We moved to Panama in November of 1939 – I was 5 years old. While there, I started school. I assume it was kindergarten, although it was a conventional school where we sat in desks. I had to walk about 1.2 a mile (by myself) along the boulevard (Paseo de Centanario) – Mom couldn’t take me because she had no car (Dad took the one car to work) and she had to stay home with brother Bobby.
I remember that I sat in the last row. Two of us had to stay after school for several days and sandpaper our desktops where we had scratched some writing on them.
I also went a few times to a local Spanish speaking school in hopes that I’d catch on to the language, but I didn’t.
I also remember that Dad and Bobby and I were in the car one day and Dad was listening to the news on the car radio (I don’t think we had a radio in the house). He said that there was going to be a war in Europe, whatever that meant.
I also remember going to watch a PanAm Clipper seaplane land. It was some distance from where we lived. While we were standing on the dock, we kept looking back at the city where there was lots of smoke rising. We rushed home, and Dad packed some things in the car and put Bobby and me there to sleep. The fire burned a huge portion of the city but stopped at the boulevard, short of where we lived. From then on, when I walked to school, I passed hundreds of tents on the boulevard that the US Army provided for people who lost their homes.
In February 1941 we moved to Alexandria, VA. There I went to a school in the center of town – again I walked about 1/2 mile by myself. I remember that I used the clock on the classroom wall as a number line when adding numbers. The teacher was impressed, and in time I was advanced half a grade. In that school system, there were staggered classes – some advanced to the next grade in June, others in December. So now I was in 1B instead of 1A.
We moved to another home in Alexandria, and I changed to a school that was close to the house. I don’t remember much about it.
Then in October 1941, we moved to Indianapolis, Indiana. I remember shortly after that our teacher brought her home radio in one Monday morning and we listened to President Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech. Pearl Harbor had been attacked the day before.
A Chinese restaurant that I passed each day on the way to school put a sign on the door announcing that they were Chinese, not Japanese.
I continued to be in the ½ year program and progressed to 7th grade. I was made a member of the Traffic Patrol. I had a white shoulder belt that I had to scrub clean regularly so that it shined. Each day I would go to my assigned corner and stop school kids from crossing until it was safe to do so. This was an honored job.
After the war, Dad was transferred by RCA to the Camden NJ plant. He found a nice house in Moorestown NJ and we moved as soon as school was out, in May 1946. New Jersey did not have mid-year promotions – I had to either drop back half a year as a beginning 7th grader or move forward to start as an 8th grader. I don’t recall being involved in the discussion between my teacher and Mom. I became a 7th grader.
One problem – they still taught penmanship in 7th grade. I had learned a style called Zaner-Bloser. In Indianapolis I was sent to the blackboard on several occasions to show how to write – my script was very good. But in Moorestown, they taught the Palmer method, and I had to change to it. Above is an example of the difference – the upper one is what I knew, the lower one is what I had to learn. I found my self stopping in the middle of words to figure out what type of letter r to make, or how to deal with a word that ended with the
I found school boring – repeating a half year was no challenge. I think it was at that time that I decided – unconsciously – that school was simply a thing I had to endure – I was not there to learn, it was an experience I had to go through in order to progress in life. That continued through college.
In high school (Moorestown, NJ) I managed to be the 21st in my class – there were 20 in the honor group. That was me – just doing enough to get through. I earned sports letters – as equipment manager of the baseball team (big athletic me!). I was on the audio/visual team – ran movies for classes, etc. Enjoyed the science courses (physics, biology, chemistry) and waded through the rest.
In college (Rennsalaer Polytechnic Institute – RPI), I learned a lot in spite of myself but still managed to play a lot and earn a 2.3 average (in a 4.0 system). Getting a job was not an issue of grades – I had worked three summers at RCA and was expected – and did – go there to a great job upon graduation.
At RCA I applied for a coveted David Sarnoff Fellowship. There were only two or three available that year (1958). I had to take a very strange graduate aptitude test (when I was done, I had no idea how I did)) and an interview at corporate headquarters in New York City. There was a blizzard building, and since I lived the closest of all the candidates, they asked me to be the last to be interviewed so the others could catch flights before they ware grounded. After the interview, I took a bus back to where my car was parked in New Jersey. The little Triumph was buried in snow. I had to use an old license plate to dig it out. I got back to the apartment and found Penny in front of the stove – no power or heat in the place!
I got the fellowship and in September we moved back to Troy New York to attend RPI.
I managed to complete a Masters in Electrical Engineering in one year.
Interesting side note: my thesis adviser was Dr. Waters, of GE research in Schenectady. I would go to his house once a week for much of the year. Years later, at my folk’s house in Earp, Nevada, Dad showed me an article from Electronics magazine about an electronic clock he was building. The article was by Dr. Waters.