Reagan Presidential Library - Treasure Trove of U.S. History, plus Historically Significant Traveling Exhibits
July 4, 2023, Simi Valley, CA: The occasion for my visit was to attend the unveiling of the beautiful Sally Ride statue at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. More about that in a minute. First, a bit of background on the scene.
From the time you drive up Presidential Drive to the main entrance, the setting for the Library is impressive, and beautiful. Vistas abound as you walk up to the buildings houssing the permanent and traveling exhibits. On this day, the 247th birthday of our nation, there was a special festive atmosphere. Children and grownups alike sported red white and blue outfits, and spangly silver as well as red white and blue stars on their faces. A band did a lively rendition of a Johnny Cash song, and various characters from our country's past were on hand to greet visitors and talk history. There were also games for both kids and grownups, and the exhibits. Before the unveiling, we had time to visit one of the permanent exhibits, the Air Force One Pavilion, what friends have called "The Wow Room." That's the one where you can see and board Air Force One, tail number 27000, the plane used as "The Flying Office" by seven U.S. Presidents in all from 1973 to 2001: Presidents Nixon, Carter, Ford, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton and George W. Bush. Astonishing how small it seems inside, compared to what one would expect. But what a sight, standing under its appropriately huge wings. Inside a building! Also in the Wow Room: one of President Reagan's presidential limousines and Secret Service suburbans (later referred to as "The Beast(s),") part of the permanent exhibit on presidential motorcades. Plaques you can zoom in to read tell us that the Secret Service began driving presidents in 1945, previously following presidents' limousines in separate vehicles. Also that to insure presidents' safety, beginning in the 1960s the Beasts were flown to countries the presidents were visiting for official business. At the time we visited, there was a major traveling exhibit about the Holocaust: Auschwitz, not long ago and not far away, to which large numbers of schools have been sending students for educational purposes. The exhibit contains 700 horrifying artifacts, objects from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum as well as more than 20 institutions and museums all over the world, and tells the story of "perpetrators as well as victims who lived inside." The exhibit is to close August 13. If you wish to see it, you can buy tickets at the link above in this paragraph. Dr. Sally Ride Inspiration for Women -- of all ages
And finally, we were able to watch the full ceremony unveiling the beautiful statue of Dr. Sally Ride, the first woman astronaut, and the person President Reagan selected to solve the mystery of what led to the Challenger disaster. In the film you'll see the lively sister of Sally Ride, Bear Ride, alongside the painting of that most inspiring woman who told young girls they should "Reach for the stars!" Dr. Bear Ride is continuing this invaluable message for girls and women around the globe through her foundation ridefoundation.org. Her speech at the event told the story of how the matriarch of the family inspired both Sally and herself to be whatever they wanted to be. Thanks to filmmaker Steven C. Barber for inviting me to attend. He was the "Energizer Bunny" as Dr. Bear Ride put it, who organized the project of creating and producing both the lovely statue and its home at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Thanks also to David Trulio, president and chief executive officer of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute for hosting this event, and providing important exhibits to the public.
0 Comments
If Merlin had the brains, Misty had the brawn. Fully grown, but still young, Misty was sitting on the floor of the dining room. Eight feet above a fly bounced against the ceiling. Misty’s head swiveled back and forth as she tracked this annoying intruder through its random flight. Suddenly, from her seated position, Misty leaped up and grabbed the fly as it bounced along the ceiling. Back on the floor, and with a very satisfied expression on her face, Misty tongued the fly to her teeth. Crunch! The fly met its swift demise. As I said, Misty was a great athlete. If there had been a Kitty Olympics Misty would easily have taken the Gold. Kittens grow quickly. Soon it was time for them to be introduced to the great outdoors, under supervision, of course. Near the house Sarah and I supervised. Later, as the cats became accustomed to the outside world, Sunny took over their training, leading them into the wilderness, teaching them how to survive the predatory hazards that abound there. As expected, the kittens made mistakes. One day I was uncovering the swimming pool when Merlin hopped onto the free remnant of the cover and started strutting around, amused by its oscillations beneath his feet. I tried to warn him off that dangerous place, but Merlin ignored me and walked ever closer to the cover’s drooping edge. Suddenly, he started sliding. Frantic, he tried clawing into the material, but the fabric resisted and he slid, backwards, right into the deep water. I was ready to jump in, clothes and all, to rescue the drowning cat. Except, this cat was not drowning. Not a bit! Merlin looked at me with an expression of pure joy, and started paddling around the pool as if he had been born to it. Now, I had long been aware of a Bengal’s affinity for water. This breed loves to play in the tub with a couple of inches of water to splash around in. But swimming in a pool was not even rumored. Yet, there Merlin was, happily swimming around without the slightest sign of distress. After a while he found the steps, climbed out of the pool, shook off sprays of water and came trotting up to soak me, as well. Though Merlin never showed fear of the water, Misty, by way of contrast, kept her distance from the pool. Merlin often quite casually walked along the very edge of the pool, never concerned about falling in. Once in a while, when he was thirsty, he would lean far down and take a drink, much as do the larger wild animals around here. Of course, as I had discovered during a close examination of his paws, Merlin had webbed feet. Maybe an ancestor of Merlin and Misty had acquired genes from an Asian Fishing Cat — a wild cat that dives deep in lakes and rivers to catch the fish that it feeds upon. Such cross breeding would explain the very large size of our kittens’ dad, as well as Merlin’s webbed feet. Merlin was remarkable in another way. He did not meow, like most cats. His voice was a wonderful musical instrument. It had the resonances of a bassoon’s upper register. His greeting was a fragment of a symphony. Charming! To this day I still hear Merlin’s voice when a symphony orchestra is playing. For the fast-growing kittens the wilderness proved to be fun. The wilderness was also a happy hunting ground, part of the fun, no doubt. Their greatest delight was chasing squirrels. Now, squirrels love trees. They feel nice and safe high up within the protective arboreal thicket. Oddly enough, so, too, do Bengals. Perhaps this is the legacy of another of their wild ancestors, the Leopard cats who hunt in the trees of Asia. In any case, Merlin and Misty had good sport merrily chasing the squirrels right into their lairs deep among the branches. “Okay,” a squirrel would respond, “see how you like this move.” Whereupon the squirrel would dash right out to the bendy, whippy end of the limb and leap to another, many feet away. Misty, in the lead with Merlin close behind, would chase after the squirrel, but not quite so far out on the branch since Misty was heavier than the squirrel. Much to the squirrel’s astonishment, and evident dismay, Misty, too, would make the long leap to the other branch, Merlin leaping after her. Don’t get me wrong, this was pure play for the fast-growing kittens — nothing malicious intended. It took some time for the squirrels to recognize this and relax — somewhat. Still, the squirrels never let Misty and Merlin get too close. The serious hunting was done on the ground. At the time the neighborhood was suffering from major infestations of gophers and their predators, rattlesnakes. Misty and Merlin took care of the problem. First they went after the gophers. With their primary food supply gone most of the rattlers subsequently went missing. The few, hunger weakened, vipers that were left were easily dispatched by these lightening quick cats. Hunting gophers required precise coordination. First, the kittens used their keen hearing to locate the two openings to each gopher den. While Merlin attacked the entrance with furious digging Misty waited patiently at the exit to catch and dispatch the panicked gophers as they fled from the security of their nests. The lawns in the neighborhood were soon blessedly free from their myriad gopher holes. There was something uncanny about the way these two worked together. On occasion I would see them walking side by side, in perfect step, their ears swiveling in unison, their heads swinging back and forth as one, their tails switching side to side, together. The two looked for all the world like a single organism with eight legs. Sarah maintained that, in that state, they really were one for they were communicating telepathically. Sarah’s theory was that these higher level animals communicate by exchanging pictures rather than words. Sarah apparently could do some of this herself for I often watched her easily taming wild animals. She said she simply told them that she was one of them. They evidently believed her. There were incidents from her past which made her theory at least somewhat plausible: One summer she worked as a Forest Ranger watching for fires from the top of a mountain. Living near the lookout tower was a bear. This momma bear, together with her cub, would, every week, walk close by Sarah’s side as she made the long trek down to the base camp to pick up supplies. Sarah’s affinity for wild animals attracted the attention of Ella, the Shaman of the Nez Perce Indian tribe. Ella trained Sarah to be a tribal shaman and then adopted her. That was how Sarah became a member of the tribe. Having learned her lessons well, Sarah said that Ella knew far more about wild animals and how they communicate than any academic biologist. Whether Merlin and Misty’s communication was telepathic or by some other means, it was fascinating to watch them at work, or at play, always strangely synchronized. Please do visit again to see what happened next with Old Merlin (our First Merlin Cat). © 2023 Chester L. Richards. All rights reserved. #cats #Merlin #hunting #stories #catstories #ChesterLRichardsBlog #memoirs #kittens Miracle Kitty Part 1 │ Miracle Kitty Part 2 A rocket scientist adventurer ponders what will kill you
Out of darkness comes hope, and out of hope comes an unexpected passion and renewed sense of life ... if he can keep himself alive long enough to enjoy it. Rocket scientist/Star Trek writer/safari warrior/author Chester L. Richards asks: Is nature out to kill us? Maybe not. But someone is.
-Ed., The Mensa Bulletin, March 2023 I’m like a pinball in a pinball machine. I get knocked about a lot. I have been highly entertained and challenged by this, engaging in near-impossible tasks as an engineer on the aerospace frontier. Even better, bouncing around my somewhat eccentric career, I have met some of the most extraordinary people. But sometimes being a pinball hurts — a lot! Read more in the March 2023 Mensa Bulletin. A huge thanks from Chester for the delightful graphics they created to illustrate perfectly how his life has ricocheted through adventures personal, professional, and both mind- and soul-expanding. Periodically Dad Cat would be allowed to roam the neighborhood. Most of the people there were fine with this. But there are always the complainers and they kept pestering the city about Dad Cat. The city fathers put pressure on the breeder to close down his operation. As I say, his difficulty was our opportunity. We reentered the house to see the kittens. There were only two six week old kittens left from this last litter. The breeder brought out one, a reddish-brown striped male. His littermate, a female, was sleeping in the safe room. The breeder told us she hadn’t been weaned yet. Sarah fell instantly in love with this little boy; he was instantly in love with Sarah. While the two of them were communing I had a surprise. Up onto the dining table jumped a little gray ball of fur, who turned out to be the boy’s sister. She immediately pranced up to me and began a romance. I was hooked. We had intended to bring home one kitten. We brought home two. The breeder was concerned about the female, since she was still nursing. He gave me instructions about how to wean her, using a special milk substitute that I could get from the pet store. I wrote down the particulars and we prepared to leave. Consider what that good man must have been feeling. These were the last of his kittens. He clearly was in love with them and this showed in their sweet spirits. It must have broken his heart to let them go. He had done this before, it is true, but these were the last, the end. There could be no more. I hope he saw in us the kind of happy future that was in store for these precious little beings. That would have helped. We installed the kittens in the TV room. This was a small room adjacent to the kitchen which could be closed off to keep the kittens safely confined when we were not present. This was to be their nursery room for a few months. We had no trouble weaning the little female. Really, she weaned herself. “What shall we name them?” I asked Sarah. “Don’t worry,” she replied. “They will soon tell you their names.” And so it was. Misty told us first. Her silver gray coat, and lively disposition, made this name inevitable. Merlin was the only possibility for the little boy, given his incessant curiosity, boldness, and obvious high intelligence. Was there an element of magician in him as well, which is what I associate with the name? How intelligent was he? He was a kitty genius. I am not exaggerating. His creative understanding of spatial relationships is typically seen in a human child only around the age of ten. Let me give one example. It is necessary to know the physical layout confronting Merlin to understand just how incredibly bright he really was. Between the nursery room and the kitchen was a long sight line that gave a view down the hallway to the bedrooms. The kittens in their early exploration could look down this corridor, but they never ventured in that direction. On the other side of the kitchen was the dining room facing the back of the house. The dining room had a sliding glass door that led out onto the patio. Extending to the left from the dining room was the living room, with a fireplace at the far end. The chimney for the fireplace projected out onto the patio and blocked the view down towards the bedroom section of the house. After a few days the kittens began their exploration of the house – very cautiously at first. They poked their noses out of the nursery and advanced a short distance into the kitchen, each day exploring further. Then, one day, at the far end of the dining room, a racoon passed by right on the other side of the glass sliding door. Misty hid from this monster. Bold Merlin galloped through the kitchen and dining room to see what this curiosity was. But by the time he reached the slider the racoon had disappeared around the side of the house. Merlin swiveled around and, for his first time, looked into the living room. Without hesitation he jumped up on the windowsill and continued to track the waddling raccoon. It was his first time up on a windowsill, too. Amazing for him to figure everything out in an instant. But Merlin wasn’t finished. The racoon disappeared around the chimney. Merlin tried leaning up against the glass to see, but it was no go. The raccoon was gone. For a moment Merlin sat thinking about the marvelous apparition he had just seen. He turned to me with a quizzical look on his face. “What was thing, Daddy? Where did it go?” Then the light bulb flashed on! He dashed down the hallway, into the bedroom and up onto the windowsill there. Merlin watched as the raccoon ambled the rest of the way across the yard, climbed the fence and disappeared. I said Merlin was a kitty genius. Consider his astonishing intellectual accomplishment. In a glance he had figured out the layout of the front part of the house and instantly exploited that information to track the passing animal. But more than that, after a moment’s reflection he intuited that there had to be a room down the mysterious hallway, on the other side of the chimney, which would have a window where he could continue to follow the raccoon. Having suddenly realized this he immediately acted. This complex sequence of thought is a classic illustration of a flash of creative insight. And, he was less than two months old! Merlin truly was intellectually gifted. Please do visit again to see what happened next with Old Merlin (our First Merlin Cat). Miracle Kitty Part 3 │ Miracle Kitty Part 1 © 2023 Chester L. Richards. All rights reserved. #cats #Merlin #hunting #stories #catstories #ChesterLRichardsBlog #memoirs #kittens Times were tough. I was barely able to make the mortgage. Four years before I had been fired for refusing a direct order to lie to our customer, the government. The sudden loss of income really hurt. But I already had substantial experience free-lance consulting so somehow I survived. My income was now much less but at least I had retained my self-respect, my honor and my dignity. Those days I was working a sixty hour week, filling the occasional contract, developing new clients and increasing my technical skills. My dear Sarah had an idea. She had been keenly observing my struggles and concluded that I needed refreshment. Without telling me, she had been doing some homework. And she found the perfect answer. One day she announced that tomorrow we would be driving up the coast to bring home a kitten. Not just any old rag-tag kitten would do. She had in mind that the perfect companion for me was a Bengal Cat. Sunny, Sarah’s orange tabby cat, a gift of our marriage, had grown feeble with age. One day, while I was working with a client, I came home and Sunny was gone. Sarah had saved me the grief of that last trip to the vet. In the years since then I had really missed that small bundle of cantankerous joy and her practical jokes. In those long-ago days there was a thing called a newspaper. In its back pages were classified ads placed by the common folk. Sarah found one from a cattery an hour’s drive away. Due to complaints from his neighbors he was going out of business and was hoping to find good homes for his latest batch of kittens. Not any kittens, though; these were Bengal cats. What a find! Just what she had been searching for. Sarah leaped on the opportunity and the next day we drove north. Bengal cats are a newly developed hybrid between the wild Asian Leopard Cat and domestic American Shorthair. It takes five generations of cross breeding before they are recognized as domesticated. Bengals are big, smart, athletic, affectionate and downright beautiful. For a long time the cat establishment refused to recognize the breed – they were just too darned attractive! This new breed was threatening to become too popular. The day of our excursion Bengals had still not been officially recognized. We were on our way to acquire an outcast. The cattery was located in a typical California middle class neighborhood – and that was the breeder’s problem, and our opportunity. The owner welcomed us into the house and escorted us to the backyard. There, in a large cage, was an enormous cat. Male Bengals can occasionally get to be the size of a small bobcat. This fellow certainly was bobcat size. The cat was sitting on a ledge in the back of the cage. I walked up close to get a good look at him. He jumped down and propped himself up next to my nose, opened his mouth, and let out an enormous deep throated roar! Involuntarily I jumped back a couple of steps. The cat’s owner laughed. “He likes you. He really likes you.” Still recovering from the shock, I didn’t understand. “He only greets people that way if he very much likes what he sees.” I wasn’t convinced then but now, with more experience, maybe I have figured it out. This breed is very vocal. They talk incessantly, and are very loud when they are happy. But when they get really angry watch out, they can be truly scary! He certainly scared me with his too enthusiastic greeting. In this case, though, it seems that Big Dad was happy to see me. But that unexpected greeting also explained the problem the breeder was having and why he was going out of business. This was not a creature to be kept caged. The breeder knew this and let him roam under the condition that he stayed out only for specified brief periods. The cat knew the rules and obeyed. Bengal cats are eminently trainable. Small European circuses often prefer Bengals to dogs as trained animals. That trainability is something we later very much valued. Please do visit again to see what happened next with Big Dad. © 2022 Chester L. Richards. All rights reserved. It must be genetic. That’s the only possible explanation. Of course, this really isn’t an explanation, but it will serve for now. For many placid northern Europeans, people in Mediterranean lands must be baffling: they furiously wave their hands while peculiar noises flow forth from their mouths. Italians are particularly outlandish in this regard. And then there are the Sicilians. If the Italians gesticulate in rhythm with their words, florid Sicilians are a cut above, or below, depending upon your viewpoint. A Sicilian simply cannot talk without his whirling hands. They are what convey his real meaning — the emotional subtleties underlying his words. And Sicilians are very emotional. I should know. For I, too, am Sicilian. And I, too, suffer from this affliction. Or, I once did, though now I suppress my uncontrollable hand waving deliberately. Actually, I am half Sicilian. My maternal grandparents were born and raised on that noble island. My father’s side, New Englanders, passed down gloom. I have suffered a lifelong conflict between these two opposing genetic strains. I well remember the moment when this fundamental Sicilian characteristic was excised from me — out of necessity, of course. In the American society of that era one had to show proper reserve to be taken seriously. Advancement in the world precluded being too Italian, much less Sicilian. Mom did the appropriate surgery. And surgeon she was, for Mom was a skilled and tenacious registered nurse. Given the troubles she had handled in the past, curing my Sicilian affliction was well within her capabilities. Pure Sicilian herself, of course she understood my problem, and almost certainly had undergone a similar discipline. Mom’s operation on me occurred one afternoon when I was particularly excited by some event of the day, talking a mile a minute, pouring out all the wonder I had recently experienced. Mom, with the voice of authority, commanded a cease fire. She grabbed my hands, put them together in her firm grip and said: “Talk.” I opened my mouth and . . . nothing came out! I literally could not say a word without my hands being in motion. I tried. I really did. But nothing. After a bit Mom released my hands and allowed me to speak. Haltingly I was able to convey some of what had excited me, but the emotional fire was gone. After that initial trauma we had several sessions of basic training in American customs and civilized discourse. Dad sat on the sidelines, watching with amusement. Eventually the newfound discipline stuck and I can now usually converse without waving my hands. But sometimes my excitement does get the better of me and I temporarily revert to my Sicilian heritage. Fortunately, my friends let these brief moments of insanity pass without comment. © 2022 Chester L. Richards. All rights reserved. With luck life gives you a first love. Sometimes life is generous and gives you multiple first loves. With me it was Linette, my pal in first grade. Then beautiful Becky, in eighth grade, who I could only admire from afar — she entered a convent. College presented me with spectacular Carla and radiant Kathy and dear Dianna. Then came my true life love, Sarah, who I wooed, won, married, lived, lost and buried. Well, there can be other types of love — maybe affection is a better word – in one’s life. How about one’s first automobile? Actually not. It was my second that I developed a well-deserved affection for. Car culture. I grew up in the heart of car culture: Southern California in the 1950’s. Naturally you adopt the culture around you, so I did. During my teenage years I lived in the upscale neighborhood of La Canada and nearby Flintridge. My family was not yet prosperous so I was the “poor” kid at school. When my friends drove their shiny new cars to school I joined in the collective admiration of their beauty. But I could only admire them as abstractions. All I had was my bicycle and that would have to do for now. Still, a bicycle was transportation and it could go places a car couldn’t go. I exploited that different kind of freedom for I had the trails. Immediately behind our newly built tract home was a bridal path. This led up the hill past two equally new houses into wilderness then snaked around Gould Mesa, descending near the parking lots of the still new Jet Propulsion Laboratory and terminating in Oak Grove Park. It was this route I took when I headed on bicycle excursions up Arroyo Seco Canyon, and its trout laden stream, riding deep into the San Gabriel Mountains. One day I was cascading my way down the JPL parking lots when I came upon a marvel. From a distance it looked like a toy, something you might find under the Christmas tree. It wasn’t, but you had to get close to be sure. It was a small, bulbous, beetle-like thing, quite unlike the streamlined, tail finned, vehicles that America was then producing. Into its back was inserted a large windup key. When you got close you could read instructional placards – one in German, the other in English. These instructed the operator to firmly hold the wheels while winding up the motor lest the wheels spin out of control. This was my introduction to the soon to be notorious Volkswagen. The car was perfectly functional and became something of a celebrity around town. It also wittily opened the door to California’s car culture and therefore to VWs acceptance into America. A dozen years in the future I was to become well acquainted with this critter. In still developing La Canada, new cut roads were being paved and more houses built, spreading civilization ever upwards towards the looming mountains. The first summer we were in our new house we gathered with our neighbors to construct a tall, steel reinforced, concrete block retaining wall. This, to keep three of the houses across the street from washing away in the expected heavy winter rains. The spirit of this land was still a bit of the Old West. Neighbors still helped each other out as they had done during nineteenth century barn raisings. I helped dad with constructions around our new home. We built brick walls to isolate our yard from the bridal trail and provide privacy between our adjacent houses. Dad cut a doorway into the lower wall of the house and together we laid a concrete floored basement and workshop. A carport was built after my colicky sister was born and the garage was converted into a suite for me so that I could get some sleep during my high school years. The old house, and all we put into it, is gone now, replaced by a Persian Palace built by an Iranian import. The value was in the land not in our wood and work. That’s okay. A house is a kind of tent. You pitch it to keep shelter and memories. When you leave you may keep your memories but the tent is folded. The land now belongs to someone else. The year I finished high school my parents bought a new house in the hilly Chevy Chase district of Glendale. That was a good place for my sister to grow up – good schools, good neighbors, quiet – except for the Great Glendale Fire of 1964 which burned off our back yard and dozens of homes across the city. The fire also temporarily inconvenienced the family of coyotes that lived in the chaparral beyond our patio and shared our property with Samantha, our orange tabby cat (her job was to keep the field mice out of the garage and understructure). In the beginning I wasn’t there much, spending my time at Berkeley picking up a degree in physics. Summers during those undergraduate years I borrowed Mom’s car to get to my summer jobs: electronic assembly, laying up fiberglass plastic, and one summer working as a technician at JPL. Physics is limited as a profession without an advanced degree. But graduate school takes money and the family budget was being devoted to the education of my sister. The solution was for me to work for a while as an engineer and save up money for my further education. I stayed with my parents, and paid them room and board, during two years before I went off to graduate school. I found a job in the Advance Design Department of an engineering company in distant Monrovia. It was a long commute in the days before freeways but the job could not have been better. This was a group of professional inventors and I was being trained as an inventor. During the job interview my unorthodox approach to the world had attracted their attention and they scooped me up. What luck! I needed a car. A neighbor sold me his old Nash for a couple hundred bucks. It wasn’t much, and it required a lot of maintenance, but it was cheap and got me to work. After a year I had enough money to buy a proper new car so I started looking around. I was now working on military projects. And, I was learning from my new colleagues what was good engineering and what was bad (there is a lot of bad engineering!). Military engineering is special and expensive because reliability is paramount. There is nothing worse than a weapon that does not work. I was familiar with war stories, of course. This was a period when the Second World War still heavily influenced the culture. Along the way I had read Ernie Pyle’s accounts of our activities in Africa and Europe. Pyle had a particularly quirky way of reporting what he observed as a war correspondent. One of his more humorous reports described the reputations of competing vehicles: Kubelwagen vs. Jeep. It seems that the Germans just loved to get their hands on an American Jeep. Oddly, the GI’s much preferred the Kubelwagen that the Germans so despised. I guess the grass is always greener. Well the Kubelwagen was just an open topped, militarized Volkswagen. Its GI reputation for go-anywhere reliability transferred to the newly arriving post war VWs. My colleagues at work also recognized good engineering when they saw it and recommended it for my consideration. What I needed for graduate school was good, cheap, highly reliable, transportation. The VW was perfect for my needs. I bought a straight-from-the-factory one for fourteen hundred dollars. No machine is perfect. A VW of that generation was no exception. My new car had its virtues – some very great as we shall see. Its vices were equally great and sometimes totally unexpected. The car’s two great mechanical vices were its aerodynamics and its balance. Both could kill you – at least until you became familiar with them and developed strategies and tactics to compensate. Machines are tools with a mission. They are just as susceptible to evolution by natural selection as are animals. Airplanes have wings in front and tails at the back. So do birds. Nature discovered the reason hundreds of millions of years ago: It works best! Automobile design is similarly driven by natural selection. A car needs to be steered. This means the front wheels must turn to control steering. An engine needs to be controlled directly, with instant response, so it is best to put the engine close to the driver – up front with direct controls. However, it is very difficult and expensive to make a front wheel drive whereby the front wheels are also doing the steering. Therefore, drive the rear wheels instead. So you install a drive shaft and a gear box down the center of the car. Voila! You have the standard car layout for the twentieth century. But you don’t have a Volkswagen. Volkswagen had a different mission than the luxury vehicles which dominated European automobile design. Its job was to provide the very most economical transportation for the masses. Henry Ford had already done this for Americans with a conventional layout and an extremely simple standardized design. But his cars were still too expensive for 1930’s Germany. In nature there are different types of animals — different solutions to survival. And, like God in the Garden of Eden, Ferdinand Porsche created a different type of beast. Porsche discovered how to have the driver’s controls for the engine and transmission be instantly responsive with the engine in the back, where the power was going directly to the rear wheels. It took some clever gear box engineering to make this happen. But why put the engine in back? The answer is you get the largest possible passenger space in the smallest, cheapest, vehicle. Unfortunately, you also get the car’s vices, as well. Aerodynamics was a new science in the 1930’s. Airplanes were becoming streamlined and more efficient. Naturally this attracted attention and Streamline Moderne became the fashion for architecture, furniture and automobiles. All well and good as an artistic movement but it produced some shockingly bad cars. Mom’s post war Plymouth coup tended to be blown all over the highway by heavy winds. The similarly shaped Volkswagen had the same dreadful characteristic. It wasn’t until the 1980’s that engineers were finally permitted by their marketing dominated management to get it right and we now have almost interchangeable jelly bean car designs. I discovered this vice of the VW the hard way. One night I was driving north on the Harbor Freeway. A stiff irregular wind was blowing and my beetle was dancing around in the slow lane as I struggled to keep it under control. Alongside the freeway was a group of industrial buildings between two of which was a narrow gap. The configuration was such as to generate a wind funnel. This sudden wind blast blew me all the way across three lanes of freeway and almost into the center divider. Fortunately, it was late at night and traffic was light so the few other cars were able to dodge me. No harm done, but lessons were learned. The VW may have been shaped like a beetle for practical reasons but, like a real beetle, it had far too much aerodynamic lift to be safe in a high wind. It tended to fly up off the road and become almost airborne. Lots of cars had that problem until it was realized that good car design requires spoilers in their shapes to push the car down towards the road at high speed. That is why modern cars look so similar regardless of brand. Somewhere along the line the nickname “beetle” changed to “bug” and the “bug-catcher” exposed me to another VW vice – its balance. The bug-catcher is one of the exchange ramps of the Los Angeles freeway system. Normally I didn’t use that interchange so I did not, at first, know about its notorious tendency to throw rear engine cars spinning off into space. Fortunately, someone tipped me off so that I would be wary should I ever have to traverse this trap. Sure enough, on my first visit to the bug-catcher I was nearly caught even though I was being particularly careful. Why this ramp was so peculiar is unknown to this day. As I have mentioned, there is a lot of bad engineering in this world – particularly in road design. People get killed. Still, one of my new car’s vices was not the fault of engineering. One characteristic had to do with emotions. Years later I had a hard time convincing Sarah to consider Honda products. Her father had been a fighter pilot and was lost in the Philippines. Being an orphan, she wanted nothing to do with Japan. Eventually she came around and loved our new cars. I understood. In the early days the VW beetle was deeply resented by many people – veterans perhaps, holocaust survivors perhaps (I later was friends with one so I gained some understanding). In any case I discovered early on just how much hate my new beetle engendered in some people. Not many days after I acquired my new VW I was driving to my job in Monrovia. Along a stretch of road in Pasadena a large truck pulled up beside me and started pacing me. I slowed down, he slowed down. I sped up, he sped up. I looked up at the truck driver and caught the expression of scornful hate on his face as he looked down at me and deliberately turned his steering wheel in my direction. Up onto the sidewalk I went. Catastrophe was avoided but I was shaken. In the million miles I have driven around this town I have seen this kind of thing a number of times. Road rage is real. Life is a pin-ball machine and we are pin balls being bounced around through chance encounters. I had already been accepted as a graduate student and was full of plans when one evening at a party I met someone who completely changed my direction. My new friend was joining the faculty at the soon to be opened Irvine campus of the University of California. The opportunity to maybe help shape something new, something you know is destined to be great, was irresistible. My friend opened the door for me and I enrolled in the first graduate physics class at the new university. U.C. Irvine’s Inauguration was held one sparkling September evening on the plaza between the Commons and the Library. It wasn’t a large crowd because the university in those days was much smaller than a typical Southern California public high school. The evening was a delight. The air was soft and warm. A brass choir, clad in Renaissance costumes, serenaded from the balcony of the Commons. The finest buffet provided refreshments. Conversation among the immaculately-dressed was erudite. It was a perfect opening for the grandeur that was to follow as the then small campus was to rapidly expand to its current enormous size. Then came the rains! The initial campus construction had not quite been finished. The delay was caused by a brief visit from the President of the United States. The State Powers-That-Be just had to show off by inviting President Johnson to the Dedication. The problem, they discovered, was that the president’s helicopter couldn’t land on just any ordinary parking lot. No Sir! No, the landing spot had to meet Air Force runway specifications. There was a mad scramble to tear up the newly completed parking lot next to the Commons and replace it with sixteen feet (someone said) of steel reinforced concrete. Naturally supplies and schedule ran out and the other parking lots and sidewalks planned for the campus remained unpaved. Then came the rains! Then came the greatest virtue of my bug. The GI’s weren’t kidding when they claimed a kubelwagen could go anywhere and do anything. So could my new VW. The mysteries of El Nino and La Nina remain unsolved to this day. Southern California is officially a desert. There are years when we get fewer raindrops than the Sahara. But then it rains. That September the rains came unexpectedly early. It rained, it rained, and it rained some more. We had weeks of drenching rain. Rain means mud. Well it meant mud at Irvine. No sidewalks, no paved parking near the class rooms. It meant mud. Thanks Lyndon Johnson! You adapt. Arrive at school, or leave the dorms, take off your shoes and carry them. A backpack helps. Galoop through the mud to get to your class. Clean off your feet as best you can and put your shoes back on. After a day or two why bother. Leave your shoes behind. Everyone did. We were all in this together. It was commonplace seeing a suit wearing professor, pants rolled up, walking barefoot through the mud. Why Not? After all, the rains were early and therefore warm. There was no great discomfort walking barefoot. The events of those weeks set an informal tone for the university which still exists to this day. With our young ladies the barefoot fashion lasted years after the rains ceased and the sidewalks were paved. If you are old enough you may remember pretty damsels traipsing barefoot through spring blossoms. That became the fashion among the young in the late sixties. Fashions start somewhere. Barefoot babes began that September at Irvine. One morning I drove to school before the rains let loose and parked in the nearby designated, but still unpaved, parking lot. It had been a long day and was already turning dark when I went back to my car. The rain had started early and by mid-day had already alerted all as to what was about to come. In the evening I gingerly made my way across the now muddy field, got in my car, and drove back to my apartment. In the morning, when I returned, several of the cars I had left behind were still there. Some of the faculty had been stuck there overnight and they were not happy. The university made emergency arrangements and bulldozers were hastily brought in to haul vehicles out of the mud. I never did have a problem. No matter how deep the mud, no matter how hard those dozers had to work to pull cars back onto the paved roads, I simply got in my VW and drove off. On one particularly nasty night, just for the fun of it, I showed off by driving a complete circle around a tractor and its tow. Bad boy! Still, some people don’t learn and cars continued to be parked in the unpaved lots. The bulldozer crews made overtime for a while. So, as you can see, there are good reasons why the original beetle was rapidly becoming legendary. The VW was versatile. It could be adapted to fill many roles. There even was a legend that VW’s could float. Who could believe that? One person tested this by converting a beetle into an amphibious car. That wasn’t hard. Just finish sealing an almost impervious bottom and gasket the doors. With that, the car had sufficient floatation. The engine was mounted high enough to keep running. The remaining modifications were simple, too. The only significant hole in the floor were air ducts for the heater (no air conditioning in that primitive vehicle.) The publicity film showed the VW driving off the road and paddling its way across a lake, its spinning rear wheels providing propulsion. There was a time when I was young and foolish. Really! You don’t believe me? What happened one day long ago will enlighten you. It was an El Nino year. It had been raining hard for a week. I was home from school staying with my family when I decided to drive out past Monrovia to visit one of the friends I had made at work. From that part of Glendale you drive down into the Rose Bowl area and then across Pasadena, Arcadia, and beyond. This had been my normal route going to work. The Rose Bowl canyon had a reputation for flooding, but I had traveled the road many times and had never had a problem, even in very heavy rains. This day I did. The rain had ended several hours before. I drove down towards the Rose Bowl and was proceeding along the familiar road when I came to a barrier that the city had set up. Beyond, in the far distance, the road was covered with a slick of water but otherwise all seemed normal. I drove around the barrier and proceeded on my way, but slowly as I approached the slick as the water was starting to sluice up around my wheels. Suddenly I was in trouble. There was something about this supposedly familiar road that I had not noticed before. Out in that water slick I could see just the very tops of the roofs of a couple of cars. This wasn’t just a wet road, there was a deep dip in the road that had created a pond which had swallowed the previously unwary. Too late. The front of my VW started to lift off the pavement. I quickly put the car in reverse but it didn’t do any good. I no longer had enough traction. With the car’s forward momentum I drifted out to sea! Think quick! I could feel a blast of hot moist air coming up from heater vents. Water was starting to rush in through those ducts. I jammed the levers down sealing off that source of leaks. My car simply sat there, bobbing merrily without any sign of sinking. The motor was running fine and the car was already in reverse so I very gently pressed the accelerator. Best not to cause too much of a stir. The slowly turning rear wheels started to provide some propulsion. Slowly, very slowly, the car drifted back until the rear wheels touched solid ground. With traction I could now pull the car out of its predicament. After that I drove the long way around the Rose Bowl area and had a different hair raising adventure with my friend and the rain, later in the day. True story! No tall tale. VW’s really could float. The only penalty for my foolishness is that I had to have the wheel bearings repacked, and that was expensive. Location! That being the measure of value in real estate. By that standard U.C. Irvine had the world’s greatest location for a campus since it was the inland extension of Newport Beach and its Harbor. Newport Beach – one of the premium garden spots of the planet. Golden rolling hills cascade down to envelope a magnificent harbor that once was a premier trading port for the sailing ships of old. Newport Beach – a salubrious climate is matched to sun, sea, surfing and sailing – and wealth. As an added attraction, nearby Los Angeles is one of the world’s greatest cultural centers. In those days, too, the immediate area was the center of aviation, the space program and electronics. It was the technology capitol of the nation. It was no wonder that even before the establishment of the university great gobs of money had poured into Newport Beach and later into the rapidly developing city of Irvine. While I was a student at the university I became the protégé of a technology investment angel. My very smart boss had the knack of finding gold in unexpected places. He used Newport Beach money to buy minority investments in struggling companies – never more than 15% of the company was his rule. He then would bring in technical and financial experts to diagnose and rejuvenate those companies. When the companies were again thriving he would sell his interest and his investors would make a handsome profit. It was a win for all: the investors, the companies and my boss. This being car culture what better way for my boss, and his two partners in the enterprise, to celebrate their new fortune than with a new car. What they came up with was suitably eccentric – but completely in their character. After a bit of searching they found the perfect vehicle. It was a very long pre-war limo that had belonged to the Queen of Belgium. It had all the fixtures that you would expect of a ceremonial vehicle: external running boards and vertical handles for the guards to stand on, gilded fixtures, all. My boss bought fancy chauffer uniforms for himself and his comrades and the trio of them took turns driving each other around town as if they were royalty. It was from my boss that I learned just how much wealth had concentrated in Newport Beach. He remarked one day that there were a hundred thousand bank accounts in that town with more than a million (1960’s) dollars in each. Allowing for inflation that represents trillions of liquid dollars in today’s money. Sadly, in 1969 the capital gains tax was raised and, within a year, technology investment money dried up. For most of the 1970’s, until the tax was again lowered, it was a bad time for risk investment. The excess liquidity went mostly into safe, inflation proof, real estate, driving up prices and thereby making housing unaffordable for many. Unintended consequences, you see. My boss, who just happened to have a PhD in physics, and had once taught at Cal Tech, closed down his operation and went off to the Scripps Institute to do cancer research. Without his steady stipend to pay the bills I dropped out of school and got a full-time job. During my occasional sojourns visiting the wealth of Newport Beach, then and in the years thereafter, I was introduced to some distinguished members of the community. From my perspective the most interesting thing about these people was how down to earth they were. I had the feeling that they were still a bit surprised at their prosperity. Most had earned it, of course, through hard work and intelligent risk taking. Although they enjoyed their new toys, none of them that I met were stuffed shirts. These people were wholly unlike the arrogant Tech Lords of today. Rather, they were good hearted souls who enthusiastically gave their time to charitable organizations – particularly those assisting underprivileged and handicapped children. As a student I availed myself of the university’s excellent program in sailing – Newport Harbor being the perfect place to learn that skill. Lots of fun, and I did become a proficient skipper. But my real outdoors recreation there was surfing. And boy did I surf! Between the Trestles at San Onofre in the south and the pier at Huntington Beach in the north are located some of the world’s premier surfing spots. Indeed, Huntington Beach – Surf City as it is known – each year in September holds the world class U.S. Surfing Championship. That is the time when, like clockwork every year, machine-perfect waves march up from the south. In the early summer the water on this stretch of coast warms enough that a wet suit is not really necessary for the hardy. Then, early each morning, before the wind picked up and blew out the waves, I would head to one, or another, of my favorite spots for a couple of hours in the water. I especially liked the “north” side (physically the west side) of the Huntington Beach pier, with its peaky waves that gave excellent lefts and rights – your choice. The large crowd of surfers preferred the much longer rides south side so I generally had little competition in the north. After school started I would migrate to the south side because the crowds had evaporated back into the classroom. The waves from the south gave long, perfect rides up the coast to where you would be dumped safely into the outgoing rip underneath the pier. That rip – the local surfer’s secret – would take you, without effort, back out to the surf line and into the southward drifting current. It was like a skier’s tow rope. I called it “The Merry-Go-Round.” This place was a kind of paradise for the knowledgeable surfer. One morning, just for a change, I decided to see what was happening at the Santa Ana river jetty. It wasn’t a great surfing spot but it could be a fun place to ride with a belly board. I grabbed my small board and shoved it into the back of my VW and headed down to the jetty. The river’s exit into the ocean was at the far end of West Oceanfront Drive, at the end of the bluffs. In those days the beach at this west end of town was relatively unused by the public. Part of the problem then was a lack of street parking. This didn’t matter to me since my bug could park on the beach sand without getting bogged down. My car was, after all, a latter day Kubelwagen. When I arrived three or four surfer VWs were already parked on the beach. I pulled in next to them and started to walk down to the surf. Just then a Cadillac pulled up and prepared to also park on the sand. A Cadillac is a wonderfully comfortable car to ride in but it had no business being there. I back-tracked and flagged the fellow down, warning him against that idea. His car was going to be trapped. It was clear this man was not a local for he was dressed in a dark suit and tie instead of the casual dress that local businessmen had already adopted. He wasn’t going to take advice from some surfer dude so he drove onto the sand anyway and promptly got stuck. I just shook my head at the manifest stupidity. This guy was going to have to walk back nearly a mile to get help and then he was going to have a hefty toll to pay to get his car back on the pavement. After a couple of hours I came back from playing in the waves. The Cadillac was still there waiting for a tow truck. The now bedraggled gentleman was sitting disconsolately in his car, the door wide open. I got in my bug and carefully drove past the Caddy at slow speed so as not to kick up any sand. I was polite. No need to cause more misery for the stranded traveler. Still, I do remember the look on his face as I drove back onto the pavement and then away. Photo by Chester L. Richards. Photo and story © 2022 Chester L. Richards. All rights reserved. |
From Chester L. Richards
Hello, and happy to see you here! A little about what's behind these stories: Having retired from the world of aerospace engineering, I now spend time reading, inventing, listening to music, taking photographs and sharing them with friends. And writing stories. Often about people I've met as I've traveled to exotic places, learned about music, surfing, white water rafting, optics, photography. Every story is true. I hope you enjoy them. Archives
June 2024
Categories
All
|