David stood up and jumped off the couch onto Ed’s stomach without warning. Eventually, Ed started breathing again. Roughly 50 years later, after not having seen each other for 40 of those years, Ed and David met again at the wedding of Pat and Ed’s daughter. The first thing Ed said, “Do you remember that time you jumped on my stomach with your cowboy boots on?” Yes, he remembered.
Pat and Ed got married on October 31, 1959, then moved to Groton, Connecticut, the homeport for Ed’s submarine assignment. Ed probably found submarine life less dangerous than hanging around the Holzworth household. Fewer surprises in any event.
Shortly after the move from Salt Lake City, Dad bid a contract for a section of the Trans-Canada highway near Creston, British Columbia, about 40 miles due north of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. When that job was finished, the company started on another project much further north at Kamloops. Because of the distance, he was away from home for many weeks at a time. Dad had a pre-arranged signal to let Mom know that he arrived at various points along the way when driving back and forth. He would place a person-to-person collect to Mom from Uncle Dudley. The operator always told the receiving party where the call came from so a decision could be made whether or not pt the charges. If something important needed to discussed, Dad would call back right away once he was sure that Mom was home.
The calls became more frequent during the fall of 1959. About this time, Mom also
told David a story about an older boy that lived across the alley who was a very good student and had graduated at the top of his class from high school. That boy had gone to college at some place called Yale with a scholarship that paid for everything. In a very low key and matter of fact way, Mom had sown a seed in preparation for what she must have known then was about to happen. The house and much of the contents were sold. Half way through the school year, Mom, Dad, Donna and David moved to Missoula, Montana and lived in a small rented apartment at 301 Broadway. The change in circumstances was dramatic and upsetting, even though Donna and David were told that it was a temporary move so we could be closer to where Dad was working.
Gradually, Donna first and then David, they began to realize that something had gone wrong with Dad’s business.
Virginia and Gene got married December 13, 1958. At the rehearsal, Dad boomed out a loud warning to Gene when he stumbled going up to the altar: "Watch that first step. It's a sonofabitch." Mom cringed, everyone else laughed including Reverend Hunter. A little over nine months later, on August 18, 1959, two things happened. An earthquake registering 7.3 on the Richter scale, the largest recorded earthquake in the history of Montana, caused an 80 million ton landslide that dammed the Madison River. The landslide traveled down the south flank of Sheep Mountain, at an estimated 100 miles per hour (160 km/h), killing and permanently entombing 28 people who were camping along the shores of Hebgen Lake and downstream along the Madison River. Upstream the faulting caused by the earthquake forced the waters of Hebgen Lake to shift violently, crest over Hebgen Dam, causing cracks and erosion.
Four hundred miles away, in Miles City, Virginia gave birth to her oldest child while the delivery table and the gurneys rolled back and forth in the hospital hallway. The following summer, Donna and David stayed with Virginia and Gene at the Hersch farm where Gene was working. They lived in that same 45 foot trailer house that was home in Salt Lake City. Mom and Dad had given it to them as a wedding present.
Gene parked the trailer on one side of an irrigation ditch; on the other side stood the main farmhouse. A narrow wooden bridge spanned the ditch. David and Donna went back and forth over the bridge, sometimes to play with the younger Hersch children, sometimes to help out with chores like using the hand crank cream separator, collecting the eggs from the nests in the chicken coup or riding one of the horses to bring in the cows. On one trip over the bridge, David was startled from his daydream by a baby rattle sound. A diamond back rattlesnake coiled in the center of the bridge a couple yards away. He turned and ran back toward the trailer, and had nightmares for the next several nights.
Terry got married to Perrylee in Salt Lake City. The family drove down for the occasion and returned through Yellowstone Park. There was still enough snow on Monida Pass for Donna, David and Pat to have a snowball fight. On the drive through the park, the family started counting wildlife and tallied a phenomenal 48 bears, a large number even in those days when bears were not automatically trapped and removed to areas away from the main tourist routes. Pat also occasionally fed the bears through the no draft until one deftly re-opened it after she had closed, sending an adrenaline rush through the entire car. David preferred the companionship and better manners of the chipmunks.
Pat got married to Ed, but not before he was vetted, in a sense, by David. Ed was headed for the Navy and was unusually proud of his peak physical condition coming out of boot camp. To demonstrate, Ed would tighten his abs and challenge the little boy named David to hit him as hard as he could. After several of these challenges, which David found very impressive, Ed came over to the house and was watching the TV, lying on the floor alongside the couch where David was sitting with his cowboy boots on. No doubt inspired by something Gorgeous George once did, David stood up and jumped off the couch onto Ed’s stomach without warning. Eventually, Ed started breathing again. Roughly 50 years later, after not having seen each other for 40 of those years, Ed and David met again at the wedding of Pat and Ed’s daughter. The first thing Ed said, “Do you remember that time you jumped on my stomach with your cowboy boots on?” Yes, he remembered.
Pat and Ed got married on October 31, 1959, then moved to Groton, Connecticut, the homeport for Ed’s submarine assignment. Ed probably found submarine life less dangerous than hanging around the Holzworth household. Fewer surprises in any event.
Shortly after the move from Salt Lake City, Dad bid a contract for a section of the Trans-Canada highway near Creston, British Columbia, about 40 miles due north of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. When that job was finished, the company started on another project much further north at Kamloops. Because of the distance, he was away from home for many weeks at a time. Dad had a pre-arranged signal to let Mom know that he arrived at various points along the way when driving back and forth. He would place a person-to-person collect to Mom from Uncle Dudley. The operator always told the receiving party where the call came from so a decision could be made whether or not pt the charges. If something important needed to discussed, Dad would call back right away once he was sure that Mom was home.
The calls became more frequent during the fall of 1959. About this time, Mom also
told David a story about an older boy that lived across the alley who was a very good student and had graduated at the top of his class from high school. That boy had gone to college at some place called Yale with a scholarship that paid for everything. In a very low key and matter of fact way, Mom had sown a seed in preparation for what she must have known then was about to happen. The house and much of the contents were sold. Half way through the school year, Mom, Dad, Donna and David moved to Missoula, Montana and lived in a small rented apartment at 301 Broadway. The change in circumstances was dramatic and upsetting, even though Donna and David were told that it was a temporary move so we could be closer to where Dad was working.
Gradually, Donna first and then David, they began to realize that something had gone wrong with Dad’s business.
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