by Studs Terkel
Almost all of the above is known to the great many. But what about his old man, what about his father? Raymond Dellinger had been, all of his working life, a lawyer, a quite conservative and successful one. He was early on a close friend of Calvin Coolidge, who for a time was governor of Massachusetts, and later our president.
Ray Dellinger was more than simply conservative; he was actively so. Yet folks in his community and beyond knew all about his son, who was vigorously against much of that in which his father believed. The father was far more than embarrassed; he felt humiliated. You may understand that son and dad did not get along at all. The son was a cut to the father’s heart.
The years went by. On special occasions, there would be family gatherings. Say it’s Mrs. Dellinger’s birthday. Dave’s mother buys a special gown for the occasion. The father is in black tie, of course. Even Dave, who years earlier followed St. Francis of Assisi’s example and traveled around in rags, would wear a tie for the occasion.
There is Dave’s memory of his father, a formal gent, subject to all ritual. Yet there was something else Dave recognized in the man. Something wholly unexpected, yet often occurring.
During the sumptuous dinner, at one unbelievably horrendous moment, the young waitress, perhaps it was her first day, perhaps it was sheer nervousness—the dress, the patrons (they were all big shots) may have been too much—spilled a bowl of lobster bisque on Dave’s mother’s gown. Silence and embarrassment, a tightening of lips, a raising of brows. Not a second hand moved, not the semblance of a pause . . . Dave’s father murmured in head-lowered fashion: “It was my fault. Did you notice what I did? I was holding forth and gesturing with my hands when they struck the tray and over it tipped.”
He apologized to the trembling girl, who must have felt unbelievably relieved. She was the only one who knew, aside from Dave, that his father was lying. He wasn’t within ten feet of that tray. Never once did Dave ever observe his father embarrassing, let alone bullying, a person serving their table.
Dave said, “That was not the first time, nor was it the last. I remember an elderly waiter, long past his prime years, goofing things up, making a mess of our order. My dad, the host, shouldered the blame as he always did, claiming he’d confused the waiter. This is how I came to know the vulnerable side of my dad. Never mind Cal Coolidge or whoever his Gibraltar may have been, my dad’s concern was for the person serving.”
Toward the end of our humiliating adventure in Vietnam, Dave’s father lay dying. By this time, his rugged honesty and hard common sense had taken over. Of the gallantry and truth of his son’s mission—as well as I can remember Dave’s words—his father said, “Dave, I am so proud of you for standing up the way you have done for what you think is right. I have finally come around to agree with you.”
There was a long pause as Dellinger told the story. Finally, Dave murmured as though his father were there: “Dad, I learned it from you.”
27
Einstein and the Rest of Us
In my abysmal ignorance of recent technological advances, I confuse the meaning of “hardware” and “software.” To me, hardware is what I’ve always found it to be: pots, pans, kettles, metallic utensils. Software has always been: pillowcases, sheets, bedspreads, towels. Today, I don’t know half the industries. I knew what a spot welder did, I knew what a tool and die maker did, a truck driver, but what does a computer programmer do? What is a computer program? What is a startup company? It is more than a generation gap. My reference is to what is a relatively new group. Technology has played its Jester role to the Lear of making dough super-fast. There are new phrases, new kinds of enterprises, that mystify me, but you, the reader, most all of you younger than I by a long, hard, confusing generation, would know.
We have technology, the pros and the cons. Where would I be without a tape recorder? Sadly, my deafness is a challenge to even the most advanced hearing aids. If there’s noise in the background, I can’t hear a thing. I can’t go to plays or see movies. My using the telephone can be an ordeal, the fifth task of Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables. The operators aren’t bad. You say you’re deaf and they immediately help, but there’s only so much they can do.
I take some license with this story I always tell, I gild the lily a little—I always do that—but it’s basically true. The Atlanta airport was very new at the time, and as I understand it, one of the first to have passenger trains. As you left the gate of the plane to continue, there were these trains that took you to the concourse that led to your ultimate destination.
You’re walking to the train and it’s silent, jammed. All you hear is a voice from up above. A human voice, a male voice, I remember it as a baritone. But the words are spoken robotically. “Concourse one, Fort Worth, Dallas, Lubbock.” Done that way. That dead voice. Just as the pneumatic doors are about to close a young couple rush in. This couple pulls the doors aside and without missing a beat that voice up above says, “Because of late entry, we are delayed thirty seconds.”
The crowd, not a word, looks at this couple. They’re at the foot of Mt. Calvary about to be crucified. I’m standing there, having had a couple of martinis in preparation for an encounter of just this sort. I cup my hands around my mouth and I holler, “George Orwell, your time has come and gone!”
Dead Silence. Instead of laughter . . . dead, dead silence. I realize there are now three of us before the firing squad: the couple and me. I’m astonished that our hands aren’t raised, awaiting the gunshots from Goya’s soldiers in The Disasters of War.
I’m wondering: What’s happened to the human voice? What’s happened to Vox Humana?
I see a little baby seated on the lap of this woman who’s Mexican or Latin American. She speaks Spanish. The baby is perhaps eight months old. I turn to the baby and I hold my hand over my mouth because my breath is a hundred proof. I say to the baby, “Sir or Madame, what is your opinion of the human species?”
And what does the baby do? The baby looks at me, and giggles. I say, “Oh, my God, thank God. A giggle. The sound of a human voice. There’s my hope.”
I don’t want to romanticize the past, become an old reactionary, an old fart saying, “In the good old days . . .” There were bad old days, too. I’m not saying factory life was a good life, I’m not saying let’s bring back Dickens’ world and the dark, satanic mills of William Blake.
Before, there was a noise, a human noise. In the old days, at the city desk of any newspaper, there were voices; there was shouting from desk to desk; a guy running back and forth with a news dispatch; someone on the phone hollering or whispering. Today there is silence in the city room. The young journalists are seated side by side, staring into their terminals. They are a foot away from each other, yet miles apart.
Yet, without the advances of technology, my own voice would long ago have been silenced. What is more of a personal metaphor for me than my being here now, approaching ninety-five? I should have been dead with my father and two brothers. A genetic problem: The men of the family all had angina pectoris. Ben was fifty-five when he died. My father fifty-six, and Meyer not quite seventy. Here I am, ninety-four. Here for one reason: the skilled hands of a surgeon and all manner of medical advance, especially in the field of cardiology. About ten years ago I had a quintuple bypass. The odds were in my favor. Nonetheless, an octagenarian was risking all. It worked. As a result, I have outlived my brothers by at least forty years.
More recently, trouble came again. When I was ninety-three, my primary care doctor, my cardiologist, and the surgeon all said I had to have a new heart valve. It was that, or a matter of months until I’d be impelled to ring the bell at the desk clerk’s window—checking out.
In any event, there was a moment when I was deciding. At that moment, the odds appeared to be in my favor. Nonetheless, were I a bookie, it’d be six to five either way. I thought: “Oh, to hell with it, let it go, I’ve had a good life.” Still, there was within me curiosity and ego. I was curious to know: What happens ne
xt? Finally my ego took over: “OK, let’s do it.”
The remarkable thing was that I wasn’t scared. Oh, why do I lie to myself in this manner? I did have a shake or two, although I’m told I was cheerfully singing, “I’m On My Way to Canaanland,” as they wheeled me down the hallway toward the operating room. As I came out of surgery, the surgeon, still wearing his rabbinical cap, looked down on me and said, “It’s all over.”
I said, “You mean I’m dead?”
“No, no. You’ve got a new valve and at least four more years.”
I said, “I don’t want four more years. One more year is enough.” But there it is and here I am.
THERE’S THE TECHNOLOGY of saving lives, and there’s the technology of death, mass death. Technology’s worth depends on who is in charge and for what purpose it’s used.
That technology, that same machinery made by what Mark Twain called “the damn human race,” the very machinery that gave us Hiroshima and Nagasaki, can destroy the whole human race in one moment. “Bring ’em on!” We can knock off the world tomorrow. You know something funny? They can knock us off, too. They, too, can say, “Bring ’em on!”
We can no longer talk about the world in old historical terms, of how an empire comes to an end. With the technology of destruction such as never envisioned before, one bomb can knock off what years of battle once took. I don’t know how many we lost in the Battle of the Somme, the great horrendous battle of World War I, or the Battle of Passendale. But I know the losses are nothing compared with what can happen when one bomb drops now.
Who is the hero, the villain, the god of all this? Who is the one above all most responsible for the state of the world today? Albert Einstein: the greatest heart and mind of the twentieth century.
It was a colleague of Einstein’s, Leo Szilard, who convinced Einstein that he was the only one who could persuade President Roosevelt to make the atom bomb. There was Lisa Meitner in Sweden, demonstrating to her nephew, with grains of sand, the theory of relativity. There also was Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. And there at my alma mater, behind the University of Chicago’s abandoned football field, was the distinguished physicist Enrico Fermi and his gifted colleagues who split the unsplittable. The phrase “Italian navigator lands safely” came to President Truman and he knew we had succeeded in splitting the atom. Our young chancellor, Robert Maynard Hutchins, wryly observed: “We should never have given up football.”
We come to a new leap, in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Here, a colony was set up of the most advanced scientists in the world, headed by the brilliant physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. There in the Alamogordo desert, Oppenheimer saw the mushroom cloud. He raised his hand in triumph like a winning prizefighter, and then immediately dropped his hand in despair, for he saw death everywhere. From then on, he devoted himself to stopping the loonies from working further on the nuclear bomb. For this he was destroyed, along with his colleague Robert Maynard Hutchins.
Sadly, our own physicists, brilliant though they were, miscalculated. They had assumed that the German scientists were way ahead. The truth is, they were far behind.
The world changed inexorably on that sunny Sunday summer afternoon, August 6, 1945, in Hiroshima. When Einstein heard that a bomb had been dropped on human beings, the bomb for which he was responsible—not simply because he convinced Roosevelt to do it, but because his very equation led directly to the splitting of the atom—he tore his hair. Einstein never dreamed the bomb would be dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. He thought it would be dropped somewhere over the wide-open Pacific.
Sometime in 1962, I interviewed the Russian playwright Nikolai Pogodin. He spoke of having been invited to Princeton by Einstein: “I felt like a pilgrim going to Mecca. Einstein’s one fatal flaw,” the Russian said, “he came out of the future, and we, his contemporaries, were not ready for him. He, the richest in vision, the most generous of heart, and the most hopeful toward the making of a better world, has caused so much trouble. Science and its exponential advocates and its advances have so threatened us.”
After the bombings, deep in grief, Einstein said: “If there’s a World War Three, I don’t know what weapons we’ll use, but I know the weapons of World War Four: sticks and stones.” Meaning that our children’s children’s children will be back in caves.
We talk about neo-conservatives and neo-liberals, and their kindergarten debates, but we never mention neo-Neanderthals, which is the end result of all of the other neos. The end result will be thousands and thousands of years of knowledge and culture gone, because out of these caves will come not our ancestors, but our descendants. Our great-great-great-great-grandchildren with bull hides on their backs and clubs in their hands. They’ll come out and they’ll be terrified, but somehow out of their tribal memory will come words . . . “Sh-hh-hh-Shakespeare. Who dat? Ode on a Grecian urn. What dat? Mozart. Ahhhh . . . who?”
Einstein had precisely the opposite in mind. He and Bertrand Russell corresponded on several occasions. Their messages were imbued with hope for a world such as there never was. With all the labor-saving devices, all the broken backs unnecessary, man would be ready for a new adventure in which his work would be the living of his life. Russell spoke of a new paradise on earth.
THERE WAS A THIRD VOICE to be heard: Buckminster Fuller. Designer. Architect. Visionary. Aside from his original thinking, he was known for the arcane aspect of his language—the geodesic dome. Spaceship Earth. Synergetics.
Buckminster Fuller was the grand-nephew of one of the most remarkable American women of the nineteenth century, Margaret Fuller. She, our country’s leading literary critic for Horace Greeley’s paper, helped us in the discovery of Melville, Hawthorne, Poe. She was a conversationalist like no other. In fact, males paid two bucks a head to listen to her talk. In her travels, she met George Sand, Thomas Carlyle (whose great-man theories she abhorred), Robert Browning and his wife in Italy, and Giuseppe Mazzini.56 Fuller and her husband and child drowned off Fire Island. But her visionary traits lived on in her grand-nephew Bucky.
We think of Bucky Fuller’s language and it is here that I must, as we near the end of my reflections, include this man of prescience. Most often, his listeners were professors and grad students—academics. Imagine him, then, in an unthinkable situation to which I had unintentionally contributed.
On one occasion, the one that, to me, represents what my books are all about, he spoke to a gathering of the unmatriculated. This occurred one fiercely cold Sunday afternoon in 1965. As we drove through an old Chicago neighborhood that had gone through many ethnic changes, and which was then primarily Puerto Rican, he said: “This is where I lived during my worst days. I was flat broke, my child had died, and I was thinking of suicide. It was at that time I realized I was thinking other people’s thoughts and not my own. That this world was in a state of change technologically, and thus humanly such as never before.”
I mentioned to him that later that afternoon there would be a gathering at a local church. No heat. No electricity. All would be cold and dim. The church was holding a gathering of protestors against evictions. Cha-Cha Jimenez, the leader of the Young Lords, who rode with us that day, told us that his family had been kicked out and forced to move six times in one month; that they felt like checkers on a checkerboard. It was then that Bucky suggested the unthinkable: “Let me talk to these people.”
I thought to myself: “Oh, my God. What crazy thing have I suggested? If professors have a tough time understanding him, how will it be with working people who’ve gone no further than fifth grade?” Nonetheless, he insisted.
This moment, this event, was a key one in my life in underscoring a belief. It is a simple one: that people can understand what is necessary for their well-being if it’s explained to them. Honestly.
Consider this most incongruous of occasions. The cold church, filled with men, women, and children bundled up in coats and blankets. There on the stage paces this old man with his crew-cut white hair, no hat, an old overcoat with two butt
ons missing, a tiny lapel mike pinned against the warm wool. Imagine Bucky Fuller’s arcane speech and the chilled, downcast assemblage of Puerto Rican working people and their families. My head was spinning at the burlesque aspect of the situation.
What was the reaction? I closed my eyes fearing the worst. I opened my eyes and I saw something wondrous. These people, of such limited academic training, listened intently to Bucky take off on the nature of housing. He spoke of gentrification and urban renewal and of the devastation it caused the have-nots and have-somewhats. He spoke of a world in which, thanks to technology, or as he called it, “technology-for-life” (rather than against it), there would be enough to go around.
I speak about an utterly new world, a world in which it is assumed there’s plenty for all; a world in which you don’t have to have a job to prove your right to live. Where the first thing you’re going to think of is not ‘How am I going to earn a living?” but “What needs to be done? What am I interested in? Where might I make a contribution?” What an extraordinary new preoccupation of man! Work will be the most privileged word we have. The right to work will be not with the muscle, but the right to work with your brain, with your mind. You are born with that, but just getting accredited by the other man to be allowed to use that tool, and getting credit enough so he helps you, and cooperates with you, and you make a breakthrough on behalf of your fellow men, is the next thing. That’s the work. Work will be the most beautiful thing we can do.
The funny thing is, after he spoke, they asked him all the right questions. They had understood everything he said and exactly what he meant.
