GEORGE TEMPLETON
COMMENTARY
By George Templeton
Gazette Columnist
Dreaming
The mystic symbolism of the book of Daniel describes King Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams. Then and now, as revealed in Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech,
the power of the dream lies not in superstition or divine prescience,
but in us. My dreams came out of placid decade culture and congealed
during the age of anxiety. A great America once had and now needs a
dream. It is as Rudyard Kipling wrote: “Now this is the Law of the
Jungle as old and as true as the sky; And the Wolf that shall keep it
may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper
girdles the tree trunk the Law runneth forward and back. For the
strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the
Pack.”
Arizona Bound
I
was born in the midst of WWII while my father fought in Italy. It was a
time before antibiotics that might have saved my mother. She died at
birth, leaving my care to my grandparents. Combined, our lives would
span 1875 to the present. So, my upbringing, my values and my roots
went back to a time before electricity, cars, airplanes, radio, nuclear
bombs, and world wars.
My
grandfather served in the Philippines in the Spanish American War as a
military policeman. When he got out he worked as a railroad detective.
My grandparents came to Arizona in 1902 while my grandfather
interviewed with the Texas Rangers, but my grandmother did not like the
Wild West of those days.
Grandmother
was only five foot two, but ruled the household with an iron hand,
having grown up in a law enforcement family with six male siblings. She
told stories of cooking meals for criminals my grandfather had
apprehended and brought to their home in handcuffs and stories of crooks
pounding on the door in the middle of the night, pleading with my
grandfather to protect them from the mob.
My grandmother was deeply religious. She never gossiped about others
even when they had earned it. Compare that with the Fox News ladies who
called Hillary Clinton “evil” and a “murderer”.
My
grandmother’s health was the motivation that finally led us to Arizona
in 1948. Those were the days before television and refrigeration. The
ice man delivered blocks of ice to keep our food from spoiling. We
slept outside in the summers. Indians tethered their horse and
buckboard at the grocery store when they came off the reservation to go
shopping.
Grade School
I
walked to and from school. My path took me past homes with high, cool
ceilings and porches where people sat hoping to encounter a neighbor
they could associate with. I stopped and talked whenever I saw them. I
visited with the old folks in the nursing home with the talking
parrot. I would go through town, stopping at the newsstand to get a
comic book or candy bar, and visited the drug stores where my
grandparents’ adult friends worked.
I
discovered everything in the third grade. It was facilitated by a
teacher whom I suspect did not adhere strictly to the lesson plan. We
spent recess collecting insects. She left her college books in the
classroom. Much of my spare time was spent reading her textbooks,
dreaming in curious fascination about bugs, plants, rocks, and science.
Paperback books and science fiction movies like The Day the Earth Stood
Still were not allowed for me, but the newspaper was filled with
stories about flying saucers that my fancy devoured. Comic strips
featured Flash Gordon. My ambition was to be part of that dream.
My
first electrical experiment was to attempt making an electromagnet. It
did not work because I used bare copper wire bought at the local
hardware store. In our town, there was a nearby motor rewinding shop.
The men who worked there seemed to appreciate the interest of a nosey
kid. They provided free enamel insulated magnet wire that solved that
problem.
It
was not long until I discovered fascinating things discarded in the
town alleys for the garbage man. My favorite stuff included vacuum
tubes, automobile voltage regulators, spark plugs, and discarded car
parts. I used these along with cardboard boxes from the grocery store
to make toy spaceships.
The Gun
I
was a bored grade school kid who completed assignments ahead of time.
I was allowed to read the encyclopedia set that my teacher kept. I
decided I would try to make gunpowder according to the recipe given in
it. The required chemicals were on the shelf at the local drugstore.
My
best friend financed our experiments. I had an old baton with one end
plugged and welded shut. It looked like a gun barrel. We drilled a
small hole at the plugged end, and made a gun. Pressure, volume,
temperature, and burning rate were not part of our studies, so my friend
insisted that we fill the whole thing with gunpowder.
We
had a 150 foot deep dirt yard with a gazebo. My friend and I decided
we would prop our gun between a wooden wheelbarrow and stepladder. We
lit the fuse and ran behind the gazebo.
There
was a huge blast that shook everything. That was followed by echoes
across town, kaboom, kaboom, kaboom, rumble, silence, and then the sound
of debris falling on the neighbors’ roofs. A huge cloud of smoke
making it impossible to hide rose. As I watched, my friend ran out
trying to fan it away with his coat, to no avail. The wheelbarrow and
ladder had ceased to exist and there was a large circle on the ground
where the blast had picked up loose rock propelling it skyward. We got
in trouble on that one, but deep inside we knew that our experiment was a
success.
Junior High
Misbehavior
was a prerequisite for acceptance in junior high culture. My cohorts
had discovered that radio B batteries could be used to administer a
painful shock to the unsuspecting. My solution used a small capacitor
that would take ten times its rated voltage. Teachers would exclaim,
"Who set off the bomb?" when I discharged it against the metal
blackboard rail while no one was looking.
Manhood
is an important thing to junior high students. I devised an electric
device to measure that. It consisted of a pulsed transformer and a
voltage divider connected along brass contacts on a box. To measure
manliness, one grasped a pair of brazing rods tightly, and climbed as
high as they could stand along the divider. Without great effort, the
device would throw you off the board.
Shop
class helped me to build a noisy spark-gap Tesla coil and a Van de
Graff generator. The coil would set fire to paper and light a
fluorescent bulb with a spark that flowed through one’s body. The
generator’s discharge was a foot or two depending on humidity and the
electrodes used. I could not persuade my distrustful classmates to
participate.
My
shocking junior high experiences would eventually lead to managing an
industrial laboratory jokingly called the department of arcs and
sparks. Besides customer projects, we tested lightening arrestor
components. Some of the apparatus I designed and built pulsed thousands
of volts and amperes simultaneously.
High School and College
My
grandmother had an eighth grade education. My grandfather stopped at
the fourth grade. Perhaps this was the reason they believed in
education. They could foresee that they would not be around to help me
with my dream.
The
curriculum in our high school included band and orchestra, full periods
in accelerated physics, chemistry, biology, English, calculus,
electronics, civics, history, and even released time Bible school. More
than one half of our students intended to go on to study engineering.
The 1957 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracey movie, Desk Set,
informed us about the coming computerized world. Portable radios were a
sign that everyone would convert from vacuum tubes to transistors. We
didn’t realize that duck and cover would not be an adequate deterrent
for nuclear war. I didn’t realize that what “God said” was revealed in
the laws of physics.
MAD
Mutual
Assured Destruction, the power of fear and the nightmare of mass
extinction, made the lives of the two kids who played with gunpowder.
We didn’t invent the solid state revolution or madness, but by
participating we helped to create them and they created us. My friend
tracked MIRV’s (Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles) while I played a
small role in the transistors that would steer them. They were part of
unseen and unappreciated government projects greater than all of the
world’s seven wonders combined. The dream that could not be seen was
ultimately microscopic. It used new science, and required new
technology. It continues to change the world even though, at its root,
it is uncertain and incompletely understood.
Jobs
In
the mid-seventies, project managers, commissioned to move jobs
overseas, met in a room. The discussion turned to a unanimous
conviction that we had seen the peak of America’s greatness. America
would not become a super-industrialized nation making products for the
rest of the world as we had dreamed. The world would make things for us
and do it more cheaply.
I
visited two huge factories in Korea employing near 500,000 employees
each. They were bigger than many towns. Their skyscrapers receded into
the far away distance. A car was needed to travel inside their fenced
plant. A third in China did not exist in my day. Added up, it is at
least 1.5 million manufacturing jobs that would have been in America had
the world not changed.
Dreams
are more than winning until you are sick of it. The Donald Trump
nightmare punishes foreign countries for accepting the jobs that we gave
to them. When he offers to bring the jobs back, what does he mean?
Can we still remember those high tech jobs or will we have to ask
foreigners to train us as we did them?
Tomorrow
Technology
is the connection between the present and the possible. Science does
not seem to be a holy place, but the war on science is a war on the
spirituality in which dreams emerge. Our individual but different
dreams are equally transcendent. They can be broad, yet not constrained
by groupthink. Truth is beyond facts. It is only when facts are
assembled that a dream emerges.
What
will be the meaning and purpose of America? Will we be trapped between
an imagined yesterday and an open but uncertain future? Why will we
create new jobs and for what internal values? Is it for nostalgia, the
good of humanity, or just profit and survival? Will our jobs help us to
understand who we are and what we will be? We must remember Rudyard
Kipling’s admonition. We belong to the world but are separate. The
answer is in the dream that is more spirit than mind.
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