When Richard Feynman came back to Ojai’s Summer Science Program in 1960 for a second, unscheduled visit, his topic was what he called “smallness.” Today that field, in which he was a visionary, is called nanotechnology.
Having been mesmerized by Feynman’s brilliance and wit during his talk on Relativity a couple of weeks earlier, we 26 science/math nerds were energized when he began by asking us to… Continue reading “Smallness”
In 1960, I sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, my feet thrust out, listening to Caltech’s Richard Feynman explain Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Einstein, dead for only five years, was an icon and a Nobel Laureate. I was too young and unread then to know that Feynman, as well, would become both. Continue reading “At the Feet of Richard Feynman”
My mother died ten years ago this week, and I am brought to think of the vanishing point, that not-so-distant past beyond which none of us can know the fathers and mothers who brought us here.
My parents were flesh to me, as were both grandmothers. I never knew either grandfather, but they are romance and tragedy to imagine. Continue reading “The Vanishing Point”
What actually happens is not always in the history books.
I grew up in California in the 50’s, graduating from high school in 1961, only 16 years after World War II ended. So how was it possible that in all my classes there was not one mention of the internment of Americans of Japanese descent?
Some of these forgotten or overlooked episodes eventually do get remembered. Some never do because of politics, prejudice, embarrassment, and in the case of Bulgarian independence, lack of interest. Americans, provincials we are in the main, simply do not care much about Bulgaria…or even know where it is (see above, Bulgaria in green).
The recent declaration of independence by Kosovo got me thinking about the Balkans and how the roads of conquest and domination have passed through southeastern Europe for centuries. Continue reading “Liberator of Bulgaria”
Almost two months had passed by my Harvard freshman door. It was 1961, early November, and the air was crisp and blue-gray. I had moved into Pennypacker Hall from a smallish farm town 60 miles northwest of Los Angeles, the smartest of 900 kids graduating from a large public high school that had never sent a student to the Ivy League in its 64-year history. My admission, with headlines bolding its uniqueness, had blossomed on the front page of our daily newspaper the previous April. A month later there was a letter to the editor from a retiree in Arizona who peevishly and poignantly reset the record with his story of a 1933 admission to Yale that he had turned down due to lack of funds.
The first month at Harvard had been manageable, although I had previously read few things more dense than a textbook. The next couple of weeks crosscut my footing with assignments in Aristotle and Piaget, and I began to teeter. I anesthetized my anxiety about insufficient studying by playing contract bridge, and on this particular night I was trolling the halls, searching for a fourth. Continue reading “George W. S. Trow (1943-2006)”
At Little Big Horn National Monument, a low, iron railing surrounds the modest, marble slabs that mark where each white man fell. The fenced rectangle is smaller than my back yard. Custer’s Last Stand…an immense celebration of an ignominious outrage. 
The day is overcast, cold, and wet. Forty-eight degrees feels colder in this Great Plains wind. A National Parks ranger gives a spirited description of tactics and weaponry. He almost prances as he gestures across the swales of brown grass, sweeping his hands from side to side to indicate how the advancing Sioux were able to slip from dip to dip without being seen.
Unlike the other National Parks I’ve visited, this is thoughts and visions, not sights. There is little to see here. Other than the white-on-black face of G. A. Custer’s marker, there is a uniformity in every direction except to the south, where several miles distant, the Montana Interstate reveals just the tops of big rig boxes floating east and west above the long, low hills. This is a small park: a couple of buildings and an attached military cemetery unrelated to The Battle. There is undoubtedly an algorithm that determines who can be interred under the martial exhalations that blow across these hills, but my gravestone investigations reveal no pattern. There are soldiers and wives from many wars.
Indoors, an emphysemic historian with liquid sibilants lectures a seated assemblage on the nature of The Battle. Through his words, all but a few whose patience and vocabulary are limited by childhood see the outcome’s inevitability. He is generous to Custer’s memory with his invocation of Murphy’s Law as a causal force. But the main wall is Custerolatry: movie posters and books, some of them published when 7th Cavalry widows were still in black, that praise the bravery instead of the folly.
It is always thus. Soldiers die. And we overlook the errors of judgment (and sometimes demonize those who point them out) so that we can say that our men and women did not die in vain. But sadly, soldiers often march obediently and with great, blind loyalty into the valley of death, led by fools or villains. It is a patriot’s job to expose such folly or villainy.
It may take years, but attitudes can change. A metallic memorial, its letters acetylene-raised, handmade welts, sits prominently, if informally, in the museum building, remembering the Indians who died, anonymous because their bodies were not left for the sun, the dogs, the vultures, and the hagiographers. And note the focus of the only paragraph on the National Park Service’s Little Big Horn Battlefield home page:
This area memorializes one of the last armed efforts of the Northern Plains Indians to preserve their way of life. Here in 1876, 263 soldiers and attached personnel of the U.S. Army, including Lt. Col. George A. Custer, met death at the hands of several thousand Lakota and Cheyenne warriors.
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