California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

If Women Ruled the World, We'd Probably All Be Better Off

by John Lawrence, July 24, 2020

Number 1. There would be much less war. War is a man's game. It's testosterone fueled. Men want the glory heaped on them for having been in a war. Number 2. Since women have historically had the role of caregivers, they would probably have much more empathy for the poor and vulnerable especially poor and vulnerable children. They wouldn't be so obsessed with having a powerful war machine under their control. The President of the United States never wants to look weak, and, as Commander-in-Chief, revels in the power under his command. That's why he always wants to increase the defense budget. Even Trump, who campaigned on getting the US out of futile wars, can't resist the urge to have even more military power at his disposal and is spending more on the military budget. A woman as President would probably not feel the need not to look weak. Her priorities might be more oriented towards curing the ills affecting humankind which are related to poverty, health and education.

There has never been a period in human history in which there has not been a war or the threat of war. World War 1 was started for no good reason whatsoever. It makes no sense that the assassination of a minor Serbian official could have caused the devastation involved in the First World War. It was so bad that the First World War was called the War to End All Wars. President Woodrow Wilson called it "the war to make the world safe for democracy." English soldiers wanted to cover themselves with glory and then be home in time for Christmas. Instead many of them died miserable deaths in muddy trenches breathing mustard gas. The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I, was around 40 million. There were 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded. The total number of deaths included 9.7 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians. European civilization before WW 1 was very advanced. All that was destroyed essentially by male testosterone and pride.

Despite the best intentions of Wilson and others that there would never be another war especially one that caused the devastation of WW 1, just a few years later we had World War 2. Wilson established the League of Nations, a precursor of the United Nations, a noble effort which, however, did nothing to prevent World War 2. The League of Nations was the first worldwide intergovernmental organization whose mission was to maintain world peace. It didn't. President Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role as the leading architect of the League. Despite Wilson's leadership, the United States never joined the League. So much for diplomacy, negotiation and arbitration. War has been primarily conducted by males whose testosterone directed anger, lack of empathy and quest for glory have led them in the direction of war. Peace after all is boring.

Now even in the midst of a pandemic which affects the whole world, you might think it would be a moment when the whole world comes together. Instead Trump and his chief warmonger, Mike Pompeo, are trying to weaponize the coronavirus and start a cold war with China who the US has decided is its chief rival. Instead of cooperation, Pompeo has decided a better policy is to exacerbate tensions with China as much as possible. CNBC reported:

Top officials of the World Health Organization on Thursday slammed “unacceptable” comments made by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who alleged that China had co-opted the WHO.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the claims made Tuesday in London by Pompeo that China had “co-opted international institutions like the World Health Organization” were untrue and a distraction from the global coronavirus pandemic response.

“The comments are untrue and unacceptable and without any foundation for that matter,” Tedros said at a news briefing from the United Nations agency’s Gevena headquarters on Thursday. “WHO will not be distracted by these comments and we don’t want the international community also to be distracted.”

Tedros has repeatedly defended the WHO against criticism of its response to the coronavirus. U.S. President Donald Trump and others have alleged the U.N. health agency has a favorable relationship with China, where the virus emerged at the end  of 2019. Tedros reiterated comments on Thursday that the politicization of the pandemic is one of the greatest threats to the global response.

Pompeo wants his cold war with China because this is the only way he knows to do diplomacy as, supposedly, America's top diplomat. He's not a diplomat. A diplomat would not try to deliberately provoke another country. Now the US has turned its attention from Russia to China as America's main bogieman. They do not even try to be peace makers or negotiators. Conciliation and cooperation are not words in their vocabulary. Maybe Pompeo has his eyes on a lucrative job in the military-industrial complex after he is out of his job as Secretary of State. So his interest is in justifying America's immense defense budget by starting a cold war which might even become a hot war. But a hot war is not even necessary to justify outsize defense budgets. A cold war will do very nicely, thank you very much.

Meanwhile many Americans are on the verge of homelessness. They will swell the ranks of the 500,000 who are already homeless. While Congress argues over the next bailout package, people are losing their jobs, their businesses, their health care and their homes. A bailout package could pay people's mortgages, rents and employee salaries for the rest of the year until, hopefully, a vaccine is discovered. That way the most economic damage could be averted. But it will probably be a paltry cash sum that will do little to protect the great majority of Americans.

What Stephanie Kelton points out in her book, Deficits Don't Matter, is that, well, they don't matter so a bailout 100 times the size of the projected bailout would not be a problem and would never have to be repaid since the US dollar is a sovereign currency. US debt can just be disappeared on the Fed's balance sheet. So both conservatives and liberals can rejoice. There's no reason not to have massive tax cuts as well as massive increases to the Health and Human Services budget. Wow, finally a cause for celebration. We can have it both ways. Now if Americans can only realize this and climb aboard the gravy train. There are some restrictions, however, as Ms. Kelton points out.

The biggest question that people asked Bernie Sanders with his ambitious social programs like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal is "How ya going to pay for it?" Stephanie Kelton has the answer and now Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex is getting on board. Ocasio-Cortez also said that Modern Monetary Theory, which holds that the government doesn't need to balance the budget and that budget surpluses actually hurt the economy, "absolutely" needed to be "a larger part of our conversation."

Chapter 2: Don't Throw Me in the Brier Patch!

It was 1948. I was in the second grade when my Mom came home from "the san" where she had been for almost four years with TB. She still wasn't completely well; she still had a lot of recuperating to do. I remember one day she was lying on a couch in a little room in our house we called the den. It had previously been a dentist's office for the original owner. I was always trying to be playful around my Mom. She didn't like that. She was always telling me "I was fresh." Anyway that day my Mom told me to leave her alone; she was in a "bad mood." That was the first time I'd ever heard that expression. Well, in retrospect it is understandable that she might have been in a bad mood. Her daughter, whom she hadn't seen since she was a baby, was five years old now and couldn't walk or talk. It was enough to depress anybody having to come home to that realization. The family was sort of belatedly having to admit that there was something seriously wrong with her, and she would require constant care perhaps for the rest of her life. Nevertheless, they didn't give up hope that she could learn to walk and talk  ... some day.

This period from 1948 to 1955 when I graduated from elementary school was a pretty normal period in my life. It was the post war period, and it seemed like everyone was pursuing the American Dream. Other than the fact that my sister wasn't normal, we had a pretty normal family life. I remember that my Grandpa Lawrence would buy me comic books at the old general store in Vernon, and, after I read them, I'd resell them to my classmates at school. I even had a special place in the closet in third grade where I stored them. I was sort of a bad kid in third grade. Bobby Morris and I gave the teacher, Mrs. Wehner, a hard time. We flew paper airplanes around the room. One day she even broke down and cried at her desk. In later years I felt bad that we had given her such a hard time. She didn't stay in teaching for very long. I had been a bad kid in kindergarten. The good kids sat at table 3. They were the kids who knew how to keep their hands to themselves. Evidently, I didn't because I had to sit by myself at table 6. Some times I had to stand behind the piano, and once Mrs. Struble broke the yard stick on me. It didn't hurt getting hit with the yard stick because there was too much "give" in it, but getting hit with the ruler was another matter. It didn't give.

I remember I was sent to the principal's office twice. Of course, the principal was my Dad. Lucky for me, he wasn't there on either occasion. Tales used to spread around the school about my Dad's "electric switch" which he would use on you if you were really bad. He would take you to that dark cavern known as the boiler room which few kids ever got to see. That's where he kept the electric switch. Later I found out that the electric switch was all a fiction, and my Dad would point to the light switch on the wall and say, "There's the electric switch." Then he probably had a talk with the little offender and tried to motivate him or her to be a better little citizen.

There was a woods out back of our house. It must have been 3 or 4 square miles. It was good size. I explored that woods over the course of my childhood. One of the things I discovered was some huge blackberry bushes growing wild. I used to go there and gather blackberries. I remember going blackberrying there with my cousin, Peggy, when she'd come over for a few days. Later, her sister, Bette would come over, but she never made it through the night. She'd be so homesick that her mother had to come get her and take her home. I had to walk a certain path through the woods to get to my friend, Gary's, house. Usually, I was accompanied by my dog, Sandy, and one time even my cat, Buttercup, came with us. Gary and I went swimming in his pond or played knock out flies. I was a very active kid. I liked to be outdoors.

There were a lot of old roads and trails in that woods. It looked like it had had a previous history some time in another era. There was evidence of former fields which had since grown up with various sorts of trees: white birch, maple, pine. Rocks had been gathered along the edges of what once had been farmers' fields. I got to know various routes through the forest and some times even went across to the other side where my friend, Teddy Titman, had a pheasant farm. Guys used to come up from the city and pay money to Teddy's father to go and shoot pheasants. There was even a brook in those woods, actually more than one, but the one I remember the best was in a sort of chasm. It was neat to play around. In the winter icycles would form around the flowing water.

In the winter I loved to go sleigh riding in the fields around our house. I would start out in the woods and come down an old road, then make a sharp left hand turn and come out in a field that had an interesting topography that would allow me to take one of several routes. On my more adventurous days I would go further back in the woods and start out in one field and sled down almost the whole length of Lewisburg road to where it met Route 23, the main road. This entailed going under two barbed wire fences at rather high speed from one field to the next. In The last field there was a saddle so I would go up one side of the saddle and then come back down. These fields were all on Hilliard's property, but they never complained about me sleigh riding or hiking on their property. I felt I could go wherever I wanted to go. I used to hate those signs that said "Private Property. Keep Off" although there was a hideout at one extreme end of the woods that was reputed to be owned by the Mafia. That's one place where I honored the "Keep Out" signs.

I used to love winter. It was my favorite season. Sometimes the snow melted a little and then froze so that the sleigh riding was extremely treacherous. There was a crust on the snow that wouldn't give in. You really went fast and it became an issue as to whether or not you would be able to stop when you got to the bottom of the hill. I developed a technique of jumping off my sled but holding on to it, and this usually slowed me down. Then I would jump back on again. But one day the snow was so slick even this didn't work. The field next to the one next to our house had a rather short sledding run and at the end was the usual barbed wire fence and then about a ten foot drop off to Lewisburg Road. Then the field continued downhill on the other side of the road. I was coming down that hill on the frozen ice so fast that I knew I couldn't stop so I jumped off the sled and let go of it. It sailed under the fence and across the road and all the way down the next hill. Fortunately, without the sled I stopped before I got to the fence.

Christmases were always great. My parents were always so good to me and gave me lots of presents. I remember one year I left a Coke for Santa Clause, and he left me a nickle in the bottle cap! Little things like that made my day. Of course, I believed in Santa Claus probably until I was 12. One day Harold Butler clued me in that there was no Santa Claus. He should have known because he lived in Butler's Alley, the ghetto of Sussex, and the poor kids there never got presents. That's one reason why on the last day of school before Christmas vacation, they bussed all the kids to the Sussex Theater for a movie and afterwards, Santa had a gift bag for everyone containing mainly fruit and nuts as I remember. Nevertheless, that was probably the only present the Butler's Alley kids ever got.

I could look forward to getting another accessory or car for my Lionel train. I was really into trains. My Grandfather Lawrence worked on the railroad. He was the station agent in Vernon, a one man shop. Every summer when I spent a week at their house, I'd spend one day with my grandfather at his station. My grandmother would pack a lunch on homemade bread. He'd have to stand along the tracks with a hoop on the end of a long stick with a note attached and hold it up for the engineer who would hook it with his arm as the old steam engine rumbled by.

My grandfather was a telegrapher. He had signals, semaphors and such that would have to be set corrrectly and he communicated using Morse code. There was an old cistern on the property in case the engine needed water in an emergency. After the engineer received the note, he'd throw the hoop out the train's window, and my grandfather and I would have to go and retrieve it. Some times it went in the brook and my grandfather would have to wade in to get it. Once in a while my grandfather had to throw the switch a little ways up the track so the train could pull over onto a siding. There was a passenger's waiting room at my Grandfather's station but there had been no passengers there in years. Only freight trains rumbled by. In the wairing room there was a poster featuring four streamliners lined up next to each other that gave the hint of modernity to the old station. Across the street was a little store where we'd go sometimes for an orange soda. My grandfather and I would walk sometimes the half mile or so from his house downhill to the station. Then we'd have to walk uphill to get home. He had an old car, a Terraplane, that he never drove more than 35 miles an hour.

In later years I would hike my grandfather's railroad, the Lehigh and Hudson, from his station all the way to Warwick, NY to the east and all the way to Franklin, NJ to the west. From Franklin I even continued all the way to the Delaware River and walked over the pedestrian bridge to Pennsylvania although not all in the same day. I hiked the rights of way of several railroads around northern Jersey. One day my foster sister, Shirley, and I hiked all the way to Pine Island, NY on the old rail line that ran by our house on Lewisburg Road. That was a hot day and it just about did Shirley in. The Papakating creek flowed adjacent to the rail line, and I hiked along it too to where it flowed into the Walkill.

My Lionel model railroad was a work in progress. I had managed to get a 4 by 8 sheet of plywood and another smaller piece at a yard sale, and I had the set-up in my room. There was barely enough room for my bed. I made scenery for my lay-out. I had a paper mache mountain, and I had used my woodburning set to make a retaining wall. I had Plasticville houses, a farm, a church and a station. I had made from scratch out of cardboard a townhouse like ones I had seen around the city. I had grass and ballast on the trackbed and fruit trees on the mountain. I had the automatic milk can car, the log car and the man on top of the box car that went flat on the roof when he hit the telltale which told him there was a tunnel coming up. My dad didn't have a lot of money so I had to settle for two of the smaller transformers but I had it rigged up so that I had two independent loops.They crossed onto the same track only briefly. One transformer controlled the inner loop and the other one, the outer loop. I had the tracks isolated electrically, but when the inner loop crossed over onto the outer loop, the train was briefly on the other transformer. Typically, I would have my passenger train on the inner loop and my freight train on the outer one or vice versa. It was frustrating when my inner loop train hit the switch to the outer loop because the train some times would stop. Then other times it would go through the switch without a hitch so to speak. It took me a long time to figure out what was going on. It was a conundrum but I finally figured out that if I plugged the two transformers into the wall a certain way everything would work correctly, and, if I reversed one of the plugs, the train would stop when it crossed over onto the other transformer. I had discovered that the electricity going to both loops had to be in phase in order for them to work correctly. It was from having solved this problem that I later decided to go into electrical engineering.

We had a neighbor down the road, a friend of the family, who I called Uncle Al. He had retired early from teaching shop, I think, down in the city. A lot of people came to Wantage Township to escape from the city, and he was one of them. Uncle Al was a junk dealer; he bought and sold various items. I remember my Dad and I went with him once to the Gowanus Canal area of Brooklyn where Uncle Al bought a load of canvases. To this day I get a shudder when I think of the Gowanus Canal reputed and probably talked up by my Dad and Uncle Al to be a "tough neighborhood." We went on a lot of adventures with Uncle Al. He had relatives that had a little cottage on Horseneck Beach in Massachusetts. We went there several times on vacations. It was a scary place. The Atlantic Ocean was out the front door. A bay was out the back door, and you had to ford a little stream even to get onto this narrow peninsula. Every decade or so a hurricane would wash all the little cottages off the beach across the bay and up onto the main land. One time Uncle Al's relatives even had to swim for it to get out after their car stalled crossing the swollen little stream.

Uncle Al would go down to the fishing district in New Bedford and, since he had connections, get a wash tub full of fish which we took home with us in Uncle Al's old station wagon. They stunk the whole way, but they sure tasted good! One time when we were there two of the workmen had gotten into a fight and the one had taken his long sharp knife which he used to filet the fish and slashed the other one's arm which he had raised to protect himself. The slasher had said that he was only playacting, that he had never intended to slash the other guy, but his raising his arm caused it to get in the way of the knife. Somebody said, "Get him a paper towel or something!" I think he needed a lot more than a paper towel by the looks of all that blood gushing out of his arm.

Uncle Al had a wife who visited him on weekends - Caroline, I think her name was. The rest of the time he was a batchelor. She worked down in the city during the week. I think they preferred it this way. I used to mow Uncle Al's lawn for 50 cents a week, and sometimes I'd see her down there and she'd wave hello. I think Uncle Al was a little bit lonely and that's why he stopped into our house so much. He would give my Mom little colored glasses and trinkets that he had acquired in the course of his junk dealing. Uncle Al always went to the Presbyterian church where we went and always sat by himself in a pew wearing a white tie. Somebody said that he wore that white tie in honor of his mother.

As my train layout got more sophisticated, I had the need for remote operated switches. I just had manual switches. However, we didn't have the money for the remote switches. Like the big transformer, they were simply out of the question. I read an article in one of my train magazines about how you could convert a manual switch to a remotely operated one. It involved building a little box with levers attached to fishing line and then you'd run the fishing line underneath the table and up to the switch. First you had to disable the switch from its normal operation so that it moved freely between the two positions - open with tension  and closed by spring action. Then you'd attach the fishing line so that you could pull the lever and it would open the switch. When you released the lever it would spring back to the closed position. It was important to keep enough tension on the fishing line so that the switch would open all the way. I prevailed on Uncle Al to help me build this little box. I remember he was a little reluctant; I don't know why. He had a reputation of being pretty handy with tools. The project turned out to be a big success, and I had the equivalent of remote controlled switches which worked great in my layout. Only they were mechanically instead of electrically operated.

Another dilemma I had was that I needed a mail car for my passenger train. Somehow I had gotten ahold of two passenger cars, but a proper passenger train needed a mail car as well. As it was out of the question to buy one (they were too expensive), I built one myself from a kit. Then the problem was that I needed trucks - the wheels that go underneath. So one day my Dad agreed to take me to Newark where I had located a train store that would sell me the trucks. I remember it was a rainy day, but it was neat spending the whole day with my Dad and going to get the trucks I needed to complete the project. We probably stopped at White Castle for a hamburger too which made the day a very special occasion. The only problem was that we had to pay as much for the trucks as it would have cost to buy the mail car in the first place. Oh well, live and learn, but it was a special day with my Dad.

I didn't get to spend a whole lot of time with my Dad because he was always out at meetings. He was President of the Hospital Board. He had those meetings. Then he had PTA meetings, Masonic Lodge meetings - all kinds of meetings. He'd go away to conventions, but he always brought home a present for me. I didn't mind that my Dad was away so much; I never held it against him, but he apologized to me later in life at the "19th hole" on a golf course (that's where you sit and have a beer) and advised me to be around more for my own daughter than he was for me. I remember saying to my Dad "You were OK" which was high praise coming from me since in later years my Dad and I had tangled about the War in Vietnam among a lot of other things. My Dad had taken up golf after his first heart attack. He graduated from going to meetings almost every night to taking care of himself, losing weight and getting some exercise. But unlike me he wasn't driven to it. In some ways he was luckier, but in others he paid a price. I'm driven to exercise, but as a by-product I have always been super healthy.

One of the things my Dad and I did do together was the garden. My Dad always planted a huge garden and I helped him plant it. Then there was the cultivating, watering etc. We harvested a lot of lima beans, Luther Hill corn, string beans, zucchini, tomatoes, lettuce and other vegetables which we cooked and froze so we had fresh vegetables all year long. My Dad would also get 50 day old chicks most years which usually ended up in the freezer too. My Mom would bake pies, cinnamon rolls and brownies for the freezer so that she could prepare a whole meal in a minimum amount of time because everything was right there in the freezer.

In fourth grade I had Mrs. Moyes, and it turned out that I went from being a problem child to being a fairly well behaved kid. But sitting in class was a challenge for me. I'm glad I went to school before the age of ritalin because they probably would have diagnosed me as Attention Deficit Disorder and drugged me. But we usually had a play period in the morning and we got to play outside on our lunch hour. This is the only thing that made it possible for me to sit through the rest of the day. We'd play knock out flies in the parking lot even in the dead of winter when the whole playground was frozen over. I needed those play periods. Then I would ususally play outside shooting baskets or something until my Mom called me in for dinner. In those days there wasn't much traffic and I'd ride my bike everywhere. When I was older I rode my 3 speed all the way to Newton to My Grandma Clark's house - 16 miles - in an hour.

But I started to realize that if I wasn't able to play baseball or basketball or sleigh ride or go hiking I didn't feel right. I was probably in the eighth grade before I came to the realization that I needed exercise in order to feel right and to enable me to concentrate on school work. It was an important realization and would have a lot to do with maintaining my sanity in later years, not to mention the demands of being a student and having to concentrate on intellectual activities. It was the beginning of the realization that I needed to be in the brier patch. I needed to work hard, especially physically. While a normal person aspired to not have to work, I needed to work in order to be happy, in order to concentrate and do intellectual work and to excel at that. I couldn't just sit around and do nothing. It would drive me nuts. So I relate to Brer Rabbit. Anyone else it would be the last thing they wanted - to be thrown in the brier patch. For him and me - well, we weren't normal. Too much leisure time not working drove me nuts and caused me a lot of psychological pain and unpleasantness. I couldn't deal with it. What most people try to avoid, I had to embrace in order to feel OK about myself. It's part of being a depressive and using lifestyle - instead of drugs - to manage it. I was just starting to figure that out. It was a hard life lesson.

Before there was a dedicated music teacher at Wantage School there was a woman, Miss Kimble, who used to come in a few days a week and give piano lessons. She also played for the assembly programs and arranged for little skits for some of the kids. I was involved in a lot of Miss Kimble's skits. I did a little song and dance routine with Carol Anderson once. We had a little group with four boys that auditioned for Ted Mack's Amateur Hour. The neat things about these little skits was that usually I got called out of class to rehearse for them. Then one day Miss Kimble called me to rehearse but instead of rehearsing out of class she wanted me to rehearse on my lunch hour. I remember I got quite indignant at the thought of missing my lunch hour where I got to blow off steam playing outside, and I wasn't very nice to Miss Kimble which I regret. Anyway that was the end of my skits with Miss Kimble. She never asked me to do anything again and who could blame her?

The next year we got a regular music teacher, Mr. Geist. I was involved in the whole music program - chorus and band. I played trumpet. I was Mr. Geist's first student to take private lessons. He had been on the road with the big bands and decided to come off the road, settle down, get a teaching job and raise a family. He had a new wife, Renee. My Dad gave him his first job as a teacher and later he moved to Springfield, NJ where he was a music teacher until he retired. I remember he had me play Bob Haggart's "What's New" in the assembly program. I even did a little bit of (prerehearsed) improvising. Later music would take an important place in my life as I became a semi-professional jazz musician and concert promoter. But mainly it was a quest to learn how to play the trumpet and to learn what was and is a very sophisticated and complex music. Charlie Parker and Clifford Brown were my favorite players and learning about jazz and the people who played it became a consuming passion. Mr. Geist got me started on this road, and it was an important one for me to travel because it calmed my demons and gave me something to live for and aspire to when my outlook on life was at its darkest.

Mr. Geist and I are still friends although I call him Morty now. I know he likes to be called Mr. Geist and all his former students call him that except me. But I decided some years ago that I would call everybody by their first name unless they were at least 30 years older than me or I was addressing them in court or something like that. I never liked to be called Mr. Lawrence, and my daughter's friends always called me John when they were growing up. I guess that's part of the informality of the West Coast as opposed to the East Coast. Mr. Geist is only about 15 years older than me, and he doesn't seem to take offense at the fact that I call him Morty.

Music and exercise took on an increasing significance as I grew older. But my parents emphasized the importance of education. Naturally, since they were both educators. My Dad was the principal of Wantage Consolidated School where I went to elementary school. He later became superintendant of the Sussex-Wantage school district. My Mom, having been a teacher before she met my Dad, later went back to teaching after a 12 year hiatus during which she was raising my sister and me and recovering from TB. My Mom one day told me that if I studied real hard and was the best student that when I graduated I would get a lot of prizes. She told me I could be valdictorian. My Mom didn't waste a lot of words or elaborate a great deal, but that became my aspiration - to be valdictorian and get all those prizes. I fully endorsed my parents' trip about education. It justified my existence and gave me a raison d'etre. It was fine with me as long as I could have my "play periods." I was really involved in Little league baseball and loved to play basketball and couldn't really study unless I got to work off my excess energy. Luckily, this all worked out and there was no conflict so everything was pretty harmonious. I was fully into my parents' trip and wanted to go to college like they had. Like a lot of people I thought a college diploma would guarantee that I had a better life and made more money. Seemed like a good plan to me.

In the fifth grade I started to take notice of girls, rather of one girl in particular. Ginny Lee had just moved to our neck of the woods that year, and I started to get the picture that she liked me. It seems she had a locket and there were some secret words written inside. They said "Johnny & Ginny." I was smitten. I don't know why. I was never really attracted to any of the other little girls in our class up till that time. But she was the archtypical blue eyed blonde that I would be attracted to for the rest of my life although there have been a few brunettes along the way too. Somehow I really fell for her. Some of the other girls suggested that I should give Ginny a ring. So I asked my mother if she had a ring I could give Ginny. She found one in a little box and I presented it to Ginny. She liked it, but a couple days later I found out that under the cardboard ring holder in the little box there had been another ring which Ginny found and this one she liked a whole lot better. This ring all the little girls oohed and ahhed over; this ring was really special. When I told my mother about the second ring, she realized that this was her special ring that she thought she had lost and she just had to have it back. I had to ask Ginny for the ring back. How embarrassing!

Our relationship didn't last long. We had one special day when Gary Stires and I rode our bikes over to Ginny's house and then Ginny and her friend, Peggy Van der Goot, Gary and I took off on our bicycles with our lunches for the day riding around on all the back country roads. It was a fun day. We ate our lunch by the side of the road. We waded in a stream. Somebody got the idea of going over to Peggy Van der Goot's barn, and we were on our way there, when Mrs. Lee found us on a dirt road and told us that my Dad had called and that I had to come home right away. Too bad for me. Who knows what might have happened in Peggy Van der Goot's hay mow.

It didn't work out between Ginny and me. She moved on; I was stuck. I was probably too immature for her, and I wasn't always nice. It was depressing, but life went on. I did get to be valdictorian and played "To the Colors" on my cornet at the graduation ceremonies. I won all the prizes for getting the highest marks in all the classes. It came to a grand total of $2.50 - $.50 per class - hardly worth it. I had put in a lot of time and hard work, child labor in fact. It was the culimination of one phase in a long career as a student which would go on until I was almost 30 - a long hard road which in the final analysis wasn't really worth it. I thought it would put me in the position that I would always have a job if I wanted one. It would enhance my freedom, my ability to pick and choose. It didn't work out that way. Instead I would one day find myself being turned down for a job because I was "overqualified."

Graduating from Wantage was the end of one chapter of my life. My Mom had tried to get me into a prep school because they didn't like the local high school. My Dad had been principal there for two years, and it didn't work out. He was lucky to get his old job back at Wantage. I don't know what the problem was with Sussex High School. Maybe it wasn't accredited or something. But a lot of students graduated from there and went on to illustrious careers. I did receive a scholarship to Phillips Academy Andover so I was about to embark on what turned out to be the worst three years of my life. My Mom went back to work as a teacher and I went to Andover and was awarded the prize for having received the highest marks on the entrance examination.

Dependency

.by John Lawrence

That dependency is a bad thing most Americans would agree. The US is a nation of rugged individualists who have to get up off their duff, work hard and earn their rewards, not a nation of people who sit around and get waited upon unless they happen to be rich and don't have to work for a living because they have plenty of money to hire people to do everything for them. But people without that kind of money have to do things on their own and not expect other taxpayers to pick up the tab for them. Why should there be a transfer of taxpayers' hard earned money to help someone who won't get up off their duff and help themselves. Why should there be a transfer of money from the more able to the less able, from those willing to work hard to provide for themselves to those who won't or can't work hard.

Nevertheless, there are those among us who are in a situation of dependency. Conservatives don't want their hard earned money transferred in the form of taxes to help them. Why should someone who has worked hard all their life have the government forcibly take their money from them to support someone who is unwilling or incapable of working hard to support themselves? Why should some taxpayer's dollars go to support people like my sister, for example. My sister, Jeanne, was born with severe brain damage although that wasn't apparent at first. It didn't become apparent until she didn't develop along normal lines. First, she didn't learn to walk at the normal age, and then she didn't learn to talk at the normal age. Although she did eventually walk with difficulty for a few years, she never learned to talk. Her mental age her entire life was that of a one and a half year old. Therefore, my sister couldn't do the simplest things for herself. For instance, she couldn't go to the cupboard, get a cup, go to the sink, turn on the tap and get herself a drink of water. This would have required a degree of difficulty way beyond my sister's ability. She couldn't have opened a can of beans, put the contents in a saucepan, turned on the stove, heated them and then placed them on a plate, gotten a spoon out of the drawer and ate them. She couldn't go to the bathroom without assistance. In short my sister required a full time care giver or else she would have died within a couple of days just as an abandoned one and a half year old would have.

But yet conservatives would say that none of their hard earned money should have gone to support people like my sister. Even though they may have not had such dependent people as my sister in their families, it was just my parents' hard luck that they would have such a person in theirs. It was their problem, no one else's. My parents had to bear the burden of taking care of my sister without assistance of any kind from other taxpayers who, after all, had the right to spend their money any way they liked and not have it confiscated to deal with the plights of unfortunate families. That would have encroached upon their liberty. So my parents had to bear the costs and responsibilities of full time child care or else send my sister off to an institution. Of course they would have had to pay the institution unless it was publicly supported through other taxpayers' dollars which would have been again an encroachment on those taxpayers' liberties.

And my sister was not an easy person to take care of. Like any one and a half year old, she was always getting into mischief. She destroyed my parents' possessions. I don't know how many times she got into the Christmas presents, tore open all the packages and pulled down the Christmas tree upon herself. She was undisciplinable. She was unteachable. But you couldn't get mad at her. It wasn't her fault, really. In some societies she wouldn't have been tolerated. Hitler would have had her killed as a mental defective, someone who couldn't possibly make a positive contribution to society and yet required a full time expenditure of resources. Hitler would not have seen her as fully human. And yet she was fully human. She laughed; she cried. She gave and received love. She had a sense of humor. But as far as her higher mental faculties were concerned, she had none. She couldn't have held a job; she couldn't have supported herself.

Nevertheless, conservatives would not have wanted to part with their hard earned money to help support the likes of my sister. It wasn't their problem. It wasn't my parents' fault either. They did not ask to have born to them a child who didn't develop as a normal child, who never went to school, who never graduated, who never went to a prom, who never went to college, who never got married, who never bore grandchildren. It wasn't my sister's fault either. She didn't make a life choice that resulted in her condition. She never took drugs except those that were prescribed for her to deal with her seizures which caused her to fall a lot during the brief period in her life when she walked. No, the full burden of taking care of my sister should have been borne privately, conservatives would say, and not by means of any public expenditures which would have required a transfer of hard earned taxpayer dollars, a forcible confiscation of hard earned money, an encroachment on the liberty of one taxpayer to help another taxpayer. This would have been immoral according to some. It was no one's responsibility except my parents'.

Luckily, Jeanne was born into a family with two strong, capable and loving parents, both of whom were capable enough and loving enough to be willing to take on the full time responsibilty of caring for someone like my sister. Luckily, in later life they had the income and resources to take care of her, although even that was shaky at first since my mother ended up in a sanitarium with TB when Jeanne was nine months old. That in and of itself caused my father to declare medical indigency, let alone the costs of caring for my sister and me, all of which had to be borne by my father who also had the responsibilty of a full time job. Luckily, in later life they had the wherewithal to pay the price of having their home in a constant state of shambles due to a marauding one and a half year old who never progressed beyond that age. Of course, Jeanne had no table manners. One of her favorite tricks was to swoop at the butter dish with her spoon if it was within reach and scoop out half the contents that then found the way to her mouth all faster than you could say Jackie Robinson. You see she had some talents, but this was perhaps her most coordinated maneuver. She loved to go for rides in the car. Sometimes my parents would stop at a roadside stand and buy her an ice cream cone. Jeanne never forgot such spots. It could be a year later, but when my parents were approaching the same roadside stand, Jeanne would start cheering and pointing and imploring them in her own way to stop.

In later life, I think my parents were able to start collecting social security for my sister much to the horror of conservatives who don't believe their hard earned taxpayer dollars should be confiscated to assist people such as my parents in caring for people such as my sister. After all my parents had the resources (by then) to take care of her themselves. Why should taxpayers have to chip in? Maybe social security should be means tested so that those with ample resources should not receive it. But that would mean a lot of wealthy people would not get social security after they retired either. Oh I see, maybe that's not such a good idea. Anyway Jeanne was able to receive social security for a few years. It helped pay for the special dentist she had to go to and her various other doctors' bills and medications. After my father died, my mother didn't figure she could take care of my sister in her own advanced age so she tried to get her into the Homestead which was a home that provided full time care giving for old people who couldn't care for themselves or whose families couldn't care for them and for people like my sister. However, despite the fact that my father had been a fairly prominent local school superintendant and budding politician before he died, my mother couldn't get Jeanne into the Homestead. I guess there was an inadequate flow of taxpayer dollars to fund such an institution compared to the need. Finally, after pulling numerous strings including contacting the politicians my father had been associated with, Jeanne was admitted to the Homestead where she lived the last three years of her life. I hate to think what would have happened to a less well connected family with the same problem.

But this dissertation isn't just about my sister who was at one end of the scale of dependency. There are far more people who aren't as badly off as her who still have some degree of dependency. There are fairly high functioning people who, nevertheless, aren't capable of being totally independent. There are people who can for the most part fend for themselves but need some assistance in order to get by. There are people, unlike my sister, who are trainable. These people can learn how to do some simple tasks. They can learn how to take care of some of their own personal needs. And then there are people who can largely function in a supportive environment. They couldn't function, perhaps, as isolated rugged individuals, but in a family they can provide some functions while other family members provide other functions. Co-dependency in the psychological literature is a bad word. It's considered a negative to be co-dependent, but, in any society, people are co-dependent. For instance, most people who are not mechanics are co-dependent on their mechanics to service and maintain their cars. And the mechanics are co-dependent on them to get money to earn a living. In families perhaps one spouse can't balance the checkbook while the other can. But the one who can't balance the checkbook might be able to bake a cake, something the other one can't. Co-dependency is the essence of any cooperative social situation. So in some ways almost everyone in society, despite the myth of the rugged individualist, is dependent on someone else. No man or woman is an island. Some people can function quite well in some environments, not at all in others. There are various degrees of psychological and physical problems which no amount of hard work can overcome.

So I think dependency is a wide ranging phenomenon. There are those who can't function normally, and, therefore, need public assistance because there aren't the resources within their families to provide the requisite assistance or maybe they don't have any family at all. These people might be able to function quite normally within certain supportive situations, but they can't make it on their own. But these people would be left at the side of the road to die unless society was able to divert some of the more able taxpayers' hard earned money to assist them. Some people only need temporary assistance. Some people like my sister need full time assistance their entire lives.

I have known other quite highly functioning people who, nevertheless, couldn't make it in society without taxpayer provided assistance. Such people, according to conservatives, should just suck it up and work hard and make it on their own instead of asking them to part with their hard earned money to support some liberal social program that might make it possible for them to live a fairly full life. Such a person we'll call Grandma Nelson, not her real name, because she's still living. After her divorce Grandma Nelson just couldn't make it on her own. She tried. She got her own apartment. She got a job, a fairly low paid one, since Grandma Nelson didn't have many skills other than having been a wife and a mother. Somehow, Grandma Nelson could never get her life to work. She got involved with boyfriends who mistreated her. She wasn't able to function well at her job. She went from job to job and those were in the days when jobs were readily available before the low skilled jobs had all been outsourced to China. And then Grandma Nelson would get behind in her rent. The accumulation of all these problems would result finally in a mental breakdown and Grandma Nelson would end up in the hospital. From there she would go to a half way house where she seemed to function quite well taking care of herself and helping out with the other inhabitants until she was ready to reenter society. She would start out again with a job, an apartment and a new boyfriend, but somehow the process would repeat itself and she would wind up back in the half way house. Luckily, in those days there were such places as half way houses. That was before state funds had dried up for such places. Finally, Grandma Nelson realized that the best place for her was in the half way house as a permanent situation. There she was in a supportive environment. She wasn't completely on her own. In this environment she could function quite well and even help to earn her own keep. But I'm sure that some hard earned taxpayer money was necessary to keep the half way house going. But today conservatives can rejoice in the fact that such places have been closed down due to a lack of funding and such people as Grandma Nelson are out on the street.

Social Darwinism has made its ugly return to American life with a vengeance of Dickensian proportions! Social Darwinism has replaced Matthew 25 in which Jesus instructs his disciples that true devotion to Him is based on helping "the least of these my brethren" rather than the mental calisthenics involved in having the politically correct belief system. Service to the needy is more important than being "washed in the blood" and being "saved" and all the other brainwashed crap that billionaire religious entrepreneurs have come up with to convince people that religion is all in your head and you don't have to get off your duff to help anyone else. You just have to give them money! Helping another person is immoral if it means the transfer of hard earned taxpayer money in order to do so. So the conservative religionists tell us. But if you take Jesus' words at face value, my parents were saints!

There are all kinds of situations in which people can't function well in society. Sometimes it's because of physical problems that interfere with getting a job. Sometimes it's because of psychological problems. Sometimes, like the present, it's because there are no jobs. Even a job, when you think about it, is a co-dependent situation. The employee is dependent on the employer for a pay check. The employer is dependent on the employee to do the job. Only the self-employed are the true rugged individualists. In many cases families provide for the nurturing, education and training of their young people and this seems to be sufficient for them to go out and become fully functioning members of society in most cases. In other cases families don't have the resources either financial or psycological to provide the nurturing environment that people need to become fully functioning members of society. In some cases this can be made up for by a public school system which guarantees every child the right to a basic education. Where there is not a functioning public school system, only the rich are educated, and the poor are doomed to a life of poverty. This, presently, is unthinkable in the US, but is the actual situation in many parts of the world. However, the public school system represents a situation where hard earned taxpayer money is transferred from the rich to the poor in order to provide education for people that wouldn't be able to pay for it on their own. Conservatives, in order to redress this unfortunate situation in which money is taken from those who have worked hard to earn it and given to those who haven't, want to privatize all public institutions including public schools. Rather than their hard earned money going to a public school, they want all families to pay for the education of their own children directly. By this line of reasoning people will have to work harder if they can't pay for private school or else have fewer children. Those who can't pay for their childrens' education just shouldn't have children, that's all.

So in the final analysis what's to be done about all the people who for one reason or another either just can't cope with life without some form of assistance or are temporarily or permanently dependent on others to provide for them. What's to be done for those whose families can't provide for them? The conservative solution is just to leave them by the side of the road if they can't pull their own weight. This is more preferable than making some taxpayer have to part with their hard earned money in order to have a society where some other person could lead a better and more productive life at their expense. The conservative solution is to let those whose families can pay for the education and welfare of their family members do so, but, if the family can't provide for the education and well being of its family members, that family will have to suffer the consequences without taxpayer assistance. If discouraged and forgotten people turn to crime, that's their own moral shortcomings. If a family cannot put a roof over their own head, hard earned taxpayer money should not be used to do so because this would set the example that people will be given stuff that they didn't have to work for. This would be moral hazard. The highest form of morality is that money should not be taken from people who have earned it to help some other person who hasn't earned it. After all this is what Ayn Rand taught. When it comes down to it, people who can't provide for themselves should be left to their own devices even if with a little assistance they might have become more productive members of society. So when it comes right down to it, it is preferable to build public jails to house them than to build public schools to educate them. But even the jails should be privatized so that they don't become government takeovers. The public school system has already become a government takeover so it needs to be retaken over by private corporations. What we need is a corporate takeover of jails and schools and more corporate profits. If that's the price to be paid for keeping government small, so be it! After all government should do nothing except to be a contractor subcontracting out all functions to private corporations.

"Bush on the Couch" and Andover

Justin Frank has written a book, "Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President," in which he attempts to psychoanalyze  George W Bush. The problem with this book is that it's just guess work. He relies on secondary sources with no real personal exposure or experience with any phase or facet of Bush's life. He theorizes that Bush was severely scarred by the death of  his  little sister and the way his parents treated the event: no mourning, golf instead. Frank points out that while the senior Bush was a star athlete, succcessful businessman and war hero, George W was generally a failure at all these things.  But while Frank has no experience with any facet of George W's life, I do: his career at Andover, one of the most elite American prep schools. Phillips Academy Andover is the oldest continuously running incorporated boarding school in the United States, established in 1778 by Samuel Phillips, Jr. I didn't attend Andover when Bush was there; I was a few years ahead of him. But I don't think that much had changed by the time Bush got there. It was still an all male, almost military environment at which one had to wear a coat and tie to class, attend compulsory chapel every morning, and call the masters "sir". It didn't become co-ed until it merged in 1973 with neighboring Abbot Academy, hitherto an all girls' school.

When Frank points out that Bush is a man not in touch with his emotions and that he's psychologically stunted, he needn't have looked any farther than Andover. It was an environment devoid of any compassion or empathy, an environment in which to acknowledge a feeling was a sign of weakness, an emotional hell. The three years I spent there were hell compared to any years of the rest of my life before or since. Or stated a different way, the rest of my life has been an absolute heaven compared to the three years I spent at Andover. It was a "Lord of the Flies" environment devoid of the opposite sex, whether as students or teachers. There were no girls, no dating, no girlfriends. It was a closed, almost cult like culture, in which there were rocks (looked up to and admired) and flits (looked down upon and denigrated). Masculinity was everything and to be stunted emotionally was considered to be the hallmark of masculinity. To be rock-like was to have no feelings, no emotions, no weaknesses.

I was a scholarship student having won the prize for the highest marks on the entrance examinations.  You might say I was a professional student having been reared in a home with two educators as parents.  As Mr. Hawes, my housemaster at Williams Hall (actually I was in an out building called Stott Cottage), had written on a report to my parents, "Johnny knows what he's here for." Yeah, I was there to study, work my ass off seven days a week and get good grades. I had no other purpose or function in life. I was to do this in an environment devoid of family emotional support or any support I might have gotten from a normal adolescence which included the opposite sex. Actually for the first two years I achieved a considerable degree of success in my chosen vocation.  Every marking period or quarter they ranked all 180 members of the class from first to last in academic achievement and divided the top ranking students into both a first and a second honor roll. I was first in the class once, made the first honor roll three times and the second honor roll three times.

Even though I came from a poor background, not the rich upper class background that Bush and most of the others came from, life at Andover pretty much sucked for everybody, and I don't think it's too far-fetched to say that almost everyone was affected in a negative way by the cynical and cruel culture which any all male environment seems to degenerate into. Although the campus and facilities there would be the envy of most colleges, it was a dystopia in which the masters (teachers) demanded absolute respect and had little sympathy for their charges. Their goal was to whip them into shape, to make "Andover men" out of them. I was merely a child of 13, not yet having gone through puberty, when I started there. It  reminded me of a comic book I had read where this family made a deal with the devil that they would get to live in this house with every modern convenience. They wouldn't have to do a lick of work and an ATM would dispense $200. every week. (This was in the 1950s, remember.) There was only one catch: they could not ever leave the house. That was the way it was at Andover. Rich kids and kids whose families lived close by could get away for the weekend. I couldn't. I was stuck there in this abnormal environment with no contact with the outside "normal" world. My parents lived too far away. Long distance calling was out of the question in those days unless you were rich, and my Mom and I exchanged letters on a weekly basis, something that seems antiquated and quaint today. I only got to go home at Christmas, spring break and summer vacation. Thank God for that or I wouldn't have survived!

Getting back to "Bush  on the  Couch" - cruelty, cynicism, lack of sympathy and compassion, superciliousness, condescension - these were the characteristics  of Andover culture.  People who were soft in any way were considered suspect. People who excelled academically  were suspect - suspected of being fairies or flits. The word "gay" hadn't been invented yet. The word "flit," insofar as I can tell, was Andover's unique contribution to terms of derogation. I couldn't quite figure out the difference between a fairy and a flit, but it was all Andover mythology anyway, and it had more to do with hurling cruel, hurtful epithets at people as a form of bullying than anything else. In a closed, cult-like culture it took on terrifying implications which seem ridiculous today now that I live in an open culture and am relatively balanced and well informed.

The socially awkward and unsophisticated were suspect. Boys were terrified of being called names that signified that they were anything less than totally masculine and so had to project a hardened, rock-like exterior. Any sign of emotion was considered a sign of homosexuality, effeminacy and weakness. Any creativity or intellectuality was a sign of weakness and fairyhood. No wonder Bush comes across as a non-intellectual. To get by at Andover, one of the nation's elite schools, you had to pretend to be anti-intellectual if you were to get the respect of your peers. You did little work and got by with a "gentleman's" C although you would not like to be characterized as a gentleman but as a rock. You showed your disdain for those trying to achieve high grades to get into a good college because you knew that you family's wealth and your father's contributions to the Yale alumni fund would get you a "legacy" admission. This is the milieu that George W Bush existed in desperately trying to achieve a degree of popularity as a cheerleader, a role he continued to carry out as President of the United States.

It was difficult for me, going through adolescence with no girls available, coming to terms with my heterosexuality at a time when little information was available, largely ignorant of what a fairy or a flit was, wondering if masturbation made me one. With little or no knowledge or available information, I was left to imagine the worst about who or what I was. While excelling academically, I was going to hell in a handbasket emotionally and psychologically. Without a supportive family environment, my self esteem was evaporating on a daily basis. I had no one to talk to about these issues and had to hold it all inside with disastrous consequences.  My parents and teachers thought I must be in wonderful shape since I got good grades, but I was hurting inside and rapidly reaching the boiling point. While I continued to function at a high level, the part of me where I lived, my psychological interior, was becoming a wasteland. These experiences, I'm sure,  were not unique to me although not everyone felt them as severely. Andover, or rather the Andover culture, ruined many a life, scarred others, including me, for life, and sent many kids packing back to their homes and families because they couldn't cope with an environment in which there was no love or compassion or members of the opposite sex. These were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones, like Bush, stayed and graduated.

Let's consider, as Frank and others have done, what the psychological characteristics of the Bush  administration are: cruelty, cynicism, lack of compassion, disregard for the poor and powerless, sucking up to the rich and powerful, selfish pursuit of money and power, superciliousness, condescension - an almost perfect fit for the values of Andover culture circa 1950s and 60s. I hope these attitudes don't prevail at Andover today. Maybe the addition of co-eds was a deliberate change of policy in order to overcome the prevailing negativity at that time. Hopefully, they aren't continuing to turn out emotionally stunted, uncaring rich kids who then go on to the corrridors of power and operate in the same way that many CEOs and politicians do today.

By my third year there (I was what they called an upper middler), I was a sick puppy. I decided I wanted out, and wasn't going to play the game of high academic achiever any longer. What did it matter if I gained entrance to a venerable educational institution but lost my soul - to paraphrase a well-known source. I became a slacker: getting demerits, not wearing ties to class (under my sweater where they sometimes went unnoticed), spending my evenings playing pool. I was determined to become a rock. I made the JV basketball team, a not inconsiderable feat given the hotly contested competition for available slots, and much to the disappointment of some guys who had me pigeonholed as a flit and were openly hostile even tripping me and causing a sprained ankle on the basketball court.

I had always been into music and I formed a dixieland band along  with Jerry Bremer who later became the Viceroy of Iraq in the Bush Administration. Jerry was a good friend to me, one of the few I had there, so I won't be critical of the role he played in the Iraq debacle. I remember him saying he wanted to be an ambassador some day. I wish he hadn't gotten his wish. I played  trumpet; Jerry played drums. We played once in front of the assembled student body before the Saturday night movie. We had a guy named John Smith on clarinet, an easy enough name to remember. We had a Flip Somebody on piano, and I can't remember the other guys' names. Jerry had set up a gig for us in Rye, NY when school was out for the summer. I think it was for a tennis tournement, but the clarinet player's house burned down so we went to Rye and just partied, didn't play. It was fun especially sneaking out at night and underage drinking. Jerry wrote me a letter that summer trying to convince me to return to Andover for my senior year which I didn't answer. But it was a nice gesture, and I thank him retrospectively. I was happy to leave Andover behind me and go to "normal" high school from which I graduated in 1959. I had heard anecdotally about the kid who left Andover and was so unhappy about the place that he requested never to be sent any Andover alumni literature or communications of any kind. He never wanted to hear from or about the place again. Feeling likewise, I did the same thing and have had no contact in any form with them ever since. For many years I could not even bear the thought of or talk about or admit to anybody that I had even gone there.

The Military Industrial Complex - Part 1 - Picatinny Arsenal

I worked in the military industrial complex (MIC) for 15 years. I left there over 30 years ago so I can only report on what my experience was then although from all indications not much has changed. Basically, the MIC is a gigantic welfare scheme for middle class functionaries and salary men who sit on their asses all day, say nary a discouraging word and collect their adequate paychecks every two weeks. It's shrouded in secrecy not mainly to protect secrets from foreign enemies but so that the rest of America doesn't know what goes on there: practically nothing. In my view this fact alone makes it corrupt.

In my 15 year career I worked for Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, NJ, Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, CA, General Dynamics Convair and Electronic Divisions in San Diego, General Dynamics Fort Worth (Texas), and Naval Electronics Laboratory in San Diego. Naval Electronics Laboratory changes its name periodically to protect the guilty so it has become at various times Naval Electronics Laboratory Center (NELC), Naval Ocean Systems Command (NOSC) and Naval Research and Development (NRAD). Can you believe guys get paid with taxpayer dollars just to sit around and come up with another name?

I was a senior in high school in 1959 when on "career day" someone from Picatinny Arsenal came around and told us abourt the "co-op" plan. It sounded pretty good to me. You worked for Picatinny Arsenal a quarter; then you went to college a quarter and so on. You had your choice of five colleges you could attend, one of them being Georgia Tech where I ended up going. The thing I liked about the co-op plan was that I got to live at home every other quarter and commute to work, and I earned enough to pay my college expenses so my college education didn't cost my parents anything. Also I never borrowed any money unlike the college kids today who are stuck with a mortgage sized debt by the time they get out of college. It took five years instead of four to get through college on the co-op plan, and the last year you went to school five straight quarters.

The summer after I graduated from high school was the first quarter I worked at Picatinny. I was in for a shock. They didn't  give me anything to do! Sure I collected a paycheck but I was bored out of my mind. This was my first introduction to the "world of work" or actually the world of middle class social welfare. I "worked" in a different group each quarter hoping to find something that would enable me to pass the time away doing something productive. One quarter I worked in a group that did drawings for machine tools and I ended up copying a lot of drawings. At least it was something to do. Finally, I ended up in this enormous office building with four desk clusters as far as the eye could see. There were no partitions, no cubicles. Guys used to test their eye sight by how many clocks they could see which hung from the ceiling every so many yards. The desks were all pushed together so that your desk was right up against two others and touching the corner of a third. The guy next to me smoked cigarettes all day, and there was a constant waft of smoke coming from his desk which seemed to aim itself right for my nose. This was in the pre-anti-smoking days when there were no restrictions on smoking. The guy had a lit cigarette going in his ash tray all day on which he puffed occasionally.

After coffee in the morning the guys would head on over to the "shop," a boondoggle for which somebody had been able to get money appropriated. It was outfitted with everything a home hobbyist could desire including drill presses, lathes etc. Here is where they did "home projects" ^i.e. they made stuff and carted it home. At Christmas time the shop was especially busy turning out Christmas presents. There was no supervision there. There was a story about one guy who had built a boat maybe not in this particular shop but in one like it. When the boat was finished, it was too big to get out the door so they tore down a wall to get it out, and then he took it home. When they weren't doing home projects, they were sitting around telling war stories. This went on till a little before lunch time when they gravitated back to the office building, looked busy for a bit and then ate  lunch. In the afternoon this process was repeated until a little before it was time to go home when they returned to the office and kibitzed until "quitting time". I heard one guy say, "I haven't done a lick of work in ten years, and, what's more, if I don't get that raise I'm after, I never will do any work here ever again." They had complete job security because in the civil service they couldn't fire you.

On the alternate quarters when I went to school, I had to perform. I had to work in order to get the grades I was accustomed to. There was no fooling around. At Georgia Tech all they cared about is that you had the right number in the right box on the tests. You got no points for almost getting it right or for having basically the right idea or having done some of the steps correctly.

I didn't enjoy at all having nothing to do at Picatinnny where there was such a lax work ethic. This was my introduction to the military-industrial complex where you had to have a security clearance to get in the gate mainly for the reason that they didn't want the outside world to know what really went on there: nothing. People were  literally paid to sit around and do nothing at taxpayers' expense. Only now since the "Republican Revolution" it's all money borrowed from the Chinese so it's not really taxpayers' expense any more. I thought that Picatinny must be exceptional, that surely this same thing, which I considered to be a form of corruption, could not be going on elsewhere, but in my journey through the MIC I found that this was quite typical. My only good work experience was at General Dynamics Convair for three years where the dynamic was somewhat but not completely different. But I'll get to that later.

Basically, how the MIC works is this. They work off of "cost plus" contracts they get from the Pentagon or sometimes they tap into pots of money directly controlled by congressmen. The essence of a cost plus contract is that the government (via Defense Department appropriations) awards (either competitively or non-competitively) contracts to various private industries (or civil service entities under direct government control) a contract to do something. In most cases these contracts are the result of direct lobbying by the industries or entities themselves for money to do some project they have dreamed up which may or may not have any relevance to actually defending the US. In most cases the cost is not defined. In other words the government pays whatever the project costs and then tacks on a certain percentage of the cost as profit, the "plus" in "cost plus." Therefore, the industry or government controlled entity such as civil service has the incentive to make the project as costly as possible. And when the contract ends, in many cases, there is nothing to show for it but a report that never gets read. There is no follow-on; nothing comes of it that becomes a part of the actual defense of the US or is ongoing even as an intellectual asset. There is no rhyme or reason.

The result is that, the more costly the project, the more profit will be realized. A good way of increasing the cost of a project is hiring more personnel. After all, money always ends up in human hands. So department heads, having obtained a "cost plus" project, immediately start hiring people even if there is no well defined role for them to play. That drives up the cost. A department head's status and salary is directly related to the number of personnel working (or not working) under him. In many cases the project or contract itself is a big boondoggle, something a congressman "delivers" to his home district so that his constituents will continue to reelect him for "bringing home the bacon." It sure helps the local economy, but it has turned the US into a national security state, a country that is primarily concerned with militarism as a means of keeping the economy going and as a platform for politicians to run on.

Now if the government has a project where it is vital that some serious work get done, they sub-contract it out to Jet Propulsion Lab which has a lot of PhDs from Cal Tech or Lincoln Labs which has PhDs from MIT. In fact most of these government entites like Picatinny simply sub-contract the hell out of a contract sometimes several times and then all they really are is contract monitors. In other words there are several levels of guys whose only job is to check on the work of the sub-contractor at the next level below them until you get down to the level where the only real work happens ^i.e. at the level of the PhDs from JPL or Lincoln Labs. The proliferation of personnel as contract monitors and the many layers of sub-contracting adds to the cost and hence to the profits as well as providing a home for the college educated middle class.

As someone said, in the old Soviet Union the employees pretended to work and the government pretended to pay them. In the good old US of A the employees in the MIC pretend to work and the government ACTUALLY does pay them! That was the difference between the USSR and the USA.

After two  years of "working" alternate quarters at Picatinny, where they had made artillery shells for World War II, I got so fed up and bored I decided to drop out of the co-op plan and go straight to school. There, at least, I felt like I was accomplishing something. I went eight straight quarters including summers and managed to graduate the summer quarter after I would have graduated if I had not been on the co-op plan in the first place. Then, having been accepted to graduate school at Stanford on a research assistantship, I went three more quarters there for a total of eleven consecutive quarters without a break. At least I wasn't bored!

The San Diego Free Press circa 1969

I used to work for the San Diego Free Press. It flourished for about two years from about 1968 to 1970. I guess there is a current version but it has nothing in common with the 1968-70 version except the name. It was an "underground" newspaper meaning that it was devoted to radical politics, alternative lifestyles, the counterculture in general. But mainly it was a political newspaper. I used to sell papers at the San Diego Zoo among other spots, one of the few people who actually went out and sold them on the street. Most of the staff just liked to put out the paper, do the art work, write the articles etc. I also wrote for the paper, took photos and was a reporter.

We all lived in a commune at Second and Thorn in Hillcrest. How we were able to rent this house I don't know because it's a really nice house. It's been totally refurbished and is in private hands. I wonder if the present owner knows the history of the house, how it housed a bunch of 60s era radicals. In a later homeless period I used to park my van and sleep just a block away from my old home at Second and Thorn.

There I had my own room on the second floor. Across from me was Jan Diepersloot the guy as much in charge as anyone. He wrote most of the editorials. In the masthead it says he's the policy coordinator. I don't even remember some of the people who worked on the paper, and some of the people who lived at the house didn't even really work on the paper. I remember Richard Blackburn, "Black Dick" they called him. I remember Herman Rumper. Most of these people were present or former UCSD students. Larry Gottlieb was a Physics major. I was a Computer Science major. We were the only two from the science and engineering type schools. All the rest were liberal arts majors, mainly Philosophy students. Matie Belle lived with us but I don't think she worked on the paper.

We also had a "retreat" out in Ramona where we could go to get away from it all. It was an old abandoned ranch with a little shack and a run down barn. One couple lived out there and grew marijuana. They got caught and hauled into court, but I don't remember whatever happened to them. Once their dog had about 16 cute little pups. They were country people and didn't like the city. Since I had a private pilot's license, they wanted me to fly marijuana over the border, but I chickened out. I remember two of our girls drove across with some. Luckily, they made it but they were shitting bricks and never did it again to my knowledge. That's how we paid our rent, I think. Anyway no one ever asked me to pay rent.

One time we ripped off a load of plywood from a building site at UCSD. We used it to floor in our attic so some people could sleep up there. The only problem was people were always stepping off the floored in area onto the lath and plaster and then they would fall through the ceiling directly over my bed. This happened two or three times. The UCSD operation was pretty sophisticated. We had look-outs with walkie-talkies. We used a converted schoolbus that belonged to this guy who stopped in from time to time and stayed with us for awhile. I think he was a friend of Jan's. He was wanted for arson up in northern California since the police had kicked him off some land he was homesteading and in retaliation he had burned down the police station. I don't think they ever caught him.

I had saved all the Free Presses and had them at the little duplex in Del Mar where I lived later after I'd gone my separate way. One day I threw them away which I later regretted. Some years later I searched for the San Diego Free Press and found them on microfiche at the UCSD library. I printed out some pages, mainly the ones on which I had written articles. I used to do a series on San Diego history. And then I did book reviews and a muckraking article on General Dynamics, a company with which I was still employed although on leave of abscence attending school although I was also on a leave of absence from school as well while I pursued revolutionary activities. Our main goal was to create a new society which would require a revolution. We never quite reached that goal. In fact we never even came close.

Following is an excerpt from a book review I did of "Who Rules America?" by G. William Domhoff, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz:

This book contains a lot of well documented facts about the nature of the American political, economic and social power structure, referred to in some quarters as the Establishment. Domhoff, a sociologist at the University of Californla at Santa Cruz, draws heavily on the works of C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite), Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy (Monopoly Capital), AND E. Digby Baltzell (The Protestant Establishment). He shows conclusively that an American social upper class does exist and that this class owns a disproportionate amount of the country's wealth and makes a disproportionate number of America’s decisions; in short, that the American social upper class is the American governing class. His criteria for determining membership in the upper class are the following: 1) listed in the Social Register, 2) attendance at an exclusive private school such as Groton, Hotchkiss or St. Marks, 3) member of a very exclusive gentlemen’s club such as the Knickerbocker (New York), the Pacific Union (San Francisco), or the California (Los Angeles), 4) father was a millonaire entrepreneur or $100,000 corporation executive or corporatlon lawyer and either a) went to exclusive private school or b) belongs to an exclusive club, 5) marries a person under 1) - 4), 6) member of family chronicled by Amory in Who Killed Society! or The Proper Bostonians. Domhoff sets very stiff criteria for upper class membership so that the errors are on the side of exclusion rather than inclusion. Consequently, the statistics he gathers are always conservative.

I Started Out as a Child

I was born July 19, 1941 in Franklin, NJ, a pre-war baby by six months. Franklin is home to some of the richest zinc ore in the world, but it is pretty much mined out by now. There is also the Franklin Mineral Museum where they have local minerals such as Franklinite and Hardystonite not found anywhere else in the world. Hardyston is the township Franklin is located in. My parents were both teachers at Franklin High School; that's where they met. One day my Dad asked a student to deliver a note to Miss Clark which asked her if she wanted to have turkey with him and his parents. If it weren't for Franklin HS and an old dead turkey, I wouldn't be here today.

Shortly after I was born, we moved to Highland Park, NJ where my Dad taught at Highland Park HS. Many of his students left directly out of high school for World War II. My Dad was voted most popular teacher at Highland Park HS and he taught Problems of American Democracy. I guess at that time the main problem was World War II.

I remember one time when I was two my parents were having an outdoor party. I remember being bored and, anxious to see what was outside the confines of my little domain, took off down the sidewalk. I guess nobody noticed I was missing for a long time because I got pretty far away. I remember crossing city streets. Finally, my mother drove up in a police car and took me back into custody. I guess she was so relieved that she couldn't even punish me. My restless nature and quest for adventure were coming out at age two. Running away from home at age two is my first memory.

I think we lived in a duplex and next door lived my first girlfriend, Betty Jane Hughes. Our parents were friends. I remember visiting Betty Jane and her family when I was 10 or 11 when they lived in Phoenixville, PA. We used to walk to a soda fountain and get cherry sundaes. Our parents kept in touch for many years.

My Dad was an amateur photographer. He took all the pictures of me when I was little. He even did his own darkroom work. Here is a picture of me in a soldier suit that was given to me by one of Dad's students. It looks like I have a gun and everything ready to defend the Stars and Stripes. I don't remember much about Highland Park except running away from home, Betty Jane Hughes and the fact that it was close to New Brunswick.

Below is a picture of me and Betty Jane.

When I was two we moved from Highland Park to Wantage Township, NJ where my Dad took his first job as principal of Wantage Consolidated School. We rented a house on a dirt road in an area known as Possum Glen. Dirt roads weren't uncommon in those days. I remember Possum Glen was pretty boring as there were no kids to play with so one day I ran away from home again. This wasn't so scary since at least there were no city streets to cross. I ended up at a neighbor's house eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches until my mother came and got me.

One winter we had such a severe snow storm that the road was impassable for a long time. My Dad had to park his car in a near-by field, and we had to walk to the house. I had a little swing my Dad made for me hanging from a tree at the edge of the yard. One day I was swinging and then got the impulse to get out of the swing and run and jump up on a soda box that was sitting by the house. When I got up there and looked down, there was a snake lying there perfectly still and staring up at me. I was afraid to get off the box so I yelled for my Dad and he came and killed the snake with a shovel. I couldn't figure why that snake would just lie there like he was guarding me and would bite me if I came down off the box.

I remember once at Possum Glen my parents had a party and they were playing softball out in the yard. I was just getting over some childhood disease like the chicken pox or something and I wanted to go outside and be with all the people. My Mom, however, wouldn't let me go out. She thought I might still be contagious and give whatever I had to one of the guests. I threw a tantrum. I felt I was well and wanted to go out and be with the people the worst way. My Mom was adamant. Maybe she thought I would run away again. I was totally distraught! My Mom didn't have too much sympathy for me, but my Grandma Lawrence did. She comforted me. I remember that. She knew my feelings had been hurt. My Grandma played a big role in my life. She was much more the nurturing, comforting type than my Mom, much as I loved her, and as my life went on, for various reasons, I found myself being emotionally much closer to my Grandma than my Mom. She played a big role in caring for me!

I was close to my cousin Peggy who lived in Hainesville where my mother grew up and was a few months older than me. Peggy was a great person who, unfortunately, died from hepatitus when she was 16. I lost a true friend. Peggy and I used to play together a lot. We went blackberrying together and our Grandma Clark used to read us stories together when we spent time with her in Newton, NJ.

When I was four we moved from Possum Glen to Lewisburg Road where my parents lived the rest of their lives. My sister, Jeanne, was born either shortly before or shortly after we moved. Now commenced several family tragedies starting with my Mom getting TB. I was 4 and my sister was only 9 months when my Mom had to go to a sanitarium. She would be gone for almost 4 years during which time my Dad was essentially a single parent, and my Grandma Lawrence took over many of the aspects of raising us. I remember the scene when my Mom left. She was very stoic and told me to be strong. She didn't like emotional scenes ever. My Grandpa Clark came to get her and drive her to Glen Gardner where the sanitarium was, and I remember standing in the living room saying our goodbyes when suddenly I grabbed her and didn't want to let her go. It was too much to bear the thought of losing my Mom.

I remember having to worry about whether or not we were going to win the Second World War, and now I had to worry about my Mom and wonder if she would ever be back. It was not a foregone conclusion in those days. Many died of TB.

The next thing that happened is that my sister didn't develop normally. She didn't learn to walk. She didn't learn to talk. I remember their trying to teach her to walk on a thing they rigged up with pipes she could hold on over in Vernon at my grandparents house. It was no use. She looked normal, but she would never learn to talk and she walked haltingly for only a few years. She had had massive brain damage at birth due, undoubtedly, to lack of oxygen. I remember hearing the story about how the doctor wasnt' there, a Dr. Scott, I believe, the same doctor who had delivered me at Franklin Hospital. The nurses kept telling my Mom to hold the baby back till the doctor got there. My Mom dutifully did as she was told with disastrous results. As a kid I remember babysitting for my sister a lot. Maybe that is where my nurturing side came from. If so, it served me well when later I found myself in the role of a single parent raising my daughter from the age of 3. I never had any of the normal sibling rivalry that most famillies with normal children experience. Instead, I was thrust into the role of caregiver.

There was a lot of sickness in our family during that period. Everyone got sick from the water which came from a cistern. Some dead animal had fallen in. Then my Dad had a well drilled. My Dad came down with rheumatic fever and almost died. It weakened his heart, and later in life he had two heart attacks, the last one fatal. It was a difficult period for my parents and me. I remember seeing my Mom only once in the 4 years she was at "the san." They were afraid of her infecting me. That time I saw her she was up on a balcony, and I was down on the lawn. It was hard; it wasn't emotional, it was sort of cold. My Mom didn't like emotional displays. I  wanted my Mom to love me. She couldn't do that in her condition. I think she gave me a wallet or something.

When I was 4, I spent the year sitting in the back of a kindergarten class. I couldn't participate. It was the only way my Dad had of babysitting me. I wasn't old enough to be in that class. It was frustrating. The next year I got to start kindergarten again with my own class. Summers we spent with Grandma and Grandpa Lawrence. Dad hired a few housekeepers from time to time whom I detested.

Finally, in second grade my Mom came home, and we got to try to have a normal family again. Shortly before, they had invented streptomycin and that was all that saved my Mom's life. It cost my Dad $180. a month for my Mom's streptomycin shots, and that was at a time when he only made $225. Dad had to declare medical indigency although he never told me about that till years later. During that era he bonded with a lot of the local townspeople who cut him a lot of slack at a time when he needed a few friends. He dedicated his life to serving those people who had been so good to him in his time of need.

The Saga of John Kyte Clark

My grandfather, John Kyte Clark, whom I was named after,  was named after his grandfather, John C Kyte. He was born in 1883. I had heard a family story that my great grandfather, Eugene Clark, had left my great grandmother, Libbie, and gone off to the city to pursue a life of wine, women and song. I don’t know if that part was true or not but the 1900 census record shows that my great grandmother had moved back to the family farm with her father and mother along with her two sons, John K and Claud. She was 43 at the time. My grandfather was 16. His older brother was 20. I imagine that my great great grandfather, John C Kyte who was 78 needed all the help he could get on the farm as did my great great grandmother Sarah who was 78 also. This was also the farm where Libbie grew up according to the census of 1870 assuming that her parents farmed the same farm their entire life which was common in those days. People didn’t move around from farm to farm much. The 1870 census shows that Libbie was 14 and living with her father, mother and 7 siblings in the farm house pictured below (picture taken 2006).
      
       I had heard that my great grandfather, Eugene, came from Bucks County, PA. That was only partially true. My great great grandfather Aaron W Clark was born in Sandyston, NJ in 1831. The 1850 census record shows that Aaron W who was 19 was living in Sandyston Township where the Kytes resided. The 1860 census shows Aaron W living in Sandyston with Hannah and oldest son Isaiah. He later moved to Monroe County in PA since the 1870 census shows him living there with wife, Hannah, and sons, Isaiah, Eugene and another with an indecipherable name. So the families might have known each other before the move to PA. Besides the farm was only a mile or so from the border with PA so moves back and forth over the border were probably common.
      
       The 1880 census record shows that Eugene and Libbie were married and farming in Sandyston. Eugene was 19 and Libbie was 22 so my great grandmother was 3 or 4 years older than my great grandfather. They had a one year old child who must have been my grandfather’s older brother, Claud, so Eugene must have been 17 or 18 when they got married. Maybe that had something to do with why he left and went off to the big city. He had gotten involved with an older woman at a very young age. However, he must have stuck around at least till 1883 because that’s when my grandfather was born. Since the 1890 census records were burned, we can’t know whether my great grandfather left before or after 1890, but he had definitely left by 1900 because, according to the census, my great grandmother was living with her parents on the family farm in Hainesville, Sandyston, along with her two sons. That was the same farm where she grew up and where my mother was born and grew up. How many generations back that farm goes in the Kyte and Clark families is unclear, but it was at least 4, probably more.
      
       In 1907, my grandfather’s brother Claud died. I had heard that he had drowned in a swimming accident. He was 28 and must have been living at the farm in Hainesville. By 1910 according to the census record, my grandfather, who was 26, was the head of household which consisted of his mother, Libbie, 53, and his grandmother, Sarah, 80, his grandfather, John C, having died in 1902. So Grandpa lost his brother and grandfather within a 5 year period, and Libbie lost her father and son. Within a 10 year or so period, they had also lost for all intents and purposes their husband and father.
      

By the 1920 census, the picture on the Hainesville farm had changed quite a bit. Grandpa John K was married to Alice Rosenkrans and they had 3 children, Florence, 6, my mother, Winifred, 4, my aunt, and J Earl, 1. Sarah had died, but Libbie was still living. She was 62. My mother was born September 5, 1913. The census listed my grandfather’s birthplace as Pennsylvania which presents something of a mystery because, according to the 1880 census, Eugene and Libbie were married and living in Sandyston. Did they subsequently move back to Pennsylvania in which case the story about Grandpa being born in Bucks County, PA may be true? If so the family sure moved back and forth between NJ and PA a lot. Great grandma Libbie died in 1924, and my mother’s brother, J. Earl, died of pneumonia in 1928 when he was only 10.
      

I know from a letter my mother had saved that Libbie went through hell and high water to get title to the family farm in the early 1900s, probably after her mother died so that she and her son would have a place to live and a livelihood for my grandfather. I think I recall that the lot lines were somewhat ambiguous probably because the farm had never been surveyed since it had been in the same family for so long. And there were probably monetary considerations in order to buy out her siblings.
      
       Eugene had died in 1916 and is buried in the family plot along with Libbie so they must never have gotten divorced. What his subsequent relationship with his wife and my grandfather was after he left the family, I don’t know, but it must have been at least sufficient so that the family was notified when he died. Sadly, by 1928, my Grandpa had lost his father, mother, brother and son. Grandpa never talked about any of this and what little I know was passed down to me by my mother. Other than, that is, what I have been able to dig up from perusing the markers at the Hainesville Cemetery and from my genealogical research online.
      
My grandfather farmed the family farm until approximately 1945 after which he sold it, and he and my grandmother moved to Madison St in Newton. My grandfather worked as a handyman for a department store installing linoleum flooring and window shades in people’s houses. My grandmother crocheted doilies and hankies and sold them through the same store. My grandfather was a good carpenter and he had a full set of tools in his little garage. Now I wish I would have asked him to teach me something about carpentry. I think he would have been glad to do it, and I could have learned something. But I never showed any interest so it was one of those missed opportunities
      
Another story is that my mother and Aunt Winnie (picture left circa 1940) and a friend drove to CA in the 30s to visit a relative, George  Kyte, who was an optometrist in Santa Monica. They must have come over the original transcontinental highway, the Lincoln Highway. He was Libbie’s brother born about 1863. Therefore, he was my grandfather’s uncle. According to the 1920 census he was living in Santa Monica with his wife, Mary, and was an optometrist.  When he died, he left his estate to my grandfather. I don’t know how much money was involved, but it must have been considerable for those days. So my grandfather and grandmother had a nice retirement in Newton. My grandmother’s sister, Mabel, and her husband lived close by, and the two couples played pinochle once a week. They had a garden and chickens. My grandfather had a black 1952 Plymouth for the rest of his life. They were frugal and always had a neat house (pictured below). Even their basement was always neat and clean. My grandmother used to read stories to me and my cousin, Peggy Cole, who was about 6 months older than me, and, unfortunately, died when she was 15. I used to spend a week with my grandparents every summer and would go into work with my grandfather or ride my bicycle around Newton which was and still is a nice town.
      

My grandfather had a stroke when he was 75 or so and then was in a nursing home in Newton until he died in 1968. My grandmother, who never learned to drive, would walk the mile or so every day to see him. When I came home on vacations, my Mom and Dad would always take me to visit my grandfather in the nursing home usually right after I came home and right before I went back. I sort of didn’t want to go so much because the nursing home was depressing, but now I’m glad my parents insisted and that I did go.
      
       My grandfather never talked too much and never talked about his mother’s and his struggle to survive or how they came to live on the farm which had been in the family for generations. It was a small farm, and my grandparents were very self-sufficient. They were both very industrious and provided a lot of their everyday necessities by the work of their own hands as did many people in those days instead of buying everything at the store. The dairy farm provided them with a cash flow so that they did have money for the things they couldn’t provide for themselves. My grandfather never had a tractor on the farm. He used teams of horses to pull the hay wagon and the manure wagon right up to the time he sold the farm. I remember riding on top of the hay wagon once when I was about 4 years old.
      
       That farm is still in good shape today. It has gone through a series of owners, but it still has significance to me. My parents were married there in 1940.  Later when my mother got TB and had to go to a sanitarium, it was my grandfather who came and picked her up while my Dad stayed with my sister and me. We would have lost our house due to the fact that my Mom’s streptomycin shots were $180. a month and my Dad only made $250. in 1946 had it not been for the fact that my grandfather bought out their mortgage and didn’t require my parents to pay anything till my Mom got out of the sanitarium and they got back on their feet. Then I remember my Mom paying Grandpa $50.00 a month. When I was going to school, my grandfather always shook hands with me and there was a $10. bill in my hand when we let go. He was a kind, generous man.
      
       Going further back in the Kyte family Libbie’s father and mother John C and Sarah were born, respectively, in 1821 and 1829. They died in 1902 and 1913, respectively. John C’s father and mother were Jacob Hoornbeck Kyte and Mary Cortright born in 1775 and 1784, respectively. They died in 1858 and 1862, respectively. Both were born and died in Sandyston. Jacob H. Kyte’s parents were Thomas Kyte (1726-1816) and Lea Keator (1739-1827). Lea Keator’s ancestry can be easily traced back several more generations. Thomas Kyte was a dead-end for now as far as my research is concerned. Mary Cortright’s parents were Simon Cortright (1764-1824) and Catherine Ennes (1764-1848).
      
       In the Clark family, Eugene’s parents were Aaron W Clark b.1831 and Hannah. Aaron W’s parents were Samuel Clark b.1805 and Elizabeth b. 1806.

The picture on the left is Johnny Lawrence and Peggy Cole in 1942.

My cousin, Jennifer Peel, has a blog that links here.

The 60s, the New Left and Revolution

In the 60s we used to make a distinction between the New Left and the old left. The old left was still around. They were old men who had admired Marxist-Leninism in the 20s or who had considered themselves communists and admired the Societ Union before it was obvious what "Uncle Joe" Stalin was up to. They continued to hold the values of universal brotherhood, considered the working class to be mainly saints, and were antagonistic to the capitalist class. Their political aspirations were mainly the pipedreams that old men dream or regrets for what might have been.

The New Left was different. We were going to make it happen - revolution that is. Thousands of college kids were demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. A cultural and sexual revolution was under way. Someone told me, "Bellbottoms are revolutionary," and I better get rid of my straight-legged jeans. On the left everyone was a brother or sister even if you hadn't met them before. The Black Panthers were our heroes. Che Guevara was a hero. Country Joe and the Fish sang "And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam." Mario Savio instigated the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley by using the F word liberally.

The father of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, was teaching at the University of California San Diego where I was a graduate student. (By the way, Herbert and I share the same birthday.) Marcuse was a German Jew who had escaped Hitler, come to America, worked for the CIA and finally wound up in Academia. He was a philosopher who had written several up to then not very widely read books. Marcuse was a Freudian-Marxist, someone who combined the revolutionary ideas of Marx with the revolutionary ideas of Freud. In appearance he seemed rather grandfatherly, certainly professorial and a kindly old man. He was in his seventies when he lectured in German philosophy at UCSD. Hegel's dialectic was on the menu. I enjoyed every minute of his lectures so much I didn't want to miss anything so I never took notes. I wasn't taking the course for credit anyway.

I was a graduate student in the Applied Physics and Computer Science Department and wanted to do my thesis on voting systems and social choice theory as I thought, if you were going to replace all the institutions of society in one fell swoop by having a revolution, you should at least have some idea, some theoretical underpinning, of the kind of society you wanted to replace it with. As such I was an ambivalent revolutionary. The Applied Physics and Computer Science Department was eager to get rid of me as I was the only student in engineering that had radical views and thought that, instead of proceeding with business as usual, we all should be doing everything we could to bring the war to an end. Toward that end a meeting had been arranged between Marcuse and me to see if it might be a good idea for me to switch departments and become his student. When I told him about my interest in applying information theory to voting systems and conflict resolution, he said, "Don't give them a blueprint." Well, I thought the most I could do was to provide a road map, not a blueprint, but I did want to proceed with my technical aspirations for societal architecture rather than writing diatribes about the labor theory of value which I had done more or less as a hobby but which I didn't consider to have any lasting value.

Marcuse had written a book, "Eros and Civilization," which was my Bible along with Norman O. Brown's "Life Against Death," and Wilhelm Reich's "Mass Psychology of Fascism." Reich's book was actually banned in the US at that time so we considered it a revolutionary act to steal a copy out of a Canadian library and reprint a hundred copies which we gave away for free, of course, to anybody that was interested. Marcuse's basic oeuvre as a Freudian-Marxist was that repression of the instincts (primarily the sexual instinct) led to all sorts of right-wing impulses such as hate, greed and war. This was also the basic belief of Brown and Reich. Marcuse advocated in circumlocutory English (it was obvious he thought in German) the "liberation of the instincts." The general idea was that, if people were unrepressed and sexually fulfilled, this would lead to a world of brotherly love which would be filled with non-greedy people willing to share what they had with others. From this a society based on the principal "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" would actually be possible and could actually be built.

Hence, the motto "Make Love, Not War" was seen as an admirable weltanschauung. The problem, which can now be seen with 20-20 hindsight, is that the Freudian-Marxist central tenet did not turn out to be correct. Liberation of the instincts (which was probably more due to Hugh Hefner than Herbert Marcuse since I'll wager more people read Playboy than "Eros and Civilization") certainly did take place. But it didn't reduce the amount of hate and greed in the world. In fact just the opposite. Hate and greed were liberated as well. This was borne out as the criminal population soon took advantage of all the free love and brotherly and sisterly trust. College girls hitchhiking down the coast to UCSD pretty soon started to be assaulted by those taking advantage of the love fest.

Charles Manson, more than anyone, put an end to the era of love and trust by killing a pregnant Sharon Tate. People started to get more conservative in their values. It was "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" all over again. The commercializers and predators moved in on the Summer of Love in San Francisco. Haight-Ashbury hippies started turning into street people still believing "Love is all you need" and that their brothers and sisters would be happy to share their spare change with them. In a massive counter-revolution, mainstrean America elected Nixon President in 1968. In the eighties Reagan led us all to believe that "greed is good." We needn't repress our urges to be greedy and selfish. Private property was good. Communal living was unAmerican. Sharing was bad.

In the final analysis liberation of the instincts did nothing to bring about a more just, equitable or loving society. People are certainly less repressed than they were, say, in the fifties - less repressed sexually and less repressed psychologically with respect to all the emotions especially anger, egotism and greed. So whether society is better or worse off, it is certainly a mixed bag. In some ways society is better off; in some ways, worse. However, liberation of the instincts did not lead to a change in the structure of society as envisioned by Marcuse et al. But Marcuse had an out, theoretically at least, something he called "repressive desublimation" which explained why liberation of the instincts might not lead to an ideal society. Irregardless of the theoretical fig leaf, I think that whatever changes there have been in societal structure or in the realm of politics have generally been in the opposite direction from the one Marcuse and the other Freudian- Marxists envisioned.

The Eponymous Clifton E Lawrence

According to the dictionary, you're eponymous if you have something named after you.  But also the thing that is named after you is also eponymous. Now it seems to me that it should be one or the other or there should be two separate words - one for the person who has something named after them and one for the thing that is named after someone. At any rate my father is eponymous because there is a school in northwest New Jersey that is named after him - the Clifton E Lawrence Elementary School.

My Dad was a special person. Before he came to Sussex, he had been voted the most popular teacher at Highland Park High School in the early years of World War II when most of his students were going to go directly from high school into the military. He taught "Problems of American Democracy." I wished I would have asked him what those problems were, but I never did. He was the principal of Wantage Consolidated school starting in 1943 and then the school system sort of grew underneath him to the point where he became superintendent of the Sussex-Wantage Regional school system. When he retired at age 62, he had been in the school business for 42 years having started as a teacher at the age of 20. Unfortunately, he died within a month of his retirement of a heart attack. He never collected one iota of his richly deserved pension. He still had a lot to give as he had just won the primary election for state assemblyman and probably would have won the general election as well. He was the ultimate civic-minded person!

But my Dad's professional accomplishments don't really tell you what kind of person he was. He was an extremely cheerful, optimistic person who brought out the best in everyone. He was a genius at human relations and he really genuinely liked people. His values were very mainstream, middle of the road American, and he kidded about being middle class. He had a great sense of humor and a lot of folksy sayings. He was intelligent, but his intelligence was infused with an emotional sense and he had excellent judgment and wise decision making abilities. He touched a lot of people's lives.

I remember as a kid his telling about this little girl in kindergarten or first grade. I guess she was a few years behind me in school because I don't remember her personally. But I remember her name  - Yvonne Petroliwicz - at least I think that's how you spell it. My Dad would say he felt sorry for that little girl because he didn't see how she was ever going to learn to spell her name! Well, fast forward about 50 years and I was in the Sussex Ben Franklin one day. I had taken in an old picture of the Wantage School (seen above) circa 1940 to get it framed. The person in the framing department looked at the picture and asked me if I had gone to school there. I said yes, did she? She said yes. Her name was Yvonne Petroliwicz. I told her that my Dad had been principal there, and she proceeded to tell me the story of how every year on the first day of school (or maybe it was the last) - I don't remember - she would bring my Dad some cupcakes. On the day she graduated my Dad presented her with a doll and she told me, "I was the only one he gave a doll to."

That was the kind of man my Dad was. He touched a lot of people's lives. He made it a point to know all the kids in his school by name even when there got to be several hundred of them. He carried a brief for his kids, looked out for their best interests. He fought for school additions when the kid population grew even though he made some enemies with the folks who didn't want their property taxes to go up. He seemed to know everyone in the county both children and adults.

I remember another time when Abie South died. Abie was about 14 at the time and lived with his mother and sister in Butler's alley, the "ghetto" of Sussex where the poorest people lived in ramshackle huts. Abie was in a coal car parked on a siding probably stealing coal to heat their house when suddenly a load of coal came down the shute positioned above and into the car smothering Abie. It was a tragedy for Abie's mother because she didn't have a husband and Abie was the "adult" male of the family. I remember my Dad driving up Butler's Alley - because I was with him - till he found Mrs. South to express his condolences. I remember her saying, "You don't know who your friends are till something like this happens." A lot of people wouldn't have bothered to contact Mrs. South. He cared about people whether they were high or low.

My Dad was very active in the community. He was President of the Board of the Alexander Linn Hospital for 20 years. He was active in the Masonic Lodge, and he was out a lot at night at meetings. One year he was secretary to the Grand Master of the Masonic Lodge, Adrian Hommell, and was out at some lodge meeting or other almost every night. I remember he used to say Abe drove 80 miles an hour with the heater on full blast, the radio on full blast, the windows rolled up and smoking a cigar! Abe was quite a character. Dad was an American history major in college and was active in all the historical events like the Bi-Centennial celebration in 1976. I remember my Mom saying that on their honeymoon they visited all the Civil War battle fields. Dad loved all the civic institutions - church, school, hospital, the Boy Scouts.

My sister had cerebral palsy. She must have had massive brain damage due to lack of oxygen when she was born. She looked normal, but she never learned to talk and walked only for a few years. Her balance was always precarious and she fell a lot. From her teen-age years on she was heavily sedated and not too active. My Dad was so good to her. He played with her and made her laugh. The only thing my sister had in life were our parents. She used to sit by the window all day waiting for them to come home and, when they pulled in the driveway, she let out a big cheer and clapped her hands. They were all she had, and they were so good to her.

My Dad was a very sociable, gregarious guy sort of the opposite of me. He was very balanced between introversion and extroversion, but he was mainly an extrovert, I think. He loved social occasions. Psychologically, he had his head on straight. It seemed like he was always "up", always in a good mood. I don't think I ever saw him lose his temper, ever saw him angry. I always wished I was more the outgoing type like him but I'm not. Even in the same family you can have seemingly opposite personality types. I'm more like my Grandfather who was very introverted, almost autistic. I've come to terms with the fact that my Dad and I are different types, and I'm glad I didn't try to follow some life path that required the social and psychological skills and abilities that he had because I just don't have them. I think everyone has to first find out who they are, and then follow the path best suited for them, not necessarily the path that their father or mother followed. Parents have to realize that their off-spring may or may not be like them. I think psychological predispositions are genetically  inherited and not just from parents but from grandparents, great grandparents - who knows how far back certain traits go - and there certainly is a diversity of personality types in any given family if you go back far enough.

When my Dad died, the Board of Education promised my Mom that, if they ever built another school, they would name it after my Dad. Well, about 10 years after my Dad died, as it turns out, they did build another school. However, the local paper announced that it was to be called the "Ryan Road" school because it was to be located on Ryan Road. When I was a kid, Timothy Ryan was the dog catcher in Wantage Township, and I guess he was the most prominent citizen living on that particular road at the time, which, if I recall, was a dirt road. So Timothy Ryan, through no fault of his own, was about to not only have a road named after him but a school as well. And the school would have been named after him had it not been for my Mom. She went into high gear writing letters to the editor, getting her high powered friends to write letters to the editor, and in general going on a campaign to make the Board of Education follow through on their promise to her to name the school after her late husband. After some initial resistance, the powers that were gave in and decided to honor their promise and name the school after my father after all. My mother was a relentless campaigner and there was no stopping her when she got on her high horse.

So that's how my father got to be eponymous. He had a great life. He enjoyed himself immensely, but not every minute. I remember him saying, "Some days I wouldn't give you a nickel for this job." He was a genuinely nice person. I don't think he had a mean bone in his body, and he seemed to have the milk of human kindness by the quart in every vein. He had a real sense of wonder about life, about the universe. My Dad was pretty down to earth and liked to joke around a lot. They used to like to have picnics in the summer time, and my Dad would say, "This tastes pretty good for an old dead cow." He also had a sense of his own mortality, and I heard him say numerous times, "But life goes on."

I Have a Job Americans Don't Want to Do. Heck, I Have a Job Not Even a Mexican Wants to Do. That's Why I'm Making Good Money!

I'm a window cleaner. At least that's my day job. My night job has varied from professional musician to information theorist to social choice theorist to web master to blogger. This is the first of a series of autobiographical posts that I call "Don't Throw Me in the Brier Patch" because most people probably would look at my life as the equivalent of their having been thrown in the brier patch. Like Brer Rabbit, the brier patch suits me just fine. I like my life. I chose it, and I like it.

It wasn't the life chosen for me by my parents or rather the life my parents steered me towards. I  was a professional student for 30 years. I'm an alumnus of Andover (where President Bush went to school), Georgia Tech, Stanford and UCSD. I worked in the industrial-military complex for 15 years. It was partly because I couldn't stand the philosophy and working conditions of the military-industrial complex and partly because I couldn't stand the sedentariness of the job that I left and became a window cleaner.

I started my own business with a capital investment of $20., no training, no apprenticeship, no certification, no credentials and no license. As an early adapter of the answering machine, I didn't need a secretary to take phone messages. Later a cell phone made it unnecessary to have a "physical" location in order to do business.

All of a sudden I was my own boss. I didn't have to ask permission to take a day off. I just didn't schedule any appointments for that day. I had my own system of "flexitime," never giving an exact appointment time, only a window. I was independent. I was free. It was how I really wanted to live although it was against everything my parents and the whole educational system stood for. The educational system is in the business of creating docile employees and complacent consumers - basically people who don't think for themselves and have a vested economic stake in going with the flow. People who, unfortunately, are vulnerable to advertising messages both commercial and political. If the educational system truly wanted to benefit its students, it would teach them to be resistant to advertising. As a window cleaner and proprietor of my own business, I had no boss, no union and no "benefits," and I had to do hard, physical work. I loved it. Most Americans wouldn't. That's why I say, "Don't throw me in the brier patch."

I could take holidays whenever I wanted to take them, not when all the lemmings took them on the same day crowding the freeways and beaches. I could take vacations during the "low rate" season, and not when everyone else took them. Just as in the movie, "1000 Clowns," I owned my days, and my nights were free from any daytime job baggage carryover. I didn't have to ask anyone's permission for anything. I worked outside in the sunlight and enjoyed the beautiful days instead of sitting in an office or in an underground, windowless bunker as in my last assignment in the M-I complex at Battery Ashburn on Point Loma, San Diego. That was a job for Naval Electonics Laboratory (NEL) which later changed its name to Naval Electronics Laboratory Center (NELC) which later changed its name to Naval Ocean Systems Command (NOSC) which later changed its name to Naval Research and Development (NRAD). People with nothing better to do kept changing the name to protect the guiIty.

As a self-employed window cleaner, I didn't have to put up with obnoxious co-workers or an obnoxious boss. Once in a while I would come across an obnoxious customer, but, if I didn't like them or they didn't like me, that would be our last encounter. I wouldn't have to not look forward to going to work every day and seeing them again. I could speak my mind and not fear losing my job. Maybe I would lose a particular customer, but so what. I wanted to cultivate a clientele of people that I liked and could get along with, not a clientele of enemies or people who treated me badly or who thought I was worth less than they were. As a result, I could look forward to going to work every day, meeting new and interesting people, doing something that was more physically rewarding than sitting behind a desk and doing something that left my mind free to think, to practice my music (you don't really have to have an instrument in your mouth to do that), or to listen to great literature or great music via my cassette (or later) CD player. When I was finished I had the instantaneous gratification of having the check in my hand, and then I was out of there. No worries. No stress. No problems.

So when my fellow alumnus, President Bush, speaks about all those jobs "Americans don't want to do,"  I wonder if this makes me unamerican for doing one of them and making good money to boot!