Contemplating Life – Episode 37 – “Putting the Deux in the Machina”

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In this episode, I begin a series of episodes about my life of ministry in my local Catholic Church. So that time was serving as the parish’s computer consultant setting up a database of parish records. I talked about the ups and downs of automating parish communications.

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Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
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YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq

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Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 37 of Contemplating Life.

Back in episodes 6, 7, and 11 through 15, I told the story of my faith journey as I grew up Catholic, left the church in my late teens, and returned in my late 20s. For over 30 years after that return, I remained extremely active in my local parish. The only reason I’m no longer active is that I simply lack the stamina to get out of the house on a regular basis and contribute my time and talent to the church. My dedication to the church hasn’t wavered much over the years.

I included the word “much” because there have been some challenging times. There were times when the work became emotionally overwhelming. I occasionally disagreed with the clergy and other volunteers about the course we should take in our ministry. There were times when I felt as though the work I did was not appreciated or understood.

I thought we would go over some of those stories in the coming episodes. As always when I discuss my faith journey, I include a disclaimer that I’m not trying to evangelize, proselytize, or convert anyone to my way of thinking or believing. I’m simply telling the stories of my experiences that I hope you will find well… As my closing remarks always say… I hope you find them educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring.

Much of my early ministry in the church revolved around my expertise as a computer programmer and systems analyst. I helped my church and others computerize their operations.

As I mentioned in that earlier series of episodes about my involvement in the Catholic Church, I began volunteering my time and talent to Saint Gabriel Church even before I decided to return to the Church.

In 1978, I had a personal computer that my dad and I had built from kit parts. I have to laugh these days when I hear someone say, “I built a PC.” What they mean is they purchased a motherboard, a CPU, a graphics card, a power supply, and a case. When I say that I built a computer in the late 1970s, I purchased circuit boards and a bag of loose parts in kit form. We had to solder integrated circuit sockets to plug the chips into as well as discrete components like resistors, capacitors, and voltage regulators.

Anyway, I drifted off topic there sorry. Make a note to self… Do a series of episodes about all the computers I’ve owned over the years.

There was a woman named Diane Something who was the parish bookkeeper. She would come over to my house once a month and enter the monthly financial report into a spreadsheet that I designed for her. I believe we were using Borland Quattro spreadsheet software. The name of that software was a joke because the leading spreadsheet at that time was a product called Lotus 1-2-3. The word “Quattro” is Italian for four. The joke was that it was one better than 123.

[Note: My bad. Quattro and Lotus didn’t come along until 16-bit systems under MS-DOS. The story I’m telling was on the 8-bit system under CP/M. It must’ve been VisiCalc or Microsoft Multiplan which I mentioned later.]

My mom heard about a program called Parish Data System or PDS for short. It was written by a Catholic programmer in Arizona in conjunction with his parish priest. It was a database program for keeping track of members. Each family had a family number and the members within the family had a member number. There were screens full of information at both of those levels that included addresses, phone numbers, and so on. It also had the ability to track financial contributions.

You could establish your own lists of keywords to assign to families or individuals. Family keywords would include things like, “school family”, “inactive”, or “out of parish” the latter being for people who attended our church but didn’t live within our boundaries.

Member keywords were usually used for the type of activities a person was involved in such as “parish council”, “board of education”, “maintenance committee, “men’s club”, “women’s club”, “Eucharistic minister”, and so on.

There were a wide variety of ready-made reports built into the system. The most useful one was called “fam-quick” which was a quick report of family information that included family name, address, and phone number. You could also print mailing labels based on keyword searches. So if you wanted to do a mailing to everyone in the men’s club, you would simply specify that keyword and it would spit out labels for everyone who had that keyword.

It also contained some rather useful Catholic-specific features most notably whether or not you had received certain sacraments and the date in which you had received them. So you might search for all children of a certain age who have not yet received First Communion and send them a mailing encouraging them to enroll their kids in sacrament preparation classes.

Someone had donated a personal computer to the parish. It was made by Zenith which was a brand name known mostly for TVs, hi-fi stereos, and other appliances. rather than computers. It was probably made by someone else and they just stuck their name on it. It had a Z80 processor and ran CP/M. It had a pair of 5.25” floppy drives. That wasn’t sufficient to run PDS. You really needed a computer with a hard drive to make good use of it.

I taught our priests how to use WordStar word processing software and I built spreadsheets using either Quattro or Microsoft Multiplan. By the way, Multiplan was the first piece of Microsoft software I ever owned. It had a feature that is still not available on Microsoft Excel or any other spreadsheet that I know of. It was three-dimensional. Microsoft Excel has the ability to have multiple pages or tabs within the same sheet. And you can reference cells or ranges of cells between pages. But Multiplan would allow you to select a range across pages. Suppose you had 12 sheets in the file, one for each month’s expenses. You could write a formula that would give you the sum of cell G32 from sheet 1 through sheet 12. If there’s a way to do that in Excel, I haven’t figured it out.

A decent personal computer with a hard drive could cost well over $2000 in those days. We then had someone make us the proverbial offer we couldn’t refuse. There was a company that would publish your weekly Sunday bulletin for you. You would send them a typed camera-ready copy by FedEx on a Monday evening. They would print your bulletin for you and FedEx it back to you by Friday afternoon. They made their money by selling ads on the back of the bulletin. If you could get a certain amount of ads sold, they would give you a free computer. I seem to recall the deal also included the Parish Data System program as part of the free bundle. That program alone was worth hundreds of dollars.

My mom told the salesman, “I’ve been lusting for a computer for our parish.” He was happy he could satisfy her lust.

The computer was a Kaypro 10. It was the second major “portable computer” mass-produced. When I say portable computer I’m not talking about a laptop. Those were still some time off. The term “portable computer” meant it folded up into a package about the size of a medium-sized suitcase. I believe the advertised it was capable of being stashed underneath an airline seat.

The first such computer was the Osborne 1 but it had a notoriously small TV screen. Adam Osborne, its inventor, sold them like hotcakes but then made the mistake of announcing more advanced versions with a better screen and a hard drive. Unfortunately, the machines were not nearly ready to ship. His sales dropped to zero because nobody wanted the old version. They were waiting for the new one.

The Kaypro II and Kaypro IV hastened the demise of Osborne Computers. They had better screens and better floppy drives. The Kaypro 10 included a 10 MB hard drive. Yes people that’s megabytes – not gigabytes. Your phone has multiple gigabytes of memory. You can get a flash drive with 256 GB of storage. But in those days, 10 MB was huge.

Whenever we got a new computer at our parish, Father Paul would give it a blessing that we would be able to use it for good purposes. I always warned him not to sprinkle holy water on it lest it short out

I helped them set up the PDS database software and put together a plan for data management. That involved choosing keywords that I thought would be useful such as those I’ve already described. This really helped them to unlock the power of a computer database beyond just printing mailing labels.

PDS report generation also had a bit of a programming language built into it so that you could create sophisticated reports. I did some pretty clever things with it over the years. Rather than just using the standard reports.

One of the limitations of the program in those days was that it would only keep track of monthly totals of contributions. It had the capability of recording donations across 9 different funds. They expected you would set up one fund for ordinary Sunday contributions and the other funds for things like capital campaigns or special fundraising drives, missionary work, etc.

I came up with a clever idea that we should create five funds one for each Sunday of the month because some months have five Sundays. That way we could keep track of weekly contributions even though the system was only designed to keep monthly totals. That still gave us 4 additional funds that we could use for other purposes like special collections or missionary work.

I had to rewrite the financial reports to take advantage of the crazy system I designed. Fortunately, the programming capabilities of the report generator were fairly sophisticated. We would mail everyone a financial statement to families a few times a year to remind them perhaps if they skipped a Sunday. Father would write a topping letter suggesting that if they notice they had missed a Sunday they might consider making it up. We would of course send them a complete report at the end of the calendar year that they could use for tax purposes.

We also had a requirement that if you had kids in our parochial school and wanted a discount on your tuition, you had to be a regular contributor. There were tax regulations that said if we required a certain level of contribution in order to qualify for a Catholic discount on tuition, you couldn’t count that as a charitable contribution. It was just a different way to pay your tuition. So, we had to drop the mandatory contribution requirement so people could still count their donations on their taxes. But still find a way to make sure that if you were going to get the benefit of the lower tuition rate, you had to be an active member of the church. Our school principal came up with a very clever plan even though in some ways it shamed people into paying. Hey, you had to be active in the church to get the church discount anything we could do to coerce you into doing your fair share was okay with me.

We preached the principle of tithing. That is giving 10% of your income to charity. It comes out of some Old Testament Scripture readings. We defined that as 5% to the church and 5% to other charitable endeavors such as United Way, American Cancer Society, etc. But we also said that the other 5% could include your Catholic tuition. I wasn’t so sure that was completely kosher if you pardon my cultural appropriation.

So we couldn’t force people to give 5% but we can use that 5% number as a standard. We participated in a federal school lunch program that would give subsidies for school lunches to low-income families. The principal knew what the income level was to qualify for that program. She took 5% of that and then concluded if you weren’t paying 5% of the poverty level income in your contribution it must be because you were too poor.

She would invite the parents to come in and very gently and discreetly offer them the opportunity to sign up for free or reduced lunch prices. After all, if you’re making more money than the poverty level, then why weren’t you contributing more? Of course, when you filled out the paperwork for the subsidies, you had to reveal your income and that’s when conversation would come about not doing your fair share. So technically we didn’t have a set amount that you HAD to contribute but we made it clear participation was a requirement. The school lunch thing was a ruse to start that conversation. Sneaky, but I liked it.

One of the clever things that we did with the program was to send out these financial statements encouraging people to meet their tithing pledge and we would send a custom letter depending on whether or not they were meeting their pledge, falling short of the pledge, or perhaps giving absolutely zero. This was whether they were making use of the parochial school or not. We wanted people to honor their pledges. But there was a limitation to what PDS could do. You couldn’t say to it, “Print letter version A to people who meet their pledge. Send version B to those who gave zero.” and do it all in the same run. You have to select the people who gave zero, print mailing labels for that group, stuff the right letter in those envelopes, and then do a separate run for the people who really gave something.

Members of the finance committee would get together on a Saturday afternoon for an envelope-stuffing meeting. I had to set things up with four different groups. School families who gave something, school families who gave zero, nonschool people who gave something, and nonschool people who gave zero. They each got a different letter and we had to run them separately.

I would give them names like Group A, B, C, and D so that the people stuffing the envelopes wouldn’t necessarily know that if they were doing Group B it was a deadbeat family with kids in school. We didn’t want them looking at those people sideways when they came to church. We wanted to respect their privacy.

Inevitably, the people stuffing envelopes wanted to know why we had to do all these complicated separate groups of mailings. I just said, “It’s a limitation of the program.” Then they wanted to know what the categories were. I finally just explained to them what the categories were. Afterward, I said, “But I’m trying to be sensitive to people’s privacy and not telling you which group is which. If you want to be really nosy and read the letter you’re stuffing and know who was a deadbeat then do so but it’s on your conscious not mine.”

Computerizing our mailings allowed us to do some really great things. For example, we could create a search of the database for anyone who had children of school age who were not already enrolled in our parochial school. We would invite them to consider coming to our school but if not, please enroll your child in Sunday morning religious education programs which we use the Catholic acronym CCD classes as I explained in an earlier episode.

Sounds like a really their idea doesn’t it? We want our kids to get a Catholic education one way or the other. If not in our parish elementary school then in Sunday school. Nothing wrong with that is there?

Unfortunately, that letter had the potential to cause someone a great deal of emotional upset. There was a man who was a very active and devoted member of our Catholic parish but whose wife was not Catholic. For centuries, Catholics were either forbidden or strongly discouraged from marrying someone non-Catholic. My dad was not Catholic. He had to sign a paper assuring the priest that any children they had would be raised Catholic. Apparently, this particular parishioner who was married to a non-Catholic did not have his wife sign said to paper or didn’t care that she violated it. The wife and kids all attended a Protestant fundamentalist church and were quite disapproving that the husband was Catholic. I can only imagine the emotional pain and marital conflict it would’ve caused if she opened a piece of mail suggesting she should send her kids to Catholic school or Catholic Sunday school. This was decades ago and I don’t recall if we were able to intercept that letter or if it was delivered. I hope we caught it in time but I think perhaps we did not.

In a similar case, a non-Catholic husband was unsupportive of his wife’s faith and didn’t want to see any mailings at all from the church. We had a special family keyword that I think we only attached to very few families that indicated “send no mail”.

One day someone asked me why we have a “send no mail” keyword. I explained that there were just some people who shouldn’t be getting mailings. They asked, “Why?” I got really frustrated And I lost my patience because they wouldn’t take my word we just needed it so I rather angrily explained, “Will if you have to know it’s because we’re trying to keep wives getting beaten by their husbands because they don’t like getting mail from the church!”

I didn’t realize it, but one of the women who had the “send no mail” keyword overheard me. I was about to apologize when she came over, patted me on the back, and said, “Keep up the good work.”

So, even though computerization gave us tremendous new capabilities, we learned very quickly that we could not take the human element out of the equation. In any such customized correspondence we created, we had to make sure we had someone knowledgeable reviewing everything that went out.

Everything I developed using the PDS program I did for free from my own parish. Then, three other parishes hired me to consult with them on the best ways to use the program. I describe those efforts as doing well while doing good.

Parish Data Systems was acquired by another company ACS Technology. It has expanded into a much more sophisticated suite of programs that also include general ledger, payroll, facilities scheduling, and other tools at both the parish and diocesan levels.

In the weeks to come, I will talk more about the eight years I served as a member of the Finance Committee and eventually as its chairman. At one point I think the community was called Ways and Means and it seemed like we always had many more ways than we had means. We’ll talk about those challenges and more in the weeks to come as I continue the story of my volunteer work at Saint Gabriel church.

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.

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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.

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

Contemplating Life – Episode 36 – “Striving to be Obsolete”

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In this episode, I will outline the advocacy efforts of my late mother Fran Young, and how I joined her in those efforts. Although I will be bragging about some of my own accomplishments, this really is a tribute to my mom who was such a dedicated advocate and volunteer in a variety of activities. Everything I accomplished in this area was based on her example of hard work and dedication to human services.

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 36 of Contemplating Life.

The tagline of this podcast says that it’s about “Disability, religion, entertainment, politics, and anything else I want to talk about. You know, the easy non-controversial stuff. We briefly dove into politics in the last episode or two so I thought I would continue with that theme.

In this episode, I will outline the advocacy efforts of my late mother Fran Young, and how I joined her in those efforts. Although I will be bragging about some of my own accomplishments, this really is a tribute to my mom who was such a dedicated advocate and volunteer in a variety of activities. Everything I accomplished in this area was based on her example of hard work and dedication to human services.

As I mentioned previously, Mom was always interested in politics. She was a bit of a news junkie. She watched the Today Show every morning, local news, and the NBC nightly news every night as far back as the days of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. I absorbed that passion by being exposed to it at an early age.

She had what I called a strong sense of volunteerism. When I started at Roberts school she became involved in the PTA. First as a “room mother” which meant that she would host various parties for my class such as an annual thank you party from the PTA to celebrate our annual cookie sale fundraiser, Valentine’s Day parties, Christmas parties, etc.

Eventually, she was elected treasurer of the PTA and then the president.

Through that effort, she got involved in the citywide and statewide PTA organizations. The Indiana State PTA had something called the “Exceptional Child Committee.” It focused not only on special education for disabled kids but also on programs for gifted children such as advanced placement classes. They were active lobbyists at the Indiana General Assembly advocating for funding for education programs for exceptional children.

There she met a remarkable woman named Amy Cook Lurvey who became a lifelong friend. Amy was trained as a speech and language therapist and was the first to hold such a position in Indianapolis Public Schools. She ran for the IPS school board in 1963 but lost to Richard Lugar who would later go on to become Indianapolis Mayor and later US Senator. We talked about Lugar in recent episodes – what an amazing man he was.

While working as a lobbyist for the PTA, Amy, and other such advocates were advised by state Senator Charles E. Bosma that they were not being effective advocates. There were too many organizations competing with one another for scarce resources. He suggested that all the disability advocacy groups form a coalition that would speak with one voice on behalf of disabled people.

Amy Cook Lurvey, Muriel Lee, and other advocates formed an organization called the Council of Volunteers and Organizations for the Handicapped, or COVOH for short. I don’t know for a fact that my mother was on any of the founding documents of this organization, she certainly was involved from its inception and I don’t hesitate to describe her as one of its founders.

It was an organization of organizations. Its members included groups representing muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, Associations for Retarded Citizens, deaf and hearing impaired, blind and visually impaired, as well as other groups involved in education such as the PTA.

Through the lobbying efforts of this organization, the Indiana General Assembly passed the Mandatory Special Education Act in 1968. Prior to that legislation, there were only two school corporations in the entire state of Indiana that were serving the needs of disabled children. One of them was Roberts School in Indianapolis where I attended. The other was a special education school in Gary Indiana. Anywhere else in the state, if you were in a wheelchair or had any other disability that could not be accommodated by your local school, you simply didn’t go to school at all. The most you could hope for was that your school district would send you a “homebound teacher.” This was a teacher who would visit you perhaps 2 or 3 times per week giving you one-on-one instruction and a bunch of homework.

The Mandatory Act required that all school districts statewide develop special education programs and begin serving all Hoosier students by 1972. That was the year I graduated high school. Mom often said, “Sometimes you build your bridges behind you so that others may cross.”

You have no idea how tempting it is to read a sentence like that like I was Forest Gump.

”My mama always said sometimes you build your bridges behind you so that others may cross.”

I was fortunate that we lived inside the Indianapolis city limits and the IPS school district. My cousin Nancy, who was born with spina bifida, lived in Lawrence Township northeast of the city. My uncle and aunt sold their home and purchased a new one on the south side of Indianapolis so that Nancy could go to Roberts School five years behind me.

As we have already chronicled in previous episodes, Roberts did a fine job all the way through junior high but their high school program was severely deficient. Nancy lived very close to the Indianapolis/Perry Township border. When she reached high school age, she persuaded IPS to allow her to transfer to Perry Meridian High School.

I was pleased to learn that my mother’s work here in Indiana was paralleled by none other than Hillary Clinton. When Hillary ran for president in 2016 there were lots of features about her history. One of her first jobs as an advocate was for the Arkansas Department of Education. They were unaware that there were so many disabled kids not being served in Arkansas. I don’t recall if they said Arkansas passed its own special education law or if she then took that issue to the federal level which resulted in the passage in 1975 of Public Law 94-142 Known as the “Individuals with Disabilities Education Act” or IDEA. I thought it was cool to learn that my mother and Hilary had worked on the same cause in different states. In 1973 we also saw the passage of the Rehabilitation Act including section 504 which provided huge civil rights benefits for disabled people. Substantial progress in disability rights on the federal level had to wait until the night to guide the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Passing a piece of legislation, and implementing it fully are two different processes. There was still much work for COVOH to do. The organization, with my mother as the eventual president of the group, continued to be active in the Indiana General Assembly and other areas.

As I grew into adulthood, I began supporting her work in COVOH. One of our major activities was to review the abstract of every piece of legislation introduced in the General Assembly to see if it impacted disabled people. We would then track its progress through the legislature and put out frequent newsletters advising COVOH members to write or call their legislators in favor of or against various bills as we recommended.

We also worked closely with special education administrators. They had an organization led by a wonderful man named Bill Littlejohn. He hired me to post summaries of special ed legislation to an online service through Prodigy.

Mom served on a statewide special education advisory board and although I didn’t participate because I wasn’t on the board, I enjoyed attending those meetings with her as well as countless COVOH general meetings and committee meetings some of which were held in our dining room.

Periodically, the Indiana State Building Commission reviews all of the building codes for the State of Indiana. Mom educated herself in the federal Section 504 accessibility requirements and other accessibility standards. She would attend monthly meetings of the Building Commission and comment on proposed revisions to the building code. While I was in college and later after I had to quit work, I would attend such meetings with her.

The typical agenda of the Building Commission was to do some general housekeeping such as approving minutes from the previous meeting, setting the agenda for future meetings, etc. Then, architects, developers, project managers, or whoever would come before the board seeking a variance from building codes. If you could prove to them that you had a particular project that was unusual and could not be built strictly according to the code but that you could make accommodations that would ensure safety and access then the commission could grant you a variance.

Mom and I would sit at the back of the room patiently waiting through the boring request for variances until we got to the part of the agenda that interested us. Only after their ordinary business of variances was completed would the commission take up the revisions of building codes including accessibility provisions for which we intended to comment.

It seemed invariably, that there was one group always asking for relief from strict adherence to disability accessibility rules. Because the commissioners knew my mother well, they would often turn to her and ask, “Mrs. Young, what do you think of this request?” She became a resource to the commission as their resident expert on accessibility issues. Furthermore, we had made friends with members of the building commission. The State Fire Marshal on the board attended the same Catholic Church we attended during the summer when we stayed at our Lakeside cabin in Brown County. If the meeting ran all day, we would often eat lunch with them.

Anyway, when the plaintiff heard them ask my mother her opinion, you could see the expression on their face saying, “Who the hell is this woman and why are they asking her?” On occasions that I was sitting there in a wheelchair with her, they seemed especially disappointed. They knew they weren’t going to get any breaks with me sitting there staring them down.

On one memorable occasion, architects representing Indianapolis’ Market Square Arena were asking for a variance. I don’t think it was for the initial construction of the facility because my research shows it was completed in 1974 and I didn’t think I was attending those meetings with Mom until years later. Perhaps this was for a renovation. At any rate, there were 2 press areas at MSA. There was one on the sixth level nestled into a couple of rows of the stands. And then there was another press box high above the arena used for hockey games. That press box was not going to be accessible by elevator which would violate accessibility rules.

The architects argued, there aren’t any disabled sports reporters. When they asked Mom what she thought, she asked, “What about Tom Carnegie?” For those of you who are not local to Indianapolis or not a race fan, Carnegie was the sports director at local TV station Channel 6 but is most famous for being the PA announcer at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway until he was well into his 80s. As he aged, he began walking with a cane and would navigate the Speedway in one of those three-wheel electric scooters.

“What if Tom Carnegie wants to branch out from racing and wants to cover hockey,” she asked.

I chimed in, “I’m an aspiring freelance writer. What if I wanted a job as a sports journalist? I wouldn’t be able to cover hockey.”

The architects went back to the drawing board.

My greatest accomplishment as an advocate was that I was instrumental in the passage of a bill that made it easier for disabled people to vote.

Mom and I would go to the Statehouse a couple of days a week during the legislative session to read bills, get copies of them, and occasionally attend hearings. I discovered a bill that would allow physically disabled people to be assisted in the voting booth by a member of their immediate family. The way the law was at the time, blind people could be assisted by family members but if you were physically disabled, you would have to be assisted by the two precinct judges – one Democrat, and one Republican.

Obviously, you want your vote to be private. These precinct workers could be people that you know from your neighborhood, church, or whatever. You don’t want them to know who you voted for. What if you wanted to vote for independent or even communist parties? That’s none of their business.

It wasn’t surprising that there was already a special provision for blind people to be assisted by their families. Prior to the formation of organizations like COVOH, it was common for specific disabilities to be able to advocate for specific benefits that related only to their people. Blind and visually impaired advocates had traditionally been very successful in securing accommodations but they did not extend those accommodations to other disabilities.

The bill wasn’t getting any action. I tracked down one of the sponsors of the bill but he said he was just a cosponsor. He really didn’t have anything to do with it. He just put his name on the bill. I needed to contact the author. So I tracked him down. He said that one of his constituents had written him a letter. She had MS and wanted her husband to help her operate the voting machine. The precinct would not allow it. So, she did what you’re supposed to do. She wrote her legislator. He wrote the bill but didn’t have the time, inclination, or political capital to see it through. He said we needed to get the committee chair to schedule a hearing.

So I tracked down the committee chair, cornered her in a hallway at the Statehouse, and asked, “Why haven’t you scheduled a hearing for this bill?” It had been assigned to some obscure subcommittee on elections that probably didn’t have any other business all session long. But seeing me sitting there in a wheelchair asking for a hearing on a bill that had no price tag necessary and wasn’t going to ruffle any feathers, she had no choice but to tell me she would schedule a hearing.

She did schedule it. A couple of days later I got on the elevator that she was on. She thought I was stalking her but I just needed a ride on the elevator. It was a coincidence. She said, “I got that hearing scheduled.” I had to explain I wasn’t tracking her down.

The hearing was scheduled for 8:30 AM and there was a question at first if was going to be in an accessible hearing room. Some of the rooms in our ancient Statehouse are up or down three or four steps for no good reason. I called out the troops and I was there along with five other people in wheelchairs ready to testify for this bill early in the morning.

One of the representatives asked, does the bill need a provision that you need something like a note from your doctor stating that you can’t operate the machine. One of my buddies Jim Pauly spoke up and said, “I’m tired of having to prove I’m disabled. Can’t you look at me sitting here in a wheelchair and not figure that out for yourself? Are you really concerned this is going to be abused somehow by nondisabled people?

The bill had no price tag attached so there really wasn’t anything to object to. It passed out of committee unanimously and went straight through both houses on unanimous votes. I don’t recall if it was even assigned to a committee in the Senate or if they just rubberstamped it in some committee. There was no need for an additional hearing. Once something innocuous makes it through one house, there is usually no resistance in the Senate.

I later saw the author of the bill and he thanked me for what I did. He was somewhat embarrassed to admit that he had not given it the attention it deserved. He said it’s the kind of thing where you introduce the bill, hope it goes somewhere, and if it doesn’t, you at least write back to your constituent and say, “I tried.” Apparently, he didn’t try very hard. I had to save the day.

I was extremely proud that my only official effort as a lobbyist was so successful.

Eventually, the volunteer efforts of my mother and I shifted from disability advocacy to work at Saint Gabriel Church. At some point, COVOH changed its name to “Council of Volunteers and Organizations for Hoosiers with disabilities” as the word “handicapped” fell out of favor. See Episode 4 for my rant over the loss of the term “handicapped”.

As best I can tell, COVOH no longer exists. It’s not that that there is no need for disability advocacy but without a central focus such as passing the Mandatory Special Education Act, the organization faded away. Mom said that Amy taught her, “The goal of any human service organization is to make itself obsolete. Once you have met all of the needs of your clientele, You no longer need to exist.” So I don’t feel so bad that COVOH is defunct. I feel like it served its purpose. There are other organizations, backed by laws and legal precedents that we didn’t have before that allow us to continue to advocate for our rights.

My mother is no longer with us. Mrs. Lurvey passed away several years ago. I’ve linked her obituary in the description. She was an amazing woman. Also, Muriel Lee, mother of my friend Christopher Lee, who was very active in that area is neuron with us. I learned a lot from their example and no others carry on that fight.

I want to recommend again a book that I recommended in early episodes. Disabled freelance journalist Ben Mattlin’s “Disability Pride: Dispatches from a Post ADA World” provides excellent background on the history of disability rights and the current state of affairs. Links are in the description.

My mother also spent countless hours volunteering for the Marion County Muscular Dystrophy Foundation (MCMDF). She developed a book about caring for special needs kids and updated a publication called “Navigation Unlimited”. It was a guidebook to accessible facilities in Indianapolis. She went to restaurants, shopping centers, government buildings, and other public places surveying their accessibility accommodations, availability of handicap restrooms, and other issues. These days, accessibility is much more ubiquitous than it was and such a guidebook is no longer needed. I’ve heard of some cities developing an app that would serve such a purpose but I don’t think it’s really needed anymore. She served on the Board of Directors of the organization and when her term was up, I replaced her and served two terms on the board.

We were funded mostly by United Way of Central Indiana. It was always a struggle to get funding for our organization because we were compared to the much more famous Muscular Dystrophy Association of America. MDAA was funded by the famous Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon. In those days, MDAA raised funds strictly for research. Nothing went to patient services such as assistance with the purchase of wheelchairs, home modification, assistive technology, accessible vans, etc.

MCMDF did fund a small research program but they primarily focused on patient services. The other reason they existed was that really objected to the way that MDAA portrayed “Jerry’s kids” as objects of pity. They would play on your guilt that you had healthy children in order to raise money. It was a successful tactic but it was abhorrent to nearly everyone in the disability community. There were also reports that of all major charitable organizations, a larger portion of their efforts with to administrative costs rather than the actual beneficiaries of the charity.

See the article from Wikipedia which talks about the downfall and demise of the telethon.

Jerry Lewis left the telethon in 2011 and the telethon ceased operations after 2014. There have been online fundraising videos a couple of hours long that tried to re-create the telethon efforts but they have been online only and have not had much success. Jerry Lewis died in 2017 at 91.

MDAA still exists and funds research. Only 30% of their annual budget came from the telethon at its height. They do now also provide some patient services and overall are a better organization than they used to be. MCMDF expanded beyond Marion County and is now known as the Indiana Muscular Dystrophy Family Foundation. They continue to focus primarily on patient services.

I also served two years on the board of another United Way Agency – the Central Indiana Radio Reading Service. This organization used volunteer readers to read newspaper and magazine articles over the radio for people who were described as “print handicapped”. This included the blind, visually impaired, and anyone who was physically unable to handle print media. The reading was broadcast over a sub-carrier frequency of the Butler University radio station and could be received by special radios that were distributed free to anyone who qualified for the service.

I joined the organization when it was founded. I remember the first board meeting. Apparently, at the time, there were 2 organizations that represented the interests of blind people and there seemed to be a rivalry between them. As we went around the table and introduced ourselves, one person said, “I represent people from the… Whatever the organization was.” And another person proudly said they represented the rival organization. You could really feel the tension between the two groups. When it came to my turn, I said, “I believe I was invited to serve on this board for my perspective on people with physical disabilities who qualify as print handicapped because they can’t handle newspapers and magazines. But it will be my intent to attempt to serve the interests of all of our constituents regardless of their affiliation or variety of handicaps.”

I saw some smiles from some of the other board members. Unfortunately, the blind representatives did not see them. I was bringing the COVOH philosophy of “We are all in this together and a rising tide lifts all boats.”

I served my term of two years and then moved on to other activities. As best I can tell, the organization no longer exists and is no longer necessary. With cable news, online news which is available to a variety of disabilities, and the advent of text-to-speech and screen reading software, such as service is no longer necessary.

I’m so very proud of everything that my mother did in her lifetime of advocacy and political activism as well as the countless hours she devoted to her church. And I’m proud to have served with her and tried to carry on some of her legacy.

As I mentioned, our focus shifted from disability advocacy to volunteering for our church. I think next week we will begin a multiparty series about the work I did at Saint Gabriel the Archangel Church. Some of it will be about my continued faith journey that I already chronicled in episodes 6, 7, and 11 through 15 but mostly it will just be my experiences of working as a volunteer there.

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 like the exclusive short story I shared with Patreon subscribers recently. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my financial supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend and other things. 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.

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

Contemplating Life – Episode 35 – “Not In My Wildest Fantasies”

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This week we conclude my two-part series on how I would change the world if I could go back in time and why the science fiction story had planned to tell based on that concept probably would not work.

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 35 of Contemplating Life.

After last week’s episode, I detailed the outline of a science fiction/fantasy novel I considered writing about how I would change history during my lifetime if I had the opportunity.

I concluded that in order to have the power and influence to make major historical changes, I needed to be filthy rich. I outlined how I would have started my own software company and beat Bill Gates and Microsoft at their own game. I know the things they did right that I could duplicate and I know the mistakes they made that I could avoid.

If you are just joining us, or to refresh your memory, the scenario I’m working with is that a man is given the opportunity to live his life over again from the beginning yet retain all of the memories, intellect, and experiences of his first lifetime. He is going to use that knowledge of the future to effect change. Also, the idea for this story started out as an exploration of what it would be like for someone with a disability to relive their life without one.

The working title of the story is “The Reboots” because our hero, a guy named Eric is given the opportunity to reboot his life. Note the title is plural because along the way he’s going to discover other people who have similarly rebooted.

Eric would coin the word “reboot” explaining that he didn’t want to use the word reincarnation because it has religious overtones. Although the phrase “born again” would be highly descriptive, that’s even more linked to religious meaning. So he decided and his colleagues simply rebooted. When you reboot your computer, you start from scratch. Everything on your hard drive stays intact but the system itself goes back to its original state. And it’s a catchy title.

Under the scenario I developed, my reboot hero had only one opportunity to make a major change in history because once he had changed the timeline, the history that he knew would no longer exist. So it had to be something big. I decided our merry band of reboots would try to stop 9/11. And if we couldn’t do that, we needed someone other than Bush 43 and Dick Cheney in the White House at the time.

Note it’s not that I blame George W. Bush for 9/11. I blame him and Dick Cheney for the aftermath. I blame them for the unnecessary war to find WMDs that weren’t there, the illegal detention and torture of people without any due process, the Patriot Act, and other erosions of our Constitution.

How do you stop Bush 43? You need to fix what was wrong with the 2000 presidential election. If I’m in the computer business, I need to strongly promote accurate, reliable, foolproof computerized voting machines to avoid the problems experienced in Florida with their crazy punch card system and the hanging CHAD.

The major problem that made it tough for Al Gore to win the 2000 election was that he couldn’t run on the legacy of the Clinton/Gore administration. During that administration, we were not involved in any significant armed conflict. The economy was booming. We had a balanced federal budget and were beginning to pay down the debt. It was an amazing record that he should’ve been able to leverage to an easy victory. But he had to distance himself from Bill Clinton because of all of the scandals.

As with most political scandals, it’s not so much what you did wrong but in the attempt to cover it up. Liberal pendants will say Clinton was impeached for having an extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky. But let’s be fair, he was impeached for obstruction of justice. To a certain extent, the same was true for Nixon. He didn’t plan or order the Watergate break-in. He orchestrated the cover-up.

So to help Al Gore get elected, we have to get rid of the Clinton scandals.

In a nutshell, the secret to stopping the post-9/11 consequences is to get Bill Clinton to keep his pants zipped!

But how do you do that?

As a young man, Bill Clinton dreamed of being president. He wanted to create a legacy for himself. If you could go to him early in his political career, convince him that you could accurately predict the future and that his destiny was the Oval Office, but similarly convince him that his unchecked libido was going to destroy that legacy, it might be enough to keep him out of trouble.

One of my favorite scenes in the film Terminator 2 is when John and Sarah Connor along with the Good Terminator, visit Miles Bennett Dyson who developed the supercomputer chip at the heart of Sky Net. Sky Net was the evil AI that tried to destroy humanity. They explained to him the consequences of his invention. Dyson says, “You are accusing me of things I haven’t done yet.” I could imagine if you sat down with Bill Clinton and told him that his extramarital affairs meant that we had a weak president in office at the time of the most deadly terrorist attack in US history he would’ve said something similar.

If you had Bill Clinton’s ear, there is a lot you could do to prevent 9/11 even if you couldn’t stop him from having a scandalous lifestyle and ruining things for Gore. The Clinton administration had the opportunity to get Osama bin Laden and missed it. You could have convinced him to make that a higher priority. There were intelligence failures that should have prevented 9/11 and didn’t. You could advise him to ensure that didn’t happen. I’ve already mentioned that you could fix the problems of the 2000 election. Clinton could have promoted a federal election law that sets standards for and promoted the use of better quality computerized voting equipment. You could institute some of the security measures that were implemented post-9/11 such as reinforced lockable cabin doors and stricter passenger screenings.

You might write a book about a fictional hijacking based on your knowledge of 9/11 to call attention to these issues. Then again, if no one heeded this cautionary tale, you would be accused of planning the hijacking for the terrorists.

How do you get your foot in the door with Bill Clinton? How do you convince him that you have credible knowledge of the future?

You have to demonstrate that knowledge. You have to make predictions for him that you are confident will come true. The problem is… I’m terrible at history. As I established last week, I can’t remember the dates or the details of historical events. Okay, I know when 9/11 was. I remember the date of the JFK assassination. But I didn’t recall the date of MLK or RFK assassinations when I talked about them a few episodes ago. I had to look it up.

I need to add another gimmick to the story to make it work. I hate to do that but I couldn’t see any way around it. In science fiction, I abhor what I call “plot-driven technology”. I define it as a gadget or gimmick that works the way it does solely for the purpose of making the plot work the way you want it to. Well-written science fiction uses “technology-driven plot.” You invent a technology and then see where that takes you. Unfortunately, in this instance, I need some gimmick to make the plot work. Someday I’ll probably do a whole episode on plot-driven technology complete with extensive examples. For now, I’m just confessing and dipping my toe into those waters.

We can’t just reboot our hero, send him back in time to the day of his birth, and have him grow up with knowledge of the future. We have to give him a photographic memory of the events of his life.

One of the problems of creating a superhero is you need to put limits on their superpowers. Every Superman has to have some sort of kryptonite. So rather than have my hero Eric have a perfect memory of everything that occurred in his life, let’s give him, and other rebooted characters, a photographic memory of particular areas of interest.

Eric, who is based on me, would have total recall of everything he ever learned about computers. He would have detailed knowledge of the APIs of CP/M, MS-DOS, and Windows so that he could easily re-create these programs himself.

Since this is a story that was born out of my own fantasies, we have to give our hero a love interest. In this case, she would be based on my teenage crush Rosie who you’ve heard about in previous episodes. I would call her Julie and she would have total recall of world events. If it was something you would see on the evening news or read in the newspaper, she could tell you the date of any major event. By the way, there are people in real life who have such an ability.

Later we would introduce a character who had total recall of medical knowledge about infectious diseases and we would develop his storyline where he could try to develop an early cure or treatment for HIV/AIDS.

Perhaps we would introduce a space enthusiast based on my friend Christopher Lee. He would try to prevent the Apollo 1 fire and or the space shuttle Columbia and Discovery accidents.

Eric and Julie using mostly her knowledge of “current events” would type up a list of predictions. This would probably occur during the Watergate scandal. Eric would come up with an excuse to interview Bill Clinton perhaps for a school project. Maybe he was writing a report about Rhodes scholars. After getting a sitdown with Clinton, he would say something like, “Mr. Clinton I have come here under false pretense. Please give me just 10 minutes of your time. In all likelihood at the end of 10 minutes, you will shake my hand, wish me well, and plead with me saying, ‘Young man. Please get psychiatric help because if you truly believed or expected me to believe this bullshit story then you truly must be crazy.’”

Eric would explain that he had accurate knowledge of future events but would not tell him how or why he was telling him this. He would hand Clinton a typed list of near-future events and say, “When you are more certain than not that the next item on the list is going to come true, call me and I will tell you why I’m letting you in on this secret.”

About six weeks later Clinton would call and say he was a believer.

One of the problems our hero would face was that he could possibly convince someone that he had credible, accurate knowledge of the future. But he couldn’t prove how he came about that knowledge. To say that he was given the opportunity to reboot his life and live it over again is less credible than if he made up some weird story about inventing a Time Machine that would allow him to read the evening newspaper in the future.

Only after Clinton was convinced that Eric could predict the future would he tell him that if he didn’t keep his pants zipped, America would be in deep trouble with a weak president during a deadly terrorist attack in 2001. Eric could also give him an outline of other things we discussed that he could do to positively change the future.

I think it’s a pretty good idea for a sci-fi novel even if it is a little bit far-fetched. It would illustrate the butterfly effect that small changes can have big consequences. For years I was very excited about the possibility of trying to write this story.

There are also some serious moral questions to be debated in this scenario. In my get-rich-quick scheme, outlined last episode, I would be stealing the legacy of Bill Gates and Ernő Rubik. What did they ever do to me that I would ruin them? Gates, unlike other billionaires such as Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Musk, has been a significant philanthropist. Maybe to assuage my guilt I would offer Gates a job or a merger between my company and Microsoft. Gates isn’t just a skilled programmer. He is a shrewd and at times ruthless businessman.

What are the difficulties of keeping such a secret? How would you apply your knowledge of the future on a personal scale? Would you make the same friends? Would they be interested in being friends with you if your life was significantly different? Would you warn friends about mistakes they were going to make and could you convince them without revealing your secret?

Would the lies you had to live weigh you down? I imagine if someone said to Eric, “Did you really invent the Twisty Cube at age 14?” He could reply truthfully, “According to the US patent office I did.” You can tell I’ve studied politics. I know how to answer the question I wanted to answer and not the one that was asked.

What does our hero do during his teenage years he wants to explore his sexuality in ways that he could not with a disability? Let’s say Eric dies and reboots at age 65. When his rebooted self is 16 and wants to have sex with a 16-year-old girl it’s not a pair of 16-year-olds. He is essentially 81 years old. That’s statutory rape. He would face some tough moral dilemmas. There is no guarantee that Rosie… whoops I mean Julie… would fall in love with him the second time around even though they would share this amazing secret existence.

So… I’ve gone into a lot of detail to tell you the outline of the story that sadly I’m never going to write. One of the problems is that many of my sci-fi story ideas take place in the very, very near future. And by the time I get the story written, the real world has evolved to the point where the story no longer works.

My plans for this great sci-fi/fantasy alternate-history opus began dying in 2016 with the election of Donald J. Trump and culminated with the events of January 6, 2021.

By that time, the greatest threat to democracy and the United States of America was no longer 9/11 and its aftermath. The greatest world crisis in public health was no longer HIV/AIDS.

I thought about writing the story with my hero dying in 2016 before Trump was elected. Then perhaps he comes across a reboot person who died in 2023 and who had knowledge of the events between those two dates. Our hero could then change his plans in such a way that he could stop 9/11 and stop Donald Trump.

At one point, I decided to do it that way. Eric would die in 2016 shortly before the election he would think that Trump was going to lose and he would continue with this plan to rewrite history as we’ve described. Then he would come across another rebooted person and he would have to rework the plants.

I started to write that story. I wrote the first chapter. When I finished it, I realized that the first chapter was a pretty good standalone story. I submitted it to seven magazine and website markets but it was rejected everywhere.

But I have news for you. My first ever Patreon benefit other than the early release of the podcast. I’m going to record a reading of that first chapter under the short story title “I Can’t Say.” No, I’m not being coy. The title is literally “I Can’t Say.” Patreon will also have the text of the story. Both the audio and text versions are available now to Patreon subscribers.

The reason I haven’t continued beyond that first chapter is I don’t know where to go with it. For the past five years or so, I’ve racked my brain to come up with an alternative way to tell the story to prevent Trump from becoming president.

All I had to do to stop 9/11 was convince Bill Clinton to keep his pants zipped. But no simple nor complex solution to stopping Trump and Trumpism has occurred to me after countless hours of trying to find a way to do it. First of all, assassination is off the table. And it’s not just stopping Trump. I have to stop the climate that allowed him to rise to power. As Rachel Maddow said recently, when history looks back on these days, it won’t ask, “How did a former president come to be indicted with dozens of felony charges?” It will ask, “How did such a man get to be president in the first place?” Even if I get Hillary elected in 2016, the January 6 riots just come 4 years early. The threat to democracy will continue.

I think over the past two episodes, I’ve demonstrated what a vivid imagination I have. I can come up with insanely crazy detailed scenarios for changing the world and changing my life. But I lack the imagination to find a simple way to stop Trump and the erosion of public trust in our institutions including law enforcement, the judicial system, and the press. I don’t know how, even if I could go back in time and rewrite history I could keep him out of office so that a competent president would have been at the helm when COVID emerged.

Directly or indirectly, Donald J. Trump has systematically assaulted our values, and our American life, and cost us hundreds of thousands of lives.

Not in my wildest fantasies can I fix what’s wrong with the world right now.

I lived through the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK. I witnessed the Iran hostage crisis, Reaganonmics, Newt Gingrich, the TEA party, the 2008 financial collapse, and wars in Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ukraine as well as the ongoing issues between Israel and the neighbors.

None of that compares to the crisis we currently face.

I can only hope and pray that the assault on democracy fails. There was a glimmer of hope when Joe Biden defeated Trump. That glimmer faded on January 6 and proves that the fight isn’t over. The GOP’s failure to deliver big results during the 2022 midterm elections is a good sign. On the other hand, indictments in four jurisdictions with over 90 felony charges have only served to strengthen Trump. Biden, if he can be relected, will be the most disliked incumbent President to ever be reelected.

A huge percentage of the country has fallen under Trump’s influence and it seems that no amount of reason or logic can sway them from their cult.

My hope and my prayer is that I live long enough to see us emerge from this crisis with democracy intact.

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.

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

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.

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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.