Generals George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn, and Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, and William Westmoreland in Vietnam all come to mind.
Somebody said I time, I remember, that General Custers famous last words were, Where are all these blankety-blank Injuns comin from?¨
Father and I, and not our pretty crystals, were for a little while the most fascinating exhibit in Moellenkamp Auditorium. We were a demonstration of abnormal psychology. Other contestants and their mentors gathered around us and put us through our paces. They certainly knew which buttons to push, so to speak, to make us change color or twist and turn or grin horribly or whatever.
One contestant asked Father how old he was and what high school he was attending.
That was when we should have packed up our things and gotten out of there. The judges hadnt had a look at us yet, and neither had any reporters. We hadnt yet put up the sign that said what my name was and what school system I represented. We hadnt yet said anything worth remembering.
If we had folded up and vanished quietly right then and there, leaving nothing but an empty table, we might have entered the history of American science as no-shows who got sick or something. There was already an empty table, which would stay empty, only 5 meters away from ours. Father and I had heard that it was going to stay empty and why. The would-be exhibitor and his mother and father were all in the hospital in Lima, Ohio, not Liina, Peru. That was their hometown. They had scarcely backed out of their driveway the day before, headed for Cleveland, they thought, with the exhibit in the trunk, when they were rear-ended by a drunk driver.
The accident wouldnt have been half as serious as it turned out to be if the exhibit hadnt included several bottles of different acids which broke and touched off the gasoline. Both vehicles were immediately engulfed in flames.
The exhibit was, I think, meant to show several important services that acids, which most people were afraid of and didnt like to think much about, were performing every day for Humanity.
The people who looked us over and asked us questions, and did not like what they saw and heard, sent for a judge. They wanted us disqualified. We were worse than dishonest. We were ridiculous!
I wanted to throw up. I said to Father, Dad, honest to God, I think we better get out of here. We made a mistake.¨
But he said we had nothing to be ashamed of, and that we certainly werent going to go home with our tails between our legs.
Vietnam!
So a judge did come over, and easily determined that I had no understanding whatsoever of the exhibit. He then took Father aside and negotiated a political settlement, man to man. He did not want to stir up bad feelings in our hOme county, which had sent me to Cleveland as its champion. Nor did he want to humiliate Father, who was an upstanding member of his community who obviously had not read the rules carefully. He would not humiliate us with a formal disqualification, which might attract unfavorable publicity, if Father in turn would not insist on having my entry put in serious competition with the rest as though it were legitimate.
When the time came, he said, he and the other judges would simply pass us by without comment. It would be their secret that we couldnt possibly win anything.
That was the deal.
History.
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T
he person who won that year was a girl from Cincinnati. As it happened, she too had an exhibit about crystallography. She, however, had either grown her own or gathered specimens herself from creek beds and caves and coal mines within 100 kilometers of her home. Her name was Mary Alice French, I remember, and she would go on to place very close to the bottom in the National Finals in Washington, D.C.
When she set off for the Finals, I heard, Cincinnati was so proud of her and so sure she would win, or at least place very high with her crystals, that the Mayor declared Mary Alice French Day.¨
I have to wonder now, with so much time in which to think about people Ive hurt, if Father and I didnt indirectly help set up Mary Alice French for her terrible disappointment in Washington. There is a good chance that the judges in Cleveland gave her First Prize because of the moral contrast between her exhibit and ours.
Perhaps, during the judging, science was given a
backseat, and because of our ill fame, she represented a golden opportunity to teach a rule superior to any law of science: that honesty was the best policy.
But who knows?
Many, many years after Mary Alice French had her heart broken in Washington, and I had become a teacher at Tarkington, I had a male student from Cincinnati, Mary Alice Frenchs hometown. His mothers side of the family had just sold Cincinnatis sole remaining daily paper and its leading TV station, and a lot of radio stations and weekly papers, too, to the Sultan of Brunei, reputedly the richest individual on Earth.
This student looked about 12 when he came to us. He was actually 21, but his voice had never changed, and he was only 150 centimeters tall. As a result of the sale to the Sultan, he personally was said to be worth $30,000,000, but he was scared to death of his own shadow.
He could read and write and do math all the way up through algebra and trigonometry, which he had taught himself He was also probably the best chess player in the history of the college. But he had no social graces, and probably never would have any, because he found everything about life so frightening.
I asked him if he had ever heard of a woman about my age in Cincinnati whose name was Mary Alice French.
He replied: I dont know anybody or anything. Please dont ever talk to me again. Tell everybody to stop talking to me.¨
I never did find out what he did with all his money, if anything. Somebody said he got married. Hard to believe!
Some fortune hunter must have got him.
Smart girl. She must be on Easy Street.
But to get back to the Science Fair in Cleveland: I headed for the nearest exit after Father and the judge made their deal. I needed fresh air. I needed a whole new planet or death. Anything would be better than what I had.
The exit was blocked by a spectacularly dressed man. He was wholly unlike anyone else in the auditorium. He was, incredibly, what I myself would become: a Lieutenant Colonel in the Regular Army, with many rows of ribbons on his chest. He was in full-dress uniform, with a gold citation cord and paratroopers wings and boots. We were not then at war anywhere, so the sight of a military man all dolled up like that among civilians, especially so early in the day, was startling. He had been sent there to recruit budding young scientists for his alma mater, the United States Military Academy at West Point.
The Academy had been founded soon after the Revolutionary War because the country had so few military officers with mathematical and engineering skills essential to victories in what was modem warfare way back then, mainly mapmaking and cannonballs. Now, with radar and rockets and airplanes and nuclear weapons and all the rest of it, the same problem had come up again.
And there I was in Cleveland, with a great big round badge pinned over my heart like a target, which said:
ExmBrroR.
This Lieutenant Colonel, whose name was Sam Wakefield, would not only get me into West Point. In Vietnam, where he was a Major General, he would award me a Silver Star for extraordinary valor and gallantry. He would retire from the Army when the war still had a year to go, and become President of Tarkington College, now Tarkington Prison. And when I myself got out of the Army, he would hire me to teach Physics and play the bells, bells, bells.
Here are the first words Sam Wakefield ever spoke to me, when I was 18 and he was 36:
Whats the hurry, Son?¨
6
hats the hurry, Son?¨ he said. And then, If youve got a minute, Id like to talk to you.¨
So I stopped. That was the biggest mistake of my life. There were plenty of other exits, and I should have headed for 1 of those. At that moment, every other exit led to the University of Michigan and journalism and music-making, and a lifetime of saying and wearing what I goshdarned pleased. Any other exit, in all probability, would have led me to a wife who wouldnt go insane on me, and kids who gave me love and respect.