Magic
Town is a pop song from the early 1960s. Being in Walla Walla
then was a magic experience for me. To celebrate the 35th
anniversary, here we are. Ordinary text which appears in
It is now 2011, so any arithmetically correct chance to have a
40th reunion is in the past. We missed the sex appeal of
Grigori
Perelman turning down a kazillion dollars for proving the
Poincaré conjecture. Can't ride on his coattails to sleb
status. Noooooo. Perelman attended a Math School in Russia.
Eight weeks does not
a Math School make,
but when that's
what you've got,
it's what ya' gonna' take.
The National Science Foundation used to run summer institutes for high school students to encourage them. There were institutes for math, physics and I guess other sciences as well.
Dr. Victor Keiser at Whitman College ran a Summer Math Institute (smi), and he got the idea that aside from normal academic routes, he might find some math talents among the top chess players in the country. And incidentally some chess opponents. So he wrote to the US Chess Federation and got the addresses of all the players on their Top-Under-16 list.
At the time, the USCF included all USCF members, including foreigners, on the list. Accordingly, I in West Vancouver, BC, Canada, received an invitation to write the exam. Well, heck, a quiz, why not? The quiz was three hours and included 7 questions. Later I discovered that I got 3.5 answers right, with a passing mark of 3. About 6 players from the chess list had qualified. One (I think his name was David Mitchell and he was from Oregon, but I never met him) decided not to come, as he was going to a Summer Physics Institute instead. One of the chess players (Roy) ended up not playing any competitive chess. One of the regulars (Eric) turned out to be a chess player.
So it was off to Walla Walla, which we had to find on a map. It was a 499 mile (or 3.14159 km, ha ha) drive for my family, who dropped me off, perhaps wondering all the while if it was for real.
Here is the cast, no longer relying on my faulty memory but on the address list recovered by Roy Truelson:
The errors of my memory are thus obliterated, but if I may say so myself, and I may, they were pretty accurate! The list also has Roberta Ann Fincke of Fairborn Ohio, but she cancelled and we never met her. It turned out that Roberta Ann went to a NSF Math Institute in Berkeley (yahooooo!). She emailed me with her recollections, but I don't know how to anonymize hers (obviously any references to Berkeley or the Bay would refer to her). Anyway, you missed an interesting time, Roberta, but you had an interesting time, too.
I hadn't updated this page in way too long. It flies, time really does.
There are no photos. Joyce took some but they never turned out. Lorne took some, but they are gone. When Mike and I visited Dr. Keiser a few years later, he opened a drawer, took out half a dozen photos--as if they had been awaiting that moment for years--and gave them to Mike. But they're gone too.
What was my contribution to the mix? I brought shyness, enthusiasm, and naïveté. Some enthusiasm for math. We went to class every morning for three hours, and then were supposed to study / do homework in the afternoon. I did--some. Then the late afternoons and evenings were ours. Some studied then.
We had two tournaments and also went on a chess outing one weekend to the Sunfair Open in Yakima. Although I was sometimes 1st or 2nd on the Under-16 list, it was Danny Kopec who came out on top, though I wished it otherwise. Then Gary Cornel and maybe Mike Montchalin or me.
Maybe I misplaced my enthusiasm in ping pong, which I played every evening. I got to be one of the best, if not the best, ping pong player. Then the fateful day came when Dr. Keiser visited with his multi-ply rubber bat, giving him great control over spin and location. I had been using the available bat, surfaced with sandpaper, which gave good speed, but no spin control. Later somebody told me that sandpaper is now illegal because it damages the balls. Anyway, I don't remember what happened in the showdown match against Dr. Keiser, but I suspect that he crushed me. Otherwise I would have remembered, eh?
Steve had a trumpet; Dean borrowed it, broke curfew, and
gave us all (especially chaperone Ken) a wakeup call at some early
hour of the morning. Or was it the other way around? I remember
borrowing Melodye's trumpet and running down the basement hall
with it, playing random notes jazz to the delight
of, well, at least myself. Sure in my embouchure.
On the last day of our Number Theory class, Dr. Underwood
concluded: A primary ideal is the kernel of a homomorphism in
which every zero-divisor is nil-potent.
That's the one thing I
remember. I occasionally try it out with mathematicians, who, after
a bit of eyebrow raising and staring off into space, after a few
seconds usually say something like I guess that's right.
In
computers with Dr. Thommassen, we learned to program in Fortran IId,
a precursor of Fortran IV. We also learned the Gauss-Jordan
Iteration Method of solving polynomial equations. Each of us had to
implement Gauss-Jordan for polynomial equations of degree 6. After
much agony, my program did not work. But at least I wasn't the only
one. I remained allergic to computers and punch-cards for another
decade, until the advent of microcomputers in 1979.
Let's face it, the highlight was the personal interaction with
other bright young people, some of whom had Ideas. This was 1969,
after all. We all treated each other pretty well, except one guy who
was picked upon. I guess we failed the Biblical test: As you
treat the least of these, so you treat me
but oh well, maybe we
learned something too. A lot of us found this guy annoying, but he
wasn't trying to annoy us, could he have been? Oh yes, and
some people got ponded. They got tossed in a garden pond not far
from the residence. No ill-will intended, I'm sure. I never was
either a pond-er nor a pond-ee.
After a few of the 8 weeks, emotional links developed between the
students themselves and also some local young people (quaintly
referred to as townies
). Some of these bonds were what you
might call romantic, some were more purely friendships. I keep
thinking that a spouse or grandchild is going to read this and shout:
So, Ethel, what the hell is this?
I remember that Marty
Scharff was loved--like a brother--by many of the townies.
It's been a long time; yes I was in that secret room; no, I didn't linger. But I do remember that some couples also went up to the 2nd and 3rd stories (which were theoretically locked and strictly off limits) for even greater privacy.
John and David built a stereo system from a Heathkit. This gave them a low profile at the beginning, but once it was built they became the undisputed cool guys. The stereo also provided new opportunities to pick on Mr. Unlucky, who was a heavy sleeper, but not when a speaker was placed beside his bed and the volume turned up to 10.
The albums I remember are Led Zeppelin (debut album),
Suzy, Suzy
Creemcheese, what's got inta ya?
The album might have been Freak
Out, and that song might have been Return of the Son of Monster
Magnet).
The pop song I remember best from the radio is Zager and Evans' 2525.
Merrilee Rush and the Turnabouts gave a concert. I didn't go, but the song Angel of the Morning lingered in our thoughts. Here are the chords and lyrics.
Our dorm was Prentiss Hall, a girls', er, women's dorm. I remember that the bathroom stalls were pink. Having found the Whitman College Photo Tour, I think that our classes were held in Olin Hall, and the computer lab was in the Memorial Building. But don't bet a lot of money on that.
We had a couple of dances in the basement. There was a stop dance competition, where when the music stopped, you had to freeze. I was one of the winners. My prize was a Whitman deck of addition cards. Quick, 3 + 4 = ? No peeking! Just to make it confusing for dylsexics, there were also spot dances, where you were dancing along and suddenly the light would shine on you, but I don't remember what happened next. John and David also had a Black Light that made it really cool to wear cotton, which luminesced brightly.
Pin hunt. Somebody organized a pin hunt. That's where you and your partner (a boy and a girl) are given a straight pin. Your task is to go round to houses and offer to barter the pin. So at the first house you might trade the pin for a bag of defunct tennis balls. Then at the next house, a dog owner might give you a broom in exchange for one of the balls. And so on. Hours later, it's show and tell with the loot. Walla Walla at the time was reputed to have the highest concentration of millionaires of any city in the USA. There were a lot of rambling old houses with huge attics, so the pin hunt was really too easy. The luckiest scroungers got to go with townies, who would know people and have ideas. Those teams could be goal-oriented. Embarrassingly, I don't remember who my pin partner was, though I have short-listed it to two. Whoever you are, darling, I had a wonderful time. Thank you. At any rate, we did the best we could. At the end we had a large collection of junk. I remember that we had two ancient football helmets. A few years later we might have earned some cachet by claiming that one of them belonged to President Gerald Ford. But those were still the Nixon-Agnew years. Other people were able to cajole interesting stuff out of the unsuspecting townsfolk. But sorry, I don't remember who the winner was, nor what objet triggered the victory. I just remember that it was a fun evening. What ever happened to the junk?
We had an all-night party in the common area of the dorm. Because of curfew, nobody could leave the building. Townies were allowed, and it was there I met Shirley Harris, who played a prominent role in my life 8 years later. I was a catalyst for even bigger changes in her life, mostly for the better, I hope. The night's highlight was a psychological or spiritual party game that Kelly played with us. We closed our eyes. He took one arm, inner arm, and gently rubbed it, in a circular motion, starting at the wrist and finishing at the elbow. All the while, he took us on a spoken journey, something like this: you go along a path, you find a container, inside the container is a key, you continue along the path, you come to water, you get across the water to the other side. Then when it was over, he asked what kind of path was it, what kind of container, what kind of body of water, and how did you get to the other side? For me, it was a path in the woods, an earthenware container, the water was a large lake, and I walked around it. I remember only the interpretation of the water. It was a person's potential love life or sex life. The way of getting to the other side was a person's way of realizing that sex life. So, in walking around the lake, I revealed myself to be, ah, somewhat shy. It took a long time to overcome shyness! By contrast, I was told that one girl came upon a puddle and jumped in it.
It was very much a Days of Future Passed evening.
As dawn began to break, the front door (it seemed like wide doors at the time) was unlocked; as we walked out onto the dew-covered lawn we saw Venus as the Morning Star.
It happened on the way back from our day out at the Snake River where some of us (not I) waterskiied behind Jerome Mullins' boat. It was a hot day, and as evening drew in, we lit a fire on the beach and began to feel just how sunburned we were. I remember that when she threw my comb into the fire, we realized that this could be something other than hello how are you, have a good day (an expression which mercifully had not blossomed into popularity). In the back seat of a car, going back to Walla Walla, we kissed. The ride was about an hour, so we kissed a lot. It was the first time I had kissed a girl.
But I had a problem. My problem was that I thought I had a girlfriend back home in West Vancouver. I wanted her to be a girlfriend, but in fact she was just an acquaintance. Let's see ... in Drama class, charades, I had done the song Broken Arrow, nobody got it, and when I revealed the title, she said it was her favourite song. There was a ceremony at the high school, and I ended up alone in the library, in my green suit. She walked in, just radiant in a dress that I imagined she wore for me. Girls, this can be effective. So is baking and mailing cookies. Guys are like dogs, show us a bit of kindness and we'll slobber all over you. Anyway, this West Vancouver girl and I had maybe held hands once and exchanged a couple of letters while I was away.
So, let's compare. Right here, in Walla Walla, I had an intelligent, good-natured girl who was a good kisser. 500 miles away, a pen pal. Gosh, at age 15 it's not too late to have both a pen pal and a good kisser. However, in the trenches in 1969, I decided to keep the penpal and drop the kisser. That's maybe the worst of the four choices but, hey, to thine own self be true. What was bad is that I agonized over it. Anybody who discovered me crying, might ask "hey bud, what's up?" and I'd tell them. But I didn't tell the kisser, who was mystified at my behaviour. Before long, all was revealed, but my kisser was none too pleased. I felt rotten. I was rotten. A couple of days later we had a reconciliation. She gave me a new comb and forgave me. See? I said she was good-natured. We became friends. I went back to smooning (a neologism which combines mooning and swooning) and redeaming (another: dreaming repeatedly) about the pen pal. Nothing ever happened between the pen pal and me, but a few years later, I took the pen pal on a date. I took her to a fancy-ish Chinese restaurant. I love Chinese food, but this was the worst I'd ever had. More important, nothing happened, not the slightest spark of seeing eye to eye with the former pen-pal. Obsession wasted, as it almost always is.
Kids don't always get consistent guidance. Sure, we've been
brought up right and we know Love thy neighbour as thyself
as
something to aspire to. But if the subtext is Don't kiss anybody
but an auntie, and never for more than 5 seconds
, contradictions
arise. Where to go? Pop music? Despite all the cool advice of the
times: If you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one
you're with
or earlier times: Where pretty girls are, you know
that I'll be found
, the subject of most pop songs was devoted,
mono, and often obsessive two-person relationships. The over-the-top
song for that is
Bernadette. I suppose that has some value in the context of the
family and child-rearing, but for kids? Do we need to
practice monogamy for a decade before getting the hang of it?
I think not. Bottom line, I was an uptight self-repressed
middle-class child. Couldn't handle two girlfriends, ended up with
none.
When I was 19, I joined a church which was evangelical bordering on the pentecostal. It was a big change from the Catholic Church I had left three years earlier. I went into it thinking that it was going to be quotes from the Bible. I wasn't prepared for Witnessing. I also wasn't prepared for the church socials, which happened frequently. It was young people (some of the guys were older), mostly girls, many of them gorgeous. During a lull, one of the older guys told me that, in his opinion, one of the biggest evils in society was dating. That was a shock, as I figured that everybody (except me) went out on dates.
Years later, I discovered that having a girlfriend can make a man more attractive to other women. I'm excluding consideration of marriage from this discussion, but feel free to add it back in!
There were no drugs, but there might have been booze. I don't remember. If there was booze, it was certainly less than what we had at home, which was typically a glass of wine every evening with dinner.
Do you remember when we all watched the first man walk
on the moon on the TV in the common room?
VietNam was going on - so some of us avoided the
news.
I wore a plaid shirt and clashing plaid shorts. Later somebody told me that I was the only one who could have made a success of that. Mike Montchalin called me Fancy Maraschino Cherry, and I had rosy red cheeks.
I am informed that the guys did a traditional panty raid. Not that I would know.
almost got a bunch of us (including me) sent home.
True Love. Townies. Absent Townies. Counsellors. Why did Frank West always wear black? Shaving Cream. The Cafeteria. Smitty's. Asthma. Marriage. Modern Algebra.
I flew from Walla Walla to Seattle and then I guess to Vancouver. It was the first time I had ever flown. Was it Northwest Airlines? I remember that Melodye travelled on the same flight. A familiar face in an unfamiliar world.
Woodstock took place August 15-18. We, at about 16 a few years younger than the Woodstock Generation, were going home, most of us gritting our teeth for the upcoming Grade 12, final year of High School. We were a bit young yet for five, six, seven, open up the Pearly Gates.
Me, I was about to go into University, but I had neglected to apply for admission. How do you spell idiot-zawand? At least I got half of it right. I just didn't think you needed to apply. I'd written exams, and scholarship exams, I thought it was automatic, like taking the next year of school. Fortunately, my mother Kate had a way with people, and a couple of phone calls from her had me at UBC for registration week as if nothing had happened. Even though my "application" was months late.
Not surprisingly, several of us are Professor so-and-so. Of Math, of Cybernetics (that's computers, not refrigerators), of Bio-Chemistry, an ophthalmic surgeon, an obstetrician/gynecologist (Sally) ... There are at least two Engineers. At least one of us is a professional in a field that has nothing to do with Science or even Academics: the delivery of social services. Lorne spent most of his career in Peoria Illinois, England, and Japan. That's getting around. Some of us were and are unfocused. For example, I am a chess journalist, organizer, referee, computer programmer, and retired business manager, though none of that has anything to do with the modest university degree I got. And Danny Kopec is still the best chess player among us.
Thanks to the six smi-ites (including one from a later year) and one prof who have emailed. Here's hoping to hear from more.
I visited Walla Walla a few times in the early 1970s. One innovation was a brand new library, not far from the College. There I found a couple of poetic excerpts that I'd like to share (thanks also to the Internet for the exact wording).
This, possibly from "The Toper's Apology", by Brother Charles Morris.
I find, too, when I stint my glass, And sit with sober air, I'm prosed by some dull reasoning ass, Who treads the path of care ; Or, harder taxed, I'm forced to hear Some coxcomb's fribbling strain, And that I think 's a reason fair To fill my glass again.
The following turns out to be "On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness" by American poet Arthur Guiterman (1871-1943).
The tusks which clashed in mighty brawls Of mastodons, are billiard balls. The sword of Charlemagne the Just Is Ferric Oxide, known as rust. The grizzly bear, whose potent hug, Was feared by all, is now a rug. Great Caesar's bust is on the shelf, And I don't feel so well myself.
Yeah, yeah, so I'm a sardonic guy, who has dined out on excerpts from these excerpts. Rage against it. According to the Wikipedia, Ferric Oxide isn't exactly rust, but to say Ferrous Oxide, as I have done, would be more wrong.
URL: This web page is:
http://members.shaw.ca/berry5868/smi.htm
Last modified June 9, 2011