In this episode, I begin a series of episodes about my college days working towards a degree in computer science at IUPUI. This week we talk about getting into college. Not just being accepted but getting in the building in a wheelchair which wasn’t exactly easy.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 43 of Contemplating Life.

In a previous series of episodes, I described my school experiences from kindergarten through high school attending a special education school as well as my neighborhood high school. Now it’s time to go to college.

I’ve mentioned many times that I attended IUPUI but if you aren’t from central Indiana you’re probably saying, “What the hell is that?”

The acronym stands for Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis. So it is a combination of the two largest state-supported universities in Indiana. Or I guess I should say, “It was…”. Earlier this year, IU and Purdue had a bit of a falling out and they dissolved the partnership. Let’s talk about the parent schools for a second.

Indiana University has its primary campus in Bloomington Indiana a little over an hour’s drive south of Indianapolis. There are several satellite campuses around the state, the largest being in Indianapolis. In addition to the liberal arts programs at a downtown campus, the IU Law School, School of Medicine, and School of Nursing are based in Indianapolis.

Purdue University is in West Lafayette about halfway between Indianapolis and Chicago. Purdue has an excellent agricultural research program but is more famous for its science and engineering programs, especially aerospace. A total of 25 astronauts have attended Purdue University including Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan – the first and last men to walk on the moon. The Indianapolis extension consisted of just two buildings on 38th St. across from the Indiana State Fairgrounds.

In 1969 these two Indianapolis extensions were combined into a single institution known as “Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis”. At the time it held the distinction of being the longest-named university in the United States – a record now held by “California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo”. Even the acronym IUPUI is a mouthful. At one point early in its history, people referred to it as “oo-ee-poo-ee” apparently an attempt to pronounce “IUI” followed by “PUI”.

Over the years, new science and engineering buildings were constructed at the downtown campus and the Purdue programs on 38th St. were moved to the new buildings downtown. That move occurred after I graduated.

IUPUI is often described as a “commuter college” in that very few students live on campus. Most live in their own homes or apartments somewhere in the city and attend classes by driving to school. IUPUI is a university full of parking spaces and not dormitories. The term “commuter college” should not be construed to imply it’s a “community college.” It is a renowned institution of higher learning with distinguished alumni of its own. It supports vibrant research programs in a variety of fields.

It saddens me every school I ever attended has been dissolved. Indianapolis Public Schools #97 James E. Roberts School for the Handicapped was closed in 1986 and eventually turned into an apartment building. Northwest High School was converted into a junior high school. Most of the classes I attended at IUPUI were at the 38th St. campus because that’s where the Purdue programs were located. New buildings were constructed at the downtown campus and everything was moved there. The 38th St. buildings were torn down and are now used as overflow parking for the Indiana State Fairgrounds. And now that the merger between IUI and PUI has been dissolved, Even IUPUI no longer exists.

I’m not sure who got what in the divorce between the two institutions or how that works on a practical level. Even though I attended something called IUPUI, my diploma says “Purdue University Awarded at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis.” So I got a Purdue degree not an IUPUI degree.

To get a degree in the school of science like I did, you are required to take some liberal arts courses to make you a well-rounded individual and not just a science nerd. I took classes like US history, French, psychology, and sociology at the downtown campus. My science and math classes were on 38th St. So my question is, if I’m getting a Purdue degree at the new Purdue at Indianapolis, does Purdue offer liberal arts classes that duplicate those offered by Indiana University at Indianapolis? Obviously, if you were in West Lafayette at Purdue, they would have liberal arts. It looks to me like the split is going to be more expensive if Purdue is duplicating all of those classes here in Indianapolis when they are being offered across the street at an IUI building.

Late update… After writing the script I found an FAQ that explains more details about which programs are moving where. You will be able to transfer credits between the two institutions and Purdue students can take IU classes and vice versa. I put links in the description.

Anyway, enough rambling about the institutions. Let’s talk about my experiences there.

IUPUI was my only practical choice. I couldn’t imagine living on campus and having to deal with hiring caregivers. I wasn’t used to being away from home. I would live at home and commute like most people.

At Northwest High School I took the PSAT test my junior year but I don’t remember the results. I’ve found a copy of my SAT results that I took my senior year and I got 540 verbal and 620 math. You may recall in my article “The Reunion” I found a way to somewhat cheat on an IQ test because the test was designed so that the answers on one side of the page lined up with the answers on the other side of the page. The designers of the PSAT and SAT were smarter than that so I had to take the tests legitimately. But I certainly had my eye open for that opportunity.

The Indiana Department of Vocational Rehabilitation also known as VocRehab paid for my tuition. The application process wasn’t very involved. I have heard stories of kids with Duchenne muscular dystrophy being denied help from their state rehab agency because they felt the kid wouldn’t live very long. As I previously mentioned, most kids with DMD barely make it into their mid-20s. But there were no such concerns expressed about my potential lifespan or lack thereof.

I applied to IUPUI with nothing but my grade transcript which was about a B average and my SAT scores. In those days colleges and universities didn’t require things like a written essay and I don’t think that at state schools like IU and Purdue even today. That’s just for prestigious private schools. State schools just are not very picky about admissions. I was confident I would be accepted so when I got my acceptance letter naturally I was very happy but it wasn’t one of those jump up and down screaming moments you see on YouTube. I guess I never really thought about what I would do if I wasn’t accepted.

My only other options would be private colleges such as Butler University or Marion College. VocRehab will only pay state school tuition rates. You can go to a private school but you have to make up the difference. I don’t think my family could have afforded that.

Sometime during the summer, I met with a guidance counselor at IUPUI who was a math professor. We picked out my first semester classes. I wanted a degree in computer science which at the time did not yet exist at IUPUI. But there were promises that one would be established in about a year. So initially, I was considered a math major which was a big mistake. I wasn’t going to be taking any programming classes my first semester. That caused major problems later on.

I took a college-level algebra class because I wasn’t confident in my algebra skills from high school. For a school of science degree, this course was considered a remedial course and I would not get Math credit for it. I said that’s okay. I still needed the course before I tried to tackle calculus. Once I was in the class, I realized it was much easier than I expected and I easily got an A.

I really liked the teacher. One time he called on me and asked me if I got the right answer on a particular problem. I said, “I probably did.” He replied, “This is not a probability class. You either got the right answer or you didn’t.” That cracked me up along with the entire class. He followed up saying, “Commit to your answers. Even if you are wrong you will learn something. But don’t give me this wishy-washy I might be right.” That was a good lesson to remember.

I took physics and a creative writing class. There must’ve been one or two other classes but I don’t recall what they were.

The writing class was a bit of a joke. The assignments were strange. The TA they had teaching it was a strange guy. After about three weeks he announced that three people would be leaving the class because they had taken the test to test out. He did not offer the option to test out to anyone who didn’t get an A on the first assignment. What I did not know was I could’ve taken a writing test over the summer and skipped the class entirely. There would be another option to take the test two-thirds of the way through the semester. I got A’s on all of my following assignments and he let me take the test which I passed. I got to skip the last third of the semester.

For the first semester or perhaps two, Mom drove me back and forth each day. Eventually, we persuaded VocRehab to pay for transportation. A wheelchair van service called CareVan would pick me up in the late morning and drive me to the 38th St. campus. I would have classes in the afternoon and early evening and then they would bring me home at the end of the day.

Getting accepted to college was relatively easy. Getting into college… That is getting into the buildings and getting around… That was a different story.

The 38th St. campus consisted of two buildings separated by Coliseum Avenue. That is the street that runs perpendicular to 38th St. and leads into the main entrance of the Fairgrounds. To the west was the Krannert Building or K-building which consisted of classrooms, labs, and offices. To the east of Coliseum Avenue was the Administration Building or A-building which housed administration offices, the library, a large architectural classroom set up with lots of drafting tables, and a couple of other small classrooms in the basement. It also housed the computer center.

On Coliseum Avenue there was a Burger Chef fast food restaurant between the two buildings. The back half of the Burger Chef also contained some offices for the psychology department but I never went inside the psych building in four years.

I’ve had a difficult time trying to find photos of these buildings which were torn down years ago. The YouTube version of today’s podcast includes a couple of photos and a map I created that shows where in the parking lot that exists today, the buildings were originally located.

The K-building was three stories tall plus a basement however the first floor wasn’t ground-level. It was up a half flight of stairs. The only way into the building by wheelchair was through the loading dock. There was a long, well-built wheelchair ramp leading up to the loading platform. Then you would get on a freight elevator to go down to the basement. From there I would transfer to the passenger elevator to access the three main floors. The freight elevator had large manually operated doors that slid up and down. Then a grill door that you would slide manually to the side. There was no way I could operate the elevator on my own.

They gave me my own keys which would call the freight elevator if it wasn’t at the dock. However, if it was in the basement and they left the door open, whoever was with me would have to go into the building, go down to the basement, close the elevator doors manually, and bring it up to the loading dock.

Inside the building, the passenger elevator was a regular fully automated passenger elevator. But to call the elevator, you had to have keys. Once you were inside, you just pushed the button to choose which of the three floors or basement you wanted to go to. My dad took a long half-inch diameter dowel rod and mounted the key on the end of it. With great difficulty, I could sometimes get the key in and turn it by myself. But then I had to get it back out again by the time the doors opened, drive into the elevator, and then use the stick’s other end to push the button. Sometimes I would have trouble getting the key out in the elevator would come and go before I could get in.

I soon gave up on that plan and just carried the keys on a keychain. I would get someone walking by to insert the key and turn it for me. Initially, I didn’t have them wait around. When the elevator arrived, I would go in and push the button with my stick. Unfortunately, one day I got on the elevator, dropped the stick, and could not push the buttons. I had to wait until someone else such as a staff member called the elevator so I could get out. After that incident, whenever I asked someone to call the elevator for me. I would have them wait until it arrived, reach in, and push the button for me. They didn’t need to ride with me. Just push the button and I could get out on my own. People were very generous with their help and oftentimes I had friends with me who could do it.

We didn’t have a cafeteria with food service. We just had a big lunch room with tables and chairs and a small room filled with vending machines. You could get horrible microwave pizza or a stale ham sandwich. I decided to pack a lunch. My favorite choice was mom’s famous tuna salad sandwiches but I had no way to refrigerate it. By the time I got around to eating the sandwich, the mayonnaise would separate and the oil would soak into the bread making it a soggy mess. It’s a wonder I didn’t get food poisoning from stale mayonnaise.

As I mentioned, there was a Burger Chef between the two buildings. Occasionally we would get someone to make a run over to the place and bring back food. I think it wasn’t until my third year that they established an “Office of Handicapped Student Services” and they would have a volunteer who would run to Burger Chef for me and a half dozen other disabled students. Burger Chef gave them a printed notepad with the menu on it like the ones that the people behind the counter used to take orders. So we would just check off what we wanted and someone went take it over there and hand it to them. Of course, that didn’t ensure that they got the order right every time.

The K-building also had a rather large recreational room with pinball machines, pool tables, a foosball table, and other tables that were often used for chess games. I drew up a sketch of a spring-loaded pool cue that I was going to have Dad build but we never got around to it. I don’t think it would have worked anyway.

My friend Rich and I would play pinball together. I could pull up my wheelchair and push the left flipper button and he would push the right one.

Access to the A-building was also via a loading dock. The ramp was a little bit scarier and you had to drive your wheelchair very close to the edge of the loading dock to get onto the elevator. There was no railing and it would’ve been easy to drive your wheelchair off the edge of the loading dock and plunging about 2 and a half feet down. The elevator was one of those freight elevators that came up out of the floor through folding doors. A very loud alarm bell would ring all the way up. It was almost deafening to ride the elevator up to the loading dock from the basement with that bell ringing and bouncing around the metal walls of the elevator. My fraternity would take people up and down on the elevator blindfolded as part of their hazing ritual. More on my frat experience in later episodes. Again this elevator had manually operated sliding grates for doors. Not only were the doors manually operated, you had to hold the pushbutton continuously to make it work.

Once inside the basement, you could take another regular automatic passenger elevator up to the first floor where the computer room was on the second floor where the library was. As I mentioned previously, I didn’t take a computer class my first semester so I didn’t have much opportunity or need to go across the street to the A-Building. By the time I did need to frequently go to the computer center, they had rebuilt the ramp, extended the loading dock, and added a safety railing.

The computer center housed 2 of the 3 available computers. An IBM 360/44 and an IBM 1620. More about them in a later episode. There were also about half a dozen 026 and 029 keypunch machines to type your programs on punch cards. Although I occasionally used these machines, most of the time I used a third computer which was housed at the downtown campus. There was a row of about a dozen teletype machines in the computer room and 2 CRT terminals available for connecting to the downtown machine.

I didn’t always have to go across the street to access the teletypes. There were also 2 teletypes in the K-building hidden away. One was hidden in a locked closet under a stairway. My friend Mike knew how to Jimmy the lock to get it open. You didn’t have to pick the lock. You just had to slide a credit card between the door and the doorjamb and push back the latch. Once you were inside, people presumed you had permission to be there and didn’t question you.

The other teletype machine was in a small room called the “Calculation Lab”. It housed several very expensive mechanical adding machines including ones that would do multiplication and division completely mechanically. They made a terrible racket when they ran. There was also a very sophisticated programmable electronic adding machine that could be programmed by sliding magnetic striped cards through a slot. Keep in mind, that this was years before the personal computer had been invented.

All of the teletypes were classic ASR 33 teletypes. The one in the Calculations Lab had a paper tape punch machine on the side. It was identical to the one that my friend Dennis had carried down the stairs at Northwest High School for me to use to run programs. We previously talked about the fact that this was the equipment that Bill Gates used to write his first commercial product, a BASIC interpreter program.

All the teletypes were connected via phone lines to a Digital Equipment Corporation DEC-System 10 computer downtown in the Student Union Building. Although I didn’t have any computer classes my first semester, I knew people who did. They would loan me their Project-Programmer Number or PPN as it was called and password to log in. If you are old enough to remember the CompuServe online network you had a PPN to log in to their service. That’s because CompuServe ran on DEC-10 computers as well.

We would play a variety of text-based computer games. The most popular were a submarine warfare game and a Star Trek game. See the links in the description for more info about the Star Trek game.

I wrote a small program in the BASIC language to print out the words of “The 12 Days of Christmas”. I only typed in the words to each day one time, then it would go through a series of nested loops to print out the words to each verse adding a line each time. Every time it typed the phrase “five golden rings” it would ring the bell on the teletype machine five times. The teletype typed so slowly that you could almost sing the song as it was typing out the words and keep in time.

Even though I didn’t have any computing classes during my first semester, it was a great experience. I made some good friends who we will talk about in future episodes.

Next week, we will talk more about my second and third semesters. Third semester I spent at the downtown campus picking up several liberal arts classes. I had quite an adventure there.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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