Patience is the companion of wisdom.

– St. Augustine

Starting a New Life  1937-1940

Our mother took John and me to Pasadena, California to escape the depredations of the Japanese in China. My father and two older brothers, George (whom we called Kemp) and Albert, stayed in China throughout most of the war. But those are other stories. We took an apartment on Hill Avenue near Colorado Boulevard and just a few blocks away from Caltech.

What a terrific difference from Nanjing! I was put into the public school system, in McKinley Elementary where many of the kids were dark-skinned and Mexican and tough, whereas I was lily white and on the delicate side. The playground was paved with asphalt and not much fun. In the classroo

m I apparently did well and was advanced a half year twice. This made up for my having to repeat kindergarten in Shanghai because of a change in the age requirements.

Once on the way home from school, I was accosted by a class bully and a couple of his buddies. They decided to have some fun, so they pushed me around and finally forced me to the ground. One of them found a red ant and pushed it against my arm, whereupon it stung me – yikes! I got over it soon enough, but I’ve always been impressed by that incident in the fact that he knew about ants and that ants could really inflict a lot of pain on an individual so hugely larger than itself. To this day I have great respect for red ants, several colonies of which we have in our New Mexico yard.

Fire and Smoke

My proclivities towards getting into trouble seemed to have followed me across the water, however. There was a small building in the rear of our apartment house that contained an incinerator where everyone put his burnable trash. On this particular day, while I was playing in the area, I noticed that the incinerator was crammed full of paper and cardboard, so that it clearly needed to be ignited. I found a ‘strike-anywhere’ match and lit the contents. What ensued was far beyond my expectations – a huge fire, with flames shooting out of the chimney. I sneaked home and engaged myself in studious activities. Soon the sound of sirens was heard, and fire trucks came roaring up. I showed an unusually limited interest in all this excitement, which of course made my mother suspicious. It didn’t take long for her to extract a confession from me. I was much relieved when she acknowledged that what I thought would be punished as a severe crime was an act of innocence and ignorance. I was spared the rod. But then, Mom was a much more forgiving soul than my father who at that time, thank goodness, was some 4,000 miles away.

But speaking of fire and smoke, at the age of 10 while walking home from school one day, I ran into a small, animated cluster of classmates on a sidewalk corner. They had happened upon a pack of Avalon cigarettes that apparently had fallen from someone’s pocket. Dares were going around to see who would smoke one. Having had some experience since the age of 5 with my father’s cigarillos purloined from his office in our home in China, I casually said that it was no big deal to smoke a cigarette. Whereupon the challenge was on; I lit up and smoked one of the Avalons to much admiration among the group. Suddenly I was somebody! With rising notoriety and bravado, I volunteered to smoke another, sealing my elevated status among this crowd. On the way home, my head started doing strange things, and my stomach followed soon after. By the time I reached home my stomach was in my mouth. It didn’t take long for Mother once again to extract a confession and a promise not to smoke again until ‘I was old enough’ which turned out to be seventeen.

McKinley Elementary School

School was enjoyable except for homework assignments on the addition and subtraction of fairly large numbers. I recall sitting in our classroom and looking out the big windows and watching it snow atop the Sierra Madre Mountains while it was sunny and warm in the city. We learned about Father Junipero Serra who established the Christian missions throughout what became the state of California; about the La Brea tar pits where Pleistocene animals were perfectly preserved; and about China! Yes we had an extended, integrated unit on China. The class composed a Chinese tune for the tin flute (which I can still play today), we made teacups of clay and had them glazed and fired, and we wrot

e – individually – poems. I believe that the pedagogy involved was very well done because to this day I remember much of the material covered. In the sixth grade it is fairly easy to bring in various disciplines to a single topic because there is usually only one teacher for the homeroom. But the power of integrated studies in the higher grades has been proven repeatedly. In my work in science education where schools have team-taught science units involving language arts (especially writing), oral communication, social studies, art, mathematics and even history, the results are often spectacular in the improvement of true learning. And the students love it.

One day the teacher told us to get out a piece of paper and write a poem about China. I did mine on “The Tall Bamboo”, and when finished I raised my hand. She came over, picked up my paper, read it, turned to me and said sternly, “Where did you get this?!” Flustered and confused, I stammered that I had just composed it, but she insisted that this was a case of perjury, and that my mother would be informed. Well, after some phoning back and forth, the teacher was finally convinced that the poem was indeed original. It was published subsequently in Boy’s Life for which I received a one-time royalty of a munificent $5.00, which at that time for a 10-year-old was like hitting the jackpot. Here it is (with spelling and punctuation as in the original):

The Tall Bamboo

I. It grows so tall the green bamboo,

It sways in the wind when it howls at you.

And it is so useful in all the lands,

In China specially it’s in everyones hands.

But the green bamboo that grows so tall,

Builds chinese houses that are so small.

The bamboo makes the ring to wed,

“It makes many things”, the Chinese said.

Chorus:

Oh you so straight, Oh you so tall,

Oh you so high above us all,

Why do you grow so very fast?

Your a big imitation of the small, small grass.

II. But when it grows so tall and wide,

The Chinese look with a great deal of pride.

As I said before it’s a useful thing,

You play flutes with it, while people sing.

Some people use it to hold the flag,

And some people weave it to make a bag.

The farmers use it to make a rake,

It’s a very strong wood, and will not break.

Chorus

A Life of the Imagination

Every Saturday afternoon John and I went to the movies. We walked down Colorado Boulevard to the State Theater where there would be a feature film plus a short or two always including an episode in the serialized Adventures of Zorro! I have no recollection of any of the main attractions. We went to see Zorro. Of course at the end of each episode Zorro had just run into an ambush, or was hanging over a cliff-edge with a villain’s knife at this throat, or was about to be hanged from a tree. So we just had to come back the next

week for the sequel in which he always managed to extricate himself. I don’t know that we learned any moral lessons from Zorro, other than that skill with the bullwhip and rapier, along with derring-do, would always triumph over evil.

John and I didn’t have any real friends from the neighborhood or school, so that we had to rely on hobbies in those days before television. We built solid model airplanes of balsa wood from kits, painted, sanded and repainted them, and then applied decals for their insignia. Mostly these were World War I biplanes and monoplanes, German, British and American. Then they were hung from the ceiling of our playroom. We also made flying models that were much more complicated to build. The ‘skeleton’ was made of light balsa pieces that were cut out by razor blade from sheets with all the parts printed on them. These were then glued together and subsequently covered with tissue paper. The paper was sprayed with a fine mist of water, which upon drying caused the paper to shrink and to become taught and smooth. Anywhere along the way, disaster could strike, often with irretrievable damage. The propeller was powered by a long, heavy rubber band, which was twisted by turning the propeller in a direction opposite to that for driving the plane. When they worked these model aircraft were sources of great delight as they flew with elegance and beauty over a few hundred yards.

For two weeks in the summer John and I would take the big red tram down to the docks, and hence by boat out to Catalina Island, just off the coast of Los Angeles. Summer camp was always a joy – full of swimming, sports, and games.

On my tenth birthday I received a small Gilbert chemistry set as a gift. It had about eight chemicals in little wooden canisters, a test tube and a beaker, along with an instruction booklet for performing some elementary experiments. This little beginning set the course for much of the rest of my life although at the time my interest level was hardly all-consuming. But it formed the basis for what was to come when we moved to Wooster, Ohio later that year.

These were happy times for us in glorious Southern California, with visits to the fabulous Huntington Library and gardens, Knott’s Berry Farm, the desert in bloom, the mountains, the Pacific Ocean, the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day, and Friday night football in the Rose Bowl.

The weather seemed perfect at a time of clear skies, prior to all the pollution that was to foul the Los Angeles valley in later years. But Mother needed to move; so we packed up and headed for Wooster, Ohio.

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