Scott Burns is doing a series using individuals to talk about changes (and the future) in the US. This particular story is his own (see the note at the end about "Bobby"). Interesting and moving to see where a favorite columnist "comes from."
Social upheaval has factored into economic expansion
11:17 AM CDT on Sunday, October 2, 2005
By SCOTT BURNS / The Dallas Morning News
One of his first memories is recorded in a scrapbook picture. The boy, nearly 7, is barely tall enough for his chin to touch the bar. He is drinking soda from a short beer glass. Father, drinking the harder stuff, snapped the photo.
It was either the Devil Bar or the Stink Fish Bar. The Devil Bar, as Bobby called it, had a large bronze bust of the devil at one end, its eyes illuminated with dim red lights and head slowly swiveling.
If you stayed at the bar long enough, as Bobby and his father did, there would be a recurring moment, about once an hour, when the devil stared straight at them.
The Stink Fish Bar had smoked herring, one of the richer forms of bar nourishment. Bobby loved shocking his mother with the scent on his hands when his father finally dropped him off.
The year was 1947. America had emerged from Prohibition, the Great Depression and World War II. It was beginning the biggest economic expansion in its history, a technological revolution and a baby boom.
Bobby knew none of this from his perch on the barstool. But he and his generation would be the beneficiaries.
For Bobby, real life began with the discovery of algebra.
It was a near-religious experience. The idea that relationships could be symbolized and that mathematics was a language of symbols and operators changed almost everything.
In one mystical moment, Bobby saw that all of life was symbolization, all the way down.
A science fiction reader, he decided mankind would need more than a barnstorming pilot for a trip to the moon. It also would require an engineer. He would be both.
He learned to fly at 16, working a full day at the local airport for each 30 minutes' flying time.
For a while, he thought he could kill three birds with one stone by attending Annapolis, West Point or the new Air Force Academy. He could do his service as a pilot and study engineering without having to pay for college.
He scratched that plan when he decided the military academies weren't strong enough in math and engineering.
He would need to go to MIT.
With the launch of Sputnik in 1957, Bobby's plan and timing seemed perfect. A humiliated country called for engineers. The space race was on!
Aftershocks
In 1940, when Bobby was born, America had been nominally at peace. But it would soon be at war, in one form or another, for nearly half a century.
Bobby was born as the Battle of Britain raged in Europe. The Japanese had invaded China and sacked Nanking. The attack on Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II were only a year away.
By the end, America's war dead numbered a blissfully small 400,000, compared with the 50 million people killed worldwide in the struggle against fascism.
The aftershocks of World War II, by contrast, will remain with us well into the current century, in the form of the baby boom and America's failing system of retirement funding.
Mind-boggling technological advances were another byproduct.
Ask most Americans to name the biggest (and most frightening) advance to come out of World War II, and you're likely to hear about the atomic bomb. In fact, the war massively accelerated other developments.
Managing the flow of men and equipment on two vast fronts required new tools. Operations research was one result, now often recognized as "supply chain management."
Similarly, work on decoding encrypted messages by Claude Shannon, Norbert Weiner and others led to modern information theory. Its applications are now fundamental in telecommunications, networks, linguistics and genetics.
Communications issues also drove the creation of the transistor by Robert Shockley in 1948, and that, in turn, led to the creation of the first integrated circuit by Jack Kilby at Dallas' Texas Instruments in 1958. (It is also credited to Robert Noyce, working separately, at Fairchild Semiconductor.)
By the early 1970s, Intel had developed the integrated circuit into a computer on a chip – the brains behind micro-computers, high-definition televisions, robot vacuum cleaners and the Internet.
We take the ubiquity of these inventions for granted today. We routinely underestimate the impact of their continuing development on the future.
Possible homicide
In 1958, with this brave future ahead of him, Bobby's life blew up.
He had spent the summer between high school and college driving to a mental hospital to see his mother. After multiple suicide attempts, she had spent most of the year "away." But as summer ended, she came home.
Two days later, the phone rang. A woman said Bobby's father was dead in Los Angeles, a possible homicide. He had been found in the street with severe damage to his skull. He had lived for a week in a coma.
Bobby knew little about his father, despite the bar time they'd shared and exchanges of letters since. He knew his father was an alcoholic, that he had an ironic sense of humor and that women seemed to like him a lot, lack of employment notwithstanding.
One unsolicited letter had advised Bobby to appreciate the miracles that women could perform, such as talk, listen to the radio and put on makeup at the same time. It would be years before Bobby understood.
Bobby and his uncle were on a plane to Los Angeles the next afternoon, thanks to the generosity of his stepfather, George.
Even today, Bobby can't tell you the hardest part of that trip. But the L.A. morgue is a top contender. Just before entering, he realized he didn't know which would be worse – being able to identify his father or not being able to.
His uncle identified the body.
Coping skills
A few days later, Bobby, still 17, was in his first physics class at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He had returned from L.A. with a box of machinist tools, a hoard of photos and a list of 21 women's names he had found among his father's papers. His mother was No. 3; the woman who'd called was No. 21.
His careful plans no longer made sense. His mother, worried, sent him a random supply of drugs – Miltown, Dexamil, Benzedrine. She even sent a little Thorazine.
Faced with a probable genetic destiny of substance abuse, Bobby decided to be scientific: He'd try them all. If any took, he'd know his fate and get on with it.
If substance abuse wasn't his fate, well, he'd have to figure that out.
On the road
American society was changing quickly.
When Bobby's mother, Joanne, was born in 1920, radios weren't widely available. Airplanes were for thrill-seekers.
By her 40th birthday, in 1960, nearly every household had a television set, and the next generation of thrill seekers was planning rocket trips to the moon.
Technology was also changing social attitudes.
In the 1940s, families gathered in the living room to listen to the radio, a floor model stuffed with vacuum tubes that amplified the signal. The programs kids listened to were the ones Father wanted to hear.
Before the integrated circuit, in 1954, another product came out of Texas Instruments that would change the world: the pocket radio. Now kids could walk around and listen to what they wanted to hear. Their new role models were rock 'n' roll stars and disc jockeys.
They read Jack Kerouac, watched Marlon Brando and imagined new social structures.
Fortunately, sex, the early alternative to television, was becoming much safer.
Venereal diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea, scourges of the 19th and early 20th centuries, could be cured with a few shots of Alexander Fleming's penicillin.
Infections plummeted in the 1930s, reflecting widespread improvements in public health.
The change was the first pillar of a global sexual cornucopia.
The second pillar was the introduction, in 1960, of the first birth control bill. The third was changing attitudes.
Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll – let the '60s begin.
IV-F: Aviator
In 1962, after four years of identity crisis and armed with a degree from MIT, Bobby was sure of little.
He knew he was an unlikely candidate for the Supreme Court or the Oval Office.
And he was a dismal failure as a substance abuser. His drug was lucidity. Genetic destiny, he would later learn, had gone into remission for a generation.
Bobby believed that his paternal grandmother, widowed in Arizona, had never accepted his mother or his birth.
The postcard he sent announcing his graduation was found on the floor of her house, delivered after she had died of a stroke.
With no will and no other heirs, her estate went to Bobby by default. It was a small fortune.
So Bobby declined a graduate fellowship and made a pact with a friend. They would apply to the Sorbonne. If they got in, they would live in Paris in the manner of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.
And what if they didn't get in? Well, they would join the Army. It was 1962 – the Cuba missile crisis was about to become history, and Vietnam was warming up. Fortunately, the Sorbonne sent letters of acceptance.
In 1963, Bobby returned to the States to enlist.
"Don't forget to tell them your mother attempted suicide seven times!" she called out as he left for his physical. He did just that, also including on the medical history form two known generations of alcoholics and his program of drug experimentation.
The Army rejected him. When his new Selective Service card arrived, it inexplicably listed a new classification: "IV-F: Aviator." For years Bobby joked he would be called when there was a need for kamikaze pilots.
Ironically, thousands of Bobby's contemporaries returned from Vietnam with the drug experience that probably kept him from going.
Bobby returned to Boston. He began working as an assistant to a weapons consultant and wrote reports on communications technologies, the market for mini-missile submarines, hand-held radar, etc.
Most of his classmates were involved in similar efforts. In the midst of the Cold War, one even worried about a "peace scare."
America invests
The GI Bill of Rights, better known as the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, helped 2.4 million veterans attend colleges and universities, provided school training for 3.5 million more and supported on-the-job training for an additional 3.4 million in a period of seven years.
Although intended only to help returning veterans find jobs and adjust to peacetime, it may have been the largest single investment in "human capital" in history.
The GI Bill educated the generation of scientists, including Jack Kilby, who helped send man to the moon and create the Internet and the generation of lawyers who argued the civil rights cases of the 1960s.
With the high-paying jobs they couldn't have imagined before the war, the veterans bought homes in the suburbs, gave birth to a baby boom and gave their children transistor radios for Christmas.
It was an amazing turnaround from 1940, when Bobby was born.
Then, people were suffering from the loss of their savings in the bank failures of the Depression. Many had also lost their homes. Only 43.6 percent of households owned a home in 1940, down from 45.6 percent 20 years earlier.
Today, by every measure, we are richer, more secure and better educated than we were in 1940. Incredibly, though, few Americans believe they are secure.
Today, as during the Depression, it is possible for the rich to become not rich or even poor.
It is possible for educated, middle-class people to become jobless and poor – it just happens in different ways.
Social upheaval has factored into economic expansion
11:17 AM CDT on Sunday, October 2, 2005
By SCOTT BURNS / The Dallas Morning News
One of his first memories is recorded in a scrapbook picture. The boy, nearly 7, is barely tall enough for his chin to touch the bar. He is drinking soda from a short beer glass. Father, drinking the harder stuff, snapped the photo.
It was either the Devil Bar or the Stink Fish Bar. The Devil Bar, as Bobby called it, had a large bronze bust of the devil at one end, its eyes illuminated with dim red lights and head slowly swiveling.
If you stayed at the bar long enough, as Bobby and his father did, there would be a recurring moment, about once an hour, when the devil stared straight at them.
The Stink Fish Bar had smoked herring, one of the richer forms of bar nourishment. Bobby loved shocking his mother with the scent on his hands when his father finally dropped him off.
The year was 1947. America had emerged from Prohibition, the Great Depression and World War II. It was beginning the biggest economic expansion in its history, a technological revolution and a baby boom.
Bobby knew none of this from his perch on the barstool. But he and his generation would be the beneficiaries.
For Bobby, real life began with the discovery of algebra.
It was a near-religious experience. The idea that relationships could be symbolized and that mathematics was a language of symbols and operators changed almost everything.
In one mystical moment, Bobby saw that all of life was symbolization, all the way down.
A science fiction reader, he decided mankind would need more than a barnstorming pilot for a trip to the moon. It also would require an engineer. He would be both.
He learned to fly at 16, working a full day at the local airport for each 30 minutes' flying time.
For a while, he thought he could kill three birds with one stone by attending Annapolis, West Point or the new Air Force Academy. He could do his service as a pilot and study engineering without having to pay for college.
He scratched that plan when he decided the military academies weren't strong enough in math and engineering.
He would need to go to MIT.
With the launch of Sputnik in 1957, Bobby's plan and timing seemed perfect. A humiliated country called for engineers. The space race was on!
Aftershocks
In 1940, when Bobby was born, America had been nominally at peace. But it would soon be at war, in one form or another, for nearly half a century.
Bobby was born as the Battle of Britain raged in Europe. The Japanese had invaded China and sacked Nanking. The attack on Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II were only a year away.
By the end, America's war dead numbered a blissfully small 400,000, compared with the 50 million people killed worldwide in the struggle against fascism.
The aftershocks of World War II, by contrast, will remain with us well into the current century, in the form of the baby boom and America's failing system of retirement funding.
Mind-boggling technological advances were another byproduct.
Ask most Americans to name the biggest (and most frightening) advance to come out of World War II, and you're likely to hear about the atomic bomb. In fact, the war massively accelerated other developments.
Managing the flow of men and equipment on two vast fronts required new tools. Operations research was one result, now often recognized as "supply chain management."
Similarly, work on decoding encrypted messages by Claude Shannon, Norbert Weiner and others led to modern information theory. Its applications are now fundamental in telecommunications, networks, linguistics and genetics.
Communications issues also drove the creation of the transistor by Robert Shockley in 1948, and that, in turn, led to the creation of the first integrated circuit by Jack Kilby at Dallas' Texas Instruments in 1958. (It is also credited to Robert Noyce, working separately, at Fairchild Semiconductor.)
By the early 1970s, Intel had developed the integrated circuit into a computer on a chip – the brains behind micro-computers, high-definition televisions, robot vacuum cleaners and the Internet.
We take the ubiquity of these inventions for granted today. We routinely underestimate the impact of their continuing development on the future.
Possible homicide
In 1958, with this brave future ahead of him, Bobby's life blew up.
He had spent the summer between high school and college driving to a mental hospital to see his mother. After multiple suicide attempts, she had spent most of the year "away." But as summer ended, she came home.
Two days later, the phone rang. A woman said Bobby's father was dead in Los Angeles, a possible homicide. He had been found in the street with severe damage to his skull. He had lived for a week in a coma.
Bobby knew little about his father, despite the bar time they'd shared and exchanges of letters since. He knew his father was an alcoholic, that he had an ironic sense of humor and that women seemed to like him a lot, lack of employment notwithstanding.
One unsolicited letter had advised Bobby to appreciate the miracles that women could perform, such as talk, listen to the radio and put on makeup at the same time. It would be years before Bobby understood.
Bobby and his uncle were on a plane to Los Angeles the next afternoon, thanks to the generosity of his stepfather, George.
Even today, Bobby can't tell you the hardest part of that trip. But the L.A. morgue is a top contender. Just before entering, he realized he didn't know which would be worse – being able to identify his father or not being able to.
His uncle identified the body.
Coping skills
A few days later, Bobby, still 17, was in his first physics class at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He had returned from L.A. with a box of machinist tools, a hoard of photos and a list of 21 women's names he had found among his father's papers. His mother was No. 3; the woman who'd called was No. 21.
His careful plans no longer made sense. His mother, worried, sent him a random supply of drugs – Miltown, Dexamil, Benzedrine. She even sent a little Thorazine.
Faced with a probable genetic destiny of substance abuse, Bobby decided to be scientific: He'd try them all. If any took, he'd know his fate and get on with it.
If substance abuse wasn't his fate, well, he'd have to figure that out.
On the road
American society was changing quickly.
When Bobby's mother, Joanne, was born in 1920, radios weren't widely available. Airplanes were for thrill-seekers.
By her 40th birthday, in 1960, nearly every household had a television set, and the next generation of thrill seekers was planning rocket trips to the moon.
Technology was also changing social attitudes.
In the 1940s, families gathered in the living room to listen to the radio, a floor model stuffed with vacuum tubes that amplified the signal. The programs kids listened to were the ones Father wanted to hear.
Before the integrated circuit, in 1954, another product came out of Texas Instruments that would change the world: the pocket radio. Now kids could walk around and listen to what they wanted to hear. Their new role models were rock 'n' roll stars and disc jockeys.
They read Jack Kerouac, watched Marlon Brando and imagined new social structures.
Fortunately, sex, the early alternative to television, was becoming much safer.
Venereal diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea, scourges of the 19th and early 20th centuries, could be cured with a few shots of Alexander Fleming's penicillin.
Infections plummeted in the 1930s, reflecting widespread improvements in public health.
The change was the first pillar of a global sexual cornucopia.
The second pillar was the introduction, in 1960, of the first birth control bill. The third was changing attitudes.
Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll – let the '60s begin.
IV-F: Aviator
In 1962, after four years of identity crisis and armed with a degree from MIT, Bobby was sure of little.
He knew he was an unlikely candidate for the Supreme Court or the Oval Office.
And he was a dismal failure as a substance abuser. His drug was lucidity. Genetic destiny, he would later learn, had gone into remission for a generation.
Bobby believed that his paternal grandmother, widowed in Arizona, had never accepted his mother or his birth.
The postcard he sent announcing his graduation was found on the floor of her house, delivered after she had died of a stroke.
With no will and no other heirs, her estate went to Bobby by default. It was a small fortune.
So Bobby declined a graduate fellowship and made a pact with a friend. They would apply to the Sorbonne. If they got in, they would live in Paris in the manner of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.
And what if they didn't get in? Well, they would join the Army. It was 1962 – the Cuba missile crisis was about to become history, and Vietnam was warming up. Fortunately, the Sorbonne sent letters of acceptance.
In 1963, Bobby returned to the States to enlist.
"Don't forget to tell them your mother attempted suicide seven times!" she called out as he left for his physical. He did just that, also including on the medical history form two known generations of alcoholics and his program of drug experimentation.
The Army rejected him. When his new Selective Service card arrived, it inexplicably listed a new classification: "IV-F: Aviator." For years Bobby joked he would be called when there was a need for kamikaze pilots.
Ironically, thousands of Bobby's contemporaries returned from Vietnam with the drug experience that probably kept him from going.
Bobby returned to Boston. He began working as an assistant to a weapons consultant and wrote reports on communications technologies, the market for mini-missile submarines, hand-held radar, etc.
Most of his classmates were involved in similar efforts. In the midst of the Cold War, one even worried about a "peace scare."
America invests
The GI Bill of Rights, better known as the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, helped 2.4 million veterans attend colleges and universities, provided school training for 3.5 million more and supported on-the-job training for an additional 3.4 million in a period of seven years.
Although intended only to help returning veterans find jobs and adjust to peacetime, it may have been the largest single investment in "human capital" in history.
The GI Bill educated the generation of scientists, including Jack Kilby, who helped send man to the moon and create the Internet and the generation of lawyers who argued the civil rights cases of the 1960s.
With the high-paying jobs they couldn't have imagined before the war, the veterans bought homes in the suburbs, gave birth to a baby boom and gave their children transistor radios for Christmas.
It was an amazing turnaround from 1940, when Bobby was born.
Then, people were suffering from the loss of their savings in the bank failures of the Depression. Many had also lost their homes. Only 43.6 percent of households owned a home in 1940, down from 45.6 percent 20 years earlier.
Today, by every measure, we are richer, more secure and better educated than we were in 1940. Incredibly, though, few Americans believe they are secure.
Today, as during the Depression, it is possible for the rich to become not rich or even poor.
It is possible for educated, middle-class people to become jobless and poor – it just happens in different ways.
