In this episode, I continue reminiscing about my college days at IUPUI. We pay tribute to one of my dearest college friends, the late great Mike Gregory.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 45 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue my series of reminiscences of my college days. Today’s topic is my dear late friend Mike Gregory.

If you had asked me a few weeks ago where and when I met Mike, I would have said it was in my physics classes because my fondest memories with him are from that class. My transcript says I didn’t take physics until my fourth semester.

According to my transcript, the first-semester class I have not yet described was “Principles of Sociology SOC S161”. One of the main sections of the course was describing how cities evolved. I distinctly remember Mike and I having a conversation with the professor about the 1972 sci-fi novel “The World Inside” by Robert Silverberg. The story is set in the year 2381. People live in 1000-story tall buildings 3 km high. Buildings are divided into separate cities over groups of floors and there is a sort of caste system in which the rich and powerful live on the upper floors and the lower classes live further down.

Mike and I had both been fans of the book and thought it explored some interesting concepts. We discussed those with the professor. For our purposes today, I just tell it because it verifies that I met Mike in that first-semester sociology class.

Mike had a huge personality. He was very outgoing and the kind of person that could easily be described as the life of the party. He had a big hearty laugh that could fill the room. Mike was a few years older than me. Out of high school, he did a few years of duty in the Navy and traveled the world. He was an avid photographer. One time we got together and he showed me slideshows of all the places he had been.

Mike was a consummate BS artist at his core. He loved telling a story about how he got to be a communications operator in the Navy. Military messages were transmitted by teletype between bases and even ships at sea. In order to qualify for the position in communications he had to take a typing test.

A teletype machine is basically an electric typewriter connected over phone lines. It used an ordinary typewriter ribbon. Rather than having hammers like a typewriter, there was a cylinder that would move up and down and spin around similar to the ball on the old IBM Selectric typewriter. You didn’t put individual sheets of paper into the machine. There was a continuous roll of paper mounted on the back that would feed into the machine. Typically it was very cheap paper that was sort of a cream-colored newsprint.

In order to pass the typing test, he had to be able to type 30 words per minute for an entire page with no more than two mistakes. That’s a pretty liberal standard. They gave them the text that they were going to type in advance so they could practice typing the exact words that would be on the test. He went into the room the night before the test, rolled a bunch of paper through the machine, and then carefully typed the assignment on the roll. He then rolled the paper backward onto the roll where it was hidden.

When it came time for the test, he rigged the typewriter ribbon so that it didn’t print. The instructor started the test and he began randomly banging on the keyboard. The print head moved across the page making lots of teletype noise and he had to hit the return at the end of the line. He wasn’t really typing anything but the bell would ring so he knew when to hit return. But it wasn’t printing anything. It was just making noise. When the test was over, he cranked the page up revealing his pre-typed assignment. He had deliberately included one mistake so that it wouldn’t look obvious. He passed the test. Of course, eventually had to learn to type well enough to do the job but he got his foot in the door for a noncombat position during the Vietnam War.

I previously spoke about the lunchroom at the K-building at the 38th St. campus. Mike was one of a group of about a dozen people who hung out together anytime we were not in class. A euchre game would start up sometime in the morning and would often last well past dinner. When you had to go to class, there was always someone there who would take your seat and the game would continue.

After playing for hours, someone would say, “I guess I better go do some homework or go to class.” Then after about 10 minutes, they would say, “Am I at class yet?”

“No, you are still sitting here playing cards,” we would reply. Eventually, we had to go to class or study but the euchre game was a tough place to get away from.

At one point, Mike and I developed signals to let each other know what suit we wanted to be called. If you put your knuckle down on the table, it meant you wanted clubs. I would tap my ring on the table for diamonds. I don’t recall what the other signals were. We finally got caught and had to discontinue the practice.

My fondest memories with Mike were in physics class. We were in at least three perhaps four physics classes together. I spoke previously in Episode 15 about Mike in those classes when I talked about my kindergarten girlfriend who had no arms. She grew up to have a very well-endowed chest and I talked about the principles of physics where normally when one walks you swing your arms to counterbalance your rotational energy from the swinging hips. Mike and I figured out that because she had no arms to swing, the rotational inertia was absorbed by her bouncy boobs. Mike referred to them as coupled harmonic oscillators– a term we used in physics class to describe two objects connected by a spring. I linked that episode in the description in case you missed it.

In one of our physics classes, the professor would call the role and take attendance every day. You would answer by telling him how many of the homework problems you had been able to work on the night before. Typically we had three or four problems. One day just before class began, I turned to Mike and asked, “How many problems were we supposed to do last night?”

“You didn’t do the homework?” he asked. “We had three problems.”

I replied, “I guess I must have gotten two of them right.” In the same way that he had deliberately made a mistake on his typing test so as not to raise suspicion, I didn’t want to brag saying I could do all three problems so I dialed that back one and claimed I had done two.

The professor must have decided to call the roll in reverse alphabetical order that day because I was the first one he asked. I proudly answered, “I got two of them right.”

“Very good Mr. Young,” and he continued to call the roll. Much to my surprise and distress, it seemed like the average answer among my classmates was only one problem, and several of them admitted they were unable to work any of the problems even though they had tried. Apparently, the homework that day was especially difficult.

He then chose one of the problems for someone to work in front of the class. When he called on me, I said, “That was the one I missed.”

Someone else went to the blackboard and worked the problem. When they finished, the professor turned to me and asked, “Do you understand it now Mr. Young?”

“Yes sir.”

Mike could hardly keep from laughing. He leaned over and whispered to me, “You know Chris, a few years when they hand you that diploma with the letters BS on it, you are really going to have earned it.”

“Hey… I learned to BS from the master Mr. I Can Type 30 Words Per Minute.”

Mike and I enjoyed nerdy physics humor. In order to understand these jokes, I need to dig into some pretty obscure physics principles. So bear with me.

In electromagnetic waves such as radio waves or light waves, the frequency of the energy is denoted by the Greek letter nu. The formula for computing frequency is c divided by lambda or more commonly read as c over lambda. In this formula “c” is the speed of light and lambda is the wavelength.

Whenever I would greet Mike I would ask, “What’s new?”

To which he would reply, “c over lambda.”

The other physics joke question we enjoyed was, “What’s a Joule per second?”

The answer is, “True”. The joke is that it’s not “What” W.H.A.T. rather it’s the unit of energy a “Watt” W.A.T.T. You have probably seen your electric bill measured in kilowatts. A “Watt” can be defined as one joule of energy per second. Literally, a watt is a joule per second.

Watt’s a joule per second… True.

This next one is even more obscure… so bear with me again. In mathematics, you cannot take the square root of a negative number. That is because when you multiply 2 negative numbers you always get a positive number and if you multiply two positive numbers you get a positive number. But mathematicians and engineers have found the need to deal with square roots of negatives so they invented an entirely new system of numbers appropriately called “imaginary numbers”. While mathematicians generally refer to the square root of -1 with the letter “i”, engineers and sometimes physicists use the letter “j”. Don’t ask me why. I have no idea. If you take the square of that imaginary number whether you call it “i” or “j” the answer is -1. J squared is -1.

Mike seemed fascinated with the letter “j” in this context. Whenever someone was doing something the opposite of what would be expected, he referred to it as “j-squared” thinking or perhaps a “j-squared” way of doing things. The rest of us not so geeky inclined would just say something like he is doing it “bass akwards”. But for Mike, it was always “j squared” this or “j squared” that.

So… I told you that story so I can tell you this one.

One summer, Mike was visiting me and my family at our lakeside cabin in southern Indiana on Cordry Lake. We had a boat dock with an upper platform that was about 10 feet off the water. Those who dared enjoyed jumping off the upper level of the dock. That particular weekend, one of my sisters had a bunch of her friends visiting or it might have been friends from neighboring cabins, I don’t recall. They were all horsing around chasing each other around the upper dock platform and trying to push one another into the water. Occasionally, Mike would get into it, grab one of them, and toss them in the water.

I was sitting in the water in my floating lawn chair about 10 feet away from the dock enjoying the show. While Mike was sitting on the edge of the dock, one of the kids tried to sneak up behind him and dump him over the edge. Although the kid signaled me to keep quiet, I wasn’t going to cooperate. I said, “Oh Michael…” I never called him that. It was always Mike.

“Yes my good sir,” he replied mimicking my formality.

“J squared you,” I said.

Without turning around, he immediately reached behind him, grabbed the kid who was sneaking up on him, and tossed him in the water. The kid came out of the water looking at me wondering, “What the hell did you say that he knew to look behind him?”

Mike understood exactly what I was saying. In his own private parlance, j squared meant backward or behind. Saying, “J squared you” was code for “Look out behind you.” It’s not like we had this code prearranged. We would just talk to each other in geek speak and we knew what the other was saying.

Mike took a variety of jobs around campus to support himself. At one point, he was working in the basement with one of the physics professors as a lab assistant. They had built something I had never heard of. It was a gadget called Magnetic Resonance Imaging or an MRI machine. They were using it to scan lab animals. Mike told me that someday MRI machines would replace or at least supplement X-rays to help doctors look inside your body. I don’t know that the work they did produced any major breakthroughs but they were working on the technology way before it was the commonplace thing that it is today.

One day I was hanging out with him in the lab where he worked and he had just unpacked a bunch of supplies wrapped in bubble wrap. We all know how addictive it can be to pop bubble wrap. When you squeeze the bubbles in your hand they make a nice satisfying little popping sound. He had a strip of it about 8 inches wide and perhaps 6-8 feet long. I had him lay it out on the floor and aimed my wheelchair so that my left side wheels lined up perfectly with it. I took a running charge at it in my wheelchair. The heavy weight of my chair on the tile and concrete floor made a horrendous popping sound easily as loud as firecrackers. I got about 4 feet into the run and stopped quickly because it was making so much racket.

Then I had to figure out how to turn and get off of it sideways without making much more noise. We closed the door and I slowly maneuvered off of it trying to minimize the sound. We expected that people would come running any minute to see what the hell had happened. Or perhaps panic and call the police to report gunfire. Fortunately, in the early 70s, active shooters on college campuses were not a thing. Had we done it today, I’m sure it would’ve caused a panic. By the way, for four and a half years of attending IUPUI, I don’t think I ever saw any campus security. There might’ve been some at the downtown campus handing out parking tickets to people who didn’t have the proper stickers. I may have seen other officers but they were probably just Indianapolis police taking criminal justice classes and not actual school security.

Mike dropped out of IUPUI before completing his degree. I never knew if he ran out of money or if his grades weren’t good enough. He continued to work for a few months at some research institute that was housed in the A-Building on 38th St. It was mindless grunt work xeroxing the abstracts of scientific articles out of journals and then cutting them up and pasting them into notebooks. Of course, there were no searchable computer databases in those days for looking up articles.

Eventually, he found another job in Baltimore and moved there. His background in communication in the Navy landed him a job with NASA or one of its affiliate agencies. He would sit at a console and type commands to a satellite known as the High Energy Astronomy Observatory or HEAO. Scientists would bring him the coordinates of what they wanted to observe in the sky. He would prepare the commands to uplink to the satellite when it passed over a ground station approximately every 90 minutes. When the satellite would go over, he would initiate commands to download the previous data and then he would upload new commands.

That only took about 15 minutes coming and going. For the rest of the 90 minutes, he had nothing to do. He was able to make unlimited long-distance phone calls from the office so he would call me up and we would just talk for nearly an hour. Then he would say, “Well… I’ve got another satellite pass coming up. I’d better go.”

Eventually, we lost touch. Sometimes he would come back to Indy to visit family we would have a little reunion with him and a few other friends from IUPUI such as Rich, Kathy, and Frank.

At one visit, he told us he was being interviewed for a new government job in satellite communication. We wished him luck. A couple of weeks later, there was a knock at my door. A 40-something-year-old guy in a gray suit flipped open his ID to show me FBI credentials. He said he was doing a background check on a guy named Michael Leeland. Gregory. He wanted to know did we attend IUPUI together. He said he was just verifying his education and that Mike had used me as a reference. I told the guy a lot of nice things about Mike. I told him he was a standup guy and I trusted Mike with my life which was true. One day when the elevator went out in the K-Building, Mike, Rich, and a couple of other guys had to carry me down a flight and a half of stairs.

I mentioned to the FBI guy that I had just seen Mike a few weeks ago when he was in town. The man suspiciously replied, “Oh… I did not know he had been here “

Okay, that was creepy.

After he left, I called Mike to tell him about it. I said, “I never told him all the dirt I have on you such as certain typing tests you allegedly passed. I could have ruined your security clearance and said something like ‘Yeah, I knew Mike from our days in the chemistry lab making napalm for the local Communist Party’ Whoops, hey FBI… If you are wiretapping us, that was just a joke.“ We both laughed hard. Neither of us ever took chemistry.

Mike had used me as a reference when applying for the job but when I told him about the guy suspiciously saying, “I didn’t know he was here in Indy.” Mike was similarly suspicious. He wondered if the guy was legitimate. I certainly couldn’t tell from a brief look whether or not someone’s FBI credentials were real. Hell, I don’t know if I could tell if they were real from a long look. What the hell do I know about FBI credentials? Mike had just broken up with a girlfriend or a wife I forget which and he thought perhaps the guy might have been a private investigator hired by his ex to check up on him. We never did find out. Mike did get the job.

I don’t know if it was the particular job that this FBI agent was clearing him for but eventually, Mike moved to Florida working for a NASA contractor. He claimed that he had actually spent time crawling around in the lower deck and the nose of the space shuttle swapping out equipment. While Mike was indeed a BS artist and it would not have surprised me if he had fast-talked his way into such a job, I don’t believe he would have lied to me and exaggerated about that particular experience.

We lost touch for many years. He ended up back in the DC area married to a wonderful woman named Ravel. We reconnected several years ago via Facebook and exchanged regular emails and occasional video chat.

He was still an avid photographer and one year as a Christmas present he mailed out customized calendars featuring his own photographs. They were really amazing.

He also was an astronomy buff and had a very nice telescope. He was going to purchase an accessory case to hold lens filters. He discovered that the case he was going to purchase online was 3D printed. He asked if I could 3D print one for him. He sent me the dimensions and I was going to design and build it but then he got to thinking about all the other things he could do with a 3D printer and decided to get one himself. He first bought a cheap Chinese kit, put it together, and couldn’t get it to work. He gave it to a friend who eventually got it working. That kind of pissed him off. In the interim, he ordered an Ultamaker 3 which was about a $4000 3D printer at the time. I was jealous. I had a clunky old Printrbot at the time. I got him into the hobby and now he was running a better machine than I had.

I don’t know if he ever built that filter case but he got into another major 3D printed project. He built an open-source 3D-printed humanoid robot known as the InMoov robot. It consisted of a torso, two arms, and a head. It had cameras computer vision, sound, and pressure sensors. It would respond to spoken commands or commands sent via a webpage. He sent me a YouTube short of the robot where he asked it, “How do you feel?” The robot starts singing, “New York, New York” and it gestures with its arms in time with the music. I have included a link in the description.

When Mike and I first reconnected on Facebook, he was getting a new job working for the Navy writing technical documentation for some sort of Navy project. But after he got the job, he said they really didn’t have anything for him to do. I don’t know how long he stayed in that job but eventually quit because he had health problems.

Mike developed multiple myeloma brain tumors. It was kept under control for several years through medications. He would go in about every few weeks to get some sort of chemotherapy or medication that he said would make him half-goofy for several days. Of course, I replied, “Only half goofy as opposed to the totally goofy you normally are?”

“Okay, smart ass… Goofier than usual.”

We didn’t correspond a lot. It wasn’t unusual that we would not message each other for a couple of months at a time. He wasn’t an avid Facebook user.

I look back over the course of 2020 and 2021 I sent him several Facebook messenger messages saying, “I haven’t heard from you in a long time. I hope everything is okay.” They went unanswered which didn’t worry me too much because as I said, he didn’t use Facebook that much.

In July 2022 he still wasn’t answering messages. I found his wife on Facebook and sent her a private message asking about him. She replied, “Chris, I’m so sorry. I thought I had contacted you earlier. Mike passed away on January 3 (that would be 2022), after being in the hospital with pneumonia and C Difficile. He then came home to Hospice, and died at home. He fought the good fight, but the multiple myeloma was stronger.”

Interviewer James Lipton famously asked his guests, “If heaven exists, what would you say to God when you get there.” I will probably answer the Lipton questionnaire some other time but let me say today that if heaven exists, I know what I’m going to say to Mike. I will ask as always, “What’s new?” Presuming that the equations of physics still apply in heaven, I can’t wait to hear him answer, “c over lambda.”

For now, all I can do is quote Mr. Spock and say that Mike has been and always will be my friend. Rest in peace, my friend.

In the next week’s episode, I finally get to take a programming class in my second semester at IUPUI.

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