(Random thoughts and memories
of an ordinary American Catholic through age 31 with later effects, selectively
arranged, mostly written in the early years of the third millennium at age 61)
1. During one climactic moment in the month of March in
the year of my Lord, one thousand nine hundred forty one,
I came into existence. Nine months
later, on December 24, I was born.
2. I was born into a world at war. A brutal war that killed over fifty million
human beings and maimed countless others.
A war that killed civilians, innocent children and their mothers,
displacing families, destroying homes, schools, churches and other vestiges of
civilization. While millions suffered
and died, I was loved and cared for by my mother and father. I was warm in my crib, thousands of miles
from the death and destruction, safe in my parents’ Illinois apartment, safe in
the heartland of the United States of America.
3.
Years later in
October 1999 as I was sorting through my parents’ belongings with one of my
cousins, we came across my christening outfit, neatly folded and stored in a
trunk by my mother. “How loved you
were,” said Margie to me with tears in her eyes. Yes, my parents loved me, and this was a
blessing. I was further blessed because
I grew up in the United States at the height of her power with unparalleled
opportunities to education, science and technology, the freedom to access
ideas, information, material possessions and the pleasures of a comfortable
life. Another blessing was my baptism as
a Christian on April 19, 1942 by the Roman Catholic Church, opening the spiritual
gifts of Jesus Christ and God’s graces for holiness. This triple blessing has influenced my entire
life and continues to affect my thoughts and daily actions.
4.
I was an only
child. My father was a lithographer, and
my mother a homemaker. When I was ten
years old, they purchased a new two bedroom brick
house in the Chicago suburb of Westchester, Illinois. My dad was a man of few words, and my mother
did most of the raising of me. Both were
very honest and instilled in me the importance of truth and getting a good
education. For my education, they sent
me to the local public schools. In the
early grades we began the day with the Pledge of Allegiance to the United
States of America and the singing of a patriotic song, the National Anthem, God
Bless America, or My Country ‘Tis of Thee, which was my favorite. In the later grades, the singing stopped, but
the Pledge continued, and the schools made it clear that I was growing up in
the greatest country in the world. I had
numerous cousins, aunts and uncles on both sides of the family who came over to
our house and who we visited. During
these visits, the men usually played poker at the kitchen table and smoked
cigars, while the children watched them; and the women sat in the living room
and talked, while the children listened to their conversations. Other times, everyone, men, women, and
children joined in a card game called “Thirty One”,
playing for nickels. My dad and uncles
were Union men and voted the Democratic ticket.
My mother was generally silent when it came to politics, but I had a
hunch she pulled the Republican handle when they fielded a candidate who she
thought was better. I had a happy
childhood, and the four years I spent in high school (1955 –1959) were filled
with fun and the excitement of learning.
5.
During my
sophomore year in high school, my plane geometry teacher presented the
Pythagorean Theorem. It was late in the
day and the class was anxious to leave for the upcoming Memorial Day
holiday. Miss Schick did not have time
to prove the theorem, but merely explained what it said and described it as one
of the most important results in geometry.
Then she casually said, “As extra homework credit, try proving this
theorem over the holiday” and gave the class a smile. My life was about to change.
6.
At home, I drew a
right triangle and decided to inscribe a circle. I connected several lines to the center of
the circle and played around in my mind with the resulting geometrical
figures. Suddenly, I had an idea on how
a proof might be constructed. I wrote a
series of equations, involving the areas of the figures. It seemed obvious that out of those
equations, the basic formula of the Pythagorean Theorem ought to fall. I spent hours trying to demonstrate my
insight, and I was finally rewarded. My
idea had been correct, and I had proven the theorem! The intellectual satisfaction of working
through this proof filled me with wonder.
I had never considered a career in mathematics, thinking that I was going
to be an announcer on the radio, but my proof of the Pythagorean Theorem put
events into motion that altered my childhood ideas. Miss Schick, after reviewing my homework,
told me she had never seen the Pythagorean Theorem proved the way I had done
it, and none of the textbooks had my proof.
I was excited to think that I might have discovered an original
proof.
7.
As a child, I did
not like visiting my maternal grandmother (my paternal grandmother had died
before I was born), but I had no choice in the matter because my parents would
not leave me at home alone and so I went with them. The three of us sat with Grandma in her
living room. Dad and I were generally
silent, while my grandmother spoke in Slovak and broken English and my mother
responded in English and broken Slovak.
I was bored and could not wait to leave.
At the end of the visit, I would dutifully get up and kiss Grandma on
the cheek. This simple task was a chore
for me because my grandmother was old and didn’t look nice and sometimes had an
unpleasant odor about her. After the
kiss, she would smile, pat my hand and say “my little one” or its equivalent in
Slovak. Then the memorable visit
happened where everything was transformed.
8.
The entire visit
was a repeat of prior boring trips, except the outcome was different. This time when I kissed Grandma, tears of
happiness glistened in her eyes and her old hand embraced my young hand with
passion. “My little one” she said. Sensing her love and recognizing that I had
caused it triggered a euphoric sense of joy within me. Every fiber of my body trembled and reverberated
with compassion and a love that I had never felt before. With my presence and a simple kiss, I had
made her happy! In the past, I had not
enjoyed visiting her and found the goodbye kiss unpleasant, but this time I had
been surprised and deeply moved by her response. The joy that I had done something good for my
Grandma stayed with me for hours, and in some way, has never left me.
9.
In the summer
between my junior and senior year of high school, I was struggling with the
concept of God and His role in the world.
I was confused. I had been
reading different books on mathematics and science, and it seemed that many of
the men I admired were indifferent to God.
The scientist I admired most, Albert Einstein, said that God did not
play dice with the universe, yet it seemed that quantum mechanics was generally
accepted. I kept putting questions to
God, asking Him if Einstein was correct or not, and if God did care about the
world and its people, then why did He remain hidden? One day, I was seated on a chair in my room,
skimming a science book, and mentally asking God these kinds of questions. Suddenly, I turned a page, and there a black
and white photograph of Albert Einstein with large expressive eyes stared back
at me. Instantaneously, my mind
registered answers to the questions I had been asking. I was so startled by the simultaneous
appearance of Einstein’s photograph and the answers I had received, I screamed
out loud and fell off my chair to the floor on my knees. I was trembling. My mind did not have the capacity to
understand the answers to the questions I was asking. Moreover, not only was I limited in being
able to understand but so was Albert Einstein!
And so was every other human. No
person had a mind capable of fully understanding the answers to those
questions. Einstein was wrong because
God, in some way, did play dice with the universe because randomness was an
essential part of the construct, but He also cared about people, and the
greatest human mind could not fully comprehend that paradox. That is the insight I had that summer day,
long ago, when I was literally knocked out of my chair.
10.
Whenever I
thought or meditated about what I should do with my life, I never had any
insights about a specific career, livelihood or vocation. However, it came to me over time that I was
free, by God’s grace, to do and to live anyway I wished, but whatever path I
took, God and His commandants had to be at the center of how I lived. Following God’s commandants meant
acknowledging Him, treating other people as I wanted them to treat me, and
avoiding sin. Although its effects may
not be immediately apparent, I came to understand that sin is harmful to people
because it is a rejection of God’s love for us and that many sinners wind up not
only doing evil but loving evil.
11.
I loved to reason
and took delight in solving math problems and reading books on science and
history. Therefore, it was natural for
me to have entered the college at the University of Chicago in September 1959
as a freshman. That autumn, the
University hosted a Darwin Centennial, marking the 100th anniversary
of the publication of The Origin of
Species. Many famous biologists came
to the campus for lectures. I had not
read Darwin’s book before, but did so as part of
freshman biology and became so engrossed that I wound up taking a course that
following spring on the “Philosophical Implications of Evolution”. My respect for Darwin and his observations
as to how nature might work has only grown with the years since my
undergraduate days, but I reject Darwinian justifications for evils such as
social inequality, war, the extermination of people deemed inferior by
elitists, and attempts to re-create human nature. Darwin’s demeanor of patiently stating facts
and observations and allowing truth and understanding to unfold with time is
what impresses me. Today the growth of
data along with refinements of Darwin’s theory through related disciplines such
as genetics has led to the acceptance of evolution among most people who have
studied the subject. Of course, the work
of science is never finished, and I expect surprises as we learn more about the
different mechanisms of evolution and their underlying mathematics. The scientific method, the importance of
keeping an open mind in the search for truth, the free exchange of ideas, and
allowing time to validate or modify concepts are some of the hallmarks of
Western Civilization and its many great Universities. I believe the American people have encouraged
these ideals, and this has helped our nation to prosper.
12.
The death of my
uncle Joseph, on my mother’s side, at age 64 in February 1972 caused me to
re-evaluate my career. I had been
teaching calculus and differential equations in the evening division of the
Illinois Institute of Technology, working on a Ph.D. in mathematics, reading,
writing, traveling and generally living a life of leisure. Although pure mathematics was an intellectual
pleasure, I sensed it was a dead end for me, as were my other intellectual
pursuits. Eventually I wanted to get
married, have children and to raise them without worrying about money. I knew about the actuarial profession, and
its solid, albeit specialized, mathematical training. What bothered me was that, at least
initially, I had to work for a company, either an insurance company or a
consulting firm. I decided to “grin and
bear it” and began looking for an actuarial job. I was to be pleasantly surprised.
13.
In May 1972, I
flew to New York City and a job interview with the Metropolitan Life Insurance
Company. When I walked through their
buildings at One Madison Avenue, I thought I had come home. I sensed that I belonged in New York and that
the Metropolitan, a large mutual life insurance company, was a good fit for
me. I accepted their job offer, loaded
my Buick Skylark with my belongings, said goodbye to my family and friends in
Chicago, and drove east. I have never
regretted my decision.
14.
On November 10,
1972, I went to the Belmont Hotel in Manhattan for a Friday evening dance
sponsored by the Catholic Alumni Club of New York. As I entered the ballroom, somewhat late for
the dance had already started, I stopped and surveyed the scene in front of me.
Over a hundred people were seated at
tables along the sides of the room, while another 50 or so were dancing in the
middle of the room. I noticed a red
headed girl seated at one of the tables, talking to a girl with black
hair. I went to the bar, ordered a seven
and seven, nodded hello to a couple of people I knew, and circled the
floor. I could not keep my eyes off the
red head. A vision of beauty and
loveliness I thought, remembering James Joyce’s description of the girl in the
stream who had captured Stephen Dedalus’s imagination. I went over to the red head, introduced
myself, and asked if I could sit down.
Her name was Nora. The other girl
was her sister, Delia. The three of us
spent the entire evening talking, and I got Nora’s telephone number at the end
of the night. As she walked out of the
hotel, Nora told her sister that she had just met her future husband. I didn’t hear about her prescience until
after we were married.
15.
Nora and I had
four children, and I was present in the delivery room when each baby was
born. The birth of a child, a new
creation, and the first cries and breaths of air from the baby, was a
transforming event, changing our lives forever.
To me the process that begins with coitus and ends with the birth of a
baby is the prototypical life experience, governed by randomness and physical
laws, linking God’s Providence with nature and the actions of people.
16.
In August 1996
physical and mental deterioration in my parents led to my daily involvement in
their lives. Eventually I moved them
from the Chicago area where they had lived their entire lives to an apartment
five blocks from my home in Brooklyn, New York.
It was during this difficult period of time, which continues to this
day, that memories of my past surfaced and led to this written record.
17.
On September 11,
2001, religious Muslim terrorists attacked the United States of America and
killed about 3,000 individuals. Their
jihad or struggle to do God’s will is
very different from my experiences. I
have struggled to understand, to learn, to find truth, to do good deeds, and to
avoid hurting other people or myself. I
have struggled against mindless belief on one hand and a skepticism that
paralyzes on the other in an attempt to lead a good life. I have struggled against passions such as
arrogant pride, self-righteous anger, and self-consuming lust. Violence or evil done in God’s name or for
some “great or noble cause” or because a person wills it, all of these are part
of human history. But the prayer,
“deliver us from evil”, and rational thought which struggles against all
ignorance are also part of our human experience and continue to offer hope.
18.
On Saturday
afternoons in the mid-1990’s, I helped at our parish’s food pantry. Working out of the rectory basement, every
week we distributed a bag of groceries to anyone who needed assistance. On one occasion, I noticed a sign that the
room where the food was stored was also used to host Alcoholics Anonymous
meetings on weeknights. Later, outside,
in the school playground, as I walked home, fathers gathered with their sons
for a Boy Scout outing. Two Eucharist
ministers came out of the church on their way to visit the sick, while inside
the church Father Farrell prepared to hear confessions. Everywhere, around Holy Name of Jesus Church
in Brooklyn, New York, the Good News of the gospel was manifest, made visible
through the actions of people and their deeds.
19.
Everywhere the
blessings of scientific thought, carefully validated and nurtured and then
applied to helping people, can be seen.
From medical technology which saves lives and reduces needless suffering
to modern communications which educates, informs and entertains to the myriad
of consumer products and foods which make lives more comfortable and healthier
to free markets which allow goods and services to flow, the positive effects of
a rational understanding of the world are clear.
20.
In the February
2002 issue of Scientific American, a
columnist quoted a famous scientist who observed that the universe has properties
consistent with blind, pitiless indifference.
I disagree because when I observe our planet I note that there are
approximately 6.3 billion possible counterexamples.
21.
I have often
taken consolation in the thought that two truths cannot contradict each
other. Is it possible, however, for two
approaches to understanding, which are incompatible with each other, both to be
valid? Reason tells me no and at least
one will be modified to conform to the other.
My insights suggest that the answer is yes if each approach applies to
different areas of human understanding and contains “singularities”, places
where reason can not go, where there is no explanation other than that the
“singularity” is there.
22.
During my
mother’s pregnancy, historic events unfolded in America and in the world. In March 1941, Franklin Roosevelt began his
third term as President. The Lend-Lease
Bill, which empowered the President to disregard American neutrality provisions
and to ship food and arms to nations fighting the Axis without a formal
declaration of war, passed the House and the Senate and was signed by the
President into law. Later, at a crowded
dinner of White House correspondents, President Roosevelt said, “I remember, a
quarter of a century ago . . . that the German Government received solemn
assurances from their representatives that the people of America were
disunited; that they cared more for peace at any price than for the
preservation of ideals and freedom. . . . Let not dictators of Europe or Asia
doubt our unanimity now. . . . May it be said of us in the days to come that
our children and our children’s children rise up and call us blessed.” The United States of America was on the path
to war, but the actual event that triggered our entry was nine months away.
23.
In 1941, American
scientists, members of the American Philosophical Society, viewed the first
clear picture of a molecule, photographed with the newly developed electron
microscope. The molecular and atomic
nature of matter was now firmly established.
Science and its handmaid, technology, were providing people with the
tools and understanding to reshape the world.
Caution concerning the impact of scientific advances, especially in the
area of atomic power, was expressed by Vannevar Bush, Chairman of the National
Defense Research Committee. “I hope they
never succeed in tapping atomic power,” said Bush. “It will be a hell of a thing for
civilization.”
24.
In 1941, Dr.
Reinhold Niebuhr, a leading American Protestant theologian in his book, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Volume 1
voiced a similar but more general concern.
Reversing his prior views, Dr. Niebuhr now downplayed the optimistic and
rationalistic trend of Christian liberalism and looked at the basic sinfulness
of mankind. The events in history,
especially from 1920 to 1940, made him realize that optimism about the goodness
of man was untenable.
25.
Throughout 1941,
Americans watched the events in the world and debated the right course of
action for the United States.
Isolationism was strong in America, and many did not want the country
involved in the Asian or European wars.
The House of Representatives considered a bill to extend the service of
draftees in the Army. The vote to extend
service for draftees, taken in August, passed 203 to 202 with 27 congressmen
not voting. The vote of one congressman
changed the outcome of the draft extension bill. I speculate about the various forces and
chance events that impacted each vote and how history might have been changed
if a single vote had been cast the other way that summer day. If the draft extension bill had failed to
pass, most of the half-trained U.S. Army would have dissolved as draftees and
guardsmen went home. The nation would
have had to start from scratch to build and train another army. Within four months the entire nation
realized that America needed those draftees when the Japanese attacked Pearl
Harbor and other American facilities in the Pacific on December 7 and December
8, 1941.
26.
It was in this
general milieu of war and insecurity that my parents, John and Katherine,
brought me to St Frances of Rome Church in Cicero Illinois to be baptized. My sponsors were Aunt Margaret, the fraternal
twin of my mother, and her husband, Joseph.
There was no doubt in the teachings of the Church, that mankind was
sinful and that a person needed to be baptized.
The war and the horrors reported daily made this teaching manifest. My parents, however, were not
churchgoers. My father had never been
baptized and found the ritual of Church life unnatural, having been raised without
any formal religion but within a Protestant cultural framework. He did believe in God and later in life did
allow my mother to baptize him. My
mother, who had been raised a Catholic, stopped attending mass as a young
woman. She could not believe that the
consecrated bread given at mass was the body and blood of Christ. She did not see any benefits in confessing
her sins to a priest. She believed Jesus
had been crucified, suffered and died, but could not believe that because of
His sacrifice, Christians would someday be resurrected. She routinely dismissed many priests and
“holy rollers” who sat in churches as hypocrites. Yet she believed in God and the prayers she
directed to God through the Blessed Virgin.
She told me throughout her life the times God had answered her prayers
after she called on the Blessed Mother.
Perhaps this is why my mother decided to have me baptized that Sunday in
April 1942, and my father agreed.
27.
During my early
years, my parents lived in an apartment on 16th Street and 59th
Court in Cicero, Illinois, a small city that borders Chicago. I only vaguely remember the flat. From the outside you walked up one flight and
then turned to your right. The apartment
stretched along 59th Court parallel to an empty corner lot. From our windows, I saw the bungalows across
the street on 59th Court and the corner of 16th Street,
which was a busy street with traffic.
One short block to the south on 59th Court my maternal
grandmother, Katerina, lived alone in her house. My maternal grandfather, Stefan, had died in
1939, leaving his wife and four grown children: Steve; the twins, Margaret and
my mother, Katherine; and the youngest, Charles. The three eldest children had all
married. Aunt Margaret and Uncle Joseph
had two girls, Joyce born in 1939 and Margie born seven months before me in
1941. They lived only a few blocks from
us in Cicero, and we saw them frequently along with Grandma. We did not see the eldest brother Steve, his
wife and two children very often, while Charles, who was single, joined the
army and was a paratrooper in Europe.
Both of my maternal grandparents had come to United States around the
turn of the nineteenth century from what became Czechoslovakia and which was
then part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire of Franz Joseph. When someone asked about our ethnic
background, we responded Czechoslovakian even though our last name was not
Czechoslovakian. The area of Cicero in
which we lived was predominately a neighborhood of first and second generation
Czechs and Slovaks.
28.
My father’s side
of the family was larger than my mother’s.
Dad was number eight of nine children, five girls and four boys, born to
Ignac and Anna. Anna came to the United
States in 1891 as a young girl from Bohemia.
She died in 1940, leaving my grandfather who lived in his two-family
house in Cicero with one of his children, Josephine, her husband, Art, and
their daughter, my cousin Eileen.
Another daughter, Ann, her husband, Al, and their son, Donald, occupied
the other flat. Grandfather had moved
his family from South Wilmington, Illinois in the 1920s. He had arrived in this country in 1893 from
Croatia as a teen-ager with two of his cousins and had settled in South
Wilmington, which was 50 miles southwest of Chicago, to do strip mining. In time, he moved to Chicago in order to find
better work for himself and his sons; and then in 1923 he moved to Cicero,
which was only seven miles from downtown Chicago. His oldest daughter, Bessie, had married and
settled in Morris, Illinois with her husband to raise four children, but the
rest of Grandfather’s children moved with him and initially lived in the
western suburbs of Chicago. All of them
married and each of them had children, giving Grandfather 16
grandchildren. My father married my mother
on November 4, 1939 and like four of his siblings, my father had only one child.
29.
The fact that I
was an only child never came into my thoughts as I grew from childhood into
adolescence. It was only later when I
was in college and then out working with people that I realized that I had
missed something important in my formative years; namely, the special and
continual interactions that siblings have as they grow into adolescents and
then adults. My mother told me her
kidneys had been hurt in delivering me, and afterwards she could not urinate
and was kept for some time in the hospital.
When released the doctor told her that it wouldn’t be wise for her to
have another baby, and so I was by myself without any brothers or sisters. As a happy child I made friends easily
throughout school, but there was a certain level of intellectual and human
intimacy, mainly through speech and shared experiences, which I found difficult
and impossible to achieve. Either
correctly or incorrectly, I attributed that to the fact I was an only child. Because of peer loneliness, I created out of
my toy animals an entire melange of imaginary characters to play with and which
I called my family, and I gave each a name and a distinct personality. My five favorites were Pumpkin Face, Cute
Kitty, Julius Caesar Dithers (after the cartoon character), Panda Bear and
Panda Doll. If I had trouble in some
interaction with one of my classmates at school, I came home and interacted
with my family of stuffed animals. I
controlled that situation and generally preferred the world I had created to
the real world. Later as I realized what
had happened, I tried to come out of myself and to be more aware of real people
in human situations. My unscientific
observations noted that individuals who came from families of four children
seemed to be on balance the best adjusted to deal with the problems of the real
world in a positive manner.
30.
As I look back to
my very early years, I remember some of the events, some of the images that are
part of me today because of conscious memory.
In most instances, it is difficult to date these memories, which ones
occurred in what order and exactly how old I was when they happened. One memory, perhaps the earliest, if not,
certainly one of the earliest, can be dated with a high degree of precision. It was early 1945 and I was age three years
and two months. I was with my mother in
our apartment, and Grandma came to our door, having walked the one block from
her house, and handed my mother a telegram that she had just received. She could not read English. My mother read the message and screamed,
blurting out anguished words in Slovak to Grandma. Then the two women began crying, standing by
the kitchen door, while I watched in fear and confusion to see my mother and
grandmother in their distress. Then I
understood the terrible news – my Uncle Charles had been killed in the war, in
Luxembourg, on February 8, 1945.
31.
A few years
later, my mother told me how he died.
Although Uncle Charles was a paratrooper, he was on the ground that day
when he went to the aid of a wounded soldier.
As he moved toward his friend, my uncle stepped on a land mine. The United States of America awarded him a
Purple Heart attached to a certificate.
They hung on my grandmother’s wall up to her death in December 1960 when
my mother took them. I found them in a
water-damaged trunk in my mother’s basement in 1999. I polished the Purple Heart and restored the
certificate the best I could, and they now hang on my wall.
32.
Another early
memory, which I can date by holiday but not by year, was the stuffed bunny I received
one Easter. I was asleep and awoke
Easter morning to see the bunny in my crib resting against the slat
railing. What a wonderful surprise! I shouted in delight at the shock of having
received this gift and stood up in my bed.
My mother came over, and we hugged over the crib railing. She kissed me and told me she loved me, and I
added another toy animal to my family.
33.
Another surprise
memory that I have of my crib happened when I was a little older. It started out as traumatic or frightening
but because of a thought or special insight that ran through my mind moments
after the incident, I was able to remain calm and the event to my knowledge was
inconsequential and did no subsequent harm.
I awoke to find blood on my right forefinger and on my penis. I screamed and my mother ran into the room
and wiped the blood away. She said
something like, “It will be all right honey; I told you to stop playing with
your pee-wee.” It was at that moment
that the thought crossed my mind that it wasn’t blood but ketchup that had been
wiped away. My mother had been trying to
stop me from playing with my penis which I used to flick back and forth from my
right leg to my left leg and back again, side to side. It was just like my mother, trying to get me
to do the proper thing, to come up with some silly idea like ketchup to
reinforce her admonitions. Fortunately,
I had the insight to notice that it had been ketchup and not blood because from
that moment I was no longer upset. Of
course, I kept my future penis flicking private, certainly away from the eyes
of my mother. Another possible
consequence of this event was that for years I ate hot dogs only with mustard,
never with ketchup.
34.
A third memory is
my mother singing a song to me at night before I fell asleep.
“There’ll
be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow,
just you wait and see.
There’ll
be love and laughter and peace ever after
Tomorrow,
when the world is free.
The
shepherd will tend his sheep.
The
valley will bloom again
And
Jimmy will go to sleep
In
his own little room again.”
Later
I learned that this song, “The White Cliffs of Dover,” was forever linked with
World War II and the heroic struggle of the English people against Hitler’s
onslaught. As a child all of this was
beyond my understanding. I called it the
“Bluebird song” and I liked the melody and the words, and the fact that my
mother would sing it to me. Years later,
I sang the “Bluebird song” to my children.
35.
A fourth memory
that I have which involved my crib occurred one afternoon when I was in for a
nap but not sleeping. The landlady had
stopped by to collect the monthly rent, and she and my mother were talking
while drinking a cup of coffee in the kitchen.
My mother had put our cat in the bathroom and closed the door, hiding
the pet from our landlady who had forbidden tenants from having any pets in her
apartment building. On this day, the cat
started meowing in the bathroom. Worried
that the landlady would hear the cat’s crying, I stood up in the crib and began
loudly meowing myself, rattling the sides of the crib. After the landlady left my mother came into
the room, laughing at what I had done and praising my actions – how clever I
had been to deflect attention from the real cat! The next month before the landlady came for
her visit my mother hid the cat in the bedroom closet. This time I was asleep, but my mother told me
that after the landlady collected her rent and drank her coffee she asked to
use our bathroom. She was definitely
suspicious, but my mother had outwitted her because there was no evidence of
our cat in the bathroom. Nevertheless,
my mother worried that she could not continue her deception, and since she did
not want to lose the apartment, she gave away our cat.
36.
Another burning
memory, the event of which happened before I entered kindergarten and probably
when I was age four occurred in our kitchen.
I was seated on the floor next to the stove, playing with my toys and
found a book of matches. My father was seated
at the kitchen table reading the newspaper.
I lit a match and surprised by the flame dropped it on the flesh of my
left leg an inch below the shorts I was wearing. I screamed as the flame scorched my
skin. My father threw himself from his
chair onto the floor and smothered the flame.
The burn on my leg was small; half the size of an American dime, but it
did not go away, leaving a mark.
37.
It must have been
the spring or summer of 1946 when my mother told me I was going to start
kindergarten in the fall. I was only four and a half years old but eligible to
start school that autumn because of my December birth date. My mother decided to enroll me at St. Frances
of Rome, which was only one block from our apartment. I remember the day we registered. We walked a few steps along 16th
street to Austin Boulevard and then turned north for about half a block. There in the middle of the block was a
bungalow house with an empty lot next to it.
The house served as a convent to the nuns who taught at St. Frances. My mother rang the doorbell, and the black
robe of the nun who answered the door startled me. We were ushered inside and sat in a small
room waiting for the principal. Black
robed nuns kept walking back and forth in the hallway. I was frightened by their appearance and
wanted to get out of there. The
principal, another black robed nun, came and spoke to my mother, and they
filled out some papers. The principal
asked me a few questions. I remember her
face, an oval bordered by a black outside, white inside hood. She seemed pleasant and smiled at me. I answered her but kept wondering why she was
dressed in black and why she was hooded.
I was relieved when we finally left the house. I did not say anything to my mother, but I
really did not want to go school.
38.
The first week or
so of kindergarten went well. There were
many boys and girls, and the half-day went quickly. A thin-faced nun kept yelling at several of
the kids, but happily she ignored me because I probably listened to and did
what she wanted. During one indoor
recess, the school had a fire drill and then a chance event changed my
life. The class was drinking milk from
glass bottles when the fire alarm went off.
Frightened by the sound, one of the girls dropped her bottle and chocolate
milk spilled across the classroom floor.
The nun started screaming at the girl for the accident and said the
class could not leave the room before the spilled milk was cleaned off the
floor. The fire alarm kept ringing and
ringing, and the girl was crying hysterically as she tried to wipe the
floor. The nun kept berating her, “If we
all burn to death, it will be your fault.”
With that most of the class started crying and screaming including
myself. I knew what it felt like to be
burned, and I certainly didn’t want to die.
I’m not sure what happened then.
I guess I blotted the rest of the nightmare out of my mind.
39.
The next morning I ran a fever, and my mother kept me home from
school. I had not told her about the
disastrous fire drill, and the nun yelling that we were all going to be burned
to death. By noon, the fever had passed,
and I was up playing with my stuffed animals.
The next day the same thing happened, I had a morning fever and my
mother kept me home from school, and in the afternoon, I was back to
normal. When I ran a fever on the
morning of the third day, my mother called our doctor. Dr. Kluzak was puzzled, but the link between
my morning fevers and school was obvious.
I am not certain how they found out about the fire drill, perhaps I even
told them although I don’t remember doing so.
In any event, my mother acted swiftly and removed me from St. Frances of
Rome, enrolling me in the local public school, Burnham. My morning fevers went away.
40.
A few years
later, my mother told me that some of the neighbors had criticized her for
taking me out of Catholic school. For
some, this was wrong and she was jeopardizing my
spiritual upbringing by having me schooled with non-believers in a public
school. However, my mother had acted out
of common sense and love for my well being.
Whenever I hear stories of ex-Catholics that left the Faith because they
were scarred by Catholic schools in the pre-Vatican II era, I think I might
have been one of those if my mother had not acted. It was not the first or the last time that
another person’s love for me changed or transformed my life. My prayer is for mothers everywhere to use
their loving instincts and have the courage to protect their children,
especially from negative influences in the classroom.
41.
The neighbors who
criticized my mother for removing me from Catholic school were correct in one
way, however. Because my parents did not
attend mass or outwardly practice Catholicism and because the public school did
not teach any religion, I grew up ignorant of religion in general and of
Christianity in particular. Some public school children of the Catholic Faith went to a
special class one day a week in the afternoon at St. Frances after regular
classes were finished to learn about their Faith, but my parents did not send
me to that class. I remember when my
cousin Margie, who was my age, was making her first Communion that something
special was happening to her, but I didn’t understand what. One day she came to visit us dressed all in
white, and she gave me a gift. It was a three inch white plastic statue of the child Jesus with
outstretched arms. I came to understand
that she was worried about me because I was not going to receive Jesus in Holy
Communion. I put the plastic statue of
the child Jesus with the outstretched arms on my bedroom dresser. Fifty years later I still have it there, a
reminder of my cousin’s innocent love for my spiritual well being.
42.
Years later when
I was in college, the plastic Jesus was accidentally knocked off my shelf onto
the floor. My roommate, David, who told
me he was an atheist, picked it up and handed it to me. “Here is your idol,” he said half jokingly,
half seriously. At that time I was an extremely private person and kept my thoughts
and beliefs to myself, and thus I said nothing about the gift my cousin had
given me. I was also taken aback by
David’s comment and wondered if he really thought that I worshipped a
three-inch piece of plastic. Later, I
had an insight through a dream sequence in which I had died and was being
buried. The plastic Jesus was placed in
my coffin as a sign of my Christian faith.
Eons later, after cataclysms and time had erased most traces of Western civilization,
archeologists opened my coffin and finding the plastic Jesus concluded that
here was evidence that American Christians, circa 1960 A.D., worshipped
idols. Scholarly papers and copious
lectures on this latest understanding of Western civilization swept academia
and inspired young minds to even greater discoveries about their past.
43.
Another early
memory was when I wanted to get out of my highchair I would raise my hands into
the air and say “Down.” My father would
pick me up out of the chair, holding
me in his arms, “You mean up, I am picking you up,” he would say. Of
course, he would then put me down on
the floor, which is what I meant because I wanted to go from the chair down to the floor. Nevertheless, words that describe direction,
up or down, north or south, top or bottom, right or left, east or west, have
always caused me problems, and I have to think in order to communicate
properly. To this day, if I am not
careful, I might say, “Let us go up
to the bookstore” although I am on 23rd Street in Manhattan and the
intended bookstore is down five blocks south on 18th Street. I wonder if this imprecise communication has
had any significant impact on my life?
44.
When I was first
introduced to fractions in grammar school, the teacher began by giving us basic
terminology. The numerator was the top
half of the fraction, and the bottom half was called the denominator. How could I remember this and not
inadvertently mix up the top and bottom numbers? I knew there was a college called Notre Dame that
was always mentioned in the sports section of the newspaper, and thus I used
the letters ND as an acronym, which I repeated to myself in order to remember
which came first. Notre (Numerator) came
first and was on top followed by Dame
(Denominator) on the bottom, and in
this way I was able to keep the numerator and denominator straight in my mind
and to prosper in early arithmetic.
45.
I am not exactly
certain when I started to read the daily newspaper, but it started with the
comics and moved to the cartoons in the sports section. My father would bring home the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Herald American. When Babe Ruth died in August 1948, there was
a drawing of him going off into the sunset, which made a big impression on me
because my father told me he was the greatest ball player of all times and here
he was dead and honored in the paper.
Whenever sports teams played, there would be cartoons depicting the
struggle both before and after the event.
For example, if the Chicago Bears were playing the Detroit Lions, the
cartoonist would draw a furious bear clawing at a snapping lion, and then once
the outcome of the event was known, a second cartoon would show the victorious
animal on top of the defeated one. I
thought these drawings were wonderful, and I came to know all the caricatures
of the various baseball and football teams.
My favorite cartoon drawing was that of the Cleveland Indians, which
was, of course, an Indian.
Interestingly, in football, my favorite was the drawing of the Ohio State
Buckeye, which was a kid on a bicycle where the cartoonist had drawn the bike
as the word “OhiO” with the O’s in Ohio representing the wheels of the
bicycle. Thus, although I lived in
Illinois, my original favorite baseball and college football teams were the
Cleveland Indians and the Ohio State Buckeyes.
I was disappointed when my parents refused my request to move to Ohio.
46.
The summer of
1954 was glorious. The Cleveland Indians
dominated the American League and won the pennant with a record 111
victories. I knew by name all the
players on that great team: Feller, Lemon, Garcia, Wynn, Hegan, Doby, Easter,
and my favorite, the third baseman, Al Rosen.
Listening to the All-Star Game on the radio that summer when Rosen hit
two home runs was a joy. What a shock
then that autumn when the Giants beat the Indians four straight games in the
World Series! I was in the eighth grade;
and during class, my science teacher, who was a New York Giants’ fan, turned on
the radio. The class sat and listened to
the World Series as he talked about the physics of curve balls. The name of Dusty Rhodes still causes me to say “Oh no”, remembering his home runs for the Giants and
the mighty Indians, my heroes, going down to defeat.
47.
One of the facts
I learned later about my Indian heroes was that a couple of them were black,
and Al Rosen was Jewish. Having rooted
for these guys when they were just names, how could I now be prejudiced against
them for their skin color or their religion?
I was lucky to have come to baseball after the game had been
integrated. Thus, I did not have to
overcome the bias that separate baseball leagues caused for many of my father’s
generation. God Bless the United States
of America for a system of government that allows social growth and then the
Americans who acted to change baseball and eventually the country.
48.
It was after the
1954 World Series that I began to pay closer attention to local Chicago
sports. One factor in this change was
that I could not get Cleveland radio or television, and although the sports
pages of the Tribune gave me the box
scores of the Indians, it wasn’t the same as listening to the game on
radio. Another factor was that my dad
was a Chicago Cub fan, and he took me to Wrigley Field a couple of times. The Cubs were generally a pathetic team, but
they were local, and being a National League team, they didn’t compete against
the Indians. Slowly, I started to follow
them. When Ernie Banks arrived and
turned into a star, my interest increased, and I became a Cub fan. When I moved to New York in 1972, my
allegiance to the Cubs did not move.
Modern communications makes following them easy, and their national
following and the aura surrounding Wrigley Field has grown since my
adolescence. My four children, growing
up in Brooklyn, became New York Mets fans and often ask me when I am going to
switch my allegiance from the Cubs. I
tell them that I will switch to the Mets once the Cubs win the World Series,
which elicits groans of “Never”.
49.
One of my memories
from Burnham grammar school was an assignment to write a poem about an
animal. I picked a cat but had trouble
composing a poem. At lunch, which I ate
at home, I mentioned to my mother that I couldn’t think of any words to write a
poem. She gave me some words and that
afternoon I turned my mother’s poem into the teacher. She read it and quickly asked me if the poem
was mine, and sheepishly, I told her that my mother had done the work. The teacher spoke to my mother and from then
on, through all my school days, my mother never did another assignment for me.
50.
Another memory
from Burnham was my teacher talking about a possible war between the United
States and the Soviet Union. This may
have been late 1949 after the Soviets exploded their atomic bomb, and the
school started preparing for where we were to hide if warned about an attack on
Chicago, but that is speculation because I don’t remember why this classroom
discussion took place. I know I wasn’t
frightened probably because the teacher didn’t seem to be afraid. I only recall the incident because one of my
classmates asked if the Russians had red skin, which I thought was an amusing
question, and it stayed with me. The
teacher explained that the Russians although they were called “Reds” did not
have red skin but looked just like us.
51.
I only remember
one unpleasant experience at Burnham grammar school and that involved a big,
heavy kid who was a bully. He went
around the playground, lifting smaller kids off the ground and holding them up
against the school building. He did it
to me a couple of times. I told my
mother who went to the school, and the incidents stopped. It was not the last time in my life, however,
that I had to deal with a bully.
52.
A few years
later, I was probably about 12 years old, and on this particular summer day, I
was playing baseball in an empty lot with a number of kids, including some of
my friends. One of the players was a boy
who I hardly knew but who had been very nasty to me in the past and always
seemed to want to fight. I usually
ignored him or ran away. On this day, he
kept constantly taunting me, and I finally agreed to fight him. In the middle of the ball field, the two of
us started punching at each other while the rest of the kids circled us and
watched, keeping a safe distance. At one
point, I landed a hard right on the bully’s jaw that sent his head snapping
back. The sound of the blow brought a
shout from the crowd. The two of us
stepped back from each other. The bully
was surprised that I was fighting him and that I had just landed the best
punch. I was wheezing hard, a full-blown
asthma attack was starting, and then I began to cry. The other kids came between us, and the fight
was over. The bully never bothered me
again.
53.
I learned from
this incident to defuse situations before they became confrontational to the
point of violence, and fortunately, I never had to physically confront a bully
again. When I read history, I found
that the United States had also learned from World War II that appeasement was
an eventual road to conflict. Dealing
with individuals who have tendencies to bully others physically, emotionally,
or intellectually is a delicate balance, and every situation is different with
its unique characteristics but a firm and consistent approach toward the bully
has worked for me.
54.
I don’t ever
remember my mother spanking me. Once I
made a tongue at her when she wasn’t looking and was caught when she suddenly
turned around. She washed my mouth out
with soap, and I stopped making tongues.
My father slapped me once. I was
about ten, whining and crying over something for several minutes, and he lost
patience with me. I was so surprised
that I stopped crying. Nora doesn’t ever
remember being spanked. Not
surprisingly, we, in turn, never spanked or hit any of our children.
55.
I don’t remember
my paternal grandfather even though I have a photograph of him, but another
early memory that I can date is his death on Sunday, March 14, 1948. My father went to visit him in the hospital
and didn’t come home that Saturday night.
He returned early the following morning and told my mother that
Grandfather had died. My father had been
with him the entire time, and I remember my mother saying that he had done the
right thing, staying with Grandfather in his final moments.
56.
53 years later,
on March 6, 2001, my father died in his bed in his apartment, one month short
of his ninetieth birthday, and I was by his side. Dad had Alzheimer ’s disease or “some disease
in that family”as one doctor told me. The
“big A”, another doctor’s name for the disease, disabled Dad and left him flat
on his back. I became involved with
taking care of him in August 1996 after my mother fell and broke her hip. At that time he was
still walking and doing most things for himself. In his last year, he was bedridden and did
not recognize me. Every night when I
came to visit him, he would look up at me from his bed and ask, “Now who is
this?” Many times
he thought I was Emil, one of his cousins, back 60 years ago. Once he told me that he couldn’t believe I
was Philip, his son, because Philip was a small boy. One month before his death, he asked me who
he was. I told him his name. “Oh, yes,” he replied, smiling. Months earlier, during one of his more cogent
moments, I asked him if he was saying his prayers. “Yes,” he replied
“and one of these days the good Lord is going to come and take me.” To the very end he seemed to recognize my
voice even if he did not know that it was the voice of his son, and I believe
he heard the final, “I love you.”
57.
One of the first
movies I remember seeing was Walt Disney’s Bambi. The scene that made a lasting impression on
me was not the death of Bambi’s mother by hunters which has often been written
about, but a subsequent scene where the orphan Bambi, frightened and confused,
is consoled by his father figure, the Great Prince of the Forest. The appearance of the Great Prince and his
soothing deep voice filled me with awe, and although I could not formulate it
at the time, I hoped that life was like that and that there would always be
someone to help when it was truly needed.
58.
My father’s family was large, and I never saw
the entire family together in one place at one time. Annual Labor Day picnics in South Wilmington
at the house of my two great uncles was the one occasion that usually brought
many of my aunts, uncles, and cousins together.
The gatherings were festive with softball, card playing, a pig roasting,
kegs of beer, soft drinks and watermelon.
Uncle Ed played the concertina.
Although not the oldest of the siblings, it was my Aunt Emma and her
husband, Al, who kept in touch with each family member and relayed news as to
what was happening. I always enjoyed
visiting them because they were always friendly, open and made me feel
welcomed. Dad was always relaxed and
most talkative around Aunt Emma. He had
had a happy childhood, growing up with eight supportive siblings. Now, however, the children and grandchildren
of Ignac and Anna did not see each other that often. My father’s sister, Lillian, and her husband
and three children had settled in California, and subsequently two of my other
cousins went there to live, followed by my Aunt Ann, and her husband, Al. Over time the remaining siblings and their
children, who in turn married and started their own families, had less and less
contact with each other.
59.
I have physically
moved to a new residence eight times in my life. The first time was in late 1950 when my
parents moved to another apartment in Cicero, and I transferred from Burnham
grammar school to Goodwin grammar school.
I was in the middle of the fourth grade, and I hated leaving
Burnham. We had a reading class where
students could read to the class, and everyday I volunteered. I had books, which I had received as birthday
gifts, published by the Disney Company, and they were filled with wonderful
stories involving Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto, and the entire galaxy of
Disney characters. The class enjoyed
having me read to them because they too loved the Disney characters, and I was
very happy being the star of the class.
Unfortunately, Goodwin’s fourth grade teacher did not allow students to
read aloud in class. Instead, she read The Tales of Robin Hood to us. I enjoyed Robin and his band of merry men, but
I was disappointed that I had lost my audience.
60.
Another reason
that I was disappointed about moving was that I had to leave my block on 16th
Street and 59th Court and the neighborhood I knew. Right up the block, my friend Jean lived and her family had a television. They would let me come over and watch Howdy
Doody or some of the Western cowboy shows that I loved. Four short blocks away was the Town Movie
Theater, and my Dad took me there to watch the picture shows on Saturday
afternoons. There were usually two
complete picture shows with cartoons between the movies, plus previews of
coming attractions and a newsreel at the beginning so we would spend the entire
afternoon at the theater. I remember
sitting in the Town Theater with Dad
watching Abbott and Costello meet
Frankenstein (1948). I was
frightened, on the verge of tears, when I saw him laughing and the thought
struck me that this was make believe and my fear went away. I liked Westerns and disliked gangster
movies. I recognized that Westerns were
make believe or at least happened in the past and that no one could get hurt in
that way anymore, while gangster movies were too close to reality and many of
them bothered me. Another movie that
upset me was The Snake Pit (1948), a
story about mental illness, which I recognized as real and terrible. Dad’s favorite actor was Randolph Scott, and
his favorite movie was The Gunfighter
(1950) with Gregory Peck. He had seen
the movie before he took me to see it, and he discussed the story with me
before the movie started. The movie was
not in color but had a special sepia tint to it. I didn’t particularly like it because the
Gunfighter dies at the end. I preferred
the Technicolor westerns of Roy Rogers that looked better and had happy
endings. Anyway, our trips to the Town
Theater stopped when we moved out of the neighborhood.
61.
I transferred into
Goodwin’s fourth grade after the school year had already begun. I didn’t know any of the kids, and none of
them lived close to my apartment building so I did not have any friends my age
when I came home from school. I withdrew
more into myself and the imaginary world I had created. I would line up my stuffed animals and make
“movies” for them. I had a collection of
toy cowboys and Indians and would devise stories, which I would act out using
the figures. Roy Rogers was my favorite
cowboy. I had seen many of his films at
the Town Theater, and sometime during this period, Dad took me to see Roy, Dale
Evans, Trigger, and the Sons of the Pioneers when they appeared live at the
Chicago Amphitheater. All of this helped
to fuel my imagination, and my stories became more elaborate, and my movies
more involved.
62.
It was 1950 and
1951 and the Korean War was being fought, and when I looked in the paper, I saw
maps of North and South Korea with the territory occupied by each side
marked. At first, the North Koreans took
all of South Korea except for Pusan in the southeast. There the Americans and South Koreans held
and then rapidly began pushing the enemy back.
The allied forces crossed the 38th parallel, took the North
Korean capital, Pyongyang, and pushed toward the Yalu River, which was the
Chinese border. Then the Chinese entered
the battle and, in turn, pushed the Allies back almost to the 38th
parallel and the original boundaries of the two countries. I was completely fascinated by the maps and
how rapidly they changed. Somehow I
never thought of the individual men dying in battle, only the overall sweep of
the action. I started making war movies
for my stuffed animal family. I didn’t
have enough toy soldiers so I took decks of playing
cards. The black spades and clubs became
the allies and the red hearts and diamonds represented
the communists. My battles took place
over the bedrooms and living room of my parents’ apartment. I moved freely from my movies, which were
made up stories to talk to my stuffed animals, which somehow to me in my
imagination were more real than the toy figures and cards. I don’t know what my parents thought about
this because I don’t remember them ever saying anything even though I talked
incessantly out loud during my stories.
63.
I believe it was
in February and March of 1951 that I added another activity to my
playtime. I had started following
Illinois high school basketball in the Chicago
Tribune. Long before the NCAA
college basketball tournament gained fame, the Illinois high school basketball
tournament had its own “Sweet Sixteen” which crowned the state champion. I was fascinated by the regional and
sectional pairings that led the winning teams to the Sweet Sixteen brackets. Morton high school, which was a few short
blocks from my parents’ apartment, had a very good team, and this added to the
local excitement. I decided to construct
my own tournament. The teams that I
imagined were not high schools but represented cities and countries throughout
the world. I went to a map of the world,
which had become familiar to me because of my interest in the Korean War, and made up teams.
I paired the teams in regional and sectional brackets and determined the
winners by flipping coins. I pretended
that my imaginary family played on the team representing the United States,
which I called the Ohio team. When Ohio
played, I didn’t flip coins. Instead I would broadcast their games, and Ohio always
won. The championship game that first
year was Ohio versus Reykjavik, and my favorite, Pumpkin Face, scored the
winning basket.
64.
My parents’ new
apartment was on 25th Street in Cicero near Ridgeland Boulevard,
which was the western boundary of the town.
On 22nd Street or Cermak Road (the street was named for the
late mayor of Chicago who had been assassinated while riding in an open car
with then President-Elect Roosevelt), there were two movie theaters, the
Olympic and the Berwyn. Both were within
walking distance of our apartment, and my mother would take me and pick me up,
allowing me to go into the show by myself on Saturday afternoons, which was
usually packed with kids like myself. If
I saw a pirate movie, I came home and made up my own pirate story. The Disney movie, Treasure Island (1950),
based on the Robert Louis Stevenson novel made an impression on me, and I
easily identified with the protagonist, a boy roughly my own age. The movies I created had human characters,
and I was performing these stories for my stuffed animal family. As director, I took as my stage name, Phil
Lip. It bothered me that I didn’t have
real humans acting in my movies so I invented
something in my mind which I called ALMA (Automated Live Movie Action). The idea was that ALMA would generate human
characters, who would then act out their parts.
From then on, all the movies I produced and directed for my family were
done in my mind using ALMA.
65.
During this time,
my parents did not own a television and so the radio provided a source of
entertainment and imagination. I
listened to a whole host of shows: Jack
Benny, Our Miss Brooks, Duffy’s Tavern, the Shadow, You Bet Your Life
and my favorite, Fibber McGee and Molly. On school nights, I was in bed by 9 o’clock,
but I used to lie there with the radio on, waiting for Fibber to open his
closet. About this time, I began to
notice the prominence of New York City in radio broadcasts. Many of the quiz and entertainment shows
originated in New York. Duffy’s Tavern
was somewhere on 23rd Street in Manhattan. In 1951, the Dodgers and Giants had a great
pennant race, and I heard about the deciding home run that evening on the
radio. And, of course, the New York
Yankees eventually won everything. One
evening, I was lying in bed listening to a show and an individual arrived in
the studio out of breath saying he had been stuck in the Holland Tunnel and
that’s why he was late. There was a lot
of laughter and excitement. A deep
longing came over me, and I thought as I drifted off to sleep that I wanted to
see the Holland Tunnel, that I wanted to see New York City and be part of where
all this was happening.
66.
In the spring of
1972, two of my colleagues at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Dave and
Mary Ellen, gave me a going away party.
I had taken the actuarial job at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company
in New York City, located at One Madison Avenue, on the corner of 23rd
Street. Everyone wished me the best, but
some apprehension was expressed about cities in general, and New York, in
particular. With the growth of suburbs,
most cities had been declining for years, and New York was no exception. I didn’t worry about this. Cities might go through periods of decline,
but experience showed they came back.
Moreover, I felt comfortable in cities, and when I visited New York and
Metropolitan Life for my job interview, it was clear to me that this was the
right place for me.
67.
When I started
work at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company on July 10, 1972, I was told it
had 18,000 employees working in buildings surrounding One Madison Avenue and
Madison Square Park. Within months, the
company announced a major decentralization across the United States, and one of
the new locations was the western suburbs of Chicago from where I had just
come. For the moment, the actuaries were
staying in New York. I was always in
favor of geographical centralization and a functional decentralization and thus
opposed moves out of Manhattan, but of course I didn’t have any say or
influence in the matter. When I retired
in 2002 from Metropolitan Life or MetLife as they are now known, the company
had less than 1,000 employees working in Manhattan, and their future location
was in doubt. Over the years, MetLife
had moved thousands of employees to places like Aurora, Tampa, Bridgewater,
Hauppauge, and Long Island City in various attempts to cut expenses and become
more efficient. I spent nearly two and
one-half years working in Bridgewater, New Jersey, but happily for me, I worked
over 27 years in the One Madison Avenue buildings in the heart of New York City
where I had first arrived and wanted to be.
Years through Age 31 and Their Later Effects
201.
Later, as I
reflected on this accident, I recognized the mystery of God’s Incarnation and
came to a better understanding of this central event in human history. God came to us as a man because we are able to
understand human communication, and He arrived in such a way that a broken
humanity would not be terrified and could be healed. Christ, as described in scripture and
understood in the traditions of the Church and as reflected in the lives of
saints, confirms a portion of my adolescent insight; namely, the insight that
God cares for and loves individual people.
202.
Between October
11, 1962 and December 8, 1965, the twenty-first ecumenical council of the Roman
Catholic Church (Vatican II) was held.
Pope John XXIII’s stated objectives in calling the Council were to seek
the renewal of the Church and to modernize its forms and institutions. He also wanted to foster unity among
Christians. Being in school and working
full time during most of this period, I did not follow the Council closely, and
indeed the opening days Vatican II were overshadowed by the Cuban Missile
crisis. Subsequently, homilies at mass
were my main source of information as to what was happening at the Council.
203.
There was a
fairly sizable group of actuarial students at Continental Assurance at various
stages in the examination cycle, and I became friendly with most of them. One group periodically met on weekends to
play cards, mainly poker and variants of the game. I enjoyed these sessions and did quite
well. At work, I was doing FORTRAN and
COBOL programming, which wasn’t that interesting but
office camaraderie helped pass the time.
In the evenings, I was busy with my courses in mathematics at DePaul.
204.
In 1931 the
German mathematician, Kurt Gödel, published a significant paper, On Formally Undecidable Propositions of
Principia Mathematica and Related Systems, which once I understood it made
me appreciate the limitations of mathematics.
Ever since high school geometry I had been enamored with the axiomatic
method where certain axioms are given or accepted and from them an entire
edifice of theorems and mathematical structure can be reasoned. In his paper, however, Gödel demonstrated
that certain statements in any axiomatic system could not be proven to be
either true or false. There were then
certain undecidable propositions, neither true nor false, but simply not
decidable. If the mathematician
attempted to add an axiom or another given in order to determine whether the
proposition was true or false, then he would disturb the consistency of the
system; that is, certain other propositions could now be shown to be both true
and false simultaneously. A contradictory
system would be untenable for mathematics.
No mathematician would add an axiom that would introduce contradictions
in order to force certain other statements to be either true or false. Thus, in order to have consistency or no
contradictions in the system, mathematicians have to live with certain
propositions that are not decidable. In
some sense then an axiomatic system is not complete because it gives rise to
undecidable propositions. To recognize
that mathematics was limited in what it could do was an important step in my
intellectual development.
205.
Particle was
a quarterly journal “by and for” science students with offices in Berkeley and
Chicago. After the Mathematics Magazine turned
down my paper on determinants, I submitted it to Particle in August 1962 and based on their comments made some minor
changes and resubmitted it a month later.
Months passed, and I never heard from them, and thus it was a surprise
in December 1963 and again in February 1964 to receive letters from them that
the paper was being reviewed for publication.
In their last letter, the referee suggested that I prove some theorems
using my definition or discuss a computer application of the method. The definition was not constructed to prove
theorems but to calculate determinants.
The FORTRAN program I had written in the spring of 1963 was the computer
application that the referee was looking for in order to complete the paper,
but I did not have the time in February 1964, with both school and work, to
integrate the two into a coherent paper.
Besides, at that point in my life, it was no longer important to publish
a paper that introduced a computational technique where professionals were
already happy with the existing methodology, and thus I did not submit an
integrated paper and my correspondence on determinants came to an end.
206.
Slowly, I came to
understand what the winter night dream sequence meant to me. Mathematics was beautiful and elegant like
the splendor of the night sky on a clear cold night, but if I went that route,
I would be alone, the solitary figure in the dream, wondering at amazement and
working within myself to generate endless refinements to the edifice that was
mathematics.
207.
In 1964 John
Bell, a physicist concerned with the design of elementary-particle
accelerators, published a paper that showed it was possible to design actual
experiments, not just thought experiments, that would decide which of two
approaches to quantum reality were correct, orthodox quantum theory or any
other interpretation based on the idea that electrons and other quantum
particles have a definite local reality.
Orthodox quantum theory predicts a correlation between distinct objects
that doesn’t rely on the physical signals or interactions of classical physics. Some physicists thought that the notion of local
reality could be salvaged at the subatomic level through hidden variables
operating within elementary particles.
Bell’s paper was a major discovery, showing that measurements would
decide if a hidden variable approach was correct or not. Subsequent experiments in the 1970’s and
1980’s based on Bell’s paper showed that orthodox quantum theory was the
correct approach. Thus
the other part of the insight I had as an adolescent was also confirmed:
quantum theory with its probabilities rather than actualities is a correct
understanding of our universe.
208.
One of the young
actuarial students at Continental Assurance was Al; and in the summer of 1965,
Al, one of his friends, and I took a trip by car to Yellowstone National Park
and the Grand Teton mountains. It was
the first of several trips that I was to make, sometimes by myself and
sometimes with friends in the years 1965 through 1971 and where I was able to
see and explore almost the entire continental United States. On this particular trip, Al wanted to see if
he could drive over 1000 miles in one day.
On the first day, we left Chicago around 5 A.M. and after an extended
rest stop in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, we made it to Casper, Wyoming, over 1000
road miles from Chicago around 10:30 P.M.
209.
Al now designed
another trip, his grand tour, which would take him to every state in the
continental United States. He had mapped
out a road plan, which covered slightly over 10,000 miles and went to each of
the 48 contiguous states. In many
instances his plan only called for him to drive into one town in a particular
state and then to drive out. He would
mail himself a card at the local post office and the cancelled stamp would show
the date and time he had been in the state.
In that way he would have a set of 48 post cards, one from each state,
documenting his grand tour. The surprise
part of his plan was that he would complete the entire tour in 10 days, which
meant driving over 1,000 miles each day for 10 consecutive days. He needed a co-pilot to keep him awake and to
watch the road and asked me if I was interested. Al had a wry quiet sense of humor that made
it difficult to sometimes tell if he was serious or joking. I think he was serious, and the idea had some
appeal for me but not the 10 day timing, and thus I
declined. The number one cause of death
for young males at the time was accidents, and 1000 miles for 10 consecutive
days for one driver was too great a risk for any personal satisfaction or
reward that accomplishing such a trip might bring. I suggested 30 days, but one month’s vacation
from the job was not possible, and we abandoned the idea. However, his goal of visiting every state in
the continental Union appealed to me, and I decided to make his grand tour
leisurely over a period of years, dividing the country into regions and
visiting the major cities and sites in that region before returning home and
then moving on to another part of the country.
210.
Another actuary
in the office was Elmore. He was
slightly older than my other friends and was an examination away from
fellowship. Our conversations usually
touched on philosophical questions and religion. His goal at working in an office was to
accumulate as much money as possible so that he could retire as quickly as
possible. He found he could do actuarial
work and was happy with the salaries actuaries earned. Like me, he abhorred drudgery, office
politics, and the notion of climbing a corporate ladder. Thus any success
toward his goal of financial independence had to come from the money he earned
as a technical actuary rather than an insurance executive and then as to how
wisely he invested that money. With
respect to religion, Elmore was an agnostic, and he seemed genuinely surprised
to have found in me a practicing Catholic who appeared at least on the surface
to be reasonably normal. One notion that
bothered him and made Christianity impossible to believe was the eternity of
hell. If God was good and in charge, how
could he assign someone to suffer forever?
211.
Upon reflection,
some individuals have freely rejected God.
Observations show some individuals acting with cruelty and wickedness
toward others and apparently loving evil.
How can a just God not deliver us from evil in the next world? And if this means separating us permanently
from those who do evil without remorse, then why wouldn’t a merciful God do
that? Unfortunately, I know I have the
capacity to do evil. That is why I need
Christ, the Savior, and why I need to think and pray daily. I didn’t say any of this to Elmore because at
that time I didn’t understand enough to formulate the words.
212.
Time is not well
understood. The fact human beings
perceive it as passing or flowing with a present, past, and future raises
difficulties with many of the theoretical constructions of physics and
philosophy. The thought of eternity, not
only as everlasting, but also as timeless where all events are “seen” in one
moment allows the Christian believer to pray for individuals from his past,
with the possibility of affecting those events which have not yet been
separated or deconstructed in a quantum universe defined by probabilistic
states.
213.
One summer
afternoon I sat reading on the back porch of my parents’ house. Birds were in the grass, pecking at the
ground, walking, and then pecking some more.
One bird was somewhat separated from the other birds, off to the side
near the bushes and trees that divided my parents’ yard from the yard of their
neighbor. There I noticed a stray cat,
crouching close to ground, almost hidden from view by the shrubbery, waiting as
the isolated bird wandered closer toward the bushes. I observed that the cat remained perfectly
still, tense and coiled, waiting to pounce on the approaching bird. If I moved, I would disturb the situation and
force an outcome, and I wondered if I should take action?
214.
In the autumn of
1964, Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater were the presidential candidates of
the two major parties. As a Democrat, I
naturally supported Johnson, and Goldwater’s rhetoric scared me enough to
actively campaign for Johnson and to write letters for him. Apparently millions of other Americans were
also scared by Goldwater because we overwhelmingly returned Lyndon Johnson to
the White House with 61% of the votes.
Having reached age twenty-one in 1962, 1964 was the first Presidential
election in which I could vote. Because
of the subsequent actions of Johnson and his Democratic advisors in Viet Nam,
it was the last time I actively worked for a candidate because of party affiliation.
215.
On June 9, 1965,
I graduated from DePaul University with a M.S. degree in mathematics. At the end of June I
learned that I had passed Part 2 of the actuarial examinations. The prior June I had received credit for Part
1. I was a very happy person as the
summer of 1965 began, not only because I had done well with my graduate level
mathematics courses and the actuarial examinations but also because I had wide
circle of friends. From my grammar
school days, I frequently saw Jim and his wife, Judy, and Ray. From my high school days, I saw my chess
playing friends at tournaments and club meetings. From my college days, I golfed frequently
with John and Ed, the latter having also received a M.S. in mathematics from
DePaul. Finally, there were my workers
and friends from Continental Assurance and a host of social activities through
work.
216.
It was reasonably
clear to me that in many ways I was now living my second dream sequence,
Renoir’s Boat Party.
217.
In July 1965
President Johnson announced massive increases in American ground troops to
prevent South Vietnam from falling to the communists in North Vietnam; and in
order to meet the demand in manpower, he also announced corresponding increases
in the monthly draft totals. In early
September, I received a notice from my draft board to report for a medical
examination on September 22. I passed
their physical and mental examinations and was classified 1A, which meant a
draft notice could come at any time. My
mother was overwrought and actually started to lose weight with worry. My godfather, Uncle Joseph, took me aside and
spoke to me like I was his son. I had a
M.S. in mathematics and if I could use my degree in some positive way and avoid
fighting in Vietnam, the family would be relieved. He said that there was no glory in the war
with North Vietnam. This was not like
World War II where the nation had to fight to defend itself. This message from a regular Democrat, an
intelligent hard-working printer with no specialized knowledge in world
affairs, given to me in 1965 proved to be more accurate and
true than the messages given by the “best and brightest” that ran the
United States. I often wonder about the
processes, the events and thoughts that cause so many individuals who obtain
positions of leadership and power to devalue or not properly evaluate the
opinions of ordinary people.
218.
I believe it was
in early 1967 that Uncle Al and Aunt Ann returned to Chicago for a family visit
from California where they had relocated.
Uncle Al told my father and his brothers about how great he thought
California’s governor, Ronald Reagan, was.
I think I smugly said something disparaging about movie and television
actors as politicians, which caused my uncle to respond, “Don’t underestimate
him. He’s a natural leader and could be
President some day.”
219.
I had thought
about teaching math at a small college once I obtained my M.S., but the
mathematics in the actuarial profession attracted me and caused me to
hesitate. Offsetting the academic
foundations of the profession was the actual running of an insurance company, a
business with all of its ramifications including office politics, which did not
attract me in the least. I kept thinking
about how much I enjoyed mathematics, the intellectual excitement of
discovering theorems and how mathematics was constructed and that I would
eventually lose that if I continued with the actuarial profession. Vietnam and the pressure of being drafted now
introduced another factor. I thought the
United States was correct in trying to stop the spread of communism but
uncertain as to the wisdom of a ground war in Southeast Asia. If drafted, I thought I could perhaps invoke
religious principles and apply for service in a medical unit, helping doctors
with the wounded rather than actually fighting, but I was not certain how our
armed services would react to such a request from a draftee. About this time, I heard of an opportunity at
a college that had recently opened for women in St. Charles Illinois called St.
Dominic’s College. They needed an
instructor in physics and mathematics starting in September 1966, and the
timing seemed right for me. I could take
the additional physics courses I needed at DePaul during the academic year
1965-1966 and continue working at Continental.
When St. Dominic College offered me the position, I accepted. The Dean wrote a letter to my draft board,
and I obtained a deferment.
220.
Sometime later as
I was studying demography I noticed that the number of births in the United
States increased dramatically in 1946; more precisely, the number of live
births went up by 553,000 from 2,858,000 to 3,411,000, an increase of 19%. This was the start of the post World War II
baby boom, which lasted in the United States through 1964. It was this increase in population that
nineteen years later gave Lyndon Johnson the extra manpower he needed to fight
the war. If the increased manpower had
not been there, would the United States have put ground troops into Vietnam? The factors and considerations that went into
the war and its continuation were never clear to me. Goldwater had frightened me because I thought
he would go to war too quickly, but then Johnson and his Democratic advisors
actually went to war contrary to the mandate he had received in the general
election. The miscalculations on the war
eventually reinforced my opinion that politicians of both major parties did not
know what they were talking about. Real
world events were complicated, intertwined with other unknowns and essentially
not predictable. Individuals, even
experts, who expressed certainty about political and social issues, were
generally not to be believed. The expert
who was more nuanced with opinions and who recognized uncertainty was more
believable. I began to look for
individuals, regardless of party or political affiliation, who I could trust to
act responsibly in a world full of surprises and uncertain events.
221.
In Illinois
voters did not have to declare party affiliation in order to vote in the
primary elections. Thus a person could
decide on the day of the primary to choose either a Republican ballot or a
Democratic ballot, and two years later switch the choice of party if a
particular candidate on the other ballot appealed to him. When I came to New York, I found besides the
two major parties, a wide array of parties, such as Conservative and Liberal,
but I had to declare my party affiliation up front at registration. “I’m independent,” I told the clerk when I
was registering to vote, “I don’t want to be affiliated with any party.” The amazed clerk had to search for a form
that allowed a citizen to register as an independent but eventually found it,
and I was so registered. The problem, of
course, was that I could vote only in the general election, not the primary
election; and in New York City where the overwhelming majority of registered
voters are Democrats this meant I could not vote in the primary election, which
for all practical purposes, determined the actual winning candidate. As an example, in the first general election
in which I voted, the candidate that I wanted had already gone down to defeat
in the primary and was not even on the ballot.
I decided I had to vote in the primaries and re-registered as a
Democrat.
222.
Many years later
as I was signing the voting register in a primary election, I noticed the
letters DEM underneath my name. This
told the clerk at the voting booth that I was a Democrat, and she duly noted
the proper ballot. What surprised me was
that my daughter, who had just turned 18 and registered, had the letters BLA
underneath her name. I couldn’t figure
out what party BLA referenced. Black
Liberation Army was the only thing that came into my mind. I knew she might have liberal tendencies but
even so that was an unusual choice of party given the current political
climate. I thought I would broach the
subject with her to see if entry into college had altered some of her
views. I laughed out loud when I found
out that BLA meant blank and that she had registered as an independent!
223.
My year of
studying graduate physics at DePaul was not very productive. I did not think as a physicist, and I found
myself struggling with many of the courses similar to my experiences as an
undergraduate and in contrast to the graduate level mathematics courses I had
just taken to obtain my Masters. I
bought the three volume set, The Feynman
Lectures on Physics, and in 1966 I had a grant at the Argonne National
Laboratory for their program, Summer Institute in Nuclear-Physical Chemistry,
and these sources gave me some confidence with twentieth century physics, but
classical physics remained a challenge for me.
224.
About twenty new
faculty members descended on St. Dominic College nestled in the woods on the
banks of the Fox River in St. Charles Illinois in the autumn of 1966. The school’s President, a Dominican sister,
wanted to develop a top-flight college quickly and decided that a high faculty
to student ratio would help recruit highly rated students. The lay faculty outnumbered the Dominican
teaching sisters three to one and was a diverse group in terms of academic
disciplines and teaching experience and also ecumenical with Protestants, Jews,
and agnostics represented. I made
friends with some of the faculty, but for a number of reasons, I did not enjoy
my first year of teaching. Firstly, the
commute between St. Charles and Westchester was too long to do on a daily basis
especially in the winter, and thus I rented a flat in St. Charles a few minutes
drive from the campus. I was lonely,
eating most of my meals in local restaurants, and preparing the next day
assignments in the evening. Secondly,
the town of St. Charles was located on the banks of the Fox River, forty miles
west of Chicago, and had its own history which dated back to the nineteenth
century. It appeared to me that many of
its residents were worried that the western suburbs of Chicago were growing too
rapidly, that all the available farm land between St. Charles and Chicago would
be lost to developers, and that the big city was encroaching on their way of
life. They were correct in their
assessment but generally powerless to stop the western migration out of Chicago
and its suburbs, and I believe this affected the way some of the native
residents viewed the new College.
Simultaneously and somewhat contradictory, I found the natural
friendliness of some of the residents disquieting. For example, when I first opened an account
at the local bank, the teller recognized the address of my flat, knew my
landlady and proceeded to tell me things about her finances that were
professionally inappropriate. I did not
feel comfortable in St. Charles and was happy to go home or into Chicago every
weekend. Finally, as a new teacher, I
was very nervous and this was compounded by the fact that I didn’t know or love
physics the way a college teacher should.
I realized I had made a mistake in agreeing to teach the subject. By the end of the first semester, I started
looking at other local colleges in order to find a job teaching mathematics,
but St. Dominic College offered me another yearly contract, this time to teach
only mathematics, and so I stayed at the school another year.
225.
During my first
year of teaching, I would periodically drive to DeKalb, Illinois and visit Joe
Hartley, my former high school basketball coach. Joe was now teaching and living in DeKalb,
but Beryl was back in Westchester teaching mathematics at Nixon grammar school
and completing the years she needed to collect a full pension. They would see each other on weekends, but
during the week, Joe was by himself and pleased to have company over dinner at
one of the local restaurants. In spite
of the age difference between us, we had a few things in common – we both
enjoyed basketball and we both dabbled in the stock market. It was actually Joe Hartley who started me
investing in stocks, back when I worked at Continental. My parents, having lived through the great
Depression, never invested in the stock market and kept their money in banks
and savings and loan associations, but Joe said prudent investing in the market
was wise over the long term and showed me the basics, giving me the name of his
broker. In 1964, I had opened an account
and began investing. I picked my own
stocks, set targets, watched my rate of return, and sold when I thought the
time was right. I was not an active
trader and never owned more than a handful of stocks at any one time, but at
least this experience gave me some idea of how a business was run and how money
was made. Joe and I now compared
companies and stocks.
226.
As far as I could
tell the changes initiated by Vatican II caused divisions among the Dominican
sisters. The tensions, although publicly
unstated and certainly not understood by me, were at times palpable. The President of the college, using the
themes of Vatican II - renewal, modernization, and ecumenism - wanted to
quickly create a great Catholic college from scratch; however, certain
practical considerations, such as outgoing expenses exceeding incoming revenues
caused in part by a large number of lay faculty and not enough students, were
obviously causing problems. More
fundamentally, there appeared to be divisions between those nuns who wanted to
move and implement changes quickly and those who wanted to go slowly or not at
all. Whatever the reasons, between my
first and second years of teaching, the President was replaced by another
Dominican sister and subsequently left the religious order. Another difficulty on campus was that a few
of the lay faculty proved to be unstable – one had an emotional breakdown and
had to leave teaching, while a second apparently left his wife of many years
for one of his students. St. Dominic
College closed its doors in 1970 and sold its campus to Arthur Andersen, the
accounting and consulting firm, who used it as a training center.
227.
One of the
students said to me that many people only call upon God when something was
going wrong. If things were going
smoothly, they did not think about Him.
I don’t know how true this is or what percentage of the population comes
under this description. In theory,
Christians should give thanks daily for all their blessings and all the good
things in life and not take them for granted.
If evil is threatened, we should redouble our prayers. God is good, and since Pentecost the Holy
Spirit is with us; and thus, we have the power to put evil behind us if are not
seduced by its short-term attractions.
Physical evil that comes to us from the outside and through nature
remains a mystery to me. I suspect that
mankind has yet much to learn about physics and biology and their connections
with our interior lives and how our minds are linked to the universe and events.
228.
One of the lay
faculty who also functioned as a student dean told me he didn’t believe in
prayer. It was a waste of time; only the
actions of people mattered and that was the way to change the world. His attitude was common among many of the
academic people I knew. Prayer, however,
is human action, requiring thought, time and energy. Actions produce results, and therefore, I
think we should pray and not be led astray by the argument that it makes no
difference.
229.
Like prayer,
almsgiving is another action that makes a difference in the world and which I
started to practice. In March 1967, I
became a foster parent, joining Foster Parents’ Plan, Inc. and began to support
a Vietnamese child, Phu. According to
the case history, Phu was born September 1, 1957 and was one of eight
children. His parents came to South
Vietnam as refugees from the north, the father died of tuberculosis in 1965,
and the mother and children settled in Cholon.
The mother and the two oldest children worked, but their combined income
was not sufficient to support their basic needs. Because of my monthly support, Foster
Parents’ Plan provided the child with a monthly cash grant, medical care, and
schooling; and this assistance gave the entire family some measure of
security. Every month Phu wrote me a
letter, which was translated into English by Foster Parents’ Plan, and I
received both the handwritten original letter and the typed translation. I, in turn, wrote short notes back to him and
his family, and we exchanged photographs.
230.
Phu was my foster
child from March 1967 through August 1971 when Foster Parents’ Plan determined
that outside assistance was no longer necessary and wrote me, “You will be
happy to learn that the family’s economic conditions have improved to the point
where further outside help will be unnecessary.
Our Director advises that the boy passed the highly competitive entrance
exams to the first grade of a public secondary school last year. He is now on summer vacation and is a very
good student. He ranked among the top
ten of sixty-three in his class. He
would like to be a teacher later on. A
recent chest x-ray examination showed that he as well as his mother and sister,
Dung, are now cured of TB.” The letter
then continued and documented the family’s finances, which had improved
significantly from March 1967.
231.
Years later I was
reading a pamphlet distributed by the
Christopher’s that encouraged individuals not to weary of doing good things
in the world. To me that is a message
worth noting. If I had not kept Phu’s
letters, I would not have remembered the circumstances of my involvement. Sometimes I hear friends of mine, basically
good people, say that they have accomplished nothing in life. I don’t think they remember all the good
things they did in the past and need the encouragement provided by
organizations like the Christopher’s
who remind us not to become weary and to continue to do good deeds to
others.
232.
During my second
year of teaching, I shared a flat with Jacque, who was a French Canadian, and
an instructor of French at the College.
The fact that I now had a roommate and was no longer alone, along with
my teaching mathematics instead of physics, made my second year at St. Dominic
College far more enjoyable than my first year, but I still thought that
teaching was probably not a good career choice for me. Moreover, I knew that a Ph.D. in mathematics
was essential if I wanted to do anything in mathematics, including teaching. It was for these reasons that I left St.
Dominic College and accepted a graduate teaching assignment in the evening
division at the Illinois Institute of Technology in the autumn of 1968. This program paid me to teach calculus and
differential equations in the evening and to pursue a doctorate in the day.
233.
The year 1968 was
traumatic for the United States. On
January 30, North Vietnam launched its Tet offensive, which turned American
opinion against the war. At the end of
March, Lyndon Johnson surprised the nation when he announced at the end of a
speech that he would not seek reelection.
I remember watching him on television with my parents and my Uncle Al
and Aunt Emma and all of them sadly shook their heads, wondering what had
happened to the Democratic Party. In
fairness to Lyndon Johnson, his domestic programs did much for the country;
Medicare and Medicaid virtually eliminated poverty for the elderly, civil
rights legislation restored justice for minorities, and a host of other
legislation improved education, cultural programs, the environment, and the
protection of consumers, but in March 1968 these achievements were overshadowed
by war. On April 4 Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. was assassinated, followed by the assassination of Senator Robert
Kennedy in June. The Democratic National
Convention held in Chicago in late August exploded in street violence. The nation seemed to be coming apart. Earlier that summer, as Jacque and I traveled
by car taking the leisurely variant of Al’s grand tour through the southwestern
and western states, we saw hundreds of students traveling, but everywhere from
the hitchhikers on the highways of Texas to the flower people in San Francisco
the V sign for peace was flashed.
234.
April 4, 1968 was
a very warm early spring day in St. Charles.
I was driving, crossing the bridge over the Fox River, with the car
windows wide open on my way to a restaurant for supper when a crazy random
thought popped into my head, “Mayor Daley has been assassinated.” I parked the car, went into the restaurant,
and ordered. While waiting for my food,
an announcer broke into the television program that was showing above the
restaurant bar. He said there was
breaking news and to stay tuned for a special announcement. I looked up startled and waited, half
expecting to hear something about the Mayor, but then the announcer said that
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot in Memphis! Up to that point, I never had a clairvoyant
extra sensory experience in my life, and technically my thought, which occurred
about ten minutes before Dr. King’s murder was announced on television, was not
correct because I had the wrong person.
Nevertheless, I sat in the restaurant, shocked at the assassination and
bewildered by my experience. Nothing
like that has happened to me subsequently, and I attribute the experience to chance
and not some “sixth sense” because I know I occasionally have silly
uncontrolled predictive thoughts, which I promptly forget when nothing happens
to validate them; but this one time, my predictive thought was close to what
actually happened and given the stature of Dr. King, I remember the event.
235.
To me Dr. King’s
public life is a testimony to the power of Christ’s message in the world. His “I Have a Dream” speech, which has made
its way into American history, is the gospel call for justice “without
bitterness or hatred” acknowledging the brotherhood of mankind and the “glory
of the Lord” and ending with a thanks to “God Almighty”. When I was growing up, I had virtually no
contact with blacks or Negroes, the term used at the time, before I went to
high school. When the civil rights
movement started, I thought everyone was like me, happy and basically satisfied
with a good life, and I did not understand what motivated people to join the
movement. Slowly, as events unfolded, I
learned. On Good Friday in 1963 Dr. King
was arrested and thrown into a Birmingham jail.
Out of that jail, he wrote a letter, which I didn’t read until much
later but which answered my questions. Dr.
King wrote, “But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers
at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen
hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and
sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers
smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society;
when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a
Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect
next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever
fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’; then you will understand why we
find it difficult to wait.” The night
before his death, Dr. King himself may have had a clairvoyant experience or
perhaps the grace of God had prepared him for death when he said, “Like
anybody, I would like to live a long life.
Longevity has its place. But I’m
not concerned about that now. I just
want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed
me to go up to the mountain and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised
land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know that we, as a people,
will get to the promised land. And so I’m happy tonight.
I’m not worried about anything.
I’m not fearing any man. Mine
eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
236.
The opening of
the first Amendment to the United States Constitution reads, “Congress shall
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof...” When Dr. King stood
at the Lincoln Memorial, on public property, and delivered his “I Have a Dream”
speech and spoke the words “Lord” and “God”, he was not establishing his
religion as the law of the land but freely exercising the right to practice his
religion as stated in the first Amendment.
237.
Sometime during
the school year 1967-1968, before the Democratic National Convention and the
subsequent trial of the Chicago 7, one of the college departments, I believe it
was the History Department, invited the anti-war organizer, Rennie Davis, to
speak at the St. Dominic campus. There
was a huge uproar, the St. Charles press and the local radio station decided to
cover the event, some faculty members were to be on the speakers’ platform with
Mr. Davis to present an alternate point of view, and the Dean who was to
introduce the speakers – this was the same Dean who told me that the world
could only be changed by physical action - decided he didn’t want to be seen
and asked me to take his place on the podium.
Even though I did not favor public demonstrations against the war, I
recognized their validity under the Constitution, and I was a reasonably
objective person. Moreover, as a
laid-back mathematician who could fairly represent both points of view, I might
serve as a calming influence on the presenters and audience. I agreed to open the session, introduce the
participants, and facilitate; and that is what I did. Happily the event took place without
incident. My recollection is that Rennie
Davis made his speech, which was neither warmly greeted nor roundly rejected by
the audience. A faculty member – the one
who eventually left his wife for one of his students – argued for American
values, stopping communism in Southeast Asia, and support for the war, which
raised a passionate rebuke from a small group of anti-war students and one
other faculty member who claimed the war went against American values and was
immoral.
238.
I watched the
1968 Democratic National Convention on television. Hubert Humphrey received
the nomination, but his triumph was overshadowed by the anti-war
demonstrations organized by Rennie Davis and others and the subsequent adverse
reaction of the Chicago police to them.
With two assassinations in mind and civil unrest rampant, Mayor Daley
was determined that the Convention would take place and not be disrupted. He was organized with police and troops that
outnumbered demonstrators two to one.
What he needed then was a calming influence, someone who could have told
the police that they had the situation under control and that there was no need
for strong-arm antics. Unfortunately
that did not happen and crowds of people were clubbed and gassed - Davis
himself was knocked unconscious – and some of the violence was shown on live
television to millions of Americans. By
the grace of God, no one was killed, but the candidacy of Hubert Humphrey may
have received its mortal wound in Chicago.
239.
The conclusion to
the first Amendment of the United States Constitution reads, “...or abridging
the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances”. The anti-war protesters in Chicago had the
right to peacefully assemble and to exercise their freedom of speech. However, the demonstrations in Chicago had
not been peaceful, and the organizers were charged with conspiring to incite a
riot. The jury trial acquitted the
“Chicago 7” of conspiracy but found five of them, including Renee Davis, guilty
of inciting a riot. Subsequently a
review court overturned those convictions.
Simultaneously, in separate cases, police officers were also cleared of
any wrong doing during the Convention.
Public demonstrations are part of the American tradition, and we need to
be vigilant that peaceful assemblies of unpopular protesters will not be
stopped by tactics that accuse them of non-existent crimes.
240.
Throughout the
1960’s and early 1970’s, I continued to play USCF chess, postal chess, and was
a member of various chess teams and chess clubs in the Chicago area. I have many pleasant memories and experiences
from chess over those years. I will only
mention two. First, between 1967 and
1971, the Oak Park Chess Club periodically visited the Indiana State Prison in
Michigan City, Indiana to play their chess team, the Gambiteers. The matches, played under tournament
conditions, within the prison’s recreational area were on Sunday
afternoons. I am reminded of those trips
whenever I hear the scriptural injunction to visit prisoners (e.g., Matthew 25,
37). Of course, modern prisons provide
food and medicine, but back in St. Matthew’s time, they didn’t, which is why it
was an important act of mercy for the early Christians. For the Oak Park chess team, we looked
forward to our matches with the Gambiteers because it was an opportunity to
play the game we loved in an unusual setting, and I don’t think our team
thought very much about the spiritual or social aspects of our visits. My second memory is that of the Illinois
Chess Open which was held Labor Day weekend, August 30-September 2, 1968 in
Chicago. Because of the trauma at the
Democratic National Convention, which ended the day before the tournament
started, the hotel that was to host the event canceled the playing site. (The joke among the chess players was that
hotel management thought we were going to continue the demonstrations, wantonly
throwing chess pieces at bystanders).
Fortunately, my former company, Continental Assurance, showed common
sense and offered us their building.
Chess players received special passes to enter the building for the
weekend tournament; I returned to the place where I had worked for over two
years; and in some small way Chicago returned to normal.
241.
Two weeks before
the 1968 election, I surprised Ray with the statement that I was voting for Hubert
Humphrey. “How in the world did you come
to that conclusion?” he asked wide eyed with amazement, believing that the
Democratic Party was in shambles and that Nixon would win easily. I explained that it had nothing to do with
party; that as an independent voter, I thought Humphrey was a better candidate
than either Nixon or Wallace and that he could do the best job as
President. Thus, on that Election Day I
cast my vote for Humphrey; and regardless of party, the person I thought the
best candidate received my vote in every subsequent election. The 1968 popular vote was surprisingly close,
but Nixon won the election and became America’s 37th President.
242.
When I first
started teaching at St. Dominic College, my Uncle Frank, my father’s youngest
brother, asked me how I liked teaching at a college for women. When I told him I was nervous teaching, he
got a lascivious grin on his face, “You’re only twenty-four; I too would be
nervous around all those twenty year old women!
Are you dating any of them?” I smiled,
“No, Uncle Frank, that wouldn’t be right, it wouldn’t be professional; however,
if I ever leave the school, I might consider it.”
243.
E. had been one
of my students, and in the tumultuous summer of 1968 when the fabric of
American society had shifted, we started to date. I was not looking for sex for pleasure in
spite of the sexual revolution that was unfolding. To me most of the cultural change was not
attractive and some of it contrary to Christianity. I wanted a family, and a woman who shared
similar ideas with respect to God, children, and living, and I looked for
someone who might have those ideas. I
thought if two people agreed about the essentials then that would naturally
lead to marriage and family living.
Thus, I kept my focus on those essentials, but it soon became clear that
there was another essential that was missing and not developing in my
relationship with E. and that was love.
Hence, we stopped seeing each other.
244.
In July 1968,
Pope Paul VI released, Humanae Vitae,
his encyclical that said artificial contraception was wrong and that modern day
developments did not warrant a change in this understanding. Many observers, both Catholic and
non-Catholic, thought the ban on artificial contraception would be lifted
because of overpopulation concerns and the advent of the birth control
pill. A majority of the individuals,
which consisted of married couples and clerical professionals, on the Pope’s
commission to study the question had recommended lifting the ban, and
therefore, there was real surprise, almost shock, when the ban was vigorously
upheld. No one in my family of parents,
aunts or uncles or any of my friends or colleagues seemed to think that there
was anything wrong with the practice of artificial birth control. The assumption, tacit but sometimes stated,
was that adult sexual intercourse was completely between the two adults and
didn’t involve others. The notions that
God and natural law might be involved were foreign concepts and never seriously
considered. Humanae Vitae received extensive criticism from both Catholics and
non-Catholics. Some Catholic theologians
and priests openly disagreed with the encyclical saying that the Pope had
issued a non-infallible decision, that there was no definition of dogma, a
point of revealed truth to be held by all, in the encyclical; and therefore,
married couples were free to follow their own consciences. Non-Catholics expressed alarm that
overpopulation would swamp the globe, leading to uncontrolled famine and wars
and that zero population growth was necessary.
I remember listening to Norman Ross, a Chicago TV and radio talk show
host, interview Philip Hauser, my former boss’s boss at the Population Research
Center, discussing the rate of increase of population and extrapolating the current
population exponentially into impossible numbers of people – how would the
human race survive? A similar theme was
discussed that same year by Paul Ehrlich in his book, The Population Bomb, and
a few years later when the global think tank known as the Club of Rome issued
their work, Limits of Growth. These experts all agreed that the planet was
in serious trouble and predicted economic crisis by the 1990’s due to
population growth.
245.
I tended not to
believe the demographic doomsters. I
didn’t have a completely cogent argument, but I think I recognized that life
expectancy was one of the basic measures as to how individuals in a population
were fairing, and globally, almost everywhere, in spite of the rapid increases
in population during the 20th century, life expectancy was
improving. Thus, increasing populations
were not immediately harmful, and if they turned out to be, then we should
start to see that impact in human mortality.
Additionally, in an intuitive way, zero population growth seemed bad to
me in that it would probably lead to stagnation and a decline in living
standards. On the other hand, unlimited
or very high population growth was also crazy as the doomsters had shown. I thought that slow, steady population growth
was the best way to achieve ongoing progress.
246.
“How many pairs
of rabbits can be produced from a single pair in a year if every month each
pair begets a new pair which from the second month on becomes productive?” This is a famous mathematical problem from
the year 1202 given by Leonardo Fibonacci, also known as Leonardo of Pisa. It leads to the following sequence where the
terms are the number of pairs of rabbits present in successive months: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144,233,... The pattern here is that each term in the
sequence, given that the first two terms are 1’s, is the sum of the preceding
two terms. These Fibonacci numbers are
seemingly ubiquitous in nature, occurring in a surprising number of unexpected
places. I have had fun working with
these numbers. Humans, of course, do not
reproduce following this sequence, but real population growth world wide has
been measured, quantified, and then projected based on various
assumptions. In the fully developed
countries of the world, birth rates have fallen dramatically from the 1960’s
and today virtually none of them are reproducing their populations, a fact that
is still masked in many countries by their prior population increases. Unless this trend is reversed, these nations
will actually start to lose population, exclusive of immigration, sometime in
the first half of the new millennium. In
most of the less developed countries of the world, birth rates today are
generally falling but remain above the replacement level. Most projections have the world population
leveling off in the middle of the 21st century and exponential doubling is no
longer in any forecast. Although the
population of the world grew four-fold in the 20th century and more
than doubled in my lifetime, the predicted catastrophes never occurred because
technology and markets produced enough food, goods, and services.
247.
Father Langan at
Divine Infant spoke about artificial contraception and the unpopularity of the
teaching which banned it, “the Pope has not been proven or shown to be
wrong.” A year before Humanae Vitae was issued, a visiting
priest told parishioners that the ban against artificial birth control could
not be removed by the Church because the teaching was true, based on natural
law which came from God, and taught consistently by the bishops throughout the
history of the Church. In my nearly
fifty years of attending mass and listening to sermons, these are the only two
times I have heard birth control mentioned from the pulpit. Information on where to learn about natural
family planning methods has been periodically listed in parish bulletins.
248.
Natural family
planning methods had been discussed and written about before Humanae Vitae, but the encyclical
brought them to the forefront with the following words: “If therefore there are well-grounded reasons
for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of
husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that
married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the
reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times
that are infertile, thus controlling births in a way which does not in the
least offend the moral principle which We have just explained.” One of these methods, which became known as the
Billings Ovulation Method, after John and Evelyn Billings, the Australian
doctors who developed and wrote about the method extensively, is very
straightforward. A change in cervical
mucus indicates that the cyclical ovulation process is beginning anew, and the
couple needs to abstain from marital intercourse during this time if they are
spacing births.
249.
In the 1960’s I
found it difficult to believe that artificial contraception was wrong, but over
time, my views were modified once I thought about nature and as a Christian
inserted God into the picture. I usually
found it easy to ignore God. I could get
up in the morning and go through the entire day without once acknowledging his
presence. If my conscience started to
bother me or if by chance I saw or heard something that reminded me of God, I
could just turn my mind away and become engrossed in another activity. I could be closed, not open, to God – I could
set up barriers. This line of thought
led me to see that contraception is a barrier, an obvious barrier to new
life. How can I reflect the natural
order and the innate desire to procreate and to transmit genes if I use
contraceptives? How can a new life come
to be if I don’t allow it? How can God
be God in the birth of a baby if I don’t allow him to be God? If Providence, and this is speculation, needs
a specific number of people to assure that a specific event or action will
occur with a very high degree of probability because at least one person will
freely do God’s will, then what happens if I don’t initially cooperate and
refuse to have children? Yet there is a
tremendous ongoing responsibility in bringing children into the world, in
educating and raising them, in assuring that the mother’s well-being and health
are preserved, all of which I could not take lightly; and if a slow and steady
growth in population is good for society, then the reason for spacing births is
clear, and perhaps providentially the Billings Ovulation Method proved to be an
effective method of spacing births.
250.
I taught
mathematics in the evening division of the Illinois Institute of Technology
(I.I.T.) between September 1968 and May 1972.
During this period of time, I took mathematics courses toward a
doctorate, played on the I.I.T. chess team for the school in matches, traveled
extensively throughout the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States, made many
new friends, wrote articles about mathematics (one published) and short stories
(none published) and generally enjoyed a life of intellectual leisure.
251.
Rodney was one of
my friends during this period of time.
He was a single graduate teaching assistant studying for a doctorate in
mathematics similar to me. After
teaching classes, the two of us, sometimes with others, would go out to a
variety of pubs to talk and socialize.
O’Rourke’s located on North Avenue was our favorite watering hole. It had darts and chess boards available to
patrons, photographs of the great Irish writers on the walls, and Irish songs
or jazz playing in the background. Rod
and I discussed mathematics, teaching, the space program, evolution, movies,
and world events. We drank beer, played
chess, and spun impossible theories – it was a good time.
252.
During my
speculations, I was not able to construct a plausible reconciliation between
evolution and the early chapters of Genesis.
The concept that mankind had fallen from some ideal state seems critical
to an understanding of Christian scripture, and thus, although it may be
convenient in various contexts to begin the discussion of salvation history
with Abraham, ultimately it is intellectually dishonest not to conceptually
consider the fall of mankind or to ignore it because it appears to be or
perhaps is not reconcilable with evolution.
I thought that scientists would continue to observe and factually
document the natural order, hopefully as free as humanly possible from any
predisposed materialist ideology, while at the same time Christians would
continue to pray and work in the world fully embracing all the doctrines of
their faith; and eventually over time, mankind would come to a synthesis and a
collective understanding of what is true.
Thus far, this has not happened, and today in the United States, the
debate over evolution continues and has expanded with Intelligent Design being
put forth as an alternative explanation and evolutionists rejecting these
arguments.
253.
Teilhard de
Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man (1959)
set forth to reconcile Christian theology with the facts and implications of
evolution. I found his writings very
difficult to understand. In the 1960’s
and 1970’s his thoughts received the attention of both scientists and
theologians, but as far as I can determine, not many individuals believe he
achieved the desired reconciliation between the supernatural elements of Christianity
and naturalism. Nevertheless, Teilhard
gave a view of the evolutionary process moving toward its consummation in God,
which helped to dispel the impression that the Christian and modern scientific
views of the natural world were in irreconcilable conflict.
254.
More recently, I
returned to speculations about evolution and the writings in Genesis. Christianity affirms an event took place at
the beginning of the history of mankind (or was it at the start of recorded or
observed history?) that separated us from God and the paradise He created. Scripture speaks of an earlier fall, those of
angels, who freely turned from God and disrupted His creation (2Pet2:4).
These events are discontinuities in religious history, and they are
barely noted, the full stories having been lost in time and forgotten, leaving
an impression of legends. These
discontinuities do not cause Christians to abandon what they know to be true
about their faith. On the other hand,
evolution shows a long history of species coming and going with homo sapiens being one of many species
to appear. Geology and biology are
marked by discontinuities, sharp breaks in empirical evidence, where it is not
clear exactly how or why a new species suddenly arose. These discontinuities do not cause
evolutionists to abandon what they know is true about their science. In the end some of these religious and
scientific discontinuities may be explained and thus will disappear, but others
may be true singularities in the construct of the universe or the natural
world. Analogous to what happens in
axiomatic systems, the complete truth may not be consistent or reconcilable or
decidable to human beings. Thus, I
continue to accept both Christianity and evolution.
255.
On July 20, 1969,
I sat with Ray in his living room and watched on television as the United
States of America landed Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin on the
moon. We were happy and proud as
Americans of this accomplishment, “one small step for man ... one giant leap
for mankind.” Five other Apollo missions
were to land on the moon, the last being in December 1972, but progress in
space has been very slow the last thirty years compared to what I and all my
friends thought would happen back in those heady days when everything seemed
possible.
256.
In 1969 the PBS
Educational Television stations showed Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, a remarkably beautiful series of thirteen shows that
summarized Western European art over the ages.
The scripts of these television shows were subsequently turned into the
text of a book, amply illustrated with the works of art discussed. One of the sculptures shown was Gianlorenzo
Bernini’s Ecstasy of St.Teresa, “one
of the most deeply moving works in European art.” Here is what Clark said of this work,
“Bernini’s gift of sympathetic imagination, of entering into the emotions of
others – a gift no doubt enhanced by his practice of St. Ignatius’ Spiritual
Exercises – is used to convey the rarest and most precious of all emotional
states, that of religious ecstasy. He
has illustrated exactly the passage in the saint’s autobiography in which she
describes the supreme moment of her life: how an angel with a flaming golden
arrow pieced her heart repeatedly.”
These words resonated with me for they explicitly recognized spiritual
and religious ecstasy, emotions that had touched me in my life, albeit not as
dramatically. Moreover, the words
“rarest and most precious” rang true for such moments that were truly rare and
once experienced, both impossible to deny and difficult to describe.
257.
I speculated that
there was a genetic component to religious emotions, and consequently, chastity
among believers has worked to keep those emotions rare in the general
population. If religious, spiritual and
altruistic tendencies are transmitted through genes, then that is another
reason among individuals with those traits to be generous when planning
children. Certain individuals are called
by God to religious life, a life of service to other people, a life where
chastity is freely accepted and directed toward a greater good; and the results
of their good deeds are seen everywhere, in hospitals, in schools and in parish
communities; but I never felt called to the religious life. Perhaps my ego deflected God’s message or my vanity was too great, but I wanted to marry
and, if possible, have children.
258.
Rodney started
dating a woman who was studying for her Masters degree at I.I.T. and suggested
that we occasionally double date. I did
so and went out with a couple of different women just to make an evening and
joined Rodney and his friend; but during this period of time, I was attracted
to another woman, X., who was also a mathematician. I saw X. socially along with other people, at
parties and school events, and we went out a couple of times. Unfortunately, our values were different, and
I could not see her raising children, and thus we stopped dating.
259.
My first year of
teaching at I.I.T. was actually my third year of classroom experience, and by
this time, I had finally developed into a good instructor. I was comfortable, confident, relaxed and
enjoyed what I was doing. Many of the
graduate teaching assistants were teaching for the first time and were struggling
like I had during my first year. To the
students in the evening division, I was a pleasant surprise and word spread
that I knew calculus well and could teach it.
My classes had a heavy enrollment and student feedback was very
positive. By my fourth year of teaching,
I probably reached my zenith, but my doctorate studies were not
progressing. I was not having any
success with my initial attempts at a thesis.
By early 1970, I knew I was not going to get a Ph.D. in mathematics and
began writing letters to colleges and junior colleges, looking for a full-time
teaching position.
260.
The market for
mathematics teachers at the college level was very poor. There were too many applicants and not enough
positions available. I had seen that first hand at the Mathematical Association of America annual
meeting held in San Antonio in January 1970 where there were dozens of
applicants, many with Ph.D.’s, interviewing for the same job that I was. I started receiving rejection letters in
March 1970, and they continued to arrive into the summer; and thus, I returned
to the evening division of I.I.T., teaching fourth semester calculus and
differential equations, and took various doctorate level courses in the
daytime. By the spring of 1971, the job
market had not improved, and I doubted if I was going to find a teaching
position at the college level. I thought
about the actuarial profession again and decided to take the third actuarial
examination that May.
261.
Part 3 consisted
of two distinct mathematical subjects: first, the theory of interest and
second, numerical analysis and finite differences. My recollection is that the three hour
examination consisted of 32 multiple choice questions, 16 in each subject, with
each question having 8 choices for an answer, all of them plausible, but only
one of them correct. The student was
penalized for guessing because one-seventh of a point was subtracted for each
incorrect answer, yielding an expected score of zero for a candidate who
guessed on all thirty-two questions. I
barely studied for numerical analysis because the subject was very easy for me
after all my graduate studies and undergraduate teaching. The mathematical theory of interest, however,
was a different application entirely, and I had to learn the specialized
notation and techniques unique to that subject in order to solve the detailed
problems. I did so, but by the
examination date, I knew I had not worked enough problems and did not have the
necessary speed needed to answer the 16 interest questions in the allotted
time. Fortunately, it was not necessary
for a candidate to show proficiency in each subject but only to get a high
enough overall score on the entire test.
I hoped that numerical analysis would carry me through the
examination. I answered 15 of the numerical
analysis questions and was comfortable with my answers, even though I
recognized that the questions were designed to snare unsuspecting students in
standard traps; but I only had time to answer 7 of the interest questions
before the examination ended. I wasn’t
certain if that was enough to pass. I
knew one-seventh of a point could be the difference between a passing grade of
6 and a failing grade of 5. On June 28,
1971 the Society of Actuaries released the examination results for Part 3 with
a standardized preamble, “The number of candidates who sat for Part 3 was 647,
of whom 47 failed to meet minimum standards (50% of the passing score). The following 240 candidates passed.” My name was on the list, and the opened
envelope revealed my grade to be a 7.
262.
Even though I did
not have a teaching position lined up for the autumn of 1971 and had just
passed an actuarial examination, I could not bring myself to return to the
profession and certainly not to Continental Assurance. I heard the company had undergone a couple
reorganizations and many of the actuaries I knew there had left to work
elsewhere. Reorganizations and internal
company politics were inherent in any business and two of the reasons why I
hesitated in seeking an actuarial position at any organization. Then the Mathematics dean who headed the
graduate teaching assistants at I.I.T. offered me another year to teach in
their evening division. The pay was
minimal but enough to keep me going and I accepted.
263.
In the autumn of
1971 I was confused about my future and what path I should follow. College teaching without a Ph.D. was not a
viable option and to enter the actuarial ranks without a desire to learn and
run a business did not seem wise; it seemed a road to frustration and unhappiness. I started to look around at other
possibilities. Computer programming
seemed to me to be too one dimensional.
I thought about getting away from careers that were related to
mathematics and briefly considered real estate sales, but after watching and
talking to various salesmen, I confirmed what I had tacitly always known, that
selling was not in my nature. Also it
did not make sense to give up and not use the one talent, albeit limited, that
I had in mathematics. I was now
ironically asking myself the question that used to amuse me as a child when
adults inquired, “What do you want to be
when you grow up?” It was now natural to
reflect on this question during prayer.
The response as I understood it was that I could do anything that was appropriate, but I had to be a Christian. Of course,
if God’s Providence required some specific action on my part, He would make it
clear to me, or it would happen naturally as part of my life without me being
aware.
264.
In early 1972 it
was clear that my Uncle Joseph was losing his battle with cancer. By mid-February, he was very ill, and I spent
a couple of overnights in his house with my Aunt Marge, offering her support
and keeping watch. His nephew, Father
John, came to the house as a priest and as a relative to visit him. Eventually my uncle went into the hospital
and a couple of days later as my cousin Margie and I stood by his bed, he
stopped breathing and died. My uncle and
aunt had made arrangements for their interments in the Queen of Heaven
mausoleum, located in Hillside, Illinois on the grounds of the large Roman
Catholic cemetery of the same name; and there in the St. Joseph’s room,
surrounded by the images of the faith, at age 64, he was laid to rest on a
winter’s morning. If there was ever a
doubt in my mind about how short life on this earth is, all illusions were
stripped away that day. It was clear
that time was quickly passing, and I had to resolve my own indecision and
uncertainty about my future.
265.
I continued to
receive and save rejection letters from various junior colleges. I saved those letters to remind me later in
life as to why I didn’t pursue a teaching career. Another reason to leave that profession was the
quality of my teaching had declined. I
was still doing a good job, but I knew that teaching the same material every
year had worn on me and made me less enthusiastic and less effective. I don’t know what would have happened had I
found a full time teaching position.
Perhaps I would have been rejuvenated in a new college, but by 1972 I
felt I was making the right move in leaving the teaching profession. I applied for an actuarial position at a
couple of mutual life insurance companies.
Mutual of Omaha was not hiring, but the Metropolitan Life Insurance
Company in New York City was. By any
standard of measure, whether it was dollars of life insurance in-force or
dollars of assets or the size of its work force or Actuarial Department,
Metropolitan was one of the two largest life insurers in the United
States. My job interviews with them had
gone very well, and with three examinations to my credit it was clear that they
were going to make me an offer. They
asked if I had any preference as to where I wanted to start – in personal
insurance or group, in pricing or reserving – and I told them I did not have a
preference and left my initial assignment to them.
266.
I accepted
Metropolitan Life’s job offer and told them I would start July 10, 1972. I had to find housing in New York, and I knew
that was not going to be easy because affordable, suitable housing was
scarce. In June I drove from Chicago to
New York to locate a furnished apartment.
As I drove into the New York area one weekday afternoon – I was still in
New Jersey -the remnants of a hurricane swept in and deluged the area with a
major rainstorm. I turned off the
highway before the Lincoln Tunnel because I didn’t want to go into Manhattan on
a work day in the middle of a storm. The rain continued and became so heavy
that the windshield wipers could not keep the water off the glass. I did not know where I was driving. I could not see anything ahead of me, and
thus I pulled the car to the side of the road, parked, and waited for the storm
to pass. After several minutes, the
storm cleared and the sun quickly reappeared.
I was on Boulevard East in North Bergen, New Jersey, directly across the
Hudson River from Manhattan and there in front of me, was a sign advertising
furnished apartments. Shortly
thereafter I had my apartment.
267.
On my first day
at Metropolitan, I was assigned to the Actuarial Department, Personal Life
Insurance, the Underwriting and Mortality Studies Unit. Metropolitan contributed mortality data to
the Society of Actuaries for inclusion in various insurance company studies,
and I would be involved in those projects.
Mel, a fellow of the Society, was the manager of the area. I noticed Mel had a chess board set up in his
office, and I casually commented about the position. His eyes lit up when I told him I was a class
A player in the United States Chess Federation.
He was captain of the Metropolitan Life chess team, which played in
Commercial Chess League of New York (CCLNY), and the team had won three
consecutive League championships under tournament conditions and retired the
League Trophy; but now Mel and the team’s two strongest players, one of whom
was a senior master and ranked as one of the strongest players in the entire
country, no longer wanted to play chess after work on Wednesday evenings. Thus, Mel was looking to replace three
players when the CCLNY chess season opened in September. Even though I was no where near the senior
master level, I was strong enough to play third board on the revised team, and
when Mel asked me if I was interested in playing tournament chess in the CCLNY,
it was completely natural for me to accept his offer. And so
on my first day on the job, because of where I had been assigned, my manager
and I spent an enjoyable hour talking chess.
The Fischer-Spassky world championship chess match was scheduled to
begin in Reykjavik the next day; PBS Educational Television would carry the
games with analysis and soon the entire country would be talking about chess.
268.
I have played
chess in the CCLNY every year since I arrived in New York and have dozens of
wonderful over the board combinations and hundreds of enjoyable memories of
friends. In the years after the
Fischer-Spassky match, 64 teams and hundreds of players competed on Wednesday
evenings after work from late September through early April in the CCLNY; but
with the passage of time, increased work loads, and opportunities to play the
game on computers, fewer individuals are willing to stay in the city to play
tournament chess. The 2002-2003 chess
season saw only 8 teams playing in the CCLNY, and the continuing existence of the
League, which was formed in 1923, remains in doubt. In order to keep the CCLNY functioning, I
recently volunteered to serve as Secretary and to calculate and distribute
match results and ratings to the players.
269.
During my first
few months in New York I frequently went out to see the attractions of the
City. While living in Chicago I had gone to various events sponsored by the
local Catholic Alumni Club. I knew this
was a good way of meeting people, and thus it was natural for me to become
involved in the Catholic Alumni Club of New York. Through that organization I helped them
sponsor a Junior Achievement company, and in another unrelated activity we took
children from a grammar school on field trips to museums and ball games. They also sponsored dances, and it was at a
dance on November 10, 1972 that I first met Nora.
270.
When I was
packing my belongings for the move to New York, I came across a typed document
that my mother had saved. It had been
typed by my Uncle Steve, my mother’s brother, and carefully bound in a
folder. Clearly, it had been important
to him. My uncle had typed out, word for
word, Kahlil Gibran’s, The Prophet.
I knew my uncle had had a difficult life and I only had faint memories
of him, but I felt as I stood with the bound typed copy of The Prophet that my uncle
had found some meaning in his life by reading and copying this work. The search for meaning in a life lived and the
attempt to transcend death through a work of art is hauntingly evocative. The empirical evidence left in some small way
by each person is a remarkable testimony of the uniqueness of human life, both
individually and collectively.
271.
In September 1972
my mother told me that she and my father had just purchased an entombment crypt
at the Queen of Heaven Mausoleum where my Uncle Joseph was buried. They had been on a waiting list and a crypt
had become available in one of the rooms, and they had taken it.
272.
In October 1998,
I was visiting my parents in Westchester and making
arrangements to move them out of their house to an apartment five blocks
from my home in Brooklyn, New York, because they had reached the point where
they could no longer take care of themselves.
I had to make a decision about the Queen of
Heaven mausoleum crypt, whether to sell it back to the cemetery and bury my
parents in New York when the time came or to keep it and return the bodies to
Illinois for burial when they died. My
father would not have understood what was being asked of him, and my mother
said I was to do whatever was easier for me.
I decided to drive out to the mausoleum, visit the crypt where they were
to rest, and perhaps talk to a cemetery official in order to reach a
decision. On my way to the car, I took a
loaf of bread from the kitchen, planning to break the bread and feed it to the
birds in the backyard, a practice that my mother had done daily before she
became immobile. Outside, it had started
to rain, making it impractical to feed the birds, and thus I took the loaf of
bread with me into the car and placed it on the passenger seat as I drove to
the cemetery. At Queen of Heaven, I
visited the St. Joseph’s room and said prayers for my Uncle Joseph and Aunt Marge,
both of whom were now entombed there. A
mausoleum directory gave me the room location and number of my parents’
crypt. Their room was called Holy
Eucharist, and it was on a floor above ground level, beautifully adorned with
images of Christ at the Last Supper. In
the room, a window overlooked the parking lot and my
car was parked at an angle where I could see the loaf of bread on the passenger
seat of the car. It was clear that my
parents should be buried in the Holy Eucharist room as they had planned.
273.
Thus when my
father died in March 2001, a small group of family and friends gathered with me
in the chapel of the Queen of Heaven mausoleum for a funeral service. The pastor of Divine Infant of Jesus Church
led the prayer service, and Dad’s coffin went into the wall of the Holy
Eucharist room. Nora had a memorial card
with the 23rd Psalm prepared as a remembrance.
274.
Speculation about
Heaven always seemed silly to me, but after my father’s death I thought about
him and his happiness. He once told me his
happiest days were when he was growing up in South Wilmington, surrounded by
his parents and his older brothers and sisters who looked after his wants and
cared for him. I can easily envision an
idyllic summer day with blue sky and white cumulus clouds and the Illinois farm
land alive with the growth of a plentiful harvest, the light rays reflecting
through the trees and the sights and smells of verdant pastures giving delight
to the senses; and Dad as a teenager fishing with his brothers in the nearby
restful waters, not a care in the world, knowing he was on the right path loved
by his family and the Creator and loving them in return. There must have been many of these special
moments when he was happy and a sense that he was almost in heaven. I know when Alzheimer’s landed him flat on
his back in his ninetieth year, he sometimes returned to his youth, and there
he seemed refreshed for his blue eyes showed happiness; and so, let me
speculate that those youthful special moments were captured in space-time under
God’s Providence and are being relived by Dad.
275.
Before I left the
Chicago area for New York City and my job at Metropolitan Life, I had already
decided that if someday I was going to marry and raise children, then I needed
a steady source of income and combining that need with my only above average
talent, mathematics, led naturally to the actuarial profession. My concerns about working for a company,
office politics, and possible drudgery remained, but if a family and a
profession based on mathematics were of primary importance to me, then I would
simply have to put up with whatever secondary nonsense there was in working for
a company. Having determined what I was
going to do, I now had to follow
through and be the best person I
could, remembering that life had been summarized by Christ as loving God and my
neighbor.
276.
The Metropolitan
Life Insurance Company was a company with an amazing and glorious past. In 1972, the financial winds of change had
been blowing since the end of World War II, but the Company did not seem to
know how to change, afraid that it was losing its precious past to
circumstances beyond its control. To
some extent, that is exactly what happened.
In 1972, however, the company was nothing like I thought it might be;
instead, it still was a distinctive company with a unique and proud history of
social progress, and I guessed I sensed this when I went for my interviews and
perhaps this why I felt so good about the place even before I started to work
there. By the time I retired in 2002,
the company had become similar to many other organizations, having lost most of
its distinctive features and was looking and acting more like the company I
feared it might be when I first joined.
277.
The distinctive
features of the Metropolitan grew out its mutualism and its size and how it
blended the two under the leadership of its top executives, particularly Haley
Fiske, to become a social force for good in North America during the first half
of the twentieth century. The Company’s
origins in 1868, its unprecedented growth in life insurance beginning in 1879,
its rise to preeminence, and its social achievements are fully documented in
the book, The Metropolitan Life, by
Marquis James published in 1947 by the Viking Press.
278.
It was in 1909
that Metropolitan began its systematic campaign of health and welfare work when
it organized its Welfare Division for the education of it policyholders and for
the purpose of cooperation with public health bodies in their work. In January of that year the Company’s new
plan stated, “Insurance, not merely as a business proposition, but as a social
program, will be the future policy of the Company,” and this announcement effectively
recognized its transformation from a commercial enterprise into a social
institution.
279.
Metropolitan also
put into place many programs for employees, which enhanced its reputation as a
good employer and which influenced other employers: (a) An Athletic Association
was organized and sponsored activities such as baseball, basketball, handball,
golf, tennis, swimming, bowling, skating, and track and field, (b) In 1908,
Metropolitan started the practice of serving a free lunch to Home Office
employees each day from Monday through Friday, (c) In 1913, Metropolitan opened
its own tuberculosis sanatorium for employees suffering from that disease, (d)
Metropolitan started free annual medical (1914), dental (1915) and eye (1913)
examinations for employees, (e) In 1914, Metropolitan provided health insurance
and free life insurance through newly formed group insurance concepts, (f) In
1925, Metropolitan established a retirement plan for employees, which provided
a retirement annuity and some degree of security on the employee’s normal
retirement date, (g) Metropolitan referred to its employees as family, and they
didn’t fire employees unless the person committed a crime. If a person didn’t work out in a particular
area, they moved the employee to another area and tried to find out what the
problem was. Metropolitan’s
maternalistic approach and virtually guaranteed employment philosophy earned
the company its unofficial name of “Mother Met”. Company publications stated, “The
Metropolitan is a beautiful Mother to Policyholders, Agents and Clerks” (All
employees who didn’t sell insurance, including officers, were known as clerks.)
280.
A 1924 company
publication, An Epoch in Life Insurance,
had the following written by its President, Haley Fiske, which summarized the
Metropolitan during the first quarter of the twentieth century: “The Metropolitan has shown other insurance
companies, especially Industrial companies, what can be done for public
welfare, and how enormously important an instrumentality they can become for
social uplift. They are now beginning to
follow the Metropolitan’s lead. It seems
to us that the best thought of the age has fixed upon insurance as the solvent
for most of the economic ills of society.
One can in imagination picture the time when instead of but one-third of
the population, practically all living in the cities and towns shall be insured
in Industrial mutual insurance companies; and in the development of these
companies along Welfare lines one may look to the time when the people shall
take care of themselves through life insurance in a service covering health in
life, care in sickness, indemnity in death, sanitation in community life, the
financing of home-owning, of public utilities and civic conveniences – a mutual
service of cooperation among such a large proportion of the population that it
may be called The New Socialism!” When
Haley Fiske died at age 77 on March 3, 1929, the events that would eventually
unravel his Metropolitan and The New Socialism and make his dreams for the country
impossible had not yet happened.
281.
On my first day
at work I was told by Personnel that a free lunch was a benefit of employment
but that I should not expect it as a continuing benefit and that soon the
company would do away with it.
Metropolitan fed 18,000 employees in a dozen or so cafeterias located in
the basements of their buildings located on Madison Avenue between 23rd
and 25th streets. Most
employees ate in the cafeterias located in 2B, the second basement. There were separate cafeterias for managers
in 3B, the third basement, that had tablecloths and better silverware on the
tables, and an officers’ dining room on the 12th floor of the South
Building staffed with waiters who served the free lunch. As an actuarial student with three examinations,
I qualified for the managers’ dining room, but initially I seldom ate there,
preferring to eat with most of my co-workers in one of the regular
cafeterias. The Company’s Athletic
Association and other clubs and organizations were prominent, and many
employees were involved with one or more of these employee activities. The Metropolitan Chess Team was sponsored by
the Athletic Association, which annually paid our nominal entry fee into the
Commercial Chess League of New York. The
morale of the work force that I saw was high, and I don’t think anyone in my
unit thought badly of the Company although everyone smiled at the quaint
practices from the past that still existed in 1972. For example, the final worksheets that were
tabulated by the mortality study clerks were done in ink on thick paper with
quill pens that were dipped into inkwells.
Periodically, an inkwell woman would come along with her equipment and
clean and refill the inkwells. Another
interesting practice was that employees were paid their salary in cash every
Friday when a money cart pushed by a clerk and accompanied by a security guard
would come around and distribute the salary envelopes to each section. These salary envelopes almost always contained
freshly minted cash and coins. If you
were going to be out of the office on Friday and your supervisor approved, you
could collect your salary early by taking the approved form to the vaults where
clerks working behind steel bars counted out your salary and handed it to you. Metropolitan now fired employees if they were
not performing in their jobs. One of the
stronger chess players on the team apparently did no work during the day and
was given a warning that he would be fired unless he changed. I was not aware of his personal circumstances
and asked him to analyze one of my adjudicated games during the lunch
period. He agreed, but we met
surreptitiously behind the columns in the balcony of the gymnasium on the 27th
floor so that no one could observe that he was looking at a chess position
during the work day. His analysis of my
game was good, but a few months later he was let go and became a full time
chess player in the New York area. There
were also other surprises. As an actuary
in the making, I was handed a copy of a memo written, as I recall, by a company
attorney that had the names or initials of all the officer actuaries signed in
the margins and which said as an actuary in a mutual company, I was not to use
the word “profit” in any memo that I might write. I found this strange because even though I
was not especially business orientated I still calculated an annual rate of
return on every personal investment I made, and I recognized that corporations
had to do the same and that making money could not be ignored by any organization
that wanted to remain viable. It
appeared then that the ideas of mutualism were not being implemented properly
by Metropolitan. My colleagues explained
that actuarial practice required each product to be priced properly and that a
permanent contribution to surplus for the ongoing health and stability of the
organization was an essential piece of any product, including products offered
by a mutual life insurance company. Not
working in a pricing area, I didn’t directly worry about, in my early years,
how Metropolitan made its money.
282.
One the early
projects that I did work on was a first attempt to develop a new valuation
table for industry use. At that time
most of the legally required life insurance reserves on individual policies
were calculated on the 1958 Commissioners Standard Ordinary (1958 CSO)
Mortality Table, which used intercompany mortality experience from 1950-1954
policy anniversaries. From published
intercompany Society of Actuaries Reports
data, I took mortality experience from 1965-1970 anniversaries and following
the same procedure that had been used to construct the 1958 CSO, I developed a
new valuation table, which I called “Valuation Table A”. This work was passed on to a Society of Actuaries
committee, which through various iterative developments eventually produced sex
distinct Valuation Tables K (Male and Female).
The industry and state Insurance Departments accepted these as the 1980
CSO Tables, which then became the legal valuation standard in the United
States. Having moved into Group
Insurance and then corporate areas, I was not part of the Personal Insurance
Society Committee that formally constructed the new standard; however, the
initial work to develop Table A was just one of many interesting and
challenging projects that I worked on over the years.
283.
One of my later
projects was to help the American Academy of Actuaries with a monograph series
on health care reform. This was in
response to the Clinton administration’s proposal to reform the health care
system in the United States. Actuaries
across the United States came together to provide information to the public,
congressional staff, and federal policy makers in a series of monographs. I was one of the principal writers of
Monograph Number Ten, Actuarial Issues Related
to Pricing Health Plans Under Health Care Reform, which was released in
July 1994. The Monograph discussed the
methods used by health plan managers to price health plans and how premiums
would be set under a reformed health care system.
284.
Although my
career has been fulfilling, I have witnessed the last half of the slow and sad
decline of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company from its preeminent position
at the end of World War II as documented in The
Metropolitan Life to one among many large institutions offering financial
services and trying to distinguish itself in a highly competitive world. Metropolitan is now a stock company, known as
MetLife Inc., having demutualized in April 2000 with a distribution of billions
of dollars to its policyholders in cash and stock. Like most large corporations, MetLife
contributes in many ways to the social well-being of the communities in which
it has a presence; however, the idea of MetLife, Inc. as a mother to employees
and policyholders and the concept of a “New Socialism” whereby financial
corporations are actively run by policyholders who cooperate to limit personal
profits funneling them toward the enhancement of society rather than
shareholders and executives are considered manifest absurdities and were dismissed
long before MetLife’s actual demutualization.
When MetLife abandoned the concept of insurance as a social need and
focused on profits, it mirrored the business and social milieu of the United
States, circa 2000. However, the mutual
interdependence of people is generally recognized, and thus noble ideas should
not be lost or forgotten but retained, remembered, and passed on, waiting for
circumstances to change and for an opportunity to restore and properly
implement them in a future historical era.
285.
In November 1972
I took Part 5 of the actuarial examinations, which was an all day examination
with multiple choice questions in the morning and written essays in the
afternoon. The topics on this
examination included risk theory, mathematical graduation, history and
construction of mortality tables, and demography. Even though I didn’t spend much time
studying, I felt reasonably comfortable about the topics on the examination
because my day time work was mortality studies and graduating mortality rates. One of the mortality questions on this
examination was flawed, but no one knew it, and I spent extra time working the
problem correctly, and then reworking it a couple of different ways and
wondering why I couldn’t find my solution on the answer key. The Society examination committee removed
this flawed problem and any work submitted on it from the grading curve so in
theory the problem had no effect on a candidate’s final grade, but the time I
wasted on it cost me additional points on other problems. When a fraction of a point can make a
difference between a passing and failing score, it was heart breaking to
receive a grade of a 5, knowing the time I had wasted on the flawed problem.
286.
In the spring of
1988 my boss, Frank, called me into his office.
At that time, I was working in the Group Insurance Actuarial Pricing
area on health insurance, and the blending of group indemnity insurance with
medical network concepts. Frank said the
Group Department wanted to make me an actuarial officer, but they couldn’t do
it within the overall company context because I needed Part 10 of the actuarial
examinations to complete fellowship. I
had stopped taking actuarial examinations years earlier after I became an
Associate, but periodically I would spend some of my free time studying
particular topics, and I had managed to pass all the examinations except the
last one. Now Frank had a proposition
for me. I should get away from work and
just concentrate on passing Part 10. The
Company would send me to the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, which
had a crash two week review course on Part 10, and the
Company would pay my expenses and the course fee, if I would use some of my
vacation time. I agreed, and so in the
spring of 1988, I said goodbye to Nora and our four children and became a
“university student” for two weeks. I
virtually did nothing during this period of time other than attend classes,
read the 2,000 pages of readings that could be on the test, sleep, and
eat. The test was five hours of essay,
which was not to my advantage, since I thought and wrote relatively slowly
compared to my actuarial competition.
There was one six-point question, which involved a pension calculation
that completely confused me. I wound up
leaving that problem blank and concentrating on the other essays, which I
barely finished before time expired.
After the test, one of my actuarial friends asked me about the
examination and questioned my decision to leave a six-point question totally
blank. He said, “You have to write
something in order to get some points.
You know that less than two points will be the difference between
passing and failing, and everyone else will probably have at least a couple of
points on you because they at least put something down on a six-point
question!” He shook his head sadly,
thinking that I was headed toward a grade of 5.
I responded that what he said was true, but I didn’t know what to do
with the problem and thus I didn’t waste any time on it. I had limited time and spent it profitably on
other questions. I had done my very
best, and what would be, would be. I was
not anticipating failing or passing - my grade would be only known when I
opened the envelope and observed the enclosed score. When the envelope arrived, I opened it and
saw a grade of 6. I had passed! I was a Fellow of the Society, and
Metropolitan did promote me to the officer level. Subsequently, I heard that the pension
question I left blank was a flawed problem and had been thrown out of the
grading process by the examination committee.
287.
On a Sunday in
November 1972, I could not find the telephone number of the redhead I had met
at the dance on Friday. This was
annoying because she was not only physically attractive to me but also educated
with a good mind and I thought we probably shared similar values. Opportunities like this were rare, and I knew
I had to see her again. Unfortunately,
there was no way of contacting Nora because I didn’t know her address, and she
was not listed in the telephone directory.
I tore my apartment apart, looking for the slip of paper that had her
number, turning every shirt and pants pocket inside out, and restacking every
stack of papers; and most certainly, I offered a prayer. On my second day of searching, I found the
paper with her telephone number, and I called her. Nora and I started dating, and on St.
Valentine’s Day 1974 at the Alpine Cellar restaurant in the Hotel McAlpin, I
proposed marriage, and she accepted.
288.
On November 30,
1974 at Holy Name of Jesus Church with a small group of family and friends as
witnesses, Delia as maid of honor, Ray as best man, and Father Grisaitis
representing the organized Church, Nora and I conferred the sacrament of
marriage on each other. The unknown and
uncertain future was ahead of us but the blessings of family, friends, country,
and faith would sustain us.
Epilogue
289.
How reliable are
my memories that go back years? Thoughts
and insights around spiritual events and God are probably reliable because they
were important to me, made an impression, were internalized, and carried
forward; they go to the heart of the matter and influence how I live my life. Memories of secular events are less reliable,
but events involving the United States are facts recorded in history and have
been either validated or corrected in my memory; and in a similar way, personal
events that I saved in letters, journals, tapes, and on pieces of paper are factual. One of the surprises for me in recording my
memories was to see connections among personal events that I had not realized
before I wrote my thoughts down. Thus,
allowing for uncertainty and the need to recite the second variant of St. Joan
of Arc’s prayer, this project has been very meaningful to me because it brought
my life into better focus and provides evidence of God’s involvement in my
daily life. Indeed, my random thoughts
and memories, when written down and organized herein, have increased my faith
and makes me want to praise the glory of God.
290.
I got out of the
chair and stood up on the back porch.
The bird in the grass was startled, flapped its wings, and flew
away. The cat sprang forward but was too
late to catch the bird. The cat looked
up at me, almost questioning with its gaze what I had done in disturbing the
situation. I went inside the house,
returned with food, and fed the cat.
291.
When I was in
college, it was fashionable for students to say all human behavior was relative
and that there were no moral absolutes.
For those who were absolutely certain that there were no absolutes, I
gave examples from the physical world such as the speed of light and absolute
zero in order to suggest that there may also be absolutes in the moral and
spiritual worlds that a reasonable person should follow. Certainly, the Gospel imperative of God and
neighbor is there.
Text
completed on April 13, 2003 (Palm Sunday).
Text reread
and minor corrections made without adding events that happened subsequent to
the original completion: April 4, 2004 (Palm Sunday).
Text reread
and minor corrections made without adding events that happened subsequent to
the original completion: March 20, 2005
(Palm Sunday).
Endnotes, References, and Additional Thoughts
(Numbers below refer to
numbered paragraphs in the above text.
In contrast to the above text, which was written before March 20, 2005,
some of the remarks below were updated or added as subsequent events unfolded.)
1.
My birth
certificate shows I was born in the Oak Park Hospital, Oak Park, Illinois at
5:01 A.M. on December 24, 1941 four hours after my mother was admitted. John F. Kluzak of
Berwyn, Illinois is listed as the doctor.
The ages of my parents are given as 29 for my father and 27 for my
mother, but both are incorrect. My
father’s birth certificate states he was born April 14, 1911, making him age 30
at my birth, although a second certificate, which my father said was incorrect,
gives his birth date as November 10, 1910.
My mother’s birth certificate states she was born November 12, 1908,
making her age 33 at my birth. My mother
spelled her first name, Katherine, with a K, but my birth certificate
incorrectly spells her name, Catherine, with a C.
2.
There are no
precise figures for the number of individuals killed in World War II. Harold Evans in The American Century, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1998, page 284 writes
“We can merely note that more than 50 million people lost their lives, perhaps
20 million of them civilians.”
3.
My Certificate of
Baptism shows I was baptized by the Reverend Anthony J. Nenesh
at St. Frances of Rome Church in Cicero, Illinois. My understanding is that Rev. Nenesh was related to my Uncle Joseph, who was my Godfather
at the ceremony.
5.
The Pythagorean
Theorem states that under the postulates of Euclid in a plane that the square
of the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to sum of the
squares of the lengths of the legs. In
notation, if c denotes the length of the hypotenuse and a and b the lengths of
the legs, then c squared = a squared + b squared.
15.
Children showed
me the spiritual nature of love. When my
first child was born, I loved him. When
my second child was born, I loved her; and I did not love my first child any
less. The same was true with my third
and fourth children. Love was not
divided into thirds and quarters but was complete and whole for each
child. The physical and material gifts I
gave them were limited and divided or shared; for example, by its physical
nature, the ice cream in the container had to be divided equally into fourths,
but my love for each did not have to be divided.
21.
An example of a
singularity comes from mathematics when an equation yields a zero in the
denominator. Dividing a number by zero
is not possible – mathematicians say an expression is not defined at values
where denominators become zero. A
denominator can be as small as you want but never zero. When a mathematical equation models the real
world, restrictions are placed on the equation in order to avoid zero
denominators, and the mathematics describes reality everywhere except at the
singularity.
22.
Time Capsule/1941, Time, Inc., 1967, page 14.
23.
Time Capsule/1941, Time, Inc., 1967, pages 181 and 182.
24.
Time Capsule/1941, Time, Inc., 1967, page 187.
25.
Time Capsule/1941, Time, Inc., 1967, page 40.
27.
According to
Ellis Island records, my maternal grandmother arrived in the United States on
September 15, 1903 from Nemsova, Slovakia. She came on the ship Konig Albert out of Bremen, Germany.
The records say she was 25 years old.
Our family records, however, give her birth year as 1876, making her age
27 years old when she arrived. She was a
widow, having lost her first husband in Europe to illness after a few weeks of
marriage. My maternal grandfather is not
listed in Ellis Island records; however, according to New York, Passenger
Lists, 1820-1957, he may have arrived in the United States on June 22, 1904 on
the ship Kronprinz Wilheim out
of Bremen where his age was listed as about 30 (he was born September 19, 1872
according to family records).
28.
According to the
Baltimore Passenger Lists 1820-1964, my paternal grandmother arrived in the
United States on September 10, 1891 at the age of 10, but family records give
her birthday as July 26, 1879, which means she was actually 12. She came from Kasejovice,
Bohemia on the ship Dresden out of
Bremen, Germany. My paternal
grandfather’s name on Ellis Island records is listed as Ignatz
(family spelling was Ignac), and his two cousins as
Stefan and Iragutin.
The country of origin is listed as Hungary, but the family always said
that they came from Rude, Croatia. This
is not a contradiction since Croatia was part of Austria-Hungary before World
War I. These three cousins came on the
ship Belgenland
out of Antwerp, Belgium and arrived March 28, 1893, which would make my
grandfather 17 years old, his birth date being February 14, 1876 according to
family records. However, Ellis Island
records him as age 19 and his cousins as age 19 and age 27. A baptism certificate in the possession of a
family member states that Ignac was christened at St.
Barbare Church in Croatia.
31. On October 9, 2017, my son, Brian, set me an email
that he had found an on-line book that mentions my uncle, Charles
Bednarik. The book is “Blood on the
Talon: 139th Airborne Engineer Battalion, 1943-1945, Volume I: Unit
History”. It’s a complete narrative
history of 139th AEB which was part of the 17th Airborne
Division in WWII and may be accessed at http://castraponere.com/bloodonthetalon/VolumeI.pdf .
Page 131 documents my uncle’s death along with two other soldiers while
clearing minefields near the Our
River. My uncle’s middle initial should be J given correctly elsewhere but not
on this page.
34. Words taken from the
website – http://member.lycos.co.uk/dover_kent/words/blue_birds_over.htm
43.
In the spring of
2001 I wrote an article, “Tips on Making an Effective Presentation,” for The Stepping Stone,
a Society of Actuaries’ Section Newsletter. At one point in the article,
I wrote the word “left” when I should have written the word “right”. The editor, Michael, caught the mistake and
asked about it in an e-mail. It’s still
happening I thought and dashed off the following response to him: “Michael, you are correct: left should be
right. Generally, I have this 180-degree
dyslexia where I say up when I’m thinking down, right instead of left,
etc. As a kid it made me wonder about
doing well on true/false tests. Thanks
for your editing! Phil.” The next morning I received
his reply:
“Michael
,yours
Sincerely
,welcome
You’re
,Phil”
Happily,
I ended the exchange with “Michael, I love your humor! It is difficult to bottom your response. Phil.”
44.
From a cultural
perspective, it is interesting to note that I called Our Lady by name (Notre
Dame) in a non-religious context; that is, when I was doing arithmetic and long
before I knew who she was and her role in salvation history.
48. In 2016 the Chicago Cubs won the World
Series. By that time my children ranged
in ages from 29 to 40, and as adults, they understood that Dad would continue
to root for the Cubs.
56.
I heard the
following story in a different context from Alzheimer’s disease, but I think of
it as a parable for dementia in general and for Alzheimer’s in particular where
a son remembers and knows more than his father:
“A
man went skiing in the Rocky Mountains, by himself. There was an avalanche, and the man was
buried in snow and ice, and his body was never found. Last winter, his son, who had been a small
boy at the time of the accident, went skiing, by himself, on the same mountain
that had claimed his father. Halfway
down the mountain, the son stopped next to a large boulder, to eat his
lunch. As he unwrapped his sandwich, he
looked down and saw buried in the snow and ice, the body of a man. Trembling, he went down on all fours and
pressed his face against the ice. He
thought he was looking in a mirror. The
face of his dead father stared back at him.
At that moment, the son realized that his father at the time of the
accident was actually younger than he currently was. Thus, a small boy had grown up and become a
man, and in so doing, had become older
than his father.”
60. The Roy Rogers’s cowboy movies and later listening to
the Lone Ranger on radio reinforced the moral code of honesty that my parents
taught me.
70. What a person does with his life, how he lives it,
what he chooses to do with the time he has, how he integrates what is given to
him at birth with the events that happen to him in life, how he handles events
outside his control, what he thinks about God, and how he treats other people;
all these factors shape history and subsequent events, making the real world
more fascinating than any work of fiction.
I’ve thought about these issues throughout my life, starting from those
early days on the playground at Goodwin grammar school when I first decided not
to repeat certain stories and jokes.
71. The Catechism of
the Catholic Church (1994) is a basic current source for understanding
moral issues in the Christian framework.
72. The house was built by Walter Baltis
whose company was a major builder in Westchester.
74. A small portion of the Illinois prairie has been
preserved in Westchester, north of 31st Street and west of Wolf
Road.
75. As I walked along the streets, I thought about
randomness and how it affected life. I
asked myself if events were predestined or fated and whether human actions were
somehow forced or determined by unknown variables. By the time I entered college I had concluded
that events were not predestined, that individuals had free will and their
decisions determined what happened. I
came to this conclusion in part because I thought I could act freely – I could
do a certain action or not; and in part because I saw chance occurrences also
determining the future, similar to my random walks through Westchester.
76. Ray died suddenly and unexpectedly in April
2004. I had written paragraph 76 in 2002
and retained it.
85.
Visitors to
Westchester after 1960 may have thought that the two public schools, Nixon and
Kennedy, were named after the 1960 presidential candidates of the two major
parties. They would have surprised to
learn that Nixon was George F. Nixon, one of the early developers and builders
of Westchester, and Kennedy was Mary Jane Kennedy, a deceased English teacher
at Nixon school.
87. In Euclidean plane geometry, it is possible to prove
that the circumference to diameter ratio is the same for all circles. An outline of a proof that I constructed
years after I left the seventh grade uses standard calculus concepts to develop
arc length. The proof starts with a unit
circle and derives an expression for the arc length along the circumference
from the x-axis to a point subtending a 60-degree angle. The arc length expression is kept in closed
form and never explicitly uses the number pi.
Then a coincident circle at the origin of arbitrary radius R is formed,
and an analogous closed expression for its corresponding arc length subtending
a 60-degree angle is constructed. Simple
algebra shows this arc length to be R times the unit circle arc length so that
ratio of arc length to radius is the same for both circles. Generalizing from a 60-degree angle to a
360-degree angle (full circle) then gives the desired result. If you move outside Euclidean geometry by
changing the parallel postulate, then triangles no longer have 180 degrees and
ratios of circumferences to diameters vary by size and are no longer uniquely
equal to pi. Thus
my objection to Mrs. Hartley was valid outside of plane geometry.
89.
To demonstrate
intellectual productivity in chess, consider one of my tournament games. The position for White consists of pawns on
b2, c3, e4, f2, g3, h3; a knight on f3; rooks on d5 and e2; a queen on a1 and a
king on g2. Black’s position is pawns on
a7, c5, d6, e5, f7, g6, h5; a bishop on h6; rooks on a6 and b7; a queen on c6
and a king of g8. I was playing the
white pieces for the Illinois Institute of Technology team in the
Intercollegiate Tournament against a player who had an Expert’s rating from the
University of Illinois at Chicago. The
game had just been adjourned at the end of the fortieth move. I’m a pawn down, but my position is far from
hopeless. During the adjournment
analysis, the idea for White to immediately open the king side and attack was
thought to be a viable option for a draw or possibly even to create enough
complications for a win. Here then is
how the game unfolded and how this simple idea was implemented over the
board: 41. Qd1 Rbb6,
42. g4 hg, 43. hg
Bf4, 44. Qh1 Qc8,
45. Qh4 Kg7, 46. Rd1
Qh8, 47. Qe7 Qc8,
48. Qh4 Rb8, 49. Rh1
Qh8, 50. Qe7 Qd8,
51. Rh7ch! Kh7 52. Qf7ch
Kh8, 53. Re1 Qf8,
54. Rh1ch Bh6, 55. Qg6
d5, 56. Qa6 Rb6,
57. Qa7 de, 58. Ne5
Rf6, 59. g5 Qg8,
60. Rh6ch Rh6, 61. Nf7ch
Resigns. My 51st move
turned the game around but that move was possible only because of the earlier
productive idea to open the king side with g4 and then Black’s subsequent
imprecise play, which often happens in tournaments even among very good chess
players.
97.
When the physical
and mental deterioration of my parents started, I focused on helping them the
best way I could, while at the same time I kept myself strong with prayers and
positive thoughts. I handled the
situation presented each day and did not worry about problems that might occur
in the future or events beyond my immediate control. I did not second guess my decisions. My mind turned toward the good things that
had happened to me in life. I made
mental notes and when I had time I started writing them down. I tried writing some poetry. I had written poems before, but I thought all
of them were uniformly poor. Anyway,
here is a poem I wrote during the 1996 Easter season, slightly modified, which
subsequently helped me once my parents started to significantly decline.
EASTER
PRAYER.
I
shun death,
The
dark, the cold, the decay,
Annihilation.
My
hope, my consolation, my joy
Is
Your Resurrection,
My
Lord and Savior,
CHRIST
JESUS,
Life
and light.
100.
My marks in high
school were significantly better than my marks in grammar school, showing the
importance of homework and additional study.
My marks in November of the seventh grade were M’s in Reading, Spelling,
English, and Arithmetic and A’s in History, Geography, and Science (A was above
average, and M was working in the class average). In March, I had A’s in all subjects except
Science, which was an M with a small x subscript. A footnote on the report card explained that
x meant, “The pupil is not using his time to advantage.” In June, I had moved to A’s in all subjects. In November of the eighth grade, my marks
were A’s except English and Arithmetic where Mx’s were recorded. In March, English had become a plain M,
Arithmetic had moved up to an A, and Science had come down to a Mx. No marks were recorded in June because I
graduated on June 7, 1955.
104.
Another related
question about computers and robots is could they develop free will? Computers and robots are programmed to
perform specific tasks but allowing open feedback to occur might develop self awareness in the machines and then their ability to
think and choose. Movies (e.g., 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Terminator
(1984), The Matrix (1999), and A.I.:
Artificial Intelligence (2001))
have all speculated that humans will create a self-aware species, and we will
have troubles because of our creation.
106.
Soon thereafter,
Jim countered with his humorous story. A
man died and went to heaven. St. Peter
showed him the different rooms in the heavenly mansion. “Behind this door are the Baptists and over
there are the Methodists,” said St. Peter.
Then passing by another door, he told the man to be very quiet. “Why do we have to be quiet?” asked the
man. St. Peter replied, “Behind that
door are the Roman Catholics, and they think they are the only ones up here!”
107.
In order to give
some flavor to the high school chess played in the Greater Suburban Chess
League, 1957-58, I offer the following game which was part of the Individual
Tournament, round 1, played on May 25, 1958 between myself from Proviso with
the white pieces and a student from Niles with the black pieces: 1. e4 e5, 2.
Nf3 Nc6, 3. Bc4 Nf6, 4. d3 Bc5, 5. c3 h6, 6. Be3 Qe7, 7. b4 Be3, 8. fe d6, 9.O-O Bc7, 10. Nbd2 Be6, 11. Bb3 a6, 12. d4 Bb3, 13. Qb3 ed, 14. ed O-O-O, 15. Rfe1 Rhe8,
16.a4 Nb8, 17. c4 Nfd7, 18. a5 Rf8, 19. Rab1 f5, 20. b5 fe,
21. ba b6, 22. ab Nb6, 23. Re4 Qf6, 24. a7 Nb6, 25.
Qb6 cb, 26. a8(Q)ch Kc7,
27. Qa1 g5, 28. d5 Ne5, 29. Qa7ch Kc8, 30. Rb6 Nf3ch, 31.Nf3 Resigns.
112.
In 1968, the
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics reissued The Pythagorean Proposition by Elisha Scott Loomis, a book
originally published in 1940 that gives 370 different proofs of the Pythagorean
Theorem. I wish I had discovered that
book in 1957 and 1958 when I ran around searching for proofs - it would have
saved me time, but I never came across the original. In any event, my proof is hinted at on page
79 of this “Classics in Mathematics Education” text, proof number 86, remark
(d), but not actually given. Thus, the
proof in the endnote to paragraph 117 below is at least proof number 371in the
Loomis text.
117.
My proof of the
Pythagorean Theorem is as follows. Let
the vertices of the right triangle be denoted by A,B, and C with the right
angle at C. Denote the opposite sides by
a,b, and c.
Then under the postulates of Euclid, we want to prove c squared = a
squared + b squared. Denote the center
of the inscribed circle by I, and P,Q,R points of contact with the sides of the
triangle, a,b,c, respectively. Label the segment CP as y so that PB becomes
a-y. Similarly, label the segment CQ as
w so that QA becomes b-w; and label the segment BR as x so that RA becomes
c-x. Now it can be easily proven that
IR=IP=IQ=y=w, and since the area of triangle ABC is the sum of the areas of
triangles AIB, AIQ and the trapezoid, BIQC, it therefore follows by
substitution: (1) ab/2=w(a+w)/2 + cw/2
+ w(b-w)/2. This may be simplified to
(2) ab=aw + bw + cw.
It can also be proven that x=a-y, w=y, c-x=b-w, and solving these
equations for w, we find w=(a+b+c)/2. Substituting this value of w into equation
(2) gives after simple algebra 2ab=a squared + ab – ac + bc
– c squared + ab + b squared – bc from which the
result follows easily.
118.
The Tribune
published a small article in their West Side Neighborhood Section in December
1958. The headline was, “Proviso East
Math Student Has New Proof.” The article
stated, “P.L. … a senior at Proviso East, has recently developed an entirely
new proof to the Pythagorean theorem.
His proof along with his picture and a short article about him appeared
in the November issue of Mathematics Journal.
Phil developed the proof over a Memorial Day weekend in his sophomore
year. “The John Crerar
library downtown lists 127 proofs of the theorem,” states Phil. “Since mine isn’t listed, it’s probably
original.” The Pythagorean Theorem
states that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle equals the sum of
the squares of the other two sides. Phil
developed his proof by splitting a large triangle into two smaller triangles
and a trapezoid; then, comparing areas.”
119.
One of the ideas
in the calculus is to partition or subdivide complicated areas into smaller and
smaller rectangles and then to add all the rectangular areas to get the
total. A fundamental theorem gives the
evaluation of many complicated expressions, and thousands of applications in
science and economics have been found. Thus looking at the very small or the infinitesimal in
mathematics has proven to be very fruitful and beneficial. Looking at very small or “infinitesimal” in
physics has led to quantum mechanics and a subatomic universe where the laws of
Newton and classical physics are not applicable. Nature at that level, as it is understood
today, behaves in a way where it is fundamentally impossible to make a precise
prediction of exactly what will happen in a given experiment. Nevertheless, thousands of useful
applications of quantum theory exist. A
statistical or probabilistic basis underlies the world of the very small and
philosophical discussions on the nature of reality continue.
120.
Provi 59, the Proviso 1959 yearbook lists the basketball scores
and teams. At the beginning of my senior
year, Proviso Township High School was split into two schools when a new school
was built in Hillside to accommodate the growing population of Chicago’s
western suburbs. The new school was
named Proviso West and the former school in Maywood became Proviso East. My senior class was kept intact in Maywood
and became the first graduating class of Proviso East High School.
129.
I saved pages
from my journal and looking back at it forty three
years later, I find that I am not able to read the language I invented.
130.
More precisely,
the astronomer said George Adamski’s, Flying
Saucers Have Landed (1953), was “nuts” and dismissed flying saucer stories
because hard evidence was lacking.
132. I now find this approach to God strange,
but I record the event as it happened along with my subsequent thoughts.
133.
If an individual
was uncertain about God’s existence and searching for the truth, I would
recommend a less restrictive prayer than the one I offered in order to avoid
the accidental chance quandary. “God, if
you exist, please help me to find you. I
want to know the truth. If you are the
truth, then help me find you.” This is a
quick prayer that can be repeated daily by the searcher and allows for a daily
reflection unique to that individual’s life.
133.
It is possible to use Bayes Rule in an attempt
to gain possible insight into this event. In this example, I examine three
possible causes of the event documented in paragraph #132; namely, (1) God
answered my prayer (God as Christians understand the word), or (2) it was an
unlikely chance event, or (3) it was a “natural cause” event. In this third category I include not only
causes such as my eyes/brain somehow recognized the bolt in the dark but also
various ESP explanations along with various “New Age” possibilities. All of this is subjective; however, having
three possible causes I follow statistical tradition and take the Bayesian
priors each to be one-third. That is,
Probability (God caused the event) = Prob. (Nature caused the event) =
P(chance) = 1/3 and use the notation P(G), P(N), P(C) for these priors along
with P(E|G) to mean the probability of the event happening given God’s
existence and P(G|E) to mean the Probability of God existing given that the
event happened. Starting with the
assumed prior probabilities of P(G)=P(N)=P(C)= 1/3, we apply Bayes Rule in the
form P(G|E)=P(G)P(E|G)/[P(G)P(E|G)+P(N)P(E|N)+P(C)P(E|C)]. Here from the documentation of the event
P(E|C)= 1/4300 = .0002 to four decimals.
P(E|G) cannot be directly measured but we know that the Christian God
answers sincere prayers affirmatively unless the person’s salvation or freedom
or the salvation or freedom of others would be lost, in which case God’s answer
is no. For this event other individuals
were not involved and hence a negative response would have meant my salvation
or freedom to act in the future would have been compromised. Since God’s response to my prayer could have
been either affirmative or not, it not unreasonable to take P(E|G)= ½ =
.5. P(E|N) also cannot be directly
measured; however, given the facts of the event, it is not likely that “nature”
had a big impact in its cause. Thus, it
is reasonable to think P(E|N) is less than .5 and as a first estimate to take
P(E|N) = ¼ = .25. Placing these numbers
into the equation gives
P(G|E)=(1/3)(1/2)/[(1/3)(1/2)+(1/3)(1/4)+(1/3)(1/4300)]=.6665. Similar equations give P(N|E)=.3332 and
P(C|E)=.0003. Thus, updating the
Bayesian priors given this event and its quantification as shown gives new
estimates as to the priors of P(G) = almost 2/3, P(N) = almost 1/3, and P(C) =
nearly 0. This calculation, albeit
speculative, reinforces the notion that chance was not the likely cause of the
event. In order to use Bayes Rule in a
meaningful way here and in other situations involving God and/or nature,
theologians and naturalist philosophers would have to have general data to
quantify specific P(E|G) and P(E|N) as they arose.
135.
The demonstration
I formulated back then is briefly summarized in the following: Religion is God’s statement to us of certain
unalterable facts about His own nature that mankind is not able to deduce from
reasoning or to observe from living.
Those facts revealed by Christ are preserved by the Church and protected
from error by the Holy Spirit. The
demonstration of this using scripture and history starts with Matthew, chapter
16, verses 13-20, where Christ changes Simon son of Jonah’s name, and Peter
becomes the head of the new church. Text
after text in scripture shows that the office Peter holds is the head and
exercises jurisdiction (examples: Matt. 10, 2; Mark 3, 16; Luke 6, 14; Acts 1,
15; Acts 2, 14; Acts 4; Acts 11; Acts 15; Mark 16, 7; Luke 24, 34). In subsequent years successors to Peter act
accordingly and early church writings reinforce this authority (examples:
Origen in the second century; Cyprian in the third century; St. Ambrose in the
fourth century; the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century). If the Church taught error with respect to
religion, then the Spirit of truth would not be with us always and the gates of
hell would prevail, contrary to scripture (John 15, 16-17 and Matt. 16,
18). Therefore, when the head of the
Church speaks for the Church about religion, he is protected from error (i.e.,
infallible).
136.
I have not
quit. With time, most Church doctrines
did fall into place, and although I am still intellectually undecided about a
couple of them, I have not found any of them to be false; and thus, I am at
peace accepting The Catechism of the
Catholic Church (1994).
137.
To the uninitiated
almost all the interpretations of quantum reality might appear to be manifest
absurdities. For example, today many
physicists accept parallel or the many universes understanding of quantum
mechanics. This leads to notion that
there are almost an uncountable number of separate universes out there, each
invisible to our own. In some of these
universes the history of the world is very different: perhaps the Roman Empire
never collapsed or Islam swept through Europe in the
eighth century or Washington was captured and the American Revolution stopped
or the South won the Civil War or the Nazis won World War II. In most of these universes you don’t exist
because mom and dad never got together.
In other universes where you were born but subsequently bifurcated many
times, you are there but probably leading a very different life. As a child and adolescent, long before I
studied physics, my coin flipping (do I walk left or right?) and my make believe story telling allowed me to imagine parallel
universes but not to the extent that the many-universes interpretation of
reality now envisions. Interestingly,
the notion of parallel universes actually bubbling up to the macro level likely
avoids one of the “problems” usually associated with an omniscient God; namely,
since God knows what you are going to do, then somehow you are not really free
when you go ahead and actually do the action because He knew the specific
outcome before it happened. In the
multiple parallel universes construct, however, God knows all the paths, all
the bifurcations that take place, and all these universes are real, the one
where you went right and the one where you went left, and He knows all of them,
all the outcomes, not just the outcome you experienced in your particular
universe. And thus
God is all knowing without having caused any of the outcomes. Aside: Boethius’s
understanding that eternity is not perpetuity is the way to understand that God
“seeing” something is not God “imposing” something.
139.
The definition of
determinant that bothered me came from Birkhoff and MacLane, A Survey of
Modern Algebra (1953), page 300.
The determinant, det(A), of an nxn square matrix a(i,j) is the
following polynomial in the entries a(i,j): det(A) =
Sum (sgn@) a(1,1@)a(2,2@). . . a(n,n@). This polynomial is a sum of n! terms, one for
each permutation i to i@ of
the digits 1, . . . n. The term
belonging to a permutation @ is a product of n factors, one from each row of A;
the factor a(i,i@) from the i-th
row lies in the column i@. The whole term is prefixed by a sign, sgn@, which is +1 or -1, according as @ is an even or an
odd permutation. The only way to
appreciate this definition is to write out the polynomials for low order
n’s. Thus, for a 2x2 matrix, we have det
= a(1,1)a(2,2) – a(2,1)a(1,2) and for a 3x3 matrix, we have det =
a(1,1)a(2,2)a(3,3) - a(1,1)a(3,2)a(2,3) - a(2,1)a(1,2)a(3,3) +
a(2,1)a(3,2)a(1,3) + a(3,1)a(1,2)a(2,3) - a(3,1)a(2,2)a(1,3). I was looking for a definition that would
generate these polynomials directly.
141.
In August 1950
Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Humani generis and
wrote, “...The teaching of the Church leaves the doctrine of Evolution an open
question, as long as it confines its speculations to the development, from
other living matter already in existence, of the human body. (That souls are immediately created by God,
is a view which the Catholic faith imposes on us.)”
149.
After years of
reflection, The Catechism of the Catholic
Church (1994) has the best answer, as explained in paragraph 309, to the
problem of evil: “If God the Father almighty, the Creator of the ordered and
good world, cares for all his creatures, why does evil exist? To this question, as pressing as it is
unavoidable and as painful as it is mysterious, no quick answer will
suffice. Only Christian faith as a whole
constitutes the answer to this question: the goodness of creation, the drama of
sin, and the patient love of God who comes to meet man by his covenants, the
redemptive Incarnation of his Son, his gift of the Spirit, his gathering of the
Church, the power of the sacraments, and his call to a blessed life to which
free creatures are invited to consent in advance, but from which, by a terrible
mystery, they can also turn away in advance.
There is not a single aspect of
the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the question of evil.”
154.
I rejected this
posture when praying long before the events of September 11, 2001. Of course, I knew bowing face down was used
by Muslims in their prayers and therefore, as a Christian, I may have been
predisposed to find it inappropriate even though Orthodox Christians also
prostrate themselves.
156.
Joan of Arc,
Mark Twain, Ignatius Press (1989), p. 23.
159.
Kennedy’s speech
to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a group consisting mostly of
Southern Baptists and Evangelical leaders, may be found at http://www.usa.usembassy.de/etexts/speeches/rhetoric/jfkhoust.htm
159.
While all of this
was going on, Roman Catholic’s had come up with various in-jokes concerning
Kennedy’s nomination: For example:
Catholic #1, “Did you hear that the Pope opened the envelope containing the
third Fatima secret?” (Sister Lucia had
written the third secret in 1944 and sealed it in an envelope, and the Pope was
supposed to reveal it in 1960.) Catholic
#2, “No, I didn’t know the secret had been revealed! What did it say?” Catholic #1, “Vote for Kennedy!”
161.
Although the
number of examinations, their organization and content has changed many times
over the years, the Society of Actuaries grading system of marks from 0 through
10 with a 6 being within 100% to 110% of the passing score has not changed.
162.
The voting age
was lowered to age 18 in 1971.
163.
For years, the
Germans and Russians blamed each other for the Katyn Forest killings but most
individuals in the West knew that this atrocity was committed by Soviets, not
Nazis; however, some Americans found it difficult to believe that an ideology
that grew out of the political left could murder in a manner similar to the
ideology out of the political right. In
April 1990, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev publicly admitted Stalin’s police or the
NKVD's responsibility for the Katyn executions.
In 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin handed over to the Polish
government Stalin's "Supreme Punishment" decree of March, 1940, which
ordered the execution of over 14,000 Polish officers and 10,000-plus other
Poles.
164.
One of my first
poems, Dead in the Street:
I
saw a dog dead in the street yesterday -
Just
lying there, dead, hit by a car.
It
was sunset.
I
wondered, “Where was this dog at yesterday’s sunset?”
Walking
along a road,
Not
knowing that soon he would be dead in the street.
And
where was I yesterday?
Walking
along that road;
And
as the sun set,
I
wondered if I wasn’t already dead in the street.
167.
Christians
understand in God’s revelation to mankind through Christ that God is three
persons in one nature. This
understanding is more important than philosophical reasoning, which deduces
God’s omnipotence and omniscience. The
philosophical understanding of God is formal and abstract, similar to
mathematical and logical exposition, but you would not approach a person abstractly as a hypothesis and a
proof, and thus I have tried not to approach God in that way.
168. On January 21, 2007 I had an experience that
showed me that I have soul, which is described in one of my speculative
thoughts.
169.
The fact that I
can now write these words in good conscience shows, I believe, the effect of
weekly communion on my interior life and the transformation of someone who had
serious doubts about life after death into a traditional Christian.
173 .As a child I used Phil Lip as a pen name. I kept it for years and used it when I first
placed this memoir on the website along with the following introduction:
“My
lips shall glorify you.” New American Bible (Psalm 63, 4);
“My lips,
two blushing pilgrims, ready stand to smooth that rough touch with a tender
kiss.” Romeo and Juliet (Act I, Scene 5);
Palmer -
A medieval European pilgrim who carried a palm branch as a token of having
visited the Holy Land, the American Heritage College Dictionary;
A modern
American palmer presents a brief written testimony of the blessings given to
him.
At that time I
thought my last name had a good chance of being related to the Palmers
mentioned in history. Subsequent
findings regarding the last name made the Palmer connection very unlikely; hence,
I removed it and also the pen name.
174.
My recollection
is that we were comparing the actual mortality experienced by the company
separated by plan, age, and duration against the expected mortality that went
into the premium.
176.
The American Century, Harold Evans, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1998, pages 488-489.
182.
The American Century, Harold Evans, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1998, pages 494-495.
183.
Robert Kennedy’s
campaign theme was The Impossible Dream.
186.
Many individuals
believe that if chance events and randomness produce order, symmetry, and
design in the universe, then there is no need for God as an explanation of that
universe. However, chance does not act
in isolation. It needs an underlying
structure and a natural setting in which to operate for by itself it cannot
produce anything. There would be nothing
at all if God had not created and did not continuously sustain the underlying
structure and natural order of the universe, allowing chance to operate and to
produce whatever it intrinsically is able to produce given the structure and
setting.
187.
My definition of
a determinant, det (N), of an nxn
square matrix is:
det
(N) = n:L1, n-1:L2, n-2:L3, n-3 . . . :Ln. Here L is a generator defined (details not
given here) to operate on integers in such a way to generate the required
polynomials using Sylvester’s Umbral Notation.
For a 2x2 matrix, det = 2:L1, 1:L2. = 12:L2. = 12 – 21 and for a 3x3
matrix, det=3:L1,2:L2,1:L3. = 23:L2,1:L3. = 123-132:L3. = 123 + 231 + 312 – 132
– 213 – 321.
196.
Interestingly,
ten years later Kitagawa and Hauser published, Differential Mortality in the United States, Harvard University
Press, 1973, a work of interest to actuaries and life underwriters. By that time, I was doing mortality studies
for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.
202.
Catholic Encyclopedia, Rev. Peter M. J. Stravinskas,
Editor, Our Sunday Visitor Inc., 1991.
207.
Einstein’s Moon (Bell’s Theorem and the Curious Quest
for Quantum Reality), F. David Peat,
Contemporary Books, Inc., 1990.
214.
The American Century, Harold Evans, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1998, page 515.
217.
I remember going
home from work one evening and thinking how happy I was and being jolted by
newspaper headlines which announced President Johnson’s plans for a massive
troop buildup. I saved the Selective
Service announcement ordering me for a medical examination on September 22,
1965.
219.
I don’t remember
how I heard about the teaching position at St. Dominic College, and the details
of my interview remain hazy in my mind.
The events that may have saved my life are lost in my memory and not
documented in my records other than the letter offering me the teaching
position.
220.
A somewhat
related demographic change occurred during the nineteenth century in Europe where
improved living conditions and agricultural yields helped to decrease infant
mortality and increase life expectancy.
The populations of many European nations doubled and nearly tripled
between 1800 and 1900, and allowed their leaders to increase the size of their
armies which, in turn, made possible the magnitude of World War I. The leaders of those nations may not have
gone to war or continued the stalemate if they didn’t have the extra manpower.
226.
After graduating
from Georgetown University in 1998, my eldest son went to work for Andersen
Consulting (now Accenture). Andersen
Consulting and Andersen Accounting had just formalized their separation but
were still sharing training facilities, and my son attended training classes in
St. Charles Illinois on the site of the former St. Dominic College. I was in the process of moving my parents out
of Westchester and so I visited him. It
was strangely haunting to see the campus after thirty years. Even though there had been massive construction
and changes, certain locations (e.g., my former office) were recognizable. Now that Andersen Accounting has been
dissolved due to the Enron scandal, I don’t know what has happened to the site.
233.
The American Century, Harold Evans, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1998, pages 516-517.
235.
The American Century, Harold Evans, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1998, pages 505 and 549.
238.
The American Century, Harold Evans, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1998, pages 550-551.
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/Chicago7/Account.html, Doug Linder, Professor of Law, University of
Missouri – Kansas City Law School.
239.
The American Century, Harold Evans, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1998, pages 550-551.
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/Chicago7/Account.html, Doug Linder, Professor of Law, University of
Missouri – Kansas City Law School.
246.
One. One.
Then two. Followed by three. Three plus two is five. Five plus three gives the next number,
eight. Thirteen is the next Fibonacci
number constructed by adding the prior two numbers. Twenty-one is next, and as the sequence
develops, the ratio of two consecutive Fibonacci numbers converges quickly to
the golden mean. Thirty-four, the next
Fibonacci number, divided by the prior Fibonacci number yields, accurate to two
decimal places, the golden mean, which is the quantity one plus the square root
of five divided by two. Fifty-five, the
next Fibonacci number, divided by the prior Fibonacci number is, rounding to
three decimal places, one, decimal point, six, one, eight, exactly (to three
decimals) the golden mean, which is also known as the golden ratio or the
golden number or the golden section and was first defined by Euclid in his
geometry. Eighty-nine comes next, but
Euclid’s number or the golden ratio emerges from geometry in the following way:
Take any line segment and divide it into two parts so that the longer part of
the segment is in the same proportion to the shorter part as the entire line
segment is to the longer part; the ratio in question is the golden ratio; and a
simple quadratic equation can be developed and solved from the above description
to yield one plus the square root of five all divided by two. 144 is the next Fibonacci number, and these
numbers and the golden ratio are connected to diverse phenomena in nature (none
of which I have verified) such as the head of a sunflower where florets form
various clockwise and counterclockwise spiral patterns, intertwined and
crisscrossing, but clear to the eye, and the number of clockwise spirals and
the number of counterclockwise spirals vary, depending on the size of the
sunflower, but the numbers are Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio emerges;
the petal arrangements in a rose; the branching of leaves on a stem; the flight
path of a diving falcon; the shapes of spiral galaxies; the way black holes
change from one phase to another; the breeding patterns of rabbits; moreover,
various human works such as the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and the art
of Salvador Dali have reflected the golden mean.
246.
Specific country
projections are found in the 2002 World Population Data Sheet of the Population
Reference Bureau, Washington, D.C., www.prb.org
248. Humanae Vitae may be found at www.vatican.va
252. My
speculations were and continue to be hindered by not understanding very well
the various disciplines
involved, including theology.
254.
Pope John Paul II
believes both are true. In October 1996
the Pope in “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth,” an address to the Pontifical
Academy of Sciences, said, “Today, almost half a century after the publication
of the encyclical [Humani Generis (1950)], new knowledge has led
to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has
been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries
in various fields of knowledge. The
convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was
conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the
theory.”
256.
Civilisation, Kenneth Clark, Harper & Row, 1969, pages 190 –
191. When I visited Rome in September 2011, I went to the Cornaro
Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria and saw
Bernini’s masterpiece, Ecstasy of St.
Teresa. I was not disappointed but the highlights of that trip for me were
my own experiences described elsewhere on the Ordinary American Catholic
website.
268.
One of my
favorite games was played in the CCLNY, Metropolitan versus Navy Yard, on
October 25, 1972. In the position
described below I have the white pieces and start a 9 move
combination that leads to checkmate – the alternatives are other checkmates or
an easy win. What a nice way to end an
over the board game with a clock running!
White: pawns on a2, b2, c2, d3, f5, g3 and h2; knights on d5 and e4;
bishop on g2; rooks on e1 and f1; queen on g4; king on g1. Black: pawns a6, b7, c5, d4, f6, g7 and h7;
knight on c6; bishops on c8 and d8; rooks on a8 and f8; queen on b8; king on
g8. The game concluded with 18. Nef6ch.
Bf6, 19. Nf6ch. Rf6, 20. Re8ch. Kf7, 21.
Qh5ch. g6, 22. fgch. hg, 23. Rf6ch. Kf6, 24. Qh8ch.
Kg5, 25.Qh4ch. Kf5, 26. Bh3mate.
268. CCLNY
continues to survive playing every subsequent season through a portion of
season 2019-2020 when CCLNY decided to stop the team tournament after round 10
on Feb. 26, 2020 because of the COVID19 virus. The League then moved to
internet chess, waiting for the pandemic to pass.
278.
The Metropolitan Life - A Study in Business Growth, Marquis James, The Viking Press, 1947, p.186.
279.
An Epoch in Life Insurance, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company publication,
1924.
280.
When Haley Fiske
died, Fredrick H. Ecker became the President.
His investment policies had kept Metropolitan out of the stock market in
the 1920’s. His position was vindicated with
the market’s collapse and the Great Depression.
During World War II, Metropolitan invested over 50% of its assets in
United States Government War (Savings) Bonds.
The Company emerged from the Depression and the War as the strongest
financial institution in a totally changed world. But the Metropolitan had not changed and did
not change in the years immediately after the War. Fredrick H. Ecker had become Chairman of the
Board and then honorary Chairman, and worked and
influenced the Company for eighty years into his mid-nineties up to his death
in 1964; his son, Fredric W. Ecker, became President in the 1950’s and his
father’s ultra-conservative investment philosophy continued. No major new individual products were introduced,
nor markets opened, and the Company went into a long slow relative decline with
respect to other insurers. Meanwhile,
the insurance industry itself did not seem to position itself well with the
American public, and lost ground to other financial institutions. For example, the theme of “buy term life
insurance and invest the difference” was not effectively combated with
advertising or competitive products marketed to capture those extra dollars.
281.
The Company
finally did away with their free lunch for home office employees in the early
1990’s. Free dental, medical and eye
examinations also went away as did the Athletic Association and the many clubs
and organizations that proliferated when employees were considered to be
“family.” Employees and retirees dug
into their own pockets as the MetLife chess team paid its own way in order to
play in the 2002-2003 CCLNY chess season.
282.
The 1980 CSO
Tables were replaced by the 2001 CSO Tables and then the 2017 CSO Tables.
283.
The Metropolitan
Life Insurance Company exited from the medical care insurance market in 1994
and eventually most of its medical care business was purchased by
UnitedHealthcare. Health care reform
came to the United States in terms of physician networks, medical care savings
accounts, and cost shifting from employers to employees but not in increased
Federal Government involvement beyond Medicare and Medicaid. There were still millions of Americans
without a health insurance plan and whose access to medical care was an
emergency room or a private arrangement with a doctor before the Affordable
Care Act was passed in 2010.
284.
During my
employment, the relative decline in the Company came in Personal insurance
lines of business. Generally, the Large
Group and Pension Departments continued to grow faster than their competitors. By the time the Company demutualized in 2000,
the volume of business under mostly non-participating institutional contracts
was greater than the business under participating individual contracts (e.g., the
dollar amount of group life insurance in-force was over three times the dollar
amount of individual life insurance in-force.)
Through the business it had placed on its books, Metropolitan had
effectively changed its characteristics from the days of Haley Fiske and had
started on the road to demutualization long before its formal action in
2000. The optimum legal structure,
mutual or stock, for a life insurance company depends on the business it writes
and the business it can write, given the social and economic situation of its
customers.
287.
I gave Nora a
poem the night we became engaged:
My
heart feels affection
Deep
and sincere
To
be your true love
Now
and for life.
So on
this Valentine’s Day
Do
not say, “Yes,”
Unless
your heart desires the same.
My
mind thinks thoughts of
Home
and family
With
a wife who is a lover
Now
and for life.
So on
this Valentine’s Day
Do
not say, “Yes,”
Unless
your mind understands the same.
288.
There is a
rational or intellectual component to love.
It is that component that leads to vows of “in good times and in bad times.” Without intellectual love, life long marriages become rare
because emotions and feelings tend to be too variable.