On the other hand, I would have missed out on some important experiences. Of course obviously I would have had other experiences instead, but on the whole, I think that it's good that I didn't take that path. It would have meant committing myself to completely cutting off an important part of myself, the part that is interested in literature, writing fiction, and cinema -- my intuitive, emotional, artistic side.
An interview with Harvey Cohn, who was chairman of the Math Dept at Arizona at that time, summed up my reasons. Among other reasons for not going on to graduate school, I told him, "I feel that right now I just need some time to myself so I can think." To which his answer was, "In my experience, most of the time when people say they want time to think, what they really want is just time to be lazy." And I thought to myself, "If this represents the attitude of the academic world, then I am certainly right to want to get away from it."
Although I was certainly very interested in mathematics, it was not at all clear that I wanted to devote my life to it. I didn't really know what I wanted, but I think at that time I would have been quite happy if any of my languages had been good enough for me to earn a living that way. I would also have liked to remain associated with theatre production. I liked being around theatre people, and I liked working backstage on plays. But economically, there didn't seem much chance of earning a decent living as a stagehand.
Among other things, I put a classified ad in the Saturday Review, listing my somewhat diverse qualifications, to which I got no response at all. I went to a number of interviews at the campus placement center. As a result, I got flown back to Washington, D.C. by IBM, but the IBM interviewer in Washington said that frankly he thought that I was too intelligent and had too many different interests, and that I would probably get bored and leave them after a few years. This was quite discouraging, because the jobs he described had sounded quite interesting to me.
Later on, when I would see the IBM customer engineers at Lockheed and Sylvania, always wearing dark suits and dark socks even at Sylvania, where almost none of the engineers wore ties, I would realize that the world of IBM would never have been one I would have felt at home in.
I sent out a whole lot of resumés and had about two replies showing definite interest. One was from a guy in the Coast and Geodetic Survey, back in Washington, D.C., and he was strongly interested in having me work for them doing computer programming. The job sounded pretty routine to me, and I was not eager to go back to the Washington area, and I was especially not happy with the idea that I would spend my life working in a low paying job for the government, like my father had. (In fairness, I have to mention here that my father actually had a quite good job in the Patent Office, and was chief of the Classification Division when he died, but at the time, all federal civil service jobs paid very badly. My father could have doubled his salary if he'd been willing to take a job with a private corporation, but the security of the civil service was important to him.)
(I should also mention the irony that I did in fact eventually wind up in a low paying job working for the government, although in this case it's a state government rather than the federal government, and being a professor does have certain advantages.)
When June came and I graduated, the Coast & Geodetic had still not managed to get bureaucratic approval to make me a definite offer, so that gave me time to see what else I could come up with in the meantime. I decided (after much discussion with my wife) that San Francisco was the place I would most like to live, so I took my wife and child to her parents house, in Phoenix, and got on a bus for San Francisco, taking one suitcase.
When I got to San Francisco, I bought a paper and looked through the classifieds and found a cheap hotel to stay at. (It was on Eddy Street, in the Tenderloin, and was truly horrendous.)
I went to a number of companies who were involved in electronics and computers, and registered with an employment agency. It was the same old response everywhere: "We don't need anybody right now," or "We're looking for someone with experience."
One place I went was the atomic energy lab at Livermore (now called the Lawrence Livermore Lab). This was a long ride trip by Greyhound, and it seemed much too far from San Francisco for me to want to live. It was also very top secret and high security, since they were doing research with atomic energy. (I think that their main project was to produce controlled fusion, a goal which of course has still never been attained.)
At Livermore, they required me to take a personality test (the MMPI). They didn't ask whether I'd be willing, they just said, "You have to take this test." I resented this quite a bit, and so I put down a fair number of answers at random and also some that were obviously crazy. ("Do you think that people follow you and spy on you?" YES.)
Needless to say, I was not offered a job at Livermore, which was fine with me. I figured that I didn't really want to work there anyway. But that MMPI score had an unexpected very undesirable consequence for my life. Because a week or so later I went for an interview at the Lawrence Radiation Lab on the Berkeley campus (now called the Lawrence Berkeley Lab), which was affiliated with Livermore. This was a low key, relaxed place, where they did cloud-chamber experiments. I don't think the people there had to get security clearances at all. The guy who interviewed me seemed very nice. He seemed to like me and I could see that this was a place where intelligent people worked, and I would have a chance to use my mathematics. In contrast to Livermore, the question of personality tests never came up.
But I never got a job offer from the Rad Lab at Berkeley.
A year and a half later, when I was leaving Lockheed, I went to the Rad Lab for an interview again and talked to the same guy. He didn't specifically remember me, but when he looked at my resume and heard that I'd applied there previously, he said, "I can't understand why we didn't hire you when you applied before."
But once again, I never got an offer. And eventually I realized that the Rad Lab had been given the MMPI results from Livermore. Mostly likely, the validity check in the test had revealed that my answers were no good, so much so that the questions were clearly intentionally mis-answered. (Or, worse still, they actually believed the answers and decided that I was a paranoid schizophrenic.)
I think that my life would have gone in a very different direction if I'd got that job at the Rad Lab. I would have liked working there and would have been willing to commit myself in a way that I resisted at Lockheed and Sylvania. And I would have been technically on the Berkeley campus, although a long ways away from classes, and I would have liked that a lot. And Berkeley was someplace I would have liked to live, instead of being lost in the Penninsula suburbs.
If I had got that job, I probably would not have left the Bay Area, and so would have been there for the whole Summer of Love and all the other marvelous things that were to take place in the San Francisco area after I left in 1965.
And I would have signed up for a few classes at Berkeley, and that would have resulted in my being less intimidated by the Mathematics Department at Berkeley and probably eventually going to graduate school there.
(As it was, I looked at the list of courses students were supposed to have taken before doing graduate work in the Mathematics Department and decided that I was seriously underprepared for Berkeley.)
Instead, I got a job as a computer programmer at Lockheed, in Sunnyvale. Technically, my job title was "engineer," which I found rather amusing. My father would have been happy, I guess, that I finally turned out to be an engineer despite everything.
Lockheed paid me quite well, but it was a hell hole. We were in a room larger than most barns, which had been subdivided by chest-high walls into cubicles. Everyone had his (there weren't any women working there, except, of course, for the secretaries) own phone, and no one every walked more than 15 feet to ask someone else a question -- they called them up. So the phones were constantly ringing. I went home from work almost every day with a headache, in part because of the incredible noise from all the phones and also simply from about 100 or 150 people all working together in the same room.
In addition, the whole attitude at Lockheed was a complete contradiction to the concept I had of who I was and who I wanted to be. It was made very clear to me on the first day that the management didn't care that much about whether I was efficient or not. The important thing was to be able to deliver on one's promises, especially as regards deadlines, and the recommended way of doing that was to promise considerably less than one believed oneself capable of.
Most important of all was to do things by the book. To come to work at 9:10 A.M. instead of 9:00 was a major failing. The fact that their computer operations were so screwed up that I might only be about to do half and hour's work during the whole day was not considered very significant. (This was the era of mainframe computers fed by punched cards. I would turn in my box of punched cards and get the output back the next day. If one of the first few cards was mispunched, then the job wouldn't run at all and one would get no feedback at all about one's program, so one wouldn't know what changes to make.)
I was told on the first day that I was expected to wear a white shirt and jacket and tie. So I bought some sort of tweed jacket that looked most unbusinesslike but still technically fell in the category "sports coat," and bought some very bright garish ties in Chinatown.
After about a year and a half, I was told that I really didn't fit in very well at Lockheed and ought to start looking for another job. I got a job at Sylvania Electronic Systems West in Mountain View, where I found the engineers and programmers to be much more my sort of people. (And most of them didn't wear ties.)
The Sylvania lab in Mountain View only hired people who had at least a B average in college, and compared to Lockheed, the atmosphere was somewhat like that of a graduate school. Many of my fellow programmers -- most of whom were women, incidentally -- were in fact taking graduate classes in mathematics at Stanford, majoring in statistics because the Stanford Math Department wouldn't accept part-time students. Many of them read contemporary literature and magazines such as The New Yorker, so I was able to have interesting conversations with them.
As at Lockheed, most of the programming done in my group was in assembly language (which we called "machine language"). I had a much better understanding of assembly-language programming than any of the other programmers at Sylvania, and my boss got me to give a couple classes in it for my fellow programmers and some of the engineers who only knew Fortran. I found the experience of teaching quite pleasurable, and this was later one of the things that made me decide that going into the academic world might not be such a bad idea for me.
After a few months, my boss (John Downey) tried making me a supervisor. This worked out very badly, for a number of reasons, one of which was that I was supposed to be in a position of authority over a number of people who had much more seniority than I did, and I didn't have the interpersonal skills to deal with that situation. Another was that I had a lot of ambivalence about having that kind of responsibility. It meant taking my job a lot more seriously than I wanted to.
While I was a supervisor, I got to participate in interviewing a number of job applicants. One of them was a woman named Connie, who I eventually had a lot of fun working with and who would later become one of my fellow graduate students at UCSD. When Downey and I interviewed her, though, I was not very impressed. She had a was just graduating from Stanford with a Bachelor's in Mathematics and had almost no experience with computers. She'd have to learn everything from scratch.
I was quite surprised, then, when after the interview John Downey immediately said that we'd make her an offer. Mostly he preferred people who would be learning everything from the beginning. The fact that she was bright and had good grades were what mattered to him, plus (something he did not say explicitly but was quite apparent) the fact that she was a woman.
I don't think that Downey liked to hire women because he was a feminist, but he was certainly fierce in defending his employees against any signs of prejudice. He didn't expect programmers to make coffee for him, and any Sylvania engineer who ever asked one of John's programmers to type a letter would feel the full brunt of his rage and never make that mistake again. He was also very supportive of his programmers efforts to enroll in graduate work at Stanford.
My own opinion, though, is that Downey hired women because he found women fun to be around and also, perhaps, because he found them less competitive and more cooperative than men.
When I first arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area, my wife and daughter and I lived in Mountain View, in a quadruplex with walking distance of nothing except a stretch of highway (El Camino Real). We drove up to San Francisco every Saturday to explore the city and look for an apartment there. Eventually, we found one we could afford on Leavenworth Street, just off the California Street cable car line.
I rented a room down in Sunnyvale rather than driving back to San Francisco from work every evening. The secondary purpose for living in Sunnyvale during the week was that it would enable me to write a novel. (The disadvantage, though, as I became very acutely aware, was that I never really felt a part of San Francisco.)
I did work quite a bit on that novel, eventually writing about seventy or eighty pages. The problem was, though, that I had no idea of how novels are written and very little idea of what I wanted to write about. I was reading a lot of other novels hoping to use them as models. The two I studied more than any other were Flight from the Enchanter by Iris Murdoch and Ritual in the Dark by Colin Wilson.
Living in San Francisco didn't give me what I had hoped for at all. I was only in the City on the weekends.
![[ Famous Vesuvio Postcard ]](http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lady/faq/beatniks.gif)
I would go up to
North Beach
to the bars that had been famous hang-outs for
the Beats,
often to Vesuvio,
a perfect bar for tourists,
and the Coffee Gallery,
which at that time catered to the young
folk-music crowd and to young wannabe Beatniks
who might play chess
at the table in the front window,
and who mostly seemed to work in the aerospace industry like myself
during the week.
Listening to the singers at the Coffee Gallery, I felt that I was on the leading edge of what would later be called the Culture war. The crowd defied and mocked the whole gray-flannel-suit world of buttoned down middle-class conformity that I hated so much, singing sarcastic songs such as
I don't care if it rains or freezesAnd the song by Malvina Reynolds, from the English Department at Berkeley: "Little boxes, on a hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky, ... and they all look just the same." Anyone who had driven into San Francisco on Freeway 101 knew exactly what she was talking about.
Long as I've got my plastic Jesus
Mounted on the dashboard of my car.
Of course all this would soon seem extremely tame when the hippies came in and the Vietnam war was starting to crank up and Country Joe & the Fish would be singing
And it's one two three, what are we fighting for?(But by the time that happened, I had stupidly move away from San Francisco.)
I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam.
And it's five six seven
Open up the pearly gates,
Ain't got no time to wonder why,
Whoopee, we'll going to die!
On Friday and Saturday nights, the two blocks of Grant Avenue from Vallejo Street to Union Street would be completely filled with people. The crowd would yield only slowly and reluctantly for the occasional car that tried to come through, persistently honking its horn. Lots of Gray Line tour busses came and didn't mind the fact that progress up these two blocks took forever. We "beatniks" were what the tourists had come to see, and the slower the bus went, the better look they got. Meanwhile, we made faces at the spectators and beat on the sides of the bus with our hands, confirming the belief of the tourists that we were very dangerous beatniks. It was a great show. I hope that Gray Line charged a whole lot for it.
Around the corner from the Coffee Gallery, on Green Street, was a much more raucous bar: the Anxious Asp (the city wouldn't allow the owner to use the name she really wanted). The Asp attracted three different groups: the owner was fairly clearly a lesbian, and most of the waitresses also seemed to be, and there were a fair number of lesbian customers. And then there were the kids who would come in to listen to the rock and roll on the jukebox at the Asp when they got tired of the folk music at the Coffee Gallery. And finally there were the Blacks, who were mostly a pretty tough bunch.
There was one homely looking girl in the crowds on Grant Avenue and in the Anxious Asp that I especially noticed. She used to sing blues sometimes at the Coffee Gallery, especially on Sunday evenings when they had the "hootenany" (i.e. open mike), and she had a very loud voice that I liked a whole lot. But despite her singing ability, she didn't seem to be able to find acceptance at all. I would look at her and think, "There's someone who's even more lost in this scene than I am."
I never knew her name at that time, but a few years later, when I would frequently see her face in newspapers and magazines, I found out that it was Janis Joplin.
(For some different observations on the North Beach bar and café scene, check out this article by P. Segal.)
A block down from Vallejo towards Chinatown, Grant Avenue crosses Broadway, where the topless craze was born during this time. At first, there were not only topless bars but topless restaurants. For a while, there was even a topless shoeshine girl on Kearny Street. The whole thing fascinated me. I don't think I'd ever seen any naked breasts at first hand except for my wife's. (Well, no, on second thought there had been a few occasions. But very few.) But I never went in any of the topless clubs because I assumed that they'd be much too expensive for me.
Also on Broadway was Mike's Pool Hall, which was probably the most interesting place to hang out at in North Beach. Somehow tourists never seemed to discover it, and mostly the people there were pretty authentic. "Authentic what?" is another question, which I never completely knew the answer to, but they were certainly authentic somethings. Authentic bartenders, authentic bums, authentic wannabe writers. And since Mike's was more a restaurant than a bar, it was able to stay open all night, although they stopped serving liquor at 2 AM, and so in the early hours of the morning authentic strippers and authentic whores would stop in to rest after work and get a bowl of the wonderful soup served at Mike's. I was seldom there that late, though.
After a while, I started to understand that if I wanted to become part of the North Beach scene, I needed to be there during the week. In some sense, almost everyone in the North Beach bars on the weekends was a tourist, even if they didn't safeguard themselves from the crowd by huddling inside a Gray Line bus. They may have lived in the Bay Area, or lived in San Francisco, but the weekend people weren't a real part of North Beach. And in any case, I was quite aware that for the most part the Beats had left North Beach several years ago.
Years later I wrote about a part of that time in my story "The Chekhovian Smile", although for some reason I transposed that story to a mythical part of a mythical city instead of frankly setting it in the North Beach area of San Francisco. ("Blacks Books" in that story is clearly City Lights Bookstore, and "Dmitri" was modeled on a guy named Lawrence, who I still occasionally see in the North Beach bars, although he must be close to 90 by now. The girl "Stephanie" was someone I never knew, but only saw sometimes standing in a doorway on Broadway.) The intense loneliness of that story represents my feelings in San Francisco at that time very well.
Those three years in the San Francisco are were a very crucial period in my life. (However I have to acknowledge that all the other periods in my life have also been very crucial. And that includes the present one.)
One evening in the Coffee Gallery I came across a guy named Robert Stock, who had been one of the friends of the woman Sheri Martinelli I used to know in Washington and in 1959 in San Francisco. I asked him if he remembered Sheri and Gilbert, and he said that they were still in town, and we soon managed to get together.
Sheri had become much much tamer by this time, almost domestic, although she was still capable of being a roaring drunk on occasion.
My wife and I (and sometimes my child) spent some time with Sheri and Gilbert off and on, but she no longer had the same magical quality for me.
Since I was only in San Francisco on weekends, I had no idea how to go about meeting the sort of people I wanted to know. And my wife, who I hoped would make connections for me, tended to shy away from that sort of person, finding them repulsive and frightening. (She put up with Sheri for quite a while, though, until one night when she came over to our apartment yelling about loudly enough for the whole building to hear her.)
My wife did make one friend, though, who became a sort of archetype in my emotional history and who I still think of from time to time. This woman, named Miriam, was about eighteen or nineteen years old and lived in the apartment above us with her husband Bob and her daughter Lisa. Bob was a fanatical student of flamenco guitar, and played one or two evenings a week at El Matador. Because Lisa was only a little younger than my own daughter, my wife and Miriam became friends and worked out baby-sitting arrangements so that one of them could go out in the evenings, especially during the week when I wasn't home and my wife would otherwise have been alone every night. (Miriam's husband worked in a hospital and was often on duty in the evenings.) They also sometimes managed to find ways of both going out together.
I didn't think much of Miriam at first. She seemed much too quiet, too shy. A little mouse, who looked like she was afraid I would bite her. But eventually, I started learning from my wife that Miriam had a number of boy friends, many of whom were foreigners and endeared themselves to her primarily by giving her expensive presents. In fact, she mostly went out in the evenings to get picked up by men. Of course this was all kept very secret from her husband, although he had his suspicions.
I find myself having a very difficult time now explaining why I was so fascinated by this. I guess it just comes down to the fact that I, intellectual nerd that I was, had never before known a really "fast" women. (Or at least not one close to my own age. Sheri, I guess, would have qualified as "fast" at the time that Anatole Broyard wrote about her, but she was not conspicuously promiscuous at the time I knew her.)
I see now how hard it is to write about Miriam in a way that will make sense to anyone else. We never had sex together, although I certain realized that there were moments in our relationship when she would have been quite willing to if circumstances had been right.
I was in love with her. I guess that's what I'm trying to say.
Later on, before we left San Francisco, her husband Bob started having an affair with a flamenco dancer, which made Miriam totally furious. Despite the fact that she was pregnant at this time, they split up.
And when Bob left, his friend George -- another flamenco guitar player -- moved into the apartment and took care of Miriam and Lisa (and, soon, Naomi). George was very different from all the boy friends I had heard about. He was young and didn't have a lot of money. At first, I thought that George would pretty much turn out to be just another Bob. (Bob's new girl friend was pretty much a carbon copy of Miriam, except for being a few years younger.) But George was a very nice guy and, surprisingly enough, Miriam became very much in love with him. They were still together four years later, when my wife and daughter and I stayed with them for a few days while traveling from San Diego up to Arcata (California). and I have good reason to believe that she was essentially faithful to him (although for all I know she may have had occasional lapses).
George got interested in guitar making and several years late opened a small guitar shop in the city, which still exists today. Because he was an excellent guitar repairman, he got to know most of the musicians who became part of the San Francisco rock scene.
Whether he and Miriam are still together is something I don't know. My wife eventually stopped corresponding with Miriam, and then much much later my wife and I split up. Somehow, though, I think that George and Miriam did not.
At this time, a few years out of college, I was confronted with the same issue which was later so often addressed in Thirtysomething, and which made that show so meaningful for me. Namely: What do I do when I grow up? (Incidentally, when I later mentioned this to my daughter, she told me about having been brought to a party with some of my friends when I was in graduate school and she was six or seven years old. She had heard one of my fellow graduate students say, "I'm still trying to decide what I do when I grow up." Since this was something people were always asking my daughter, her thought was, "Oh, how neat! It's okay to not know the answer to this, because even some grownups haven't got it figured out." (And I still haven't figured it out yet!)
More precisely, the issue was: What does a person whose only talent is being good at going to school do after he gets out of school? I had temporarily rejected the obvious solution to that quandry, namely to spend one's whole life in school, and gradually make the transition from being a student to being a professor.
I had learned a whole lot of skills in college that were important to me: I could write a damned good term paper or book review, and I knew a hell of a lot about a great diversity of things. And now I didn't know what to do with any of those skills. I certainly wasn't using them as a computer programmer.
I was aware of being torn between two urges. On the one hand, to be involved in science, which had seemed very exciting to me since I had been in grade school. Or on the other hand, to follow my very strong inclination to be involved in the arts, especially literature. (I was not much good at the purely visual arts. I didn't even understand modern painting or sculpture very well.)
By getting involved with computers I had opted for the science side, but now I realized that as a compueete progranner I wasn't really involved in doing science or even learning much about science at all.
After a year at Sylvania (and my disastrous experience as a supervisor), I asked for a job that would be less routine than programming. I was put in a group headed by a guy named Charlie Chick. The guys (there were no women) in this group mostly had Masters degrees in mathematics or physics, and were interested in many of the same things that interested me~-- current affairs, especially international relations, political philosophy, and the like. They liked to take long walks at lunch time through the nearby fruit orchards (at that time there were still lots of plum and cherry orchards in that region, which would later be called Silicon Valley) and discuss what seemed like the important issues facing the world at that time. This sort of thing was right up my alley.
The work they did basically consisted of drafting proposals to submit to the Pentagon. One of the big topics they were concerned with was disarmament. We weren't so concerned with the idealistic reasons for which one might want disarmament. Instead, the Defense Department wanted us to try and figure out the details of what might actually be involved in the disarmament process. (Not all the generals and civilian leaders in the Pentagon were as automatically opposed to disarmament treaties as one might suppose.)
After a while, I was asked to design a "peace game." This was to be a peaceful analogy to war games, to simulate the process of inspection to verify compliance with a hypothetical tactical disarmament treaty with the Soviets. ("Tactical," in the jargon of the disarmament community, referred to such things as tanks and artillery: everything except nuclear weapons, which were called "strategic.")
I had no idea what this "peace game" was wanted for or what it was supposed to accomplish, and when I persisted in asking questions, it became clear that nobody else in the group did either. As part of one of their contracts with the Pentagon, they had promised to devise this game, but nobody had the slightest idea how to do it, so they gave the project to me.
I read some papers by Hermann Kahn and others about gaming theory, but they were really no help at all. (The book Games People Play by the psychotherapist Eric Berne was probably as useful as anything else, although in a very indirect way.) Eventually I came up with some insights and wrote several pages that essentially said this: "Look, this idea of a peace game is really simplistic, because there are several different things that need to be accomplished, namely A, B, C, and D. And there's no way that we can say in advance how to plan such a game and what the rules should be. So ultimately the object of the game is to discover the rules."
I was pretty unhappy about not coming up with any of the nuts-and-bolts details for accomplishing any of the objectives I had laid out, but I managed to write up my ideas in a fairly readable and entertaining way that disguised the lack of much real content. My superiors were very pleased with my report, and in fact it became the highlight of the whole project. (In fact, the kind of bullshit I had written was very much like a lot of the reports put out by the Rand Corporation.) The Pentagon was very enthusiastic and wanted Sylvania to put together a task force to carry out the playing of this peace game.
For my part, though, I felt completely inadequate. I felt that it was only by a lot of luck and the skin of my teeth that I had escaped total defeat on the project.
In any case, by then I had decided that, one way or another, I had to escape from the world of the aerospace industry.
One big disappointment about the peace game was that I never got to keep a copy of what I had written. Originally, I had been told that it would be unclassified, but after it was finished I was told that Sylvania liked it so much they wanted to make it a proprietary product, and as a way of protecting the company's interest in it they were going to have it given a SECRET classification. So I had to turn in all my rough drafts and notes and have them locked up in the safes. Furthermore, since all disarmament work automatically came under the aegis of the Atomic Energy Commission, and I hadn't yet been given AEC clearance even though I did have SECRET clearance, I was now no longer allowed even to read the words that I myself had written.
It was certainly a relief to leave that world where one had to wear a badge all day at work, where all the really significant documents were locked up in safes, and it was a serious security violation to take documents home at night.
One other thing I did while in San Francisco was to have a radio program for thirteen weeks. This came about because I was looking through the classified ads in the newspaper, trying to see what jobs I might be qualified for (something, incidentally, which I continued doing whenever I was in a strange city until many years after I got my Ph.D.) and found an ad for disk jockeys, no experience required.
The idea attracted me, but the ad was essentially a scam. It was for an FM station, KMPX, which at the time was struggling and not very well known and for the most part played what can best be described as hotel music. (Today one might call it supermarket music.) And they were willing to essentially sell me a job. For $300, I could have an hour of air time once a week for thirteen weeks, with the privilege of selling whatever advertising spots I could manage to.
$300 was at that time a lot of money, but it seemed that it might be a worthwhile experience, and might possibly lead somewhere.
So I created a radio program called "Café Swing." The first half hour was jazz and the second half hour consisted of popular music in foreign languages.
Since the station had an extremely small record library, I bought my own records for the show. I had very little expertise in the sort of music I wanted, but at that time, it was still possible and take an LP from the bins in a record store into a little booth and listen to it. So each week I'd go to the store, choose a large stack of records that looked good to me (judging from the covers and the liner notes), try them all out and buy two or three of them.
In retrospect, I can see that the show was just an excuse to buy records that I wanted. I would have considered it much too extravagent to buy them just for myself.
The jazz part of the program was actually rather absurd. I wanted to be adventurous and play things that showed the most current trends in jazz. But I knew almost nothing about jazz. Which would have been find if I'd just acknowledged that, but I was trying to seem authoritative on the basis of reading from liner notes.
The foreign language part of the show was quite successful though. I was playing mostly quiet stuff: French singers like Yves Montand, George Brassens, and Juliette Greco; Portuguese fados; Katsanzakis and Nana Mouscouri. My lack of expertise actually worked to my advantage, since things that appealed to me were seldom so alien sounding that they would alienate my listeners.
I do think I once tried a little Ravi Shankar on the show, but at that time (1964) he was over the head of both my listeners and myself.
The show was fairly popular and after a while the station manager asked me if I'd be willing to do it Friday evenings as well as Saturdays. My immediate cynical reaction was, "Sure, and then you'll want another $300 from me." So I refused, without even asking what the terms of his offer were. Likewise, I conscientiously counted out my 13 weeks, and on the last week announced to my listeners that I was being kicked off the air, without even discussing the matter with the manager.
In retrospect, I realize that I was an asset to the station (although I was not a very good announcer) and that would have been quite happy to let me continue doing my show for free. (They probably would not have gone so far as to pay me, however.) In fact, it turned out that after I left, they decided to try an all foreign language format.
A year or so later, this station, KMPX, discovered the newly emerging San Francisco Acid Rock scene, and became the flagship radio station for the Love Generation in 1966 and 1967.
In 1964, though, the station would never have considered playing rock and roll. And it would certainly never have occurred to me to play it. Rock and roll was beneath me. It was low class music.
For a while, I considered the possibility of emigrating to Australia, which my wife was definitely willing to do. But that just didn't really seem to be the answer. It seemed like it would be change for the sake of change, and wouldn't really move me forward toward whatever goal it was I wanted to reach.
I started graduate study at the University of Maryland. I spent a horrible year and a half there.
Mathematically it was great. I had an opportunity to take some really good advanced courses that were not offered at the other two universities I subsequently attended. (I did not take the typical first-year math grad student's curriculum.)
But I was living with my wife and five-year-old daughter in my mother's house. My wife insisted that if I was going to school, then she was going to also go to school, to work on finishing her bachelors degree. (I later realized that her real consideration was that she was understandably not about to be left sitting at home with my young daughter in suburbia all day.) So we set off at seven every morning, dropped my daughter off at day care, and got back home at five-thirty. I had no social life with the other graduate students and there were almost none of them that I much liked.
The math grad students had one party during the time I was there -- at Christmas. It was a quite dismal affair. Everyone sat alone or with their date, pouring liquor into a paper cup out of the bottle they'd brought, and making unsuccessful attempts at conversation.
(My wife, however, got invited to some really good parties given in a big house by some undergraduates from one of her classes. For me, though, the trouble with those parties was that what everybody did was dance. They were all having tremendous fun, but I didn't know how to dance -- or, to be more honest, was too inhibited -- so I just stood on the edges and watched.)