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Contemplating Life – Episode 34 – “Changing History”

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This week we begin a two-part episode where I describe how I would change history if I could go back in time. This fantasy/mental exercise was going to be the basis of a sci-fi novel I might write someday.

Links of Interest

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq

YouTube version

Shooting Script

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 34 of Contemplating Life.

I always hated history class in school which is strange because as a topic, I greatly enjoy history. History classes in school test you on what I believe are inconsequential aspects of history. Things like the date something occurred or even its exact location are often not important. I’m more interested in the cause and consequence of a historical event.

I have a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle when it comes to history. I can tell you when was the War of 1812 but I don’t know where it was fought. I know where the Treaty of Versailles was signed but I don’t remember the date. Okay, bad joke.

But seriously… For me, the details are not as important as the context. History classes expect rote memorization of facts and don’t always seem to care as much about context as I wish they did.

I’ve always believed that the adage “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Apparently, it was originated by Spanish philosopher George Santayana but most remember it from a speech given by Winston Churchill in 1948. Regardless of its origin, I’ve always heeded its warning and studied history for that reason.

Last week I discussed several major historical events that I’ve lived through because I think reflecting on history is an important way of contemplating life.

As regular listeners know, I’m a huge fan of science fiction and an aspiring science fiction writer. One of the most popular sub-genres of science fiction is the time travel story. Typically someone invents a Time Machine and wants to travel to the past or the future out of curiosity. However, most time travel stories involve someone who wants to change the past. They want to rewrite history and “fix” whatever’s wrong with it.

For this episode and the next one, and want to talk about what I would change in history during my lifetime if I could and speculate on how I might do it. It’s a bit of fantasy that I’ve engaged in over the years on sleepless nights. I hoped that someday I might be able to turn this mental exercise into a sci-fi novel. Spoiler… It isn’t going to work. But I want to tell you about it anyway and why it won’t work.

When contemplating my own life and attempting to learn from my own history, I think it might be useful to consider what I might have done differently if I had the opportunity to do things over again. How can I avoid mistakes of the past? What have I done wrong that needs to be set right?

After careful consideration, I came to the amazing conclusion that I probably wouldn’t change very much. Oh, certainly there are mistakes I’ve made that I would fix if I could. I’ve hurt people’s feelings, and occasionally sadly I’ve betrayed their trust, and/or neglected to appreciate people in my life. We’ve already discussed some of those things in previous episodes.

But when it comes to major life choices, I couldn’t think of anything I would do differently. I don’t regret leaving the church in my late teens. I don’t regret coming back in my late 20s. I don’t regret my choice of college major or career. I might have started pursuing fiction writing earlier rather than waiting until I was in my 60s. But other than that, when it comes to life choices there isn’t much I would change.

The only marginally big decision I would make differently is I probably would not have joined a fraternity in college. The fraternity was Alpha Phi Omega. It wasn’t your typical social fraternity. It was more of a service organization founded on the principles of the Boy Scouts of America. It’s not that I regret joining the organization. I have mostly fond memories of membership. But in the balance of things, I don’t think I got as much out of it as I put into it. I developed no lasting friendships from being a member. It just wasn’t rewarding enough to take up as much of my life as I devoted to it. No regrets per se. But it just wasn’t that special.

Naturally, the biggest challenge of my life has been my lifelong disability. It has been irresistible to speculate what my life might have been like had I not had Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Note that in Episode 2 I argued that you can’t do that. That you can’t separate me from my disability especially because it’s genetic. If I didn’t have SMA I would be a totally different person.

In August 2020, I decided to try my hand at writing science fiction. I was going to write a collection of stories titled, “You Can’t Do That… But What If You Could?” The tagline would be “Dreams, fantasies, and the stories behind them.”

One of the stories I wanted to write was a fantasy about what it would be like if I could live my life over again without my disability. It would fit in with the title “You Can’t Do That… But What If You Could?” As I mentioned in Episode 3 many people would think that it is ablest to fantasize about what your life might have been like without a disability. I’ve already given my reasons why I don’t agree.

So the scenario I set up was a guy named Eric who is essentially me. He has SMA just like me. His life is very much like mine. He is on his deathbed on a ventilator in a coma. He hears a disembodied voice who offers him the opportunity to live his life over again with two unique features. First of all, he would not have SMA or any other disability. And second, he would retain all of the memories and intellect that he had accumulated in his first lifetime.

In the story, Eric’s consciousness would be transported back in time to the day of his birth and would be implanted in him as a newborn baby. He would only have the physical abilities of an infant his age so he likely wouldn’t be able to talk immediately or have physical control over his body but obviously, he would acquire these skills much more rapidly than he would through normal development. The first question would be, “How much of my secret ability should I reveal?” I concluded he would want to be as normal as possible so he probably would not reveal much if any of his secret abilities or knowledge.

This started out as an exploration of what it would be like for a disabled person to relive their life without a disability. I don’t think I would have argued that his life was better with the disability. I think the story would’ve concluded that he was no more or less happy or fulfilled without the disability than he was with it.

But then I realized that it is essentially a time travel story. There would be things you could do to exploit this magical circumstance. You might invest in Apple and Microsoft on day one. You would bet on the Super Bowl assuming you can remember who won. I would be putting big money on the Jets over the Colts in 1969. Nobody saw that one coming.

I became obsessed with exploring what one could do in such circumstances regardless of the idea that you got rid of your disability. I could tell the story about a nondisabled character just as easily

While it’s obvious that my personal history would be vastly different from the original timeline, could I change major historical events? How else might I become rich, famous, or powerful? Let’s assume I do so for altruistic purposes. I want to make the world a better place. I want to take advantage of the gift of a Mulligan.

Suppose I can change history. That ruins my ability to know the future because history would unfold much differently than the history that I lived through the first time. This means that if I’m going to make a major change, I only get one shot at it.

What big event in my lifetime would I change to make the world a better place?

In 1963, I was eight years old. Could I save JFK? If an eight-year-old kid calls the FBI and says that President Kennedy is going to be killed in Dallas, no one is going to believe him. Kennedy dies anyway. And then they come back and want to know how you knew. They put you in a lab and study you for the rest of your life. I think I’ll pass on that option. Besides, Stephen King already explored that in the TV series “11.22.63.”

Could I stop the Vietnam War? Daniel Ellsberg tried and couldn’t. I don’t think leaking the Pentagon Papers earlier would’ve had any impact.

Could I have stopped Richard Nixon? As traumatic as Watergate was for the country, in the end, justice was mostly served. Nixon left office and never influenced public policy again or redeemed his reputation.

I certainly was no fan of Ronald Reagan. John Hinckley hated Reagan and had an abnormal crush on Jodie Foster. I could identify with both of those things. The thing that made Hinckley insane and not me is that Hinckley thought those two things were connected somehow. I couldn’t make that connection. As much as I disliked Reagan and had a crush on Foster, I never wished him any ill will. Love him or hate him, Reagan’s massive military spending contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union and brought down the Berlin Wall. Maybe Reagan gets a pass.

As I was formulating the story, the biggest world health crisis of my lifetime was HIV/AIDS. While I might have done something to call attention to it sooner, I lack the technical skills to do anything about it.

A few years ago as I was pondering these issues, the biggest threat to democracy in my humble opinion was 9/11 and the aftermath. By aftermath, I mean things like fighting an unnecessary war over WMD that didn’t exist, Dick Cheney, Halliburton, no-bid contracts to rebuild Iraq, the Patriots Act, enhanced interrogation which is a fancy word for illegal torture, holding prisoners at Guantánamo without legal representation and against international treaties, and other nasty things that proceeded from the post 9/11 era.

So, I would prevent 9/11, keep incompetent Bush 43 and evil Cheney out of the White House, put in a strong progressive administration, and fix what’s wrong with the world. You know, typical liberal agenda stuff. It sounds like fun. How do we do that?

The best way to influence policy and get the ear of the powers that be is to be filthy rich. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk came along too late so I can’t steal their legacy. Besides what do I know about internet marketing, social media, electric vehicles, and rocket design? Nothing. But I do know personal computers!

I need to become Bill Gates. I need to be Gates before Gates becomes Gates. I need to out Gates Gates. It turns out, even though this is a wild ass fantasy, I seriously think I could do it if I could go back in time. I know what he did right and could duplicate it. I know what he did wrong and I could learn from those mistakes.

Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in April 1975. I was a sophomore computer science student at IUPUI at that time. Gates’ first product was a BASIC language interpreter for the Altair Personal computer. He didn’t have one of those computers at the time. But he had access to the university’s PDP 10 computer and an ASR 33 teletype with a paper tape punch machine on the side. He had written an 8008 microprocessor emulator which ran on the PDP 10 and used it to develop the program. He punched it onto paper tape and delivered it to Mits Computers who produced the Altair. In 1975 I had access to a university PDP 10 computer and an ASR 33 teletype with a paper tape punch machine on the side. It would’ve been a challenge, but I have no doubts that my friend Dennis and I could have duplicated what Gates and Allen did if we had had the insight to do so.

Just because we wrote the BASIC interpreter that Gates wrote doesn’t mean we could have duplicated his success. If we missed the opportunity to write that program, there was another nexus point in history where Gates was vulnerable.

Microsoft’s next big product was MS-DOS. Gates heard that IBM was entering the personal computer market with a new 16-bit computer. They were going to need a disk operating system for the machine. According to legend, Gates asked Allen, “Do you know anything about writing an operating system?” Neither of them did. But they had heard about a company called Seattle Computer Products right up the road from Redmond Washington. Seattle Computer Products made circuit boards for the popular S-100 bus architecture computers. They made great products. I had two of their memory boards in my first computer. They had introduced a new 16-bit 8008 processor board but they knew that their customers would need an operating system.

The market leader in 8-bit operating systems was a program called CP/M from a company called Digital Research run by Gary Kildall. His 16-bit operating system which would be known as CP/M-86 wasn’t quite ready yet so a developer named Timothy Patterson at Seattle Computer Products wrote a clone of CP/M that would run on 16-bit processors. He called it QDOS which stood for Quick and Dirty Operating System. Gates and Allen traveled to Seattle and purchased the source code and rights to QDOS for $50,000.

They made minor modifications and put in a bid to license it to IBM for the new IBM PC. Kildall also tried to get IBM to license CP/M-86 but was a very arrogant man who thought that IBM could never succeed In the PC market without him. He made ridiculous demands. Gates had only one condition. He would license his slightly revised QDOS to IBM under the brand PC-DOS but he would retain the right to sell the same operating system to other manufacturers under the name MS-DOS.

IBM told Kildall to fuck off and signed with Gates. By the way, when Patterson found out what Microsoft was going to do with this QDOS that he had sold for a relatively small amount of money, he sued and reached a nice settlement

IBM suffered from arrogance of its own. It was so certain that it would dominate the market that it didn’t anticipate that users would rather have a cheap IBM clone running MS-DOS than pay for a brand name like IBM.

Inexpensive clones from companies like Gateway and later Dell dominated the market and Microsoft became dominant in the personal computer software business.

Microsoft was shocked when Apple came along with the Macintosh computer and its graphic interface. They responded a little late with Windows. While the first few iterations of Windows were pretty much useless, eventually Windows came to dominate the market and the rest is history. Gates is the fourth richest person in the world.

If I operated a software company, I could have entered the bidding war for the IBM operating system. I know how I would outdo both Gates and Kildall. In a single word… Drivers.

An operating system is supposed to isolate the application programmer from the hardware they are running on. If you’re a word processor or spreadsheet, you shouldn’t have to know in advance the size of the screen, the type of the printer, or other hardware details. But both CP/M and MS-DOS which was basically a 16-bit version of CP/M only slightly abstracted the hardware interface. All they had was the ability to read and write data to a disc, read characters from the keyboard, write characters to the screen, and write characters to a printer port.

So, if you were writing a word processor, you had to write special code to handle every brand and model of printer on the market. Under CP/M and MS-DOS, the driver for those printers was built into your application program and not the operating system where it belongs. So your word processing might support your printer but perhaps your spreadsheet didn’t. In contrast, drivers are loaded into Windows. An application program such as a word processor talks to Windows and Windows handles the hardware-specific features of your brand of printer.

I think that I could’ve written an 8-bit operating system to compete with CP/M that would have introduced advanced features that were not found at the time. There were two varieties of 8-bit processors used in those machines. The Intel 8080 and the Zilog Z80. The Z80 was cheaper, faster, and completely backward compatible with the 8080. Anything that would run on an 8080 would run on a Z80. However, the Z80 added additional features unavailable on the 8080. Massive numbers of computers such as those made by Radio Shack used the advanced Z80 processors but they were running the software meant to work on the less capable 8080 chip. The software was not taking advantage of the advanced Z80 features.

I believe that I could’ve written something I would have called Z-DOS – a Z80-specific operating system that would’ve included advanced features such as long filenames, hierarchical file folders, and timestamps which were not introduced until later versions of MS-DOS. And I could’ve programmed drivers in a way that was not available until the introduction of Windows.

I probably could not have dethroned CP/M but I could have gotten my foot in the door at IBM and possibly beat Bill Gates and Gary Kildall both because I would have already developed an operating system with features not present in QDOS/MS-DOS nor CP/M-86..

It takes money to make money. Kickstarting such an endeavor to develop that operating system would’ve taken a lot of startup money. I needed to get a little bit rich before I could get very rich.

What could I do, perhaps as a teenager, that would leverage my knowledge of the future and make me a few hundred thousand dollars before I ever started in the computer business? After many sleepless nights, the answer came to me and was relatively simple. Before I could out Gates Gates, I had to out Rubik Rubik.

Hungarian Professor of Design, Ernő Rubik invented his famous puzzle in 1974. I was 19 years old at the time.

I’ve taken apart a Rubik’s Cube. I know how the pieces fit together. If I had good use of my hands, I could probably build one from scratch even without a 3D printer which wouldn’t be invented for many years. I could probably carve one out of hardwood. Or perhaps I could make the pieces out of clay and then use that to make a silicone mold that I could fill with resin.

My grandmother knew a well-to-do family who possibly could have loaned me a couple of thousand dollars to hire a patent attorney. In real life, when the matriarch of that family died, I inherited $5000 that I put into my own computer business. So I think they would have been open to helping me. I would have called it the “Twisty Cube” because “Young’s Cube” isn’t as mysterious or exotic as Rubik’s Cube. I would’ve licensed it to Mattel or Wham-O and made a fortune.

Meanwhile, Ernő Rubik and Bill Gates would be sitting around Budapest Hungary, and Redmond Washington respectively saying to themselves, “Gee… I wish I’d thought of that.”

So, in my fantasy which might someday become a sci-fi novel, now that I’ve figured out how to become a millionaire by 17 and a billionaire by 30, I’ve decided that we need to cure AIDS, stop 9/11, install politicians with a solid liberal progressive agenda. But how do I do that?

Tune in next week for the rest of the story of how I would change history if I could live my life over again.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and any other benefits I might come up with down the road. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my Patreon supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend. But mostly I appreciate it because it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience.

All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast. Share with me stories of historical events you lived through. Let’s get a conversation going.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

Contemplating Life – Episode 33 – “Witness to History”

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This week we reflect on some of the major historical events that I witnessed in my 68 years on this planet. We especially talk about my recollections of 9/11 given that this episode will be released on that anniversary. Although I tried to keep this podcast in a listenable format, the YouTube version has lots of interesting images and video clips so you might want to check out the YouTube version instead of the cardioversion. Note there are brief images from 9/11 but none of them are explicit.

YouTube version

Links of Interest

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq

Shooting Script

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 33 of Contemplating Life.

A quick note to say there are lots of video clips in the YouTube version of today’s podcast so you may want to try the YouTube version. You can find links in the description of the video excerpted here as well as lots of Wikipedia links that will be of special interest.

After taking a couple of weeks off, it’s time to figuratively roll up my sleeves and get to writing again.

After spending over 15 weeks looking back on my life in school, it got me thinking about how much history I have witnessed in the past 68 years. I’ve lived through a lot of stuff. Recently, I was talking to one of my home health aides about this. She’s an African-American woman in her early 30s. Many of the things I was talking about were before she was born. I told her, “I’m really old. I’ve witnessed a lot of interesting events in my lifetime. I watched people walk on the moon live on TV.”

“Yeah, I guess you really are old if you remember seeing people walk on the moon. Next thing you’re going to be telling me you saw Martin Luther King walking around too.”

“Not in person. But I remember very well watching the news flash interrupt my TV show when he was killed. Bobby Kennedy too.”

“Holy shit I didn’t think you were that old!”

In her mind, MLK was ancient history. I said to her, “You can do the math, can’t you? I’m 68 years old. MLK was killed in 1968. I was 13 years old at the time.”

A couple of years ago when it was the 20th anniversary of 9/11 I had a home health aide who was only 19 years old. It freaked me out that 9/11 was before she was born. That really made me feel old.

I decided I would do a few episodes about some of the major historical events I’ve witnessed over my lifetime.

My mother was a very political person. She was a lifelong Democrat and a Roman Catholic so naturally, she was very excited when John F. Kennedy was running for president. I was in kindergarten at the time. My Aunt Jody took care of me on election day because Mom had volunteered to work at the polls. My aunt didn’t live far from my house and they rerouted the school bus a couple of blocks to pick me up at her place.

I could sense Mom’s enthusiasm for JFK as a candidate and really saw her joy when he was elected. She tried to explain to me that it was a big deal because we never had a Catholic president before. I asked why is it a big deal. She explained that a lot of people didn’t like Catholics. Fortunately, it was something I never experienced personally. I was aware that Catholics were somehow different from other Christians but it was more along the lines of, “That’s weird,” rather than “You are horrible for being Catholic.”

My mother watched the Today Show every morning. That brought me news of the first significant world event that I recall – the Cuban missile crisis. American spy planes had detected that Russian missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads were being deployed in in Cuba just 90 miles from Florida. President Kennedy established a naval blockade around Cuba to prevent further Russian ships from delivering weapons. I could sense that my mother was deeply disturbed by the news. Many people were justifiably concerned that we were on the brink of a nuclear war.

I have very distinct memories of uttering the sentence, “What’s a ‘blockade’ mommy?” I once told that story to a friend at church who was my age. She said, “Yes I remember that distinctly as well. But we lived in Alaska. My parents were scared that if the missiles flew out of Cuba, the land invasion would be right on top of us.”

Ever since I was very young I’ve been fascinated by space travel. When I was telling stories about my kindergarten days, I forgot to mention that in my kindergarten class, we Had a TV in the classroom and watched Alan Shepard as he became the first American into space on his suborbital flight on May 5, 1961. My classmates were upset that it interrupted their favorite children’s show Captain Kangaroo. I thought they were all crazy. I liked Captain Kangaroo a lot but this was a guy sitting on top of a rocket going into outer space for the first time. That was way more cool.

The next big world event that I lived through with vivid memories is of course the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I already told that story in Episode 16. I was eight years old in the third grade.

If you know any US history from that era, you know that 1968 was a huge year. As I previously mentioned, I was watching TV on April 4, 1968, when they announced that Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy was in Indianapolis that night holding a political rally in a park when the news came down. He announced to a crowd of mostly black voters that MLK had been killed. He gave an amazing speech that night to keep the crowd calm. Here are some excerpts from what he said. you can see the entire speech in a YouTube video linked in the description.

[Insert video here]

They subsequently raised a monument on that spot to commemorate what he did. Indianapolis was one of the largest cities that did not have riots that evening in response to the MLK assassination. Portions of that speech also on the RFK Memorial in Wellington National Cemetery. Just 68 days after the MLK assassination Robert Kennedy was killed as well.

In August of that year, my family took our first out-of-state vacation. We went to Chicago and spent three days visiting museums. I’ve been back there on two other occasions and really love the city.

While we were there, protesters were already gathering in Grant Park in anticipation of the Democratic National Convention that was just a couple of weeks away. Weeks later I watched on TV in shock and horror at the chaos inside and outside the convention. Inside the convention, there were disagreements over alternative slates of delegates. As one rejected delegate was being thrown out of the venue, CBS reporter Dan Rather was roughed up by security guards as he tried to interview the man. Outside the convention, Mayor Richard Daley became fearful of threats made by the protesters and sent massive amounts of police and National Guard troops to break up the protests. Protesters were brutally beaten by police on national TV. On several occasions, I have jokingly quipped, “Yeah, I was in Chicago in ‘68. I’ll never forget the sites I saw. The Yippies gathering in Grant Park not knowing the fate that awaited them.” When I tell that story, I leave out the part that I was only 13 years old and was visiting museums with my mommy and daddy. I wasn’t exactly plugged into the Yippie scene at that young age.

While we were vacationing in Chicago, the Republican National Convention was going on in Miami. One evening we watched some of it on TV in the hotel room.

Indianapolis Mayor Richard Lugar gave an address at the convention. I remember that as the keynote address but my research says Ronald Reagan gave the official keynote. It was still a major speech that put him on the national stage. Referral at the convention, someone gave him the unfortunate title “Nixon’s Favorite Mayor.” Not that I want to have anything to do with but he was my favorite Mayor and US Sen. as well. Lugar was one of the few Republicans I’ve ever voted for. When he was mayor, he established something called the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Handicapped and was a staunch advocate for a variety of disability issues both as mayor and later as US Senator. I heard him speak on campus at IUPUI one time and he was amazing. I had great respect for the man. He not only fought for Indiana issues, but he was also famous for the Nunn-Lugar Act on the disarmament of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

In 2012 he faced a serious primary challenge from radical conservative “TEA Party” candidate Richard Mourdock. Mourdock held bizarre views such as the idea that if a woman was raped and conceived a child, it was God’s will. I crossed over and voted in the Republican primary that year to try to help Lugar stay in office. Unfortunately, Mourdock defeated Luger in the Republican primary. Democrat Joe Donnelly won the general election despite the fact that Indiana is a mostly red state.

Lugar never held political office again. He died in April 2019.

Anyway… Back to 1968 again.

The highlight of 1968 for me and for many people was the mission of Apollo 8. Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders, circled the moon in December 1968. It was the furthest that human beings had ever traveled from Earth at the time. In a live television broadcast on Christmas Eve, they read verses from the book of Genesis about the creation of the Earth and then wished everyone Merry Christmas back on the Good Earth.

When they returned, they released a very famous photo called “Earthrise” showing the distant earth rising above the horizon of the moon. Seeing the Earth from that perspective created a lot of healing at the end of that troubled year that saw the Vietnam War, peace protests met with violence, and the assassination of two major political leaders who were men of peace.

* * *

Rather than go through a continued chronological telling of my recollections of major world events, we’re going to skip ahead to September 11, 2001. This episode will premiere on September 11 (although Patreon subscribers will get it a week early).

In those days, I typically didn’t get out of bed until around 10:30 or 11:00 AM. My mother, as she had done since I was a child, was watching the Today Show that morning. She came in and woke me up saying, “An airplane has hit the World Trade Center. Do you want to turn on the Today Show?”

I told her, “Wow! I remember hearing that back in the 1940s.a military plane crashed into the Empire State Building on a foggy night.”

I turned on the TV mounted on the wall over my bed and was surprised to see a clear, bright, sunshiny day in New York City. Whatever caused this, it wasn’t fog or visibility problems. They were saying that it was a “commuter plane.” Having never flown before, my image of a “commuter plane” was perhaps a twin-engine propeller aircraft holding perhaps 12-15 people. I certainly wasn’t thinking of a 767.

Along with millions of other people around the world, I watched live as the second plane hit the South Tower. It amazed me that it disappeared into the building and nothing but flame and debris exited the opposite side. Along with everyone else, I came to the realization that this was no accident.

I sat through the endless replays of the event. Some of the cameras broadcasting the scene were tilted very slightly and at several points, Mom and I thought it looked as though one or both of the World Trade Center buildings was going to fall over sideways. In retrospect, I should’ve known it wouldn’t happen that way.

My next recollection was NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski was put on the air live from the Pentagon. Here is part of his report.

[Insert Video here]

A few minutes later, he returned to the air to confirm that he had spoken to a high-ranking military man (I think it was a general but I’m not sure). He reported that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon near the helicopter landing area.

I don’t recall the exact sequence of events and I’m not going to bother researching just to tell the story but we eventually learned of the fourth plane crashing in Shanksville Pennsylvania.

The thought that was going to everyone’s head at this point was, “How big is this? How many other crashes will we have?” It was no longer isolated to New York City.

I think it was the next day or soon after I spoke to my friend Judy who had been working in a tall office building in downtown Indianapolis. She said they evacuated the building and sent everyone home.

I distinctly remember the speeches that President Bush gave at a school in Florida that morning as the attacks occurred, at a military base where Air Force One stopped off briefly, and then again at the White House later that evening. I was shocked when I heard that the FAA was shutting down the entire US airspace.

My next recollection from 9/11 was when CNBC correspondent Ron Insana joined the coverage in the studio. In those days, I was a regular viewer of the CNBC business channel because I had about $2000 invested in the stock market and he was one of my favorite correspondents.

He appeared in their New York studios covered in gray dust. It was all over his bald head and the shoulders of his dark gray suit. He told the harrowing story of being near the scene when the first tower collapsed. A giant wave of gray dust rolled down the street. He and an MSNBC cameraman ducked inside a parked car as the sky turned black around them. When it turned into gray dust, they exited the car and a police car picked them up and drove them out of the area only stopping to pick up some injured people and take them to a hospital.

That’s when I burst into tears and began sobbing uncontrollably. Someone who I felt like I knew personally from watching him on TV every day… someone who I admired… someone who was baldheaded wore glasses and was an intellectual like me… they had nearly died. And somehow it all became very real at that instant.

When I saw the footage of the towers collapsing, I felt like slapping my forehead and saying, “Of course, that’s how it looks when a building collapses. Hollywood has it wrong almost every time.” You’ve seen the scenes in post-apocalyptic movies where they show devastated cityscapes. Invariably there will be at least one skyscraper tilted over leaning against another one at least a 30° angle or more. Buildings just aren’t strong enough to stay intact if they ever did fall sideways like that.

Movie special-effects people also never show the vast clouds of dust like we saw during the collapse of the World Trade Center. You would think they would know better because of all the footage we have of controlled demolitions. Those demolitions always create vast clouds of dust that roll down connecting streets for blocks just like we saw from the WTC collapse.

I’ve seen several documentaries about taking down buildings using controlled demolitions. When they blow out the foundation, the entire building starts moving straight down. Once it is in motion, the momentum of all that weight moving, causes the floors to pancake upon one another.

The towers of the World Trade Center were weakened by the burning jet fuel about two-thirds and three-fourths of the way up. Once those gave way, the floors above started moving downwards. That momentum carried through till there was nothing but a pile of rubble. There was a slight twist to the upper floors as one of the towers collapsed but for the most part, it went straight down with the debris cascading out the sides like a gray waterfall.

I imagined Hollywood special effects crews watching the scene and thinking, “We are going to have to come up with new ways to depict buildings collapsing in apocalyptic films.”

That probably seems horribly cold and detached. Over a thousand people were dying in those buildings at that instant and all I could think of was how it would be depicted in movies. I think it’s because, at that moment, I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea that so many people were dying before my eyes.

To this day, the most haunting thing about those images is the knowledge that there were people in wheelchairs stranded in those buildings. Disabled occupants were told that the standard procedure in case of emergency was to make their way to one of the mid-level lobby floors and shelter in place until they could be rescued. A story emerged post-9/11 of a man who died because he stayed behind to sit with his disabled friend in a power wheelchair who could not get down the stairways. I could imagine a number of my friends possibly doing that for me. It makes me feel blessed and revulsed at the same time.

When I was attending IUPUI at the 38th St. campus, the elevator went out in the Krannert Building one day. A couple of my friends had to carry me in my wheelchair down two and a half flights of stairs. Another time I was visiting my friend Judy at her job at the Church Federation when the elevator went out. The janitors cured me down one flight. I could never work or study on a regular basis in any building any taller than a couple of stories.

My house is located near one of the approach flight paths to Indianapolis International Airport. The planes don’t fly directly over my house but we see them as they come from the Northwest to the southeast, turn due South over Speedway, and then head towards the airport. For three days, only military and police aircraft were allowed to fly over the US. When the planes returned to the skies, it seemed eerie to hear them again flying near my home.

Two days later, it was my job to teach a class for Catholic converts at Saint Gabriel Church. I set aside my regular curriculum for half of the class. I did some research by going to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Part of it is organized around the Ten Commandments. I looked under the Fifth Commandment “You shall not kill.”

Among the pertinent topics it discussed was suicide since obviously, this was a suicide mission by the hijackers. It explained that while it might be noble to sacrifice your life in battle, there was a difference between being a casualty of war and going on a deliberate suicide mission. The church of course is completely opposed to suicide.

It also talks about our obligation to constantly work for peace but recognizes that under particular circumstances, participation in war can be justified. Here are a few interesting paragraphs from the Catechism.

2308 All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war. However, “as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed.”

In other words, governments have the right to defend their country because we don’t have a global police force.

no

2309 The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. the gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:

  • the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
  • all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
  • there must be serious prospects of success;
  • the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. the power of modem means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the “just war” doctrine. The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

I always felt that the first Gulf War Where Iraq invaded Kuwait was a reasonably good example of those conditions. Bush 41 tried every means of diplomacy available, put together a broad international coalition, and only attacked when all else said failed. I think that the defense of Ukraine also falls into that category. You had one country illegitimately invading another and Ukraine has every right to self-defense and the support of other nations in that effort.

Anyway, discussing these topics was very difficult to do just two days after 9/11 but I felt we had to do it given the circumstance.

On September 30, 2001, they held the US Formula 1 Grand Prix at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway less than a mile from my house. It was the first major international sporting event after 9/11. People were very worried something might happen but fortunately, it did not. The Indianapolis 500 held each May is the largest single-day spectator sporting event in the world and could be a prime target for terrorist activity but fortunately, we have been spared.

I apologize that this episode is already longer than usual. I think is instructive to look back on history and see the ways that things either have changed or failed to change. As I mentioned before, I’m an aspiring science fiction writer, and often sci-fi tells time travel stories about people who want to change history. Next week I will give you an outline of my little fantasy story of how I would change history if I could. It’s a story that’s been brewing in my mind for many years. I’m going to tell you how that story would have unfolded and why recent events have made that story impossible at least the way I wanted to tell it originally.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and any other benefits I might come up with down the road. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my Patreon supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend. But mostly I appreciate it because it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience.

All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast. Share with me stories of historical events you lived through. Let’s get a conversation going.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

Contemplating Life – Episode 31 – “Party Like It’s 1973”

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This week we continue with stories from my senior year at Northwest High School and Roberts Handicapped School. It includes my first date with a girl, my first kiss, and the senior prom.

Links of Interest

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq

YouTube version

Shooting Script

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 31 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue with stories from my senior year at Northwest High School and Roberts Handicapped School.

Throughout all four years of high school, I continue to have strong feelings for Rosie Shewman. I’ve already described how she turned me down when I fell in love with her at first sight at age 12. How we briefly were a couple in eighth grade at age 13 and heartbreak when she dumped me just a few weeks later.

As I gradually matured over the next few years, some things occurred to me that I’d not seriously considered before that. What if things had been different? What if she did have the same feelings for me that I had for her? What would our future look like?

Although she couldn’t walk, she could stand briefly if holding onto something sturdy. She was able to get in and out of her wheelchair on her own. She was completely capable of living independently with minimal outside assistance. In fact, a few years after graduation her mother passed away and she did live on her own. Friends and family helped her with housework and grocery shopping but in all other respects, she was capable of self-care.

On the other hand, I never have been able to live independently even though I had much more ability all the way into my early 20s than what I have now. I could not get in and out of my wheelchair, dress, or go to the bathroom by myself. Rosie barely had sufficient capability of taking care of herself and it suddenly dawned on me that she would not be able to do everything I would need to live independently with her.

That would give us two options if we ever got married: Move in with my parents and let them continue to be my caregivers or hire caregivers to take care of me. Such hired help would probably have to be live-in. They would have to be there in the morning to get me ready for work and possibly transport me there. They would need to be available when I got home and throughout the night. While some of the expense for such help would be covered by allowing them to live rent-free, it would still be an expensive proposition.

I had no doubt that we could make a physical relationship work. Without going into any details, any woman I was with would be on top and have to do most of the work. I’m confident she was capable physically to make that work. Regardless of which living arrangement I chose, my parents or hired help, there wouldn’t be much privacy for a young married couple.

I began to realize that no matter how persuasive I could be with Rosie, no matter how cool I was, no matter how kind or supportive or chivalrous I was towards her, it simply wasn’t going to work. I described it like riding a roller coaster (something I’ve never done) enjoying the ups and downs, the thrills of twists and turns of a relationship, cresting the biggest hill, speeding down the far side, and running smack into a brick wall.

If she had loved me the way I loved her. We would’ve crashed into that wall together and suffered terrible heartbreak. I simply could no longer envision living happily ever after with Rosie or any other woman with a severe disability.

I often wondered, if perhaps she had realized that much earlier than I did. Although we did talk about our relationship in phone calls years later after graduation, that’s one thing I never got around to asking her. We heard of other disabled couples who lived with the parents of one or the other of them and it never worked out. That doesn’t necessarily mean it couldn’t work out but it was a data point suggesting my fears about the situation were founded.

Throughout my senior year, Rosie and I continued to have opportunities for heart-to-heart talks in which we commiserated about living with a disability through our teenage years. At one point, as we were both discussing our loneliness, she suggested we could spend time together outside of school on a date of sorts as long as I understood it was just a couple of friends having a good time and she was not open to a romantic relationship.

Of course, I jumped at the opportunity. The logistics of driving all the way to the East side to pick her up, and go somewhere for dinner and/or a movie didn’t exactly sound like it was worth the effort. It had to be something bigger than that. At age 17, this was going to be my first date with a girl ever.

There was going to be a program at Northwest one Friday evening where a group of touring college performers were going to put on a show. It was similar to a famous group called “Up with People” who would go around performing musical numbers and spreading the message of self-empowerment, peace, love, and understanding. I forget the name of the group. Rosie agreed to go with me. My mom or dad would drive me to her house on Bosart Avenue not far from Roberts School, pick her up in my van, drive us to Northwest for the performance, and then drive her home again afterward.

Unfortunately, fate conspired to make it something less than I had hoped. The teachers’ union went on strike against Indianapolis Public Schools. One of the top officials in the teachers’ union was not other than my science mentor Mr. Stan Irwin. There is a photo of him in my senior yearbook walking a picket line.

My dad was a union sheet metal worker and I grew up appreciating that much of my lifestyle and health insurance was provided by the benefit of a union so I was very pro-union.

Even though the musical program was being presented on a Friday evening and not during school hours, in the middle of the strike kids weren’t very interested in doing anything at school. There wasn’t any opportunity to promote the program very well. The plan was that the teachers would give it a lot of hype but that never happened because of the strike. Rosie and I showed up at Northwest’s Auditorium with about 30 other people. It would probably hold several hundred people.

The performers invited everyone to come down front to make it a slightly more intimate setting. But a group like that depends on getting an audience fired up, clapping their hands, singing along, and sharing in the joyous atmosphere. It just wasn’t the kind of event it was supposed to be. Rosie and I sat side-by-side in the aisle near the front and enjoyed the show as best we could.

That wasn’t the only event in Northwest’s auditorium that I attended. Each year, Northwest’s drama department would put on a play or a musical. Maybe it was two per year. One time they did the musical “South Pacific”. I was already familiar with the music because my mom was a big fan of Broadway musicals, especially Rogers and Hammerstein.

They did a production of a play called “The Man Who Came To Dinner”. I seriously considered trying out for that when I heard that it was about a guy who is a guest for dinner, slips and falls on the front porch, moves into the house in a wheelchair, and demands that the occupants wait on him. The fall occurs offstage so I thought perhaps I could play the part. Spoiler alert… He recovers quickly and fakes it. There is a scene where he is alone in the room, gets up out of the wheelchair, and dances around. So much for my opportunity to become a famous thespian.

A production of “Arsenic and Old Lace” caused a bit of controversy. The closing line is, “I’m not a Brewster… I’m a bastard.” Some of the teachers wanted to change it to “I’m illegitimate.” I think the students convince them to let them deliver it as written.

I went to all of these performances alone. Some of my friends were in the productions. They put on pretty good shows. Although we did have music programs at Christmas at Roberts, the kids there never had the opportunity to see their friends perform in a play or musical as I did. That’s just another thing they missed out on by going to a real school.

The gang at Roberts had the opportunity to see a musical as well. Arsenal Technical High School is just down the street from Roberts. Technically when you graduate from Roberts your degree says Arsenal Technical. It’s like they were a branch. They did a production of “Music Man” and we got to go over there one afternoon and see the dress rehearsal. We had to leave about two-thirds of the way through because the buses had to leave to take us home but we still had fun.

Anyway… Back at Northwest, our spring musical during my senior year was “Guys and Dolls”. Rosie agreed to go with me again. This time the house was packed. We tried to sit in the center aisle where we had been the last time. The teachers didn’t go for it. It really would have been a hazard to block the aisle. They suggested we could sit one in front of the other. I rejected that idea immediately. Even if it was “just friends” this was a date. I wasn’t going to not sit next to my companion. They suggested we move off to one side on a side aisle. We were very near the front and the floor was not as sloped as it was where we would have been before so that was okay.

At least until the play director saw us sitting there. At some point after the Havana Cuba scene, a bunch of extras were going to run down off the stage and out the side door of the auditorium. They asked if I would move over to sit single file just for that part of the show so I agreed.

We both really enjoyed the show. Even though I know a lot of Broadway music I was mostly familiar with the works of Rogers and Hammerstein but I was unfamiliar with this show by Loesse, Burrow, and Swerling. Years later I really enjoyed seeing the movie version with Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra. It’s now one of my favorite musicals.

During both dates with Rosie, I parked my wheelchair as close to her as I could. I kept hoping she would put her arm on the armrest and we could at least hold hands but she leaned over the opposite side of her wheelchair on both occasions. I told my friends she gave me such a cold shoulder I had icicles hanging off of my elbow.

Somewhere along the way, I took the PSAT and SAT tests. I don’t recall my PSAT score but I found my SAT results and I got xxxx. It was good enough to get me accepted to IUPUI working towards a degree in Computer Science right behind my friend Dennis.

The motorized wheelchair I had been driving since fifth grade belonged to the school. I was going to need a new wheelchair. Somewhere around the middle of the year, I got a new chair paid for by Dad’s insurance. This one had a proportional control joystick with a kind of “fly-by-wire” circuitry in it. If you’re going down a hill, it would automatically control the speed for you. It had 20-inch bicycle tires that were about 2 inches wide. It was impossible to get it to slide around the corners going down the big ramp but overall it was a much better wheelchair and I enjoyed the upgrade. That chair lasted throughout college, my two years working after college, and probably another 10 years after that. At Roberts, they reassigned my power chair to a guy in junior high named Kelly Garrison who had Duchenne muscular dystrophy. We mentioned him briefly in episode 20.

As the year wound down to a close, the excitement of anticipating graduation became palpable. I purchased a class ring. Filled out forms to rent a cap and gown. We planned a big party to celebrate.

And it was time for the senior prom at Roberts school. Almost as a joke, because I knew she would say no, I asked LeaRea Herron, sister of my buddy Mark Herron, if she would go to the prom with me. It wasn’t very romantic of a proposal. I kinda shouted to her as Mark was getting off the bus one day. “Hey, LeaRea… One to go to prom with me?” She shouted back a very disgusted “No way.”

I had planned to go by myself again. My buddy Wayman Glass was going to go stag as well and needed a ride. At one point, a cute freshman girl in a wheelchair at Roberts named Cheryl (not the one from kindergarten with no arms) let it be known through the grapevine that she was looking for a date to the prom and would be open to an invitation from me. Cheryl had a cute smile, long black hair, and a very ample chest that according to legend had been thoroughly explored by Alan Whitney one day in the art supply room. While I always thought of Rosie as being sophisticated-looking, Cheryl was wonderfully cute. By some standards, she was better looking than Rosie.

I up to her in the hallway one day and said, “The word is you’re looking for a date for the prom.”

“Yes I am”, she replied.

“Would you like to be my date?”

“Yes absolutely.”

“Okay, it’s a date. Uhhh… There is one problem though…” I told her the story about getting my photo taken with Rosie at the junior prom and the photo got lost. I asked her if it was okay if I did a reshoot with Rosie. She must’ve been desperate for a date because she agreed. So I ended up getting my picture taken with two different girls at the senior prom. You can see the photos on the website or on the YouTube version of the podcast.

That was it. I had a real date for the senior prom with a really cute girl.

I rented a tuxedo. Bought her a corsage. This was going to be a real prom.

We determined that we could get me, her, and my buddy Wayman all three in my van. Wayman lived on the west side just west of White River off 10th St. Cheryl lived on the east side somewhere. My mom drove.

Rather than wasting money on some cheesy garage band like they did my junior year, they recruited the Tech High School swing orchestra to provide live music. Teachers, parents, and some of the walkers actually danced at the event. It was still a pretty lame event but it was more fun than my junior year and I had a good-looking girl for a date.

After the prom, there was a party at Rosie’s house. All of the kids sat in the living room and ate snacks. The adults, including my mom, sat in the dining room and drank wine. We all had a much better time at the after-party than at the actual prom. The only problem was it was crowded in the living room and somehow Cheryl ended up across the room from me instead of beside me. On the plus side, I got to look at her all evening.

The party broke up at about 1 AM. As we left the house, I realized I wasn’t going to have the opportunity to get a good night kiss. Wayman came up with a plan. He was going to be my ultimate wingman. He deliberately left his jacket in Rosie’s house. As we were about to load the wheelchairs into my van, he said, “Mrs. Young… I left my jacket in the house. Could you get it please?” I was worried someone else would volunteer to go get it but the trick worked. My mom went back into the house. Wayman turned his back and I pulled up close to Cheryl, leaned over, and asked her for a kiss.

She agreed. We did it.

It occurred to me later that all over the city of Indianapolis… hell all over the country… every weekend in late May there were probably people who were losing their virginity after the senior prom. I was getting my first kiss after the prom at the ripe old age of 17 almost 18. At least it was progress.

I was always very grateful to Wayman for being such a great wingman that night.

We took Cheryl home and then went to drop off Wayman. It was about 2 AM when we got to his house. He lived in a very rough neighborhood and my mom banged on the door to try to wake up his brother. She couldn’t get anyone to answer the door. She said it was a bit scary being out there alone banging on some strange door at 2 AM. Fortunately, his brother eventually woke up.

Naturally, at school on Monday following that I was sure to tell all the guys about the kiss and how Wayman helped me out. When Rosie heard about it she said to me, “I heard you kissed Cheryl outside my house.” She said it with a tone of surprise and had a strange look on her face.

“Yeah, so what of it? Don’t look at me like that”, I said. “You look jealous.”

Her face kind of turned red and she giggled.

I continued, “You don’t get to be jealous. You had multiple opportunities at this”, I pointed to myself, “and you turned them down.” We both laughed hard. She neither confirmed nor denied she was jealous.

Next week, I’ll conclude this series on my history at Roberts Handicapped School and Northwest High School which we began way back in Episode 15. We will talk about the Roberts class picnic, the graduation ceremony, and some sad goodbyes to people who had been my friends for years.

After next week’s episode, I’m going to take a couple of weeks’ vacation from the podcast. I will probably begin writing the next series but I’m not sure exactly what it’s going to be about. We might go back to religion and my faith journey or we might go right into my college days. But I need to write a few scripts to get ahead of the schedule so I’m not always rushing to produce them at the last minute.

All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and any other benefits I might come up with down the road. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my Patreon supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend. But mostly I appreciate it because it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience.

If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

Contemplating Life – Episode 30 – “Failed Experiments and Squandered Opportunities”

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This week we continue with stories from my senior year at Northwest High School and Roberts Handicapped School.

Links of Interest

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq

YouTube Version

Shooting Script

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 30 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue with stories from my senior year at Northwest High School and Roberts Handicapped School.

After the fiasco of taking a freshman physical science class during my junior year, I finally got to an age-appropriate science class with senior physics. Mr. Stan Irwin was once again my teacher and my classmates were very much my intellectual peers. We had a bunch of fun in that class.

The lab work was the best part of course. We had a neat piece of equipment called a linear air track. It was an aluminum rail about 3 feet long with hundreds of tiny holes in it. A blower would blow air out the holes sort of like an air hockey table. There was a little aluminum gadget that would slide along the rail on a cushion of air. It had springs on either end and the little slider would bounce off the end stops or you could put two devices on and they would bounce back and forth off of each other. As you would slide one into the other one it would stop and transfer all of its energy to the second one. Or you could get two of them bouncing back and forth in different patterns. It was sort of like the same principles in the desktop toy known as Newton’s Cradle. I linked a YouTube video of a similar device.

One of the requirements for the class was to do a project that would demonstrate some sort of principle of physics that we had learned. I tried to build a homemade Ohm meter. I designed it and my dad did most of the construction. I had a pointer mounted on a board that would pivot freely. It had a magnet on one end. Near the magnet was a coil of wire and when connected to a battery it was an electromagnet. There were some resistors in a triangular pattern known as a Wheatstone bridge. Theoretically, when you connected different resistors into one of the four sides of the bridge circuit, the current would flow forward or backward through the meter. I never did get it to work exactly right because I didn’t have a good spring to put tension on the pointer.

I inadvertently demonstrated a different principle of physics. I didn’t have a spring so I used stretched-out please of elastic thread that my mother had in her sewing kit. The problem was that the elastic thread wasn’t actually elastic by the definition of elasticity in physics. Elastic objects in physics when stretched out, will always return to their original shape. But when you stretched this thread, it didn’t always go back to its original length. It was an inelastic elastic thread.

I don’t recall what grade I got on the project but it was okay because my basic design was sound. It’s just that the gadget I built didn’t work as designed. This was a physics class – not an engineering class.

One guy built a closed-circuit television camera for his project. He purchased some sort of small electronic sensor and designed a circuit that would generate a TV signal. I seem to recall he got it working. The image was pretty low quality and a bit jittery but it worked.

Another guy made an 8 mm film stop-motion animated home movie. He had these little clay figures that were nothing but a ball with eyes and a mouth. They were pushing around toy blocks to demonstrate basic machines such as the lever, an inclined plane, a pulley, and a screw. You couldn’t tell what they were building until the very end. It was a monument that spelled out the word “Irwin” in honor of our teacher. Although it had no sound, he played music while showing it. It was a crazy song from the 70s called “Hocus Pocus” by a group called Focus. He didn’t have the timing of the animation figured out quite right so the figures moved very rapidly. The frantic pace of the silly song went perfectly with the animation. If you never heard “Hocus Pocus by Focus be sure to check out the link. It is a very crazy song.

I enjoyed an experiment we did with a gadget called a “tape timer.” It was a little device that you would feed a string of paper tape through it. It would print a dot on the tape at regular timed intervals. You would attach the tape to a little cart and string a lead weight off the edge of a table. It would accelerate the car pulling the tape. You would then carefully measure the distance between the dots and calculate the acceleration. At the far end of the building, there was a ramp down half a level. I think it went to the shop department. We took all the equipment down there and ran the cart down the ramp. I also grabbed hold of the tape and ran my wheelchair down the ramp at full speed but I don’t remember the results of my calculations as to how fast I was going.

We also took a trip down to the school auditorium on the stage and we hung a Foucault pendulum from high in the catwalks of the stage and demonstrated that the earth was turning beneath it. Of course, we also did the trick where he would stand a student in front of the pendulum with the weight hanging right in front of his nose and then drop it. When it would swing back again, it had to of lost some tiny amount of momentum from friction and air resistance but it looks like it’s going to hit you in the face.

We did the famous “monkey gun” experiment. The premise is, there is a monkey hanging from a tree. You aim your rifle directly at him but the instant that you fire your shot, he hears it and lets go of the branch and starts to freefall. However, your bullet is freefalling at the same rate and travels in a slight parabolic arc. The bullet will always hit the monkey because they are falling at the same rate due to gravity. In reality, if you were in such a situation you have to deal with the reaction time of the monkey. For our experiment, we had a blowgun with a metal ball in it. There was a switch at the end of the barrel that would release an electromagnet holding a tin can up in the air. When the ball hits the switch, the magnet releases and the can starts to fall. Because our muzzle velocity isn’t very high, you can see the ball traveling in an arc but it always hits the tin can assuming you’ve aimed directly at the can to begin with. You don’t have to compensate for the ball’s falling trajectory.

The experiments with static electricity were especially fun. We had a device called a Van de Graaff Generator. The device is about 3 feet tall with a large metal sphere on top. It sits atop a glass cylinder. In the base, there is a belt on a pulley that rubs against something and creates static electricity. The electric charge is carried to the sphere on top via the belt. The end result is you get a large static charge in the sphere. If your hand is on the sphere when it charges up, it makes your hair stand on end. We even made a chain of students all holding hands with one of them holding the sphere. Everyone in the chain had their hair standing up. I would’ve liked to try it but I was afraid a static charge might blow out electronics in my power chair.

We tried to pull a prank on Mr. Irwin one morning. The class was first period and we could get there about 10 minutes before class started and before he arrived. The Van de Graaff generator was sitting on the lab table at the front of the class. On a couple of occasions, he would write something on the blackboard and you couldn’t see it because the device was in the way. We had to ask him to move it. We used that situation to set up our prank. We charged up the device and then turned it off. Normally when you’re done with it, you would ground it to release the static charge. We had a glass rod about 18 inches long with a metal tip on the end. A ground wire extended from the tip and would clip onto the faucet in the sink at the end of the lab table. We disconnected the ground wire and left it lying near the faucet so it looked normal.

When he came into the room and started lecturing, we were on the edge of our seats waiting for him to write something on the blackboard. It must’ve been a good 10 or 15 minutes and we were worried that the device would slowly leak off its charge. Finally, he began writing on the blackboard and within seconds someone asked him to move the generator. As he reached for it, he must have felt the hair on the back of his arm stand up and realized what was going on. He looked at the class and smiled, “Somebody’s trying to be very clever. I told you not to mess with the equipment when I’m not here. You thought you were cute but you didn’t catch me.”

Then he picked up the grounding wand and touched it to the sphere. Normally as you approach with the wand, a tiny spark will jump. He noticed it didn’t spark. He picked up the loose ground wire and smiled at the class again. “You really thought you were clever didn’t you?” The whole class cracked up hysterically. Even though we didn’t give him the shock we were hoping for, even the failed attempt was a bunch of fun.

Meanwhile, back at Roberts School, things were going rough. It was obvious that morale at the school was at an all-time low. Teachers and administrators knew that neither the environment nor the curriculum were meeting anyone’s needs.

Roberts High School had a student government where we elected a class president, vice president and I don’t know what else. We had the problem that there weren’t enough kids who had sufficient grades to serve on the student council. We propose an amendment that would lower the standards but the teachers were against it. I don’t recall how that turned out.

We brought one of our grievances to the teachers and administration during one of our open Council meetings. As I mentioned in earlier episodes, from time to time we would get visitors in the building. They were either nursing students or special education teaching students. One day there was a guy in the group who stopped by and asked me what homework I was doing. It happened to be French so he spoke a few words to me in French and I was able to reply. He later stopped by to tell me he got in trouble for talking to us. They were supposed to just observe like we were animals in the zoo. During the student Council meeting, I brought up the question, “Why can’t they talk to us?” Are we just some sort of curiosity put on display?”

They said the policy was they didn’t want anyone to say anything embarrassing to us. I said the only thing embarrassing was being treated like animals and that was on them not the visitors. Or perhaps I suggested they were embarrassed by the quality of education we were getting.

You will recall the stories I told in my article “The Reunion” regarding how depressed all of us were in those days. I described a sort of town hall meeting we had to express our feelings.

Early in my senior year of attending both schools half-day, a proposal arose to move the high school program out of Roberts School and into a regular high school. I don’t know if that proposal was a result of some behind-the-scenes activity by my mother but I don’t think so because she knew I was happy at Northwest. I only had a semester and a half left before graduation. I also don’t know if the morale issues I discussed just now were a contributing factor. I have to believe that my success at Northwest did have an effect on the decision-making to consider moving us into a regular high school.

At the time, the only high school in Indianapolis that was completely accessible with an elevator was Shortridge. The school opened in 1864 and was the oldest free public high school in Indiana. It has a lengthy list of distinguished alumni including Senator Richard Lugar, Congressman Dan Burton, author Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and many others. See the Wikipedia article linked in the description.

We had a meeting in the Roberts school auditorium one evening that brought together students, parents, teachers, and administrators. I invited Mr. Irwin to attend to give his perspective on what it was like to have a handicapped student attending a regular high school. At first, he was reluctant to come. He wasn’t sure what he could contribute to the discussion.

The proposal before us was to move the entire Roberts program into Shortridge High School. Mrs. Bartlett and Mr. Price would continue to be the homeroom teachers and in all likelihood would continue to teach most if not all of the same subjects they were currently teaching. However, anyone who wanted to take a class that was lot offered by this special education program would be free to go out into the building and take any other class. You wouldn’t be stuck in a biology class with no lab. You could also have physics or chemistry instead. There would be more foreign languages than just French. There would be advanced placement classes if you qualified. Shortridge had the same teletype machine we had at Northwest and taught the same computer programming class in BASIC that we had.

Although I would’ve hated to leave Northwest in my senior year after achieving so much success, the opportunity to go to a regular high school full-time was irresistible. I would have loved to do it.

Before the meeting, we took a field trip to Shortridge and a student showed us around. We toured classrooms, the cafeteria, the math department with the teletype machine connected to the computer, the shop and home ec classrooms, and science labs. During the trip I tried to explain to everyone just how cool all of this was and what they were missing out on.

For the most part, the overprotective parents were opposed to it. Although Shortridge was a prestigious institution, I believe there was a perception that it had lost its former glory. It was now just another inner-city school with a majority nonwhite population. The parents had the impression it was the kind of place where a fight broke out in the cafeteria about once a week and they didn’t want their precious little crippled kids exposed to that.

Even though Roberts was the most racially diverse and integrated school in the entire IPS system, I believe racial prejudice was a large part of the opposition to moving the school to Shortridge.

Mr. Irwin participated openly in the meeting. I don’t particularly remember anything specific that he said but he was quite incredulous at the opposition to the move.

I tried to explain not only the academic advantages I had at Northwest and could have at Shortridge but I talked about those intangible things I’ve spoken of in earlier episodes. I tried to describe things like the excitement of going to a pep rally or any other kind of school assembly.

For the most part, the students were either not enthusiastic or completely opposed to the idea. They knew that they had it easy at Roberts. They knew they had the teachers wrapped around their fingers. We had that porch that we could hang out at when we weren’t in class and the guys could smoke out there as long as the lookouts did their job.

I’m guessing perhaps 70% of the meeting was about something negative about the move. In the end, it was up to the school administration to decide.

The spineless bastards gave into the pressure and pretty much gutted the plan. The best they would do is that anyone who wanted to go to Shortridge could go and would have absolutely no support other than transportation. If the entire program had moved, I would’ve gone to Shortridge full-time but considering that the proposal was completely gutted, I decided to stay going half-day to Roberts and half-day to Northwest. It was my senior year and I really didn’t want to move. Only two students signed up to go. They came back within two weeks.

Afterward, I had a conversation with Mr. Irwin about the experience. All he would say was that it was very eye-opening. He reiterated that initially, he didn’t know why he needed to be there but once he was, he knew he needed to be there. I asked him what he meant. What did you learn? He wouldn’t say specifically but it was clear he was incredulous at the overprotectiveness of the parents and staff and he understood why I had gotten out of there to the extent that I could. I always wondered if perhaps you gain some understanding of me because I had grown up in that environment.

Many times I’ve done Google searches and Facebook searches looking for Mr. Stanley Irwin I’ve not had any success locating him.

One time, there was another teacher who offered commentary to me about my attending Northwest. She was a very strict English teacher named Constance K. Kochman. We nicknamed her KKK… not because she was racist (because I don’t think she was) but because she was such a pain in the ass. In retrospect, she was a good teacher who was tough on her students because she wanted the best from them.

She chewed me out one day for being lazy. She said, “I found out that you came to the school because you’re getting a lousy education where you were and you wanted to come to a place where you could really learn something. Your mother hauls you over here every day so you can get a quality education and you’re squandering the opportunity.”

I told her I appreciated everything my mother did for me and that I was still getting a much better education at Northwest than I would have at Roberts. But I wasn’t going to bust my ass to get straight A’s when I didn’t have to. I told her I was there to have a normal high school experience and for me that meant studying when I felt like it, learning what I could, and having a good time doing it like a normal high school kid. I never got below a “B” during the three years that I was there and that was good enough for me. I didn’t tell her about my friend Terry Johnson who got straight A’s throughout four years of high school and then died six months later but I’m sure that was in the back of my mind.

I suppose in retrospect, I could’ve worked a little bit harder at Northwest but I don’t have any great regrets about anything I did or didn’t do academically except perhaps the way I looked down on the freshman students who were not up to my level.

I’m still disappointed that I couldn’t communicate to the people at Roberts what it was they were missing by not attending a regular school. The administration wasted a wonderful opportunity to really help my classmates get a better education.

Next week, I’ll discuss more events of my senior year. We will talk about the first three dates I ever had with a girl. Actually, I went on three dates with two different girls. And I will finally wrap up the series as I describe my high school graduation. I’m thinking about taking a couple of weeks off from the podcast after we conclude this series. I’ve been writing, recording, and editing between 2500-3500 words per week for 30 weeks straight and I need a vacation. I’ll discuss that more when I figure out what I’m going to do but this is not the end of the podcast.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and any other benefits I might come up with down the road. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my Patreon supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend. But mostly I appreciate it because it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience.

If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

Contemplating Life – Episode 29 – “Cold Chills”

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This week we continue reminiscing about my high school days and tell the story of a murder mystery I wrote for a creative writing assignment during my junior year.

Links of Interest

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq

YouTube Version

Shooting Script

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 29 of Contemplating Life.

It’s been a busy week for me and I don’t have time to write a completely new episode from scratch. It’s already Friday and it takes me a day to record, edit, and upload everything by Sunday. But I do have a story to share that originally appeared in my blog and is relevant to our current series so I did a quick rewrite of that. I think you’ll enjoy it.

It was the second semester of my junior year at Northwest High School and my regular English teacher needed some time off for some reason. We had a substitute teacher named Mrs. Allen. When she wasn’t substitute teaching she was a professional writer. She claimed to have published several short stories and poetry.

I recall discussing with my friend Dennis what a wonderful teacher Mrs. Allen was. Several people had said they wish they could’ve had her full time but Dennis and I concluded that would be a shame because only one class at a time would have the benefit of her skills. By serving as a substitute, she could spread her joy around to more people.

Whenever Mrs. Allen came in for an extended period she would throw out the curriculum and give us a writing assignment.

This was the second time I had her as a substitute. In my sophomore year, my teacher got married and took a week off. That time we wrote her essays that were suggestions on married life. I wrote a humorous piece about how she should purchase fast food, take it out of the bags, put it on fancy plates, and serve it up as a gourmet meal. When she returned from her honeymoon and read the stories she had very nice things to say about my suggestions. She thought it was really funny.

I don’t recall why my teacher needed time off during my junior year. Our assignment this time was to write a short story. There’s an adage that says, “Write what you know.” So I decided to write a bit of science fiction. That was the majority of what I read those days and still is.

I stole the basic premise of the story. My dad had told me he had read a story or seen a movie somewhere where a guy got away with murder by stabbing someone with a sharpened icicle. The murder weapon had melted and evaporated leaving no trace of the weapon or fingerprints. I decided to steal that idea as the basis of my own little murder story.

Apparently, the idea is more common than I had thought it was in those days. I’ve done some Google searches today to attempt to identify the story my dad told me about all those years ago.

There is a murder mystery role-playing game called “The Icicle Twist” which I presume has something to do with stabbing someone with an icicle. IMDb has a keyword category of several films in which someone is stamped with an icicle but they are all more modern than what could have been the basis for my dad’s story. I’ve seen questions about a young adult novel from the 1980s which is obviously after I was in high school so that’s not the origin.

My best candidate is a 1925 story called “The Tea-Leaf” by Edgar Jepson and Robert Eustis. In that story, someone was stabbed with an icicle in a steam room. I seem to recall my dad telling me that in the story he read, the murderer was caught because they found traces of soot in the wound and somehow determined it had come from an icicle. That wasn’t the case in the Jepson/Eustis story.

I’ve linked that story and some other websites related to my research including some answers to Quora inquiries that suggest that it has actually happened. But then again, I’m not sure that someone replying to such a question is all that credible. There were no links to articles supporting the answer.

If anyone knows of similar stories either real or fiction, please send me a link. I’d like to know more about it.

After doing all this research, now I’m probably on someone’s watchlist for researching how to get away with the perfect murder. And so are you for listening to this podcast.

Much of my deep appreciation of the short story form comes from reading Edgar Allen Poe… Especially his classic short story “The Cask of Amontillado”. I’ve provided a link to the story in the description. The opening line is “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.”

That’s the whole story in one sentence. Everything that follows is simply the details. It doesn’t explain who Fortunato was in any detail. It doesn’t say how he injured or insulted the narrator. It’s just the story of how he plotted and executed his revenge. He lured him into a basement wine cellar for a taste of Amontillado wine. Then he shoved him into an alcove, chained him to the wall, and sealed up the alcove with bricks burying him alive.

This shocking and brutal ending is what most people remember about the story. They even did a version of it in the classic horror soap opera Dark Shadows in episode 442 when Barnabas lures Reverend Trask into the basement and bricks him into an alcove. For me, the shocking ending wasn’t nearly as interesting as that opening sentence. To me, that’s the absolute essence and perfection of the short story form. You grab them with a catchy opening sentence and then end with a big surprise. That is what I wanted to go for.

So, back to my semi-plagiarized sci-fi murder mystery. We were going to commit the perfect murder by stabbing a guy with an icicle. This clearly had to be premeditated and well-planned in order to be a perfect murder. It’s not a crime of passion but rather a coldly calculated plot… emphasis on cold.

You have to get someone to a place where you have an icicle handy. You have to prepare it to a sharp point and keep it cold until you can do the deed.

While trying to craft my catchy opening sentence, I came up with the idea that committing the perfect murder was something that had been pursued ever since Cain slew Abel. Although I believe people are fundamentally good, there is always something inside us that tempts us to do violence against our perceived enemies. We’ve always been searching for the perfect murder. It’s one of those eternal quests like building a better mousetrap.

Wait a minute!

What did I just say?

My muse had spoken. I had my opening line. I had my hook that would tell the entire story in one sentence and draw you in to make you want to read more. I had my Amontillado-like opening line which would read as follows…

“Man has always had two great ambitions. To build a better mousetrap and to commit the perfect murder. I have accomplished the latter on the man who accomplished the former.”

That was my entire story in one sentence… well actually three… but certainly one short paragraph. Somebody will build the legendary better mousetrap. The only reason you would want to kill such a person is that somehow they cheated you out of the honor of building it yourself. So the perpetrator and victim were former business partners. The victim cheated his partner and that was the motive. The story is told in first-person by the murderer as a revenge story in the same way that Amontillado was told.

I already had my method to commit the perfect murder with the melting murder weapon. Now I had to build a better mousetrap. That’s where the science fiction elements come in. Our inventors used genetic engineering to create a virus that would be deadly to mice but harmless to any other species.

Apart from the big opening line, I also learned from Edgar Allen Poe the beauty and ingenuity of a plot twist. Something shocking at the end of the story that gives the reader something unexpected. You grab them in the beginning. You lead them on a journey. You have to end on a high note as well. I came up with that as well but I won’t spoil it.

When I originally wrote this up for my blog in November 2020, I couldn’t find my copy of the story, didn’t remember the name of it, and naturally did not remember the name of the teacher. You didn’t really think I could remember the name of a substitute teacher 50 years later, did you? Two months later, I found the original manuscript and posted that on my blog. I have linked a PDF copy of the scanned manuscript in my own handwriting complete with the teacher’s notes and all of her circling my spelling errors. You can also see it in the YouTube version of this podcast.

The version I present here is as it was written with the spelling and punctuation corrected.

I will now read you my short story which I wrote in my English VI class at Northwest High School, March 16, 1972. Then I’ll tell you about what happened afterward. This story is titled…

Cold Chills

by
Chris Young

Man has always had two ambitions: to build a better mousetrap and to commit the perfect murder. I have done the latter to the man who did the former.

David Brown was my victim. He had been a friend and business partner for some time until he dumped me from the company two months ago. We were in the pesticide business and our main product was rat poison. Business had been slipping because of bad talk about pesticides polluting the environment. People would rather clean up the trash to get rid of the rats than buy our poison.

Then Dave came up with the answer. His formula affected only rats. It altered their chromosomes so that only male offspring were produced. In a generation, the rats would be extinct because there would be no females to reproduce. Dave put the product on the market the week after our partnership was legally dissolved. He had ruined me and I had to return the favor.

I once read a mystery story where a man was stabbed with a sharpened icicle. The 5urderer was never caught because no weapon was found; it melted away. The idea started out as just a wild notion, and I didn’t take myself seriously at first.

Then, just to pass time I started to work out details, but just to pass time. The longer I worked on my plan the more it appeared possible. Also as my plot started to gel; I grew more hateful each day toward my lost partner. I would look out my bedroom window and stare transfixed at the glistening spears growing downward from the eaves of my house.

Then I did it. On the night of December 30, I left my house and walked around the side, and carefully snapped off an icicle. As I walked towards my car, I chipped off pieces with my pocket knife till there was a clean sharp point. I left the heat off in my car so that the 10° weather would keep my weapon sharp. I knocked at the door with my icy weapon behind my back. Dave answered the door.

“Well, if it isn’t Bob Johnson my old partner. Come on in.”

I tried to stay calm, “I just wanted to let you know that I’ve decided I’ve been foolish about holding a grudge against you for putting me out of business.”

He smiled, “Well now, isn’t that sweet of you? Now, tell me why you’re really here.”

I slowly made my way over to him and patted him on the back. “Well, let me tell you about it.”

My arm swung around with every ounce of force in my body.

He dropped.

I pitched my icy weapon into the fireplace and left without closing the door. I drove down the street and went into a bar and got very drunk.

The police questioned me and never suspected me after I told them our partnership had been dissolved.

Three days later I attended the funeral. I was the last person to leave the church. As I walked out, I stopped on the top step to watch the hearse drive away. I reached back to pull my collar up to shield myself from the cold wind when a cold crystal clear icicle fell from the eaves of the church and slid down my back.

p.13 Capital City Star
January 2, 1973
Robert C. Johnson died today in front of St. Peter’s Catholic
Church of a heart attack. He was attending the funeral of his
former business partner, David R. Brown, who was
mysteriously murdered earlier this week.

So there it is. My first great work of science fiction – written over 50 years ago. I hope you enjoyed it.

Mrs. Allen really liked the piece. She read several excerpts from some of the best stories in the class but she started with mine. She heaped praise upon the story especially focusing on the opening paragraph. She said to the class, “I’m going to read you this opening paragraph and I want you to guess which of your classmates wrote it.” She read the paragraph more than one of my classmates identified it as mine. I don’t know what it was about their opinion of me that led them to identify me but I couldn’t have been happier.

Then she pointed out that I had misspelled the word “always” with two Ls and looked at me and said, “You know better than that.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her I really didn’t. As you may recall from previous episodes I’m a terrible speller.

She concluded her review of my work by saying, “Know when to quit.” She thought that the news item at the end was unnecessary. I guess I wasn’t confident that the reader would know that the guy who killed someone with an icicle was killed by an icicle. I’ve tried to apply that advice about knowing when to quit when I write other stories but I think in essence she was saying trust your audience to get your point. That was the real lesson.

At the end of the semester, they give you a folder with all your homework in it so you can review your grades, but they want you to turn it back in so you can’t sell your term paper to someone next year. I kept my copy of the story and turned back the folder with everything else in it.

As I was reviewing the story just now, I probably would have rewritten a couple of sentences and fixed some other grammatical issues suggested by Grammarly. The two-month timeline in the story doesn’t make much sense. There are some other things that need fixing. In retrospect, I probably should have switched from first-person to third-person when I’m describing the icicle falling off the church.

Overall I think it’s pretty damn good for a 15-year-old author. I’m still quite proud of it over 50 years later.

Mrs. Allen’s written notes included, “Very clever story – good use of words, good introduction.” The grade was “A-”.

On the last page, she wrote, “I like the ‘irony of fate’ ending.” Then she attached a handwritten note as follows…

Chris,

This is a great story! You have a natural knack for telling a tale. This one is suspenseful and well organized. Your sentences and phrases are well formed.

The “better mouse trap” gimmick is worth repeating or at least mentioning, a second time.

About the title – Why not “A Partnership Dissolves”, using of course, a play on the word “dissolved.”

As for myself, I prefer the story to end with – “… our partnership had been dissolved.”

Knowing when to quit is a neat trick to learn.

Many thanks for sharing your story. You have the potential for a “selling” author.

Mrs. Allen

I remembered her saying to me in person that I could’ve shortened the ending and repeated the comment “know when to quit.” But I seem to recall in person she simply suggested leaving off the news article and ending it with the icicle down the back. But her notes say that it should end after the police questioned me. On the other hand, she liked the ironic ending so that speaks to leaving at least the irony and perhaps cutting the news article.

Mrs. Allen encouraged me to continue writing fiction but I never did until a few years ago. I’ve already talked about my successes writing nonfiction but for a variety of reasons, I didn’t think I could write fiction despite her encouragement. Let’s be honest… I stole the plot from something my dad told me about something he had read. Just because I know how to tell a story doesn’t mean I know how to make one up.

At some point in future episodes, I will talk about my next attempt to write fiction which didn’t begin until August 2020. The short version of that story is that I’ve written 10 pieces in the past three years and I’ve collected over 15 rejection emails from magazines and websites.

As I’ve explained before, I’m currently enrolled in a writing seminar and I’ve written another story that grew out of that class. Again it is a somewhat science-fiction murder mystery. It doesn’t have quite as catchy an opening paragraph as “Cold Chills” but I still like it. It’s a much longer piece at just under 10,000. After I get some more feedback from friends and family I’ll start submitting it and hopefully, I can put an end to this streak of rejection letters. If not, I’ll simply have to wait for my muse to inspire me again. Until then, I’ll keep writing biographical nonfiction and other commentary.

Next week, I’ll discuss more events of my senior year. As I teased at the end of the previous episode upcoming topics include: the senior prom, another town hall meeting, and more stories about my mentor Mr. Irwin. I will go on actual dates with (spoiler redaction). And I’ll relive the joys and fears of graduation.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and any other benefits I might come up with down the road. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my Patreon supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend. But mostly I appreciate it because it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience.

If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

Contemplating Life – Episode 28 – “A Haunting Melody”

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This week we continue reminiscing about my high school days traveling back and forth between a special education school and my regular neighborhood high school. I tell the tale of my friendship with a girl in my senior year.

Links of Interest

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq

YouTube Version

Shooting Script

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 28 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue reminiscing about my high school experiences attending a special education school and my neighborhood regular school Northwest High School. We are going to start off with a story from my senior year.

During my sophomore and junior years, I attended RobertsSchool for the Handicapped in the mornings and Northwest High School in the afternoon. However, this being my senior year, there were things that went on during the homeroom period that were important for seniors. There would be information about senior photos, class rings, renting your cap and gown, and other important information. The homeroom period was a short 15-minute period wedged between the third and fourth periods. Freshman through junior classes were assigned homeroom in various classrooms but for seniors, we all gathered in the cafeteria so they could make the same announcements to all of us.

So we reversed the schedule. I would take physics with Mr. Irwin during the first two periods with a lab during the second period every other day. I would then do English during third period followed by homeroom. Then my mom would pick me up and take me to Roberts for lunch, social studies, calculus, and typing. Then I would ride the bus home from Roberts at the end of the day.

I would arrive each morning at Northwest about 20-25 minutes before my first class. Students arriving early were not allowed to wander the halls. We were supposed to gather in the main lobby until a bell rang 10 minutes before the first class. Only then were you allowed to go to your locker or go upstairs. I never had a locker assigned to me at Northwest. I just carried my books in a bag on the back of my wheelchair. I wouldn’t have been able to operate the locker and I didn’t need it. I could also hang my coat on the back of my chair.

The bus would drop me off outside the music wing and I would proceed straight to the lobby. While there, waiting on classes to begin, I met a girl.

I was going to tell you the story of my friendship with her but I’ve already written that story three times as an assignment for the online writing seminar I’ve been attending for nearly a year. That program is presented by Hugo and Nebula award-winning author David Gerrold. He got his start as a science fiction writer when he wrote the script for the famous Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”. He also worked on the television series “Land of the Lost”, and the first season of “Star Trek: Next Generation”.

One of our writing assignments for David’s program was to write a scene or a small story using three different tenses. I begin by writing the story of my friendship with that girl in first person past tense. That’s the form I find most natural as a blogger, podcaster, and author of autobiographical magazine articles. In first person past tense, I’m telling you the story of something that happened in the past. That’s what I’ve been doing throughout this podcast. David noted that writing in the second person present tense is very rare for most fiction. However, it is the way you write a script or a screenplay. You are describing the action as it’s happening. I’d never attempted to write a script or screenplay so I decided to give that a try as part two of the assignment. For part three, I wrote third person past tense as if an omniscient outside observer is telling the story . The problem with that when telling a two-story (or let’s say mostly true) is that you have to figure out what the other person was thinking or feeling. In this instance, I didn’t have any idea how she experienced the events.

I’m going to read you the first person present tense version of the story. It’s my account of the story and although I have somewhat dramatized it, the basic facts are true. On my webpage for this podcast, I will include the second person script as well as the third person account. The third person version is highly fictionalized because I’m speculating about her thoughts, motives, and feelings.

So without further ado, here is my 99% true story that I call “A Hunting Melody”.

A Haunting Melody

by

Chris Young

According to the song by Irving Berlin, “A pretty girl is like a melody that haunts you night and day.” In this case, the inverse was not true. No boy in the high school would’ve described Melody as a pretty girl. Still, the memory of my brief friendship with her haunts me 50 years later.

It was early in my senior year of high school when I met her. The wheelchair bus from the special education school dropped me off at the regular neighborhood high school each morning about 20 minutes before my first class. Students arriving early were sequestered in the main lobby until the bell rang five minutes before the first class. Only then could you proceed through the rest of the building to go to your locker or your first-period classroom.

I would park my motorized wheelchair with my back to the wall of the lobby out of the way of the traffic of students gathering there. Most days I would blankly stare into space trying to wake up or I would engage in some girl-watching.

One day I noticed a young girl sitting on the steps across from me waiting for the bell to ring. We made brief eye contact and then both quickly turned away, each hoping that the other did not notice that we were looking. Peripheral vision is not very good at a distance of about 40 feet so the only way to see what the other person was doing was to look directly at them.

After several failed attempts to not catch each other looking, she stood up and started walking across the lobby toward me. Oh shit! She’s coming over to talk to me. What the fuck do I do now?

Her face featured bushy unkept eyebrows and lacked any positive features such as dimples or freckles that might have made the word “cute” applicable. She wore no makeup or jewelry. She had frizzy, shoulder-length, deep brown, naturally wavy hair pulled back from her face by a pink plastic headband. Her fuzzy pink sweater had barely perceptible curves where her breasts were. A plaid wool skirt that ended just above her knobby knees somehow managed to stay up despite the lack of any apparent curvature of her hips. Her white bobby socks and penny loafers did nothing to enhance the appearance of her legs.

With the hindsight of 50 years of perspective, I could accurately characterize her as exceedingly plain and homely. To my much less generous 17-year-old eyes she was just plain ugly.

I was anticipating the usual litany of questions about why I was in a wheelchair. I’ve always tried to be generous with my explanations. Many of my disabled friends responded to such queries with sarcasm and a huge chip on their shoulder. I always felt that attitude widened the gap between us and the larger community which was often ill-equipped to know what to think about us. People are genuinely curious even though they often express such curiosity with cringe-worthy condescension. Why confirm their fears with a snarky attitude?

“Do you need any help getting to your first class?” she inquired in a genuine tone of concern and helpfulness. It lacked the typical tone that implied, “You poor helpless thing… what can I do to ease your suffering in your horrible condition?”

Less than a second after she offered to help, the bell rang. I quickly responded, “No, I can get around on my own thanks.” I sped off in my power chair to my physics class, thereby escaping in a demonstration of my mobility. My only thought was how literally the phrase, “Saved by the bell” applied to the incident.

As I feared, the next day I was not so fortunate. Immediately upon my arrival, she crossed the lobby from her usual position sitting on the stairs and began engaging in small talk.

I learned her name was Melody. She was a 14-year-old freshman. I never knew if my status as a 17-year-old senior was a plus or minus in her calculations.

“What class do you have first period?” she asked.

“Senior physics,” I replied.

“Ewe… science is my worst subject. I just can’t get interested in it.”

Well, cross that off as a possible common interest. I could tutor her but if she doesn’t care about science I’m not wasting my time on her.

Sensing the kind and sincere person she was I suggested, “Yesterday, you asked if I needed help getting to class. I do have one thing you could do. I need help getting my coat off.” She accepted immediately and followed my directions carefully on how to extract me from my coat.

Having survived our second encounter without too much awkwardness, I didn’t approach the next day with the same level of dread. This time upon seeing me enter the lobby, she sprinted across the room sporting a broad smile expressing an eagerness to see me. She quickly proceeded to help me with my coat and exuded great joy at the accomplishment.

Holy shit this ugly freshman chick has a crush on me!

Careful not to give her any encouragement, I continued to engage in small talk. She complimented me on how smart I must be to take calculus and physics. Other than that and her daily enthusiasm to see me, I didn’t sense any more worrisome infatuation.

A few weeks into the relationship, I don’t recall if we were talking about Halloween or Thanksgiving when she explained her family doesn’t celebrate any holidays because they are Jehovah’s Witnesses. This includes not celebrating religious holidays such as Christmas or Easter as well as birthdays and other anniversaries. When I said I was Roman Catholic she didn’t say much but the expression on her face spoke, “Well… Nobody’s perfect.”

The religious revelation began to put pieces of the puzzle together. Her timidity, lack of self-confidence, and absence of fashion sense, makeup, or jewelry took on new meaning in the light of her restrictive, conservative religious upbringing.

I was already struggling with doubts as to why I continued to participate in the Catholic Church which seemed to lack relevance in my life. I was beginning to think that any faith was at odds with my rational, scientific mind. Being only marginally tolerant of my own religious traditions I found it hard to be sympathetic towards her faith that I felt to be so repressive of self.

I eventually found the courage to tell my disabled friends about Melody.

Because the high school had no elevator, it was impossible for me to take math or social studies classes upstairs. Each day at noon, my mother drove me across town to the special education high school where I would take classes that were inaccessible to me in the neighborhood high school. The wheelchair bus then brought me home each afternoon.

My friends at the special education school looked up to me in the same way small-town folks admire someone who escaped the tedium of a dead-end existence. Having no idea what it was like to attend pep rallies, homecoming festivities, and other extracurricular activities some of my buddies lived vicariously through the details I brought them.

When I revealed that a freshman girl seemed to be infatuated with me, they immediately asked, “Is she hot?”

“Unfortunately no. Quite the opposite.”

“How bad can it be?”

When I described her to them, they sought to help me salvage the situation with the advice, “Maybe she’s got good-looking friends she can introduce you to.” Another friend noted, “Yeah… The hot chicks sometimes hang out with the ugly ones so they look even better by comparison.”

I’m embarrassed to admit, that I took their advice and asked one of her better-looking friends for a phone number. Worst of all, I did so in front of Melody. I struck out multiple times.

Gradually, I began to enjoy the simple pleasure of my daily conversations with Melody. Just as I was beginning to appreciate her friendship, fate (or was it karma?) removed her from my life. When the spring semester began, our class schedules changed. She didn’t have a first-period class and so she could stay home an extra hour. She explained it didn’t make sense to come in early just to sit in the study hall.

I suggested perhaps we could meet at a school event. I knew better than to think her parents would let her go on a date with me or meet me at a school dance. Perhaps she could come to a basketball game and we could sit together. She said her parents would never allow her to go alone and definitely not with a boy. We had already established the fact that phone calls were out of the question.

Throughout the remainder of my final semester, I would occasionally see her between classes and we would smile and wave but we didn’t have time to talk as we rushed between classes.

At age 17, hormones, social conditioning, and a dogged determination not to lower my expectations in the face of my disability all conspired to blind me to the unimportance of physical appearance in a meaningful relationship. In the decades since then, I’ve beat myself up considerably for my selfish, cavalier, and disrespectful attitude toward her. I still carry her photo in my wallet lest I forget the lessons learned.

Multiple Google searches and Facebook searches have turned up many Melodys with her last name but none were her. Should such searches someday yield results, all I want to do is apologize for how poorly I treated her. At age 68, that apology occupies a prominent position on my bucket list.

Irving Berlin concludes his song with the words, “She will leave you and then come back again, A pretty girl is just like a pretty tune.” However apparently, when you fail to recognize her beauty, fate conspires that she doesn’t return. But the memories and the regrets linger forever.

-end-

 

So, that’s the story of what a jerk I was when I was 17 years old. I described it as 99% true. I think in real life, she didn’t take off my coat until about the third or fourth day. Also, I’m not really as haunted by the story as I let on. I do regret how I behaved and I would apologize to her should I ever see her again. But, I would hardly call it a bucket list item. Attempts to locate her on Facebook have been unsuccessful.

As I mentioned in the introduction, the screenplay version and the third person version are much more fictionalized by their very nature. I’m not going to read those here but you can find them on the Contemplating Life website.

Next week, I’ll discuss more events of my senior year. As I teased at the end of the previous episode upcoming topics include: the senior prom, another town hall meeting, and more stories about my mentor Mr. Irwin. I will go on actual dates with (spoiler redaction). And I’ll relive the joys and fears of graduation.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and any other benefits I might come up with down the road. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my Patreon supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend. But mostly I appreciate it because it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience.

If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

Other versions of “A Haunting Melody”

Contemplating Life – Episode 27 – “Prom and Prejudice”

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This week we continue reminiscing about my junior year of high school traveling back and forth between a special education school and my regular neighborhood high school.

Links of Interest

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq

YouTube version

Shooting Script

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 27 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue reminiscing about my junior year of high school days traveling back and forth between a special education school and my regular neighborhood high school.

In my junior year in high school, I was 16 years old That’s the age when one becomes eligible for a driver’s license. It’s also the age when dating becomes a major part of social life. Despite the “normalcy” of attending a regular high school, my inability to drive a car severely limited my experience of difficult teenage years. Even if I had what could be considered a reasonable chance of persuading a girl to go out with me, the prospect of having my parents drive me on a date was not at all appealing. I also couldn’t envision my parents allowing a girl to drive our wheelchair van. The issue was moot anyway because I never found a girl with whom I figured I had half a chance at success.

In my neighborhood, there was a girl whose name escapes me but at one point she stated she wanted to be my girlfriend. I think I was about 15 and she was 16. Her tone of voice made it obvious she was making fun of me and was not the least bit serious. I just told her I didn’t believe her, it wasn’t funny, I did nothing to deserve her cruelty, and she should go fuck off.

Decades later, I’ve fantasized about what I wish I had said. I wish I’d told her that she was nothing but a ditzy blonde. I wanted to say that because she was so hot looking, she would probably attract some football player who would’ve wished he had an IQ approaching 100 (assuming he even knew what that meant). He would blow out his knees in the senior homecoming game, never go to college, get a job in a warehouse or as a truck driver, keep her barefoot and pregnant, come home drunk, and beat the crap out of her. I would explain that in contrast, I was college-bound with a career as a computer programmer. I would likely make a six-figure salary and I was capable of being the most loving and devoted companion she could ever wish for.

I didn’t exactly fulfill the destiny that I imagined for myself in those days. I did go to college, earn a BS degree in computer sciences, and get a decent job. I worked for Indiana University and never made much money. My salary of $11,700 per year in 1977 Is the equivalent of $ 58,700 in today’s money. Had my disability not cut my career short and had I worked in the private sector instead of for the University, I could have easily made six figures eventually. I had to quit my job after two years because I lacked the stamina to work a 40-hour week. Even though I still am a bit bitter towards her for thinking she could toy with my feelings, I hope my vision of her future didn’t exactly come true for her sake. I have no idea what happened to her after she moved out of the neighborhood.

I continued to have feelings for my junior high crush Rosie Shewman. Although she did go out a couple of times with some other guys, she never was in a serious relationship throughout high school. That gave me hope that eventually, she would reconsider our relationship.

You may recall in Episode 22 where I read my award-winning article “The Reunion” I recounted the story of a “rap session” we had at Roberts. Note that we weren’t spitting words to a beat. A rap session meant we had a sort of town hall meeting in which people express their feelings. I made a big speech about the depression we were all feeling about dealing with a disability during our teenage years.

I had another opportunity to discuss life with a disability during a rap session at Northwest.

There were racial tensions at Northwest High School in the 1970s. US District Court Judge Hugh S. Dillon issued a series of rulings that Indianapolis Public Schools was guilty of racial segregation in violation of the famous Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. He ruled that the violation was de jure which means “by law” not just by circumstance. Historically, IPS had forced all black students to attend Crispus Attucks High School. That, along with other policies such as real estate redlining, caused a migration of much of the black population to concentrate in certain neighborhoods. Even though IPS longer forced segregation, the damage had been done. He also ruled that a contributing factor was the so-called Unigov initiative. Unigov was legislation that merged Indianapolis city and Marion County governments but excluded the merger of IPS with suburban Marion County school districts. The judge also cited the failure to establish public housing in suburban areas. IPS was forced to reassign staff and to bus children within the district to achieve better racial balance.

In an effort to ease racial tension and create positive dialogue, all of the English classes at Northwest took time off from the regular curriculum to have a sort of town hall discussion of racial issues. Everyone had to take some sort of English class all four years so having it during English insured everyone participated. Teachers invited students to share their feelings about race honestly and openly.

I thought the session conducted by my English teacher, I don’t recall her name, went really well. Black and white students admitted their biases without the discussion turning nasty.

At one point, the topic of interracial dating arose. In those days, it was quite rare. There was opposition to it expressed on both sides. Some said they wouldn’t consider an interracial relationship for fear of backlash. Why bother exposing yourself to that stigma? If you got married, your children would suffer as well.

Then someone uttered the cliché excuse, “I guess it’s okay if they really love one another.” I thought that was ridiculous. How do you get to that point? Except for fairytale love at first sight, how do you fall in love with someone if you aren’t allowed to date them, get to know them, and then potentially fall in love? Why is it okay to date someone of your own race if you aren’t in love but have to be in love for an interracial relationship?

That’s when I spoke up. I said, “We’ve had people here today honestly and openly admit prejudices and biases. But I have a question for you. I want to reassure you that no one’s feelings will be hurt by how you respond. You’ve talked about the difficulties of interracial dating but my question is, ‘Would you date someone in a wheelchair?’ I think there are prejudices and biases toward handicapped people.”

I still cherish the approving smile on the teacher’s face when I said that. I don’t know if she knew it before, but she knew it then… this is why Chris is in this school. This is why he needs to be here not just for him but for everyone else in the room.

One of the girls was curious about how that would work logistically. She correctly assumed that I couldn’t drive. I explained I had a wheelchair van. I wasn’t sure if my parents would allow my date to drive it. Although having my parents as a chauffeur/chaperone wasn’t ideal, it was an option.

One girl hesitantly and awkwardly raised the issue of a physical relationship. When you date someone, even casually, there is still the issue in the back of your mind that this might be someone you want to spend the rest of your life with. Long-term, she would want to know if the guy could be a husband in every sense of the word.

My reply was, “That’s a legitimate concern. And it’s something that a handicapped person might have to address earlier in the relationship than you might normally discuss it. Let me just say that handicapped people have to have a very strong will to deal with everyday life. And as the saying goes, ‘If there’s a will, there’s a way.’”

One of the guys brought up another cliché scenario. “Don’t you hear these stories all the time about guys coming back from Vietnam with an injury and they end up falling in love with their nurse or physical therapist and getting married? They make it work.”

I tried not to laugh and said, “Yeah but there’s a big difference in the relationship between a patient and a nurse versus a guy and some girl in his English class. This goes back to that statement someone made earlier. ‘It’s okay if they really love one another.’ But how do you get from here to there whether you’re dealing with a handicap or a racial difference? If it’s not okay to date someone unless you really love them, how did you get to that point?”

They didn’t have an answer to either question. I allowed them to move on by thanking them for their honest replies and saying I just wanted to give them something to think about that prejudice and bias take many forms.

The teacher continued to smile. I wish I had run into her maybe years later and asked her what she was thinking that day.

It didn’t result in any of the girls coming up to me afterward and offering a date. But that wasn’t the point. Maybe they would look differently at the next guy or girl they met in a wheelchair.

The folks at Roberts did their best to give us social opportunities. We had a class picnic every year that was reasonably fun.

There was a balcony porch just outside the high school classrooms. We persuaded them to allow us to go outside during nice weather to get a break from the monotony of having nothing to do for half of the day. Eventually, they obtained a picnic table and we could sit there and actually do some studying in a better environment.

Some of the guys would smoke out there. Others like myself would serve as a lookout. If a teacher came, we would signal and they would throw their butt over the railing. There was probably a huge pile of cigarette butts in the bushes below. The teachers admonished us that the lookouts were just as guilty as the offenders. Our attitude was, “Yeah so what? Catch us if you can.”

The biggest attempt to create a normal high school experience was that we had a prom each spring. It was a single event for both juniors and seniors. Because that only involved about a dozen people at best, recent alumni were also invited. Add to that most people brought a date some of which were outside the school it made for a reasonably sized little party if not a massive event.

For my junior year, I didn’t want to go. I didn’t have a date. The excuse I gave was that everyone would be getting their picture taken with a date and I didn’t want to be left out. Rosie said that if that was my only concern, she would agree that I could have my picture taken with her. She didn’t have a boyfriend but her official “date” ore junior year was some goofy kid named Richard who also didn’t have a date. It was clear she was only considering him as her date because she felt sorry for him. They arrived separately and went home separately. It was nothing but a photo up for him as well even though she called him her date.

The teachers spent hours for days decorating the auditorium with crêpe paper streamers. We had some sort of background for the photos and there was a theme but I don’t recall what it was. They hired a band which was a fairly lame garage band made up of some friends of Alan Whitney. I seem to recall that Alan sat in with the band to sing a couple of numbers.

There were snacks, punch, cake, and finger food available. It wasn’t a terrible experience since it was kind of fun to get dressed up and have a little party to celebrate the end of the school year. But overall it was pretty lame

The photographer for the event was a teacher Mr. Ball. He taught what we called the “special ed” class. It seems strange that in a school that was entirely special ed, we singled out one class and called that. It was a non-grade program for kids with both physical and intellectual disabilities. Anyway, that teacher had professional photography equipment that he used as a hobby or a side business. It was a large-format camera with professional light stands and it all looked pretty expensive. He seemed to know what he was doing. I got my photo taken with Rosie. We were first in line. When he developed the film, he couldn’t find our photo. The only reason I went to the damn thing was to get my picture taken and I didn’t even get that. Oh well, there’s always next year.

Next week, I’ll talk about my senior year which was much more fun than my junior year. We will have yet another prom, another town hall meeting, and more stories about my mentor Mr. Irwin. I will go on actual dates with (spoiler redaction). And I’ll relive the joys and fears of graduation.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and any other benefits I might come up with down the road. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my Patreon supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend. But mostly I appreciate it because it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience.

If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

Contemplating Life – Episode 26 – “Academic Best of Times; Worst of Times”

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This week we continue reminiscing about my high school days traveling back and forth between a special education school and my regular neighborhood high school.

Links of Interest

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq

YouTube version

Shooting Script

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 26 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue reminiscing about my high school days traveling back and forth between a special education school and my regular neighborhood high school.

During my sophomore year which was the first year that I split between Roberts Handicapped School and Northwest High School, the schedule was easy to arrange because all of my classes at Roberts were already scheduled in the morning. All I had to do was skip the ones that I was taking at Northwest and take them in the afternoon there.

I was concerned that perhaps the teachers at Roberts would have a hard time accommodating my scheduling needs for my junior and senior years. It was probably a very difficult task to schedule 30 kids ranging from freshmen through seniors into 24 class periods between two teachers. Somehow they made it all work out.

I took math, history, and bookkeeping at Roberts in the morning. At Northwest, I would take science and English. The question was, which science? Normally a science major would take chemistry in their junior year. But the chemistry labs were all upstairs. The lab tables had a sink in them. There was specialized chemistry equipment in the room. It was the one upstairs class that actually was impossible to move downstairs. You can teach math and social studies anywhere and I was always disappointed they wouldn’t move those classes for me.

I wanted to take physics but it was strictly for seniors. I couldn’t convince them to let me take it in my junior year. The only two options were “Earth Science” and “Physical Science”. Although I had a mild interest in meteorology having always been fascinated by tornadoes, most of Earth Science was geology rather than climate. I didn’t care about that. Physical Science was a freshman physics class for non-science majors. You had to have at least one year of science even if you weren’t a science major and this was the course you took.

It was pretty much a junior high science class rather than at the high school level. The vast majority of the kids in the class were not exactly academically inclined. They were taking the class because they had to. For many of them, their academic skills were barely sufficient to get through it.

The grading scale was adapted to allow these non-gifted students to squeak through with a passing grade. It was based on a points system. Tests and quizzes were worth a certain number of points. Lab reports earned points as did homework assignments.

To get an “A” you only needed 80% of the available points. 70% would earn you a “B”, 60% a “C”, and 50% a “D”. On average, two or three kids each semester failed to get a passing grade at 50% of the required work. I discovered that I could get full points or nearly full points on tests, quizzes, and lab work and completely skip all the homework and still get 80% for an “A”. If for some reason I blew a quiz or got less than full marks on a test I could do homework and make up the points.

If there was ever a case of a class that failed to challenge an academically gifted student it was this one. I did not belong in that class.

The teacher was one of my favorites of all time – Mr. Stan Irwin. Having him as a teacher was the only thing that made the class tolerable. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant. I had a lab partner who was capable of getting As and Bs in the class so he was the closest thing I had to a peer in the room. When the teacher would ask a question and my hand would go up, I could see that he was ignoring me most of the time. He knew that I knew the answer. He wanted to see who else in the class knew the answer. When he would ask the question and get nothing but blank stares from the rest of the room then he would call on me.

I don’t know how much I really learned in the class but the lab experiments were definitely fun. I think my favorite was doing electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen and then lighting a flame and igniting the hydrogen. When we did it, it was from a small glass bottle it made a nice satisfying popping sound. Mr. Irwin also created hydrogen from some chemical reaction and filled up a balloon. When he set fire to that we had a really nice fireball.

He had me hang out after class one day for a heart-to-heart talk. Apparently, I was doing a really bad job of hiding my disdain for the lack of academic prowess of my classmates. He approached the topic very sensitively. He wasn’t chewing me out. He was being sympathetic and offering me advice as a mentor when he said, “You know and I know that you don’t belong in this class but those are the cards we’ve been dealt. Next year, when I have you in physics and you want to go toe-to-toe showing off your intellect with classmates who are the quality of your buddy Dennis Adams then go ahead. Bring it on. Show them what you’ve got all out. But when you’re in here, show some compassion. Let me put it to you this way… If some of the football players were always up in your face flaunting their physical abilities and mocking you, you wouldn’t like it very much.”

Wow, he had me on that one. I apologized and I thanked him. He had explained it in terms I could precisely understand. I had always liked the guy but now I felt a real bond. Fortunately, I never experienced any such harassment from the jocks but I knew I wouldn’t have liked it if I had. It wasn’t so much that I made fun of the other kids, but I did kinda look down on them.

While writing this, I was going to say that if Mr. Irwin had asked me to throw a chess match the way my junior high mentor Mr. Kohl had done, I would have done it. While writing that sentence, it occurred to me that’s exactly what Irwin was asking. He wanted me to dial back my intellectual ego for the sake of someone else’s feelings.

Irwin has suggested I could intellectually spar with people like my friend Dennis Adams. We mentioned Dennis briefly in the last episode. He was one of the students who hung out with me in the science department office before my first class. All these years later, I can confidently say that Dennis is the most academically gifted person I have ever known. He would have been valedictorian of his class but he got a “C” in gym class his freshmen year and it killed his GPA.

Dennis said his guidance counselor kept giving him different standardized achievement tests and IQ tests trying to find one that Dennis would score below the 99th percentile.

He would write love notes to his girlfriend describing their relationship like the plot of a sine wave that has its ups and downs. He declared he wanted “Pi over 2 for you forever.” If you aren’t nerdy enough to get that, a sine wave peaks at Pi divided by 2. He wanted their relationship to stay at that maximum level. It doesn’t get much nerdier them that. Apparently, he got his wish. Over 50 years later he’s been married to the same woman he fell in love with in high school.

You would think with his academic prowess he could’ve written his own ticket to any school in the country. In the end, however, he landed at IUPUI funded by the Indiana Department of Vocational Rehabilitation. That was the agency I planned to use for my college finances. What I’ve not told you yet is that Dennis also had a disability. He had a rather severe hearing impairment and wore hearing aids.

Dennis wasn’t just a good friend. He changed my life for the better by setting me on my career path as a computer programmer.

At an early age, I had no idea such a career awaited me. I wanted to be an astronomer. I mentioned in an earlier episode that my fascination with the night sky sparked my early interest in science. It was also the height of the space race and the eventual moon landing in 1969. That also led to my passion for science fiction. So astronomy was a natural choice. I presumed that you could sit in a wheelchair and look through a telescope just fine. I got my first telescope for my 13th birthday. I really enjoyed looking at the craters of the moon, the Galilean moons of Jupiter, and the March 1970 partial solar eclipse.

I developed concerns about my chosen career path when I saw a photo in a book that showed an astronomer who had climbed up into the structure of a giant telescope to change a photographic plate. I tried to dismiss it saying, “Oh well, I’ll just hire somebody to do that for me or maybe get a grad student to do it.” I didn’t think about what I would do when I was a grad student and it was my job to do that dirty work. Nor did I think too much about the fact that there are no significant astronomy programs here in Indianapolis. I think Butler University has one and they do have a small observatory. Butler is a private school and Voc Rehab will only pay state school tuition or up to the state school amount for a private university.

These days, technological advances would make it easier for someone like me to be an astronomer. Telescopes use digital cameras for imaging. Astronomers do a lot of computer programming to analyze their data. You don’t have to be physically present at the telescope to do your work – especially if your instrument is Hubble or the JWST.

The thing that finally made me give up on my dream of becoming an astronomer was an assignment I had in eighth grade. We were supposed to investigate what we wanted to be when we grew up and what it would take to do that. I learned that most astronomers have a Ph.D. That required four years of college and another three or four years to get your master’s and doctorate. While spending that much time in school wasn’t appealing, I figured I could put up with that. The thing that scared me away was writing a master’s thesis and a doctoral dissertation.

I hate research! I hate research with a passion. Book reports, term papers, index cards full of footnotes… all of that is kryptonite to me. I like learning for the sake of knowledge but regurgitating that knowledge in a nitpicky formal way rather than just showing off like a know-it-all… Not for me.

At one point, I figured I would end up in law school. There were no physical requirements except perhaps stamina which I had sufficiently at that young age. It would take lots of years of postgrad work but I thought I was up to the challenge. Even though you don’t do a dissertation there still is a lot of research and writing but it’s a different kind. I liked the idea of making logical arguments to prove my point. The pay would be good. And I have a passion for the law and politics. Years of watching my mom as a disability advocate and the work she had done as a lobbyist were very inspiring to me.

All plans for law school flew out the window once I discovered computers. I will be eternally grateful to Dennis for setting me on that path.

The Northwest High School math department taught a class in computer programming. They had a classic ASR-33 teletype machine complete with the paper tape punch and reader on the side. It was connected via a dedicated phone line to a timesharing Honeywell computer located in the Indianapolis Public Schools’ main offices downtown. I seem to recall it was a Honeywell 200 but I just researched that on Wikipedia and it didn’t mention timesharing capabilities so I might be wrong about that.

The class taught the BASIC programming language.BASIC n all caps. BASIC is an acronym for Beginners All-purpose Systematic Instruction Code. It was the primary language in those days for teaching computer programming.

My problem was, the teletype was located in the math department office which was upstairs. Dennis got me a book and I taught myself the basics of BASIC. He agreed that if I wanted to write a small program, he would go up there and type it in and run it for me. I created a program to track statistics for an intramural basketball team that my friends in the neighborhood were in. I think we only ended up putting in the stats for one or two games but at least it got me some experience in programming.

That wasn’t good enough for Dennis. He wanted me to have the opportunity to have hands-on experience with the machine. He thought about recruiting some help to carry me up the steps for a day so I could use the teletype. There was a better solution. If I couldn’t come to the teletype, the teletype had to come to me. The machine used a special, always-on, dedicated phone line. If it had been a dial-up or had an acoustic coupler, that would’ve been easy.

Dennis noted that the phoneline was very long. It was sitting coiled up on the floor in the back of the machine. He figured out that we could run the cable out the window of the math department office upstairs and back in the window of the home economics department which was right below it downstairs. He got permission from both department heads and one day with the help of a friend they carried the teletype machine downstairs and connected it in the home-ec department with the cords running out the windows..

For about an hour, I had my first experience actually operating a computer. We played a couple of classic computer games such as tic-tac-toe and submarine warfare. I don’t think I had yet gotten my basketball stats program ready yet. I tried some classic exercises in using an interpreted computer language such as typing PRINT “Hello world” at the READY prompt and having it print the words back to me.

I was late getting to my science class with Mr. Irwin. I asked Dennis, “Don’t we need a hall pass or a note from the math department explaining why I’m late?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll walk in with you. Irwin knows me and we will just say we got tied up doing something for the math department.”

Dennis accompanied me back to my class. He didn’t say anything when we walked in. He just walked through classroom, went to the storage closet and then out the other door of the adjoining classroom without any explanation. He left me hanging there! Feeling incredibly awkward, I had to tell Mr. Irwin that Dennis and I got tied up on a math project. Irwin accepted that and never asked for any further explanation so it turned out okay. I forgave Dennis for abandoning me. He’s too good a friend not to forgive but as you can tell, 50+ years later I still haven’t forgotten. Anyway…

I have a great fondness for that old ASR-33 teletype. We had about a dozen of them at IUPUI when I first started there two years later. History tells us that Bill Gates had one and used it to write a BASIC language interpreter for the Altair personal computer in 1975. Gates didn’t have an Altair computer to test the software. He had written an Intel 8008 emulator that ran on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 mainframe at Harvard. Until he and Paul Allen delivered the product to MITS headquarters, makers of the Altair computer, it had never actually run on that machine.

I’ve fantasized a lot about that situation. I was a computer science student at IUPUI in 1975 and I had access to a DEC PDP 10 and ASR-33 teletype machines. I’m confident that Dennis and I could have done the same thing as Gates and Allen if we had thought of it. Our lives would’ve been much different. I’ll discuss that fantasy and others in future episodes.

Dennis was a year ahead of me. After I graduated high school and became a computer science major at IUPUI we would continue our friendship there. I’ll have more stories to tell about our college days together and our continued friendship over the years.

I recall on the last day of school my junior year… Dennis’ senior year as he and I exited the building via the science wing door he shouted rather loudly a mathematical cheer he had taught me.

E to the X, dy/dx. E to the X/dx. Cosine, secant, tangent, sine… 3.14159. T-square, slip-stick, boogie factor 2… Northwest high farewell to you! Although we might have thrown in an expletive in there somewhere.

A brief PS to this episode…

After I initially recorded it, I dug out some old high school yearbooks so I could insert some photos YouTube version of this podcast. I found this picture in my 1972 yearbook. It shows Dennis appearing on TV in the “Exercise in Knowledge” quiz show for high school students. He signed my yearbook over that photo. It says, “Chris, What can I say? We have had many interesting talks. Many interesting programs! Hope your helper next year is more dependable. Dennis C. Adams”

That shows what kind of a guy he is. He knew I was counting on him to help me with various things and he was disappointed in his own performance. I couldn’t have asked for a better friend when we were in high school.

So, Dennis, you are a very good helper. There was no one more dependable. Even if you did abandon me as we came back to my grasp after the computer project 🙂

Many thanks to you for all these years of friendship and for setting me on my life’s career as a computer programmer.

Next week, I’ll have more stories to tell about my junior year at Northwest.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and any other benefits I might come up with down the road. It’s not that I’m desperate for money, but a little extra income sure could help.

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I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

Contemplating Life – Episode 25 – “Ironsides Goes to High School”

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This week we are going to resume talking about my experiences growing up attending a special education school and how I transitioned to attending a regular high school part-time.

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq

YouTube version

Shooting Script

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 25 of Contemplating Life.

This week we are going to resume talking about my experiences growing up attending a special education school and how I transitioned to attending a regular high school part-time. Some of this story you’ve already heard in bits and pieces in previous episodes as well as in my reading of my award-winning magazine feature titled “The Reunion”. But we’re going to add some detail and context in this episode.

For many kids, the transition from junior high to high school is a difficult one. In eighth grade, you are the “upperclassman” of the junior high. In high school, as a freshman, you are at the bottom of the pecking order. In a very small school like James E. Roberts School for the Handicapped that’s not such a big issue. These are kids you have been going to school with for perhaps nine years. You already know the sophomores and juniors because they were in 7th and 8th when you were in 6th. It’s not like you were moving to a different building and mixing with a bunch of kids you’d never known.

There were somewhere between 25-30 kids in the entire high school program at Roberts. During my freshman year, I was assigned to Mrs. Harriet Bartlett’s homeroom. There was a row of wheelchair desks along the back wall facing the wall. I would sit at that desk whenever I wasn’t in class. There was always a class going on at the front of the room around a large table. When it was time for one of my classes, I would either go to that front table or to the other high school room with Mr. Sam Price.

Mrs. Bartlett taught math, French, and bookkeeping. Mr. Price taught English and social studies as well as sophomore biology which was the only science class available.

Freshman algebra was no challenge to me because it didn’t require any basic arithmetic. As I mentioned in earlier episodes, I can do complex mathematics but simple addition and subtraction is sometimes a challenge. I had no trouble mastering the logic of deriving algebraic equations and I enjoyed graphing functions. I also had no difficulty with English. We didn’t have spelling words anymore. Again you may recall I suck at spelling. I don’t exactly recall what classes I took. I think perhaps the school nurse taught a health class.

I took French but I was never any good at it. I got an “A” for the first six weeks, a “B” for the second six weeks, a “C” for the third six weeks, and straight “Ds” thereafter for two years.

I sang in the choir with Mrs. Atkins who we mentioned extensively in a previous episode. We also had a part-time art teacher who came into the building one or two days a week and I took an art class.

I remember one art project where we cut an abstract shape out of a piece of cardboard and then used it as a stencil and spray-painted Day-Glo colors around it. I couldn’t handle spray cans so the art teacher did it for me. She would twist and turn the shape in different orientations and spray different colors. It looked completely abstract to me. I thought the Day-Glo spray paint gave it a bit of a psychedelic look.

It turns out the teacher had something up her sleeve. She entered my creation, which was actually about 75% hers, in something called the 500 Festival Art Contest. It won a blue ribbon. We took a field trip to where all of the artwork was on display including my ribbon-winning entry. I don’t recall where it was. It might’ve been the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Anyway, my creation was expertly mounted and framed. This was the first I had seen it in such a condition. She had given it the title “Radiant Madonna”. It took me a while staring at it to get the point. When I was making it, I was holding it horizontally in landscape format. She turned it vertically in portrait format and if you looked at it weirdly, it vaguely resembled a mother holding a baby.

Let me make it plain, that was not my artistic intent. I’m not sure Picasso would have seen the outline of a Madonna it was so abstract. But the judges thought it was brilliant. I got the blue ribbon but I didn’t get to keep the artwork. They auctioned it off and the proceeds went to arts programs. I’m not sure what they got for it. All of this was without my permission.

The art room wasn’t much more than a supply closet with a table in the middle. The only other interesting thing that ever happened there was Alan Whitney made out with Cheryl Fayette one time when the art teacher accidentally left the door unlocked on a day we didn’t have class.

I mentioned previously that in order for two teachers to try to teach an entire high school curriculum from freshman through senior years, they had to divide the day into 12 periods of 30 minutes each. A typical high school class period runs 45 minutes and I think in some schools even an hour. Because class periods were just 30 minutes, if you took 5 classes plus lunch that meant you still had 6 periods with nothing to do.

To fill the time, I spent a lot of time reading sci-fi books and even attempted to write my own sci-fi story. I had no plot. No outline. No characters established. No idea where it was going. Somehow I thought you wrote books the same way that you read them. You just started out and the ideas would come to you in order. Some people might do that but it didn’t work for me. I wrote about two pages and then didn’t know what to do. I gave up quickly.

I really don’t remember much more about my freshman year.

When my sophomore schedule came out, all of my classes were before lunch. That meant I was going to spend three straight hours in the afternoon with absolutely nothing to do except try not to get in trouble and ignore the class going on at the front of the room. The biology class was going to be nothing but a textbook course with no lab equipment and no animal dissection.

My mom was furious at the substandard education I was getting and I wasn’t too happy about it either.

She arranged a meeting between her and the principal or vice principal at my neighborhood high school – Northwest High School just a few blocks from my house. The ground floor was wheelchair accessible but there was no elevator or ramp to the second floor. Certain departments were exclusively on the second floor – most notably all social studies and math. Biology and physics were split between both floors but chemistry was exclusively upstairs where they had special lab equipment. English was split between floors. Although the library was on the ground floor, there were 2 steps you had to go down to get to it. I would have liked to have been able to access that. It turned out, I could get everything I needed for term papers and other homework at the local public library.

While I could understand why it was impossible to move the chemistry classes downstairs because the room was specially fitted with chemistry equipment, it would not have caused any problem to move one math and one social studies class downstairs each semester. Mom couldn’t persuade them to do that and so I would not be able to attend Northwest full-time.

They were also concerned about what I would do in the lunchroom and how I would go to the bathroom. Bathroom issues probably deserve an entirely separate podcast episode. We probably could have worked out the bathroom issues as well as getting someone to help me with lunch. I was able to feed myself. I would have just needed someone to carry a tray for me. The school wasn’t convinced I could handle it.

The only compromise we could reach was for me to attend Roberts in the morning and take whatever courses were inaccessible at Northwest. In the afternoon at Northwest, I would take whatever was available on the ground floor. It wouldn’t require any changes at Roberts because all of my classes were already in the morning. I would just skip the ones I would be taking at Northwest.

The next issue was transportation. I could ride the bus as usual from my house to Roberts in the morning. The school district refused to transport me from Roberts to Northwest at midday. So my mom agreed to drive me every day in our van. After morning classes followed by lunch at Roberts, I would go to the bathroom there with the assistance of the janitor who normally helped me. Then mom would drive 7 miles from our house to Roberts, pick me up, and drive 7 miles back to Northwest. The school bus was coming through my neighborhood at the end of the day anyway because it had to bring home my friend Mark Herron who lived right around the corner for me.

So, approximately two weeks into the semester we implemented the plan.

There was a major misunderstanding about the afternoon bus trip at first. The first day I waited a very long time for the bus to pick me up at Northwest and bring me back home. Rather than go to Northwest in the middle of their round as they came through my neighborhood, they finished the entire round and then came back to Northwest and picked me up to bring me home.

We pointed out how ridiculous that was. We explained to them that the trip from Northwest to my house was not out of their way and they could do it in the middle of the route. After that initial hiccup, the bus transportation went okay.

Mom made that trip every day for three years with two exceptions. She had some back trouble one time and needed a few days off. She was also pregnant with my sister Karen during my junior year and needed a few days. The school district agreed that we could use the bus if we would pay the bus driver Mr. Lewis to drive it for the midday trip.

I took French, geometry, trigonometry, and choir in the morning at Roberts and then took Biology with a biology lab followed by English at Northwest.

There were some timing issues to work out. I would arrive at Northwest about halfway through the period before my first class. I had to be somewhere not just roaming the halls so they had me sit in the science department office. Biology class had what they called swing periods. There were two biology classes that occupied three periods of the schedule. One of the classes met fifth and sixth periods. The other class met sixth and seventh periods. That middle period alternated between lab and study hall. The study hall they used was upstairs so on the alternate days when my group didn’t have a lab, I would go back to the science department office.

They always had a volunteer student in the office throughout the day to answer the phone, take messages, and help out any of the science teachers who needed help setting up experiments or cleaning out the storage rooms. The first semester there was a guy named Jim something. We got to be friends but not really close. For my second semester, the other student in the science office was Dennis Adams and we became very good buddies. I will talk much more about him in later episodes.

I had no difficulty adapting to regular, non-special ed, classes. I did so well in biology the first semester that they transferred me to AP Biology for the second semester. That was a mistake on my part. I had tried so hard to impress everyone that I excelled too much. AP Biology was really hard and I was lucky to get a B for the semester. After that, I always was careful to dial it back a bit so I wouldn’t get AP placement again.

Back to the scheduling issues… Once we had the bus running a decent route, I still had about 20 minutes after the last period before the bus would arrive. Either Dennis, one of my other classmates, or a teacher would help me get my coat on. During nice weather, I would wait outside. When it was cold, I would sit just inside the door of the science wing and I could see the bus pull in the parking lot. By the time they got parked and got the wheelchair lift unfolded, I was out there waiting.

There were some afterschool activities such as chess club and AV club that met after school. I tried hanging out with them for 15 or 20 minutes while waiting on the bus and occasionally I would lose track of time and the bus would be waiting on me. There wasn’t anything I could do in AV club but I was just fascinated by the videotape machines and I had them show me how they worked. This was in the days before the VCR was invented. I think I only went there maybe twice. There really wasn’t time to play chess either.

One of the major reasons disabled kids were isolated at Roberts school was that they thought we would be safer there. As I already illustrated in one of the early episodes, disabled kids could be just as nasty to one another and tease one another about their disability as anybody else. At Northwest, I never had anybody even come close to making fun of me or saying anything cringe-worthy.

One time, I was going down the hall and overheard a couple of black guys talking and one of them said, “Get a load of Ironsides over there.” He was referring to the TV show “Ironside” which was the fictional story of Chief of Detectives Robert Ironside played by Raymond Burr. The back story was that he had been shot in the line of duty and became a paraplegic but continued to serve the police department in a wheelchair. He was assisted by a young black man who drove him around in a wheelchair van. The show ran for 195 episodes from 1967-1975 and was quite popular.

Anyway, when the guy called me Ironsides (with an “S”) I thought it was cool. Of course, the name Ironside was sort of a joke because the TV character’s wheelchair (and mine) had metal sides. Anyway, I stopped and turned to him and said, “You can call me that if you want.” He turned to his buddies laughing and sounding like Eddie Murphy when he said, “You hear what he say? He say we can call him Ironsides.” He then turned to me, “You cool man… You cool.” I don’t think anybody except that one guy ever called me that but I liked the nickname.

The only other sketchy thing that ever happened was while I was outside waiting for the bus one day. A clean-cut-looking white guy struck up a conversation with me. He opened a large textbook with pages cut out of the center. Inside this hidden compartment was a bunch of drugs. He asked me if I was interested. I told him, “My body is already messed up. I can’t afford to mess up my mind. It’s the only thing I got going for me.”

He replied, “That’s cool man. No pressure. Take care.” He walked away and I never saw him again. I never felt unsafe during that incident or any other time for the three years I attended.

While I appreciated that I was getting a good education and I enjoyed the academic challenges it afforded me, the real value was that I was living a genuine high school experience. I was making new friends on a regular basis. Keep in mind I had been going to school with the same bunch of kids for many years – some since kindergarten. I didn’t have many opportunities to make new friends. By the time I got to high school many of my Roberts friends had moved on to regular school.

The opportunities for girl-watching were phenomenal even though I never tried to date anyone. We had a bookstore where you could go by a notebook or a pad of paper as well as discount tickets to the school sporting events. We had pep rallies in the gymnasium. The halls were decorated with posters during homecoming. These were all experiences I had never had and never could’ve had at Roberts. Sure I made the move for academic reasons but the intangibles are what made the experience most enjoyable.

I tried to explain to my friends back at Roberts what they were missing but I don’t think they really understood. They knew they had it easy and they weren’t interested in giving that up even if they could. Eventually, as I kept telling stories about what was going on in the real high school, I think some of them grew to live through me vicariously. Of course, the guys were most interested in my descriptions of the girl-watching availability. They didn’t bother to ask if I had a girlfriend. It was a foregone conclusion that I probably didn’t. And they were right. That’s not to say that I wasn’t friendly with girls. I had a girl for a lab partner in biology and we got along okay. But I knew there weren’t any dating possibilities. We will talk more about that in the later episodes.

Overall, the experiment was a success. Apart from some initial minor glitches, my first year as a sophomore at Northwest was educational, enjoyable, and uneventful.

Next week we will talk about my junior year at Northwest and some unfortunate academic choices that were made for me.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and any other benefits I might come up with down the road. It’s not that I’m desperate for money, but a little extra income sure could help.

Many thanks to my Patreon supporters. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience.

Recently I was sharing the podcast with one of my home health aides. We listened to it while she was getting me dressed and into my wheelchair. I noticed that at the end of the podcast, I asked for comments or feedback. I think I put that in because I was expressing some somewhat controversial positions. Even when I’m not pontificating, I still welcome any comments, questions, or feedback you have about the podcast. Is there something you’d like to know more about? Always feel free to ask me anything.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

Contemplating Life – Episode 24 “To All the Toys I Loved Before”

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This week we take a nostalgic look back at the happier times of my childhood and all of the toys and hobbies that I enjoyed. I highly recommend you check out the YouTube version of this episode because it has lots of photos and video clips embedded. I was going to post photos here as well but there were just too many. See the video instead.

Links of interest

NOTE: I have linked many eBay and Amazon products here just for illustration purposes. I’m not endorsing any of them. They could be total junk and a waste of money.

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq

YouTube version

Shooting Script

Contemplating Life – Episode 24 “To All the Toys I Loved Before”

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 24 of Contemplating Life.

Over the past several weeks we’ve covered some of the darker moments of my junior high and high school years struggling with the loss of friends and wrestling with my own mortality. This week I’d like to take a detour to a lighter topic. This episode will not be as dramatic or poignant as some have been but we need a break.

I want to talk about other childhood memories away from school. I want to talk about all the fun summer things I did and take a nostalgic look at my favorite childhood toys and my hobbies. No drama this week. Just fun. And there is a point to make at the end so stick with me and leave your handkerchief behind for a change.

When I was young, I didn’t seem to lack any friends. Lots of neighborhood kids would come to play with me because I always had a great collection of really cool toys. Until I was eight years old, I was an only child. Also given that my parents didn’t think I was going to live very long, I was quite spoiled.

My extended family is small – Dad had only one brother and Mom had only one sister. I only had 4 cousins, 2 on each side, and all of them are younger than me. That meant that my grandparents could afford to spoil us all as well.

I still had to count on friends to come visit me. I never went to their house to play except for an occasional Monopoly game with Mike Tillery next door. However, he would cheat me. I could only reach about halfway across the gameboard. Sometimes I would land on “Chance” and he would have to read the card for me. Way too often it said, “Go to boardwalk” and his cards way too often said, “Advanced to Go”. He would stuff the card back in the deck before I could read it. I finally had to insist that he show me the card. Decades later, Mike is now my dentist. I just saw him for a dental visit this week and we reminisced about those days. He conveniently forgot how he used to cheat me.

Mike played varsity basketball at Northwest High School while I was there. When we were in the state basketball tourney, I recorded the radio broadcast of the games he played in. When we won the Sectional Round and they cut down the basketball nets, he gave me a piece of the net. I still have it pressed in my high school yearbook. Unfortunately, we were defeated in the first round of the Regionals.

As I mentioned in previous episodes, my school gave me the use of a motorized wheelchair when I was 10 years old in the fifth grade. Unfortunately, for the first year or two they did not have a lift-equipped bus that would run through my neighborhood. There was a wheelchair bus at Roberts School but it only ran on the east side.

The bus driver would lift me out of my manual wheelchair at home in the morning onto the bus. Then upon arriving at school, he would lift me into the power chair and reverse the process at the end of the day. I was able to take the wheelchair home over the summer but throughout the school year, when I was home, I was stuck in a manual wheelchair that I couldn’t push.

Occasionally, mom would be at the school on a Friday afternoon doing some sort of volunteer work and I would persuade her to take me home in our van which had a ramp. She would then have to drive me to school Monday morning but it meant I got to use the chair over the weekend.

On a couple of occasions, I got sick on Friday and they had to call my mom to pick me up. They accused me of faking it when it happened the second time. I don’t really think I was consciously faking illness but I have to admit, it might’ve been my body just reacting to my desire to take the chair home. I think in a case of mind over body I really did get sick but it was just emotionally triggered.

When they finally got the wheelchair bus running sometime around seventh grade, having the power chair at home all the time gave me phenomenal freedom.

My friends would get on their bicycles and we would get in a small area like a one-car garage and play tag. They were fast but I was maneuverable in the tight confines of the garage.

Whether it was at my house playing with my toys or at other friends’ houses having a good time, I led a very enjoyable childhood.

My friends were quite accommodating to my needs. When a group of them built a nonpowered go-cart to push each other around in, they asked my mom for permission to lift me out of my wheelchair into the cart. They lined the seat with a bunch of pillows. I have a photo of me in the go-cart that you can see on the YouTube version of the podcast.

When I was a teenager, the guys built a clubhouse in Mike Goodlett’s backyard. It was about an 8 x 8 shack but they made sure that the roof was tall enough for me to get inside because I couldn’t duck. And the doorway was wide enough for my wheelchair.

In preparing for this episode, I did a lot of research on some of my favorite toys that I had while growing up. I was surprised to see that many of them were collectibles selling for high prices on eBay, Etsy, and Amazon. I usually put links in the description of this podcast to items that I mention. This time there are just too many. Instead, this time I direct you to the Contemplating Life website where I post the transcript of the podcast. It will include links and photos. You can also see photos of these toys in the YouTube version of the podcast.

Some of the toys I had, you couldn’t sell today because they would be considered too dangerous. Three of them had an electric hot plate that was very dangerous. One of them was the Mattel Vac-U-Form. You would heat up a small 3 x 3” sheet of plastic over a hot plate until it was soft. Then flop it over onto a mold and pump a pump handle to suck out all the air and shape the plastic around the mold. Today if I want to make something out of plastic I use a 3D printer. I guess this was a kind of 2D printer.

The same hotplate was incorporated into another toy called “Creepy Crawlers”. You had negative molds made from aluminum in the shape of spiders, snakes, and other creepy things. Then you would pour in some liquid plastic called Plasti-goop and the heat would harden it into a wiggly rubber worm or insect.

You were supposed to pour in the liquid while the mold was at room temperature and then put it on the hotplate. I discovered that if you heated the mold first, you could drip drops of plastic in strategic locations, let it cure, and then add different colors on top of that. Sometimes I would add a little wadded-up piece of paper to block off part of the mold so that I could fill the mold in selective sections. Then I would cut that part out and fill in the rest with different colors making striped worms or spiders with different colored legs.

They also had a different formula that was editable. They called that “Incredible Edibles” and you could eat the worms and bugs. The candy liquid used in that toy was called Gobble-degoop.

I also had a small power woodworking toy that could be converted from a table saw to a drill press to a lathe to a disk sander. I had lots of fun with it. It came with a supply of balsa wood and pine wood for making toys.

For my eighth birthday, I got a small reel-to-reel tape recorder that was a big hit. We would make pretend interviews on tape. I also used to take that tape recorder with me to the drive-in movies to bootleg music. I had recordings of all the music from Mary Poppins, and The Beatles films A Hard Days Night and Help. Of course, the little window speaker at the drive-in movie had terrible sound and my cheap tape recorder did a terrible job of recording it but it was free music. These days, people take their video cameras or phones into the theater to bootleg the movie. I was doing audio back in the early 60s. A criminal ahead of his time

I later replaced the reel-to-reel recorder with a cassette recorder that included a built-in AM/FM radio. It wasn’t yet the era of the big Boom Box. It only had about a 3-inch speaker. The quality wasn’t bad all things considered. In addition to buying pre-recorded cassettes, you could record music off of the FM radio with reasonably good quality. My dad had to attach a lever to the knob that changed functions between rewind, play, stop, and fast-forward. I had a heavy weight that I would sit on the record button because it was too hard for me to push it and turn the lever simultaneously. I would wait for my favorite song to come on the radio and hit record. Sometimes I would just sit there and hit record every time the DJ stopped talking. Then if it was a song I didn’t want or already had I would just stop, go back, and erase it. By the time I was in high school, I had a box of over a dozen mix tapes that made me very popular.

The Kinley family a few houses down the street had a basketball goal that my friends would play at. I would record myself as a radio announcer calling the game. Then we would play it back and have a good laugh.

I had a lot of the really popular toys of the day. I had the 12-inch tall poseable G.I. Joe complete was a pup tent. I collected little six-inch action figures called Astronaut Major Matt Mason. I had his space station which was basically a three-story dollhouse for action figures. I also had his battery-powered moon crawler and the moon suit accessories.

I had a remote-controlled battery-powered blimp called Helios-21 that you could fly around the house. It wasn’t radio-controlled. It was connected to your controller by a very thin wire. It came with an extra “space capsule” which was just a free-floating mylar balloon in the shape of a capsule.

Another favorite toy was Johnny Astro which was a battery-powered fan built into a gadget that looks like a radar dish. Your spaceship was an ordinary toy balloon that you would just blow up with ordinary air, not helium. The fan would blow the balloon off the ground and make it hover in midair. It had a joystick and throttle control. I would practice making precision landings on a target.

When I was about 12 or 13, we visited our family friends the Byrum family. Their son Jimmy was my age. He had a paper route and he used the money to buy a massive HO-scale slot car racetrack with four lanes. When I was about 6 or 7 I had toy trains and I had a very small two-lane oval slot car track but neither was as cool as the four-lane road course with bridges and crisscrosses that Jimmy had.

I had to have one.

I got a pretty good starter set as a birthday present and then used other allowance money and gifts from Grandma to expand it. My dad had a home-built ping-pong table in our garage and we set up a huge track on that table. Decades later when I go in the garage and smell the familiar smells of oil, grease, and paint I have flashbacks to our days of raising the slot cars.

While researching the podcast, I discovered that the brand of slot cars I was using was an Aurora Thunderjet series with pancake motors. One Camaro slot car I had is selling for $70. Other toys I researched are selling for hundreds of dollars and I threw them all away when I was a kid.

I really enjoyed building model cars and airplanes. My uncle John would frequently buy me really complicated large 1/12 scale model cars with working suspension, steering, and a small electric motor. that unfortunately was too weak to make the car roll. You had to pick the car up and just watch the rear wheels spin. During my research, I found the cars I built. They were futuristic-looking prototype sports cards called “The Lindberg Line SC-100 and SC-101“. An original SC-101 unassembled kit is selling for $299 on eBay.

I also built lots of standard 1/24 scale cars. My favorite was a 1969 Pontiac GTO “Judge” painted bright orange. I found a diecast 69 GTO with the Judge paint scheme for sale for about $40. I might have to buy it.

I remember I did some kitbashing on a Chevy or Lincoln model car and made my own Batmobile that looked amazingly like the one from the 1960s TV series. I used my Vac-U-Form to make the windshield using a model airplane cockpit as a mold. I used the cap off of a bottle of nose spray as the mold to Vac-U-Form the red light on top of the car. I painted it black and applied orange pinstripe tape. Someone later brought me an official Batmobile model and I didn’t like it nearly as well as my kitbashed version.

I built and painted transparent anatomy models of both male and female humans as well as a transparent V-8 engine. Those models made by Ravell are still available as collectibles. The Visible Woman anatomy model has a special optional feature they called “The Miracle Of Life”. It was a separate set of pieces you could install to make the woman appear about eight months pregnant. While all of the other pieces in the kit were stored in clear plastic bags ready to be assembled and painted, this optional set of parts was in a brown cardboard box. I asked my mom why the parts were in a separate somewhat secret box. She explained that some parents might want to remove those parts from the kit if they didn’t want to have to answer questions about where babies come from.

I thought that was ridiculous then and now. For the first eight years of my life, my mom was constantly pregnant. I knew an awful lot about pregnancy at a very early age. But more on that in a different episode.

I built and painted superhero models of Superman and Batman, Universal monsters such as Frankenstein, Wolfman, and the Mummy. I was surprised to see the exact models I built for sale online. An unassembled Frankenstein kit exactly like the one I had was for sale for $2000. That’s not to say they found someone to pay that much but I was amazed nevertheless.

Online I found a really cool model of a Mercury-Atlas rocket exactly like the one that I built at a very early age during the Mercury space program. It included a launchpad with a ramp leading up to it. There was a transporter/erector gantry and some tiny fuel trucks. It brought tears to my eyes when I saw it available for sale. It was the first display model rocket I ever built. I also found the exact Gemini capsule model I built.

I had a 3-foot tall 1/100 scale Saturn V display rocket. I went looking for one of those but all I found online were “50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing” models and I’m not certain this rereleased version was identical to the one I built in the late 60s. I also built a larger-scale model of the Apollo spacecraft that included the enclosure for the Lunar Module, the Lunar Module itself, as well as the Command and Service Modules.

All of the above were simply display models. I also very much enjoyed building and flying cardboard and balsa model rockets. I got a starter kit and launchpad from Estes Rockets and then used allowance money to buy more and more rockets. Estes sold a kit called “Cineroc”. It was a tiny custom-built super 8 mm film camera that would sit atop a D-engine model rocket. The custom film cartridge would shoot about 30 seconds of footage. I launched it twice. You had to send the film back to them to be processed. A friend of the family had an 8 mm movie viewer like they use to edit movies. They warned you to only shoot your film in the middle of the day in full sunlight. I didn’t pay attention to the warning and my first launch was about 4:30 in the afternoon. It looked sunny enough for me. The film came out very dark. My second attempt was much more successful.

My pride and joy flying model rocket was the Estes Saturn V. I just recently found some old photos of me and my friends flying that rocket in the big field behind the Coca-Cola plant on 30th St. just two blocks from my house.

When I was at Northwest high school, we had a bicycle race each May called the “Little 500” modeled after a famous similar race held at Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana. My science teacher, Mr. Stan Irwin was the faculty member in charge of the event. I volunteered to do a rocket launch during the opening of the race right after the national anthem. I had damaged my Saturn V on previous launches so I wrote to Estes and asked for custom replacement parts. I explained I needed to do a rebuild for a demonstration launch at my school. They didn’t normally sell these replacement parts. I included a check for what I thought was a reasonable price for the parts. They sent me the parts and a voucher for a couple of dollars refund I had overpaid.

With the help of friends, I repaired and rebuilt the model. A few days before the event, we went out to the football field and I did a demonstration launch for Mr. Irwin. He approved and I launched a huge model rocket in front of about 1000 people. I really wish we had had camcorders in those days. I don’t have any still photos from that event.

Estes had a Space Shuttle design contest a few years before the real shuttle was designed and flown. I entered it with a design I made and I helped my friend Mark Heron prepare his submission. He earned an honorable mention in the sixth grade and under category. I think I was in eighth or ninth grade at the time and I didn’t win anything. Mark had a form of muscular dystrophy. It wasn’t SMA and it wasn’t the common Duchenne MD. He had a name for it but I don’t recall what it was. He lived around the corner from me less than a block away. We rode the same bus for many years.

When I was about 12 or 13, there were older teens and young adults in my neighborhood who could afford to build and fly radio-controlled model airplanes. I really wanted to fly RC aircraft but they were just too expensive. A six-channel digital proportional transmitter and receiver with a decent airplane would run about $600 which was even more money in the early 1970s than it is today.

I did try flying a control line airplane with a small two-cycle 0.49” motor. You held a handle in your hand and it was connected to 2 pieces of nylon kite string. As you tilted the handle up and down, it would make the elevator of the airplane go up and down. You had to spin around in circles. I would drive my wheelchair with my right hand and fly the plane with my left hand. It was hard to spin around in my wheelchair fast enough. Sometimes the plane would go faster than I could turn. It would be flying around behind me. At one point when the airplane was behind me where I couldn’t see, I gave it a full up elevator hoping it wouldn’t crash. They tell me I did a loop before crashing but I didn’t see it because it was all behind my head.

Many years later when I was an adult and after my dad retired, he started flying RC aircraft. He built one for me to try to fly but we couldn’t get the joystick control adapted in such a way that I could do much with it. I can’t move my head around very well so I wouldn’t have been able to see the airplane unless I flew it way out in front of me. I think it was the only bit of assistive technology Dad and I ever failed to successfully solve. Even though I was never able to fly, I certainly enjoyed watching Dad build and fly his airplanes. Our favorite was a beautiful yellow Piper Cub to which he attached pontoons. He flew it several times over Cordry Lake where we used to have a cabin.

My dream of flying a radio-controlled aircraft had to wait until just a few years ago when my friend Bill Binko created some assistive technology that allowed me to fly a quadcopter drone using my wheelchair joystick and some VR goggles. Video link in the description.

At this point, I’ve probably lost most of my audience. Except for my dentist cheating me at Monopoly, there were no funny anecdotes. There were no poignant tear-jerky moments. No philosophical discussions about theology. It has just been a nostalgic look back at all the toys I loved before.

But that’s the point.

Even though I didn’t play ball, ride a bike, have a sleepover at a friend’s house, or have any friends sleep over here (I wore diapers at night) in most other respects I did the same kind of things other kids did. I played with the same toys. I hung out in the clubhouse in the backyard of a friend. I played games, played with action figures, and built model cars and planes, and rockets. I forgot to mention I flew lots of kites – many of which ended up in trees or on roofs.

I didn’t let my disability get in my way of having a very fun childhood.

One of my mom’s favorite sayings was, “The only difference between men and boys is the size of their toys. Little boys… little toys. Big boys… big toys.” She was very much right.

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