SIX ARTICLES AND STORIES BY TOM SLATTERY FOR CHALICE MAGAZINE,

2013 - 2014

Tom Slattery's published stories and articles in Chalice magazine were subject to normal
editorial alterations. So there may be some slight differences between the printed
magazine texts and these texts that were lifted from his computer memory.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
The World Has Changed: Normal (1940 - 1946) ..... page 1
To Seek the Truth in Love ..... page 6
A Volcano Changes the World ..... page 11
It's All in the Mind ..... page 17
A Risk One Day Long Ago ..... page 23
Lesson and Life ..... page 29
INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR ..... page 37

Volume 1, No 1
October 2013
Chalice magazine Page 2
"The World Has Changed: Normal (1940 - 1946)"
by Tom Slattery
Consider this. When a child is born and suddenly goes from being a chemical reaction to
being a perceiving and evaluating human being, it is a scary thing. We all begin existence
fearing for our lives. Perception and evaluation begin working at birth and are moderated
through the ancient protective instinct of fear.
It is the same for puppies, kittens, and goat kids, but human kids begin life with bigger
brains and imaginations that can appreciate complexities and extrapolate threats from
hypothetical futures. These big-brained minds might succumb to paranoia, but also have a
talent to fabricate surroundings into something they feel is normal.
Like all creatures my beginnings were crazy and scary, but my mind made it normal. It
was the rock bottom of the Great Depression: I am told that my baby bed was a wicker
laundry basket.
By the time I was old enough to develop permanent memories and understanding, World
War Two was raging in Europe and Asia. I grew up with our whole planet at war. While
While it raged far off on other continents and distant oceans, it had its effect on
everything in the world, including a kid growing up on Archdale Avenue in Lakewood,
Ohio.
It was a war like no war before. It was a war of Good versus Evil on a global scale. There
were identifiable good guys and bad guys. We only found out how bad the bad guys were
as the war ended and mass-murder factories were revealed and massive disease
experiments were made known.
Both the good guys and the bad guys were developing devices that would profoundly
change the world after the war -- jet planes, radar, guided missiles, synthetic rubber and
plastic, antibiotics. When the war finally ended my normal world was fated to end, too.
An estimate of 60-million people were killed by the war and another 20 million died from
disease and starvation. And the war ended as the world's first nuclear war with the
massive instantaneous obliteration of two Japanese cities.
In 1940 I was four. I was not oblivious to the war, but events were distant and the threat
level was low. I had my kid toys and kid thoughts. Lurking in the back of my mind
though were the talk, images, radio commentary, and radio war sounds, so I grew up
knowing what was going on.

There was no commercial television. But newspaper and magazine images as well as
radio reports of the war were beginning to be part of the normal. And movie theaters
showed clips of battles and destruction. In addition there was a national chain of
Telenews theaters that showed only newsreels 24/7, which of course were mostly war
images along with war descriptions.
In 1941, probably because my father got a new and vital job in a war-related industry, the
family moved to a second-floor flat on Archdale Avenue in Lakewood, a house owned by
my grandparents. And these are memories from that time.
I lived in almost the last house in the Madison Elementary School district and walked
about a half-mile to Madison School every school day morning in rain, snow, bitter cold,
or exhausting heat. The war had brought on gasoline rationing and those few parents that
had cars could not afford to waste valuable gasoline on taking their kids to school. But it
was still a demographically rural country emerging from the Great Depression, and few
people had cars anyway. My great aunts owned a 1936 Chevrolet that my father was able
to borrow every now and then. But essentially we had no car. To get to downtown
Cleveland or anywhere else we took streetcars.
The distant but omnipresent world war was only part of my normal reality. The calendar
said it was the 1940s. But due to war demands on factory production, war rationing, and
conservation measures in effect for the duration of the war, time was trapped in the
1930s. Moreover, the 1930s themselves had been curtailed by the Great Depression, and
that whole decade never recovered from the 1920s and earlier. So a disproportionately
large number of 1920s cars still plied the streets and people rode nearly indestructible
streetcars built decades earlier.
There were no fast-food franchises -- no McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, or Wendy's. No
one even knew what a taco was let alone went to a Taco Bell. No one I knew on the far
west side of Lakewood at the edge of Rocky River farmland would have even known
what a pizza was.
The cityscape was dotted with small storefront Mom-and Pop eateries specializing in
meatloaf and mashed potatoes. These served real food free of additives and bought that
morning from markets. Hardly anyone had refrigerators. So food was kept as fresh as
possible in ice boxes.
In the 1940s Eugene O'Neill wrote a play titled "The Iceman Cometh." It was a time
when an "iceman" still delivered a large block of ice to customers for their iceboxes. The
iceman, who came several times per week to our Archdale Avenue flat and used ice tongs
and his shoulders to haul a huge block of ice up a flight of stairs, was a regular fixture of
my childhood. We did not get a refrigerator until well after the war ended.
Another touch on art now lost to the generations was in the 1935 song "Lullaby of
Broadway." A phrase "milkman's on his way" in it lets the audience understand that time

has gone by and it has gotten late. But the "milkman," like the "iceman," Was a regular
part of my childhood. Schneider-Bruce Dairy of Rocky River employed "milkmen" to
deliver large round quart glass bottles with "milk trucks" largely made by White Motor
Company in Cleveland. Homogenized milk had not yet been invented, so the cream and
the milk separated in the cardboard-capped glass bottles. The milkman left one or two of
these bottles at the front door every morning.
There was also the "breadman." The breadman worked for Spang Baking Company and
he used a delivery truck to bring loaves of bread to customers. Modern plastics had not
yet been invented. So the bread was packaged in wax paper. Wax paper did not hold in
moisture for very long. By the end of the day the bread that remained in the package was
partly dried out. Try as a kid might, there was no practical way to restore it back to moist.
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches had to be spread on partly dried bread slices.
There was also a periodic vegetable man. I have to guess now that he came from the
farms of Rocky River and beyond. During the war gasoline was severely rationed. So the
iceman, milkman, breadman, and vegetable man sometimes used a horse-drawn wagon to
deliver. Oat-powered vehicles were not bound by gasoline rationing.
Garbage was picked up using low-slung gray-colored dump trucks we called garbage
trucks. "Garbage men" would stand in these and receive battered galvanized steel garbage
cans and dump them at their hip-booted feet.
Two forms of money were needed to buy anything, real US currency and ration stamps
and tokens. Tokens were made from pressurized cardboard and had value equivalents of
quarters, dimes, and nickels. Bread was a dime a loaf, and also needed a ration token to
buy it. Losing a dime meant a small financial loss. But losing a rationing token was a
small disaster.
There were no supermarkets. Small grocery stores, small meat stores, small vegetable
stores, and small five-and-ten-cent stores filled needs for food and small implements. One
bought a large burlap sack of potatoes and stored them in the cool basement. There were
no refrigerators let alone freezers. So sometimes there were fresh vegetables in the
icebox. But most often vegetables came in cans.
All day long the huge block of ice melted in the icebox. Under it was a pan to collect the
water. Once or twice a day the melt water had to be emptied into the sink.
There was no air conditioning. And in the winter there were no automatic furnaces. Every
house had a coal bin in its basement. A coal man came and emptied a dump truck load of
coal down a coal chute. Basements were, as a result, filled with coal dust.
On cold winter days and nights someone had to constantly shovel coal into the basement
furnace to keep the house warm. One had to shovel enough coal into the furnace to keep a
fire going all night until morning. Even so, the furnace fire was either out or almost out

by morning. I remember wanting to stay in bed under warm covers rather than get up into
a literally freezing bedroom.
The war drew everyone in. At Madison Elementary School there were air raid drills
where teachers would herd us kids into adjacent cloakrooms and have us crouch on the
floor. Kids helped the war effort. I can say that even though I was too young to fight, I
helped to win the war. I had a little red wagon, and I went around house to house and
picked up flattened tin cans and other non-flattened cans filled with solidified fats from
cooking fats like bacon grease, for instance.
The fats went to make explosives for the war effort. The flattened tin cans went to be
recycled for their tin content so the country would not have to depend on tin from
overseas that came in ships vulnerable to being torpedoed.
And there was a terrible toll. Houses in the neighborhood would put blue stars in the
windows to signify that a family member went off to war in Europe, Africa, or the
Pacific. Some would be replaced by gold stars, meaning that the service member had
been killed. Often after that the terrible grief would be betrayed by un-mowed lawns,
unpainted house siding, un-repaired this or that.
But then suddenly it was over. Americans had dropped some kind of new big bombs and
it was over. But so was the normal world at war that I had grown up into. In late 1945 it
was all over. And soldiers were starting to come home by 1946. The old scary had
developed into the new unfamiliar.

Volume 1, No 2
November 2013
Chalice magazine Page 15
"To Seek the Truth in Love"
by Tom Slattery
As Sunday services begin and a flame is lit in the chalice at the West Shore UnitarianUniversalist Church we pledge, among other things, "to seek the truth in love." Unlike
virtually all other religions, the "truth" that we seek is not in revealed texts. We believe
that collectively as human beings we must find it for ourselves.
Unlike truth revealed in religious texts, the truth that we seek must be testable. It is not
necessarily scientifically testable truth. Some of it may be historical truth testable by
processes ranging from archaeological discoveries to DNA analyses. Some of it may be
biographical truth discovered by researchers who find the humanity in personalities
raised to mythological superhuman.
But most of it is scientific. We hear sermons that are drawn from the latest science. We
really want to know and really do not want to deceive ourselves about this reality that we
were born into and so fleetingly occupy. We are accused of being too intellectual as
opposed to being deeply religious. But this is false. We are religious about seeking the
truth in love as distinct from accepting the supernaturally revealed in fear.
And we are free to ask ourselves about what might be true and what might be not so true
in the other six days of the week. We crave new knowledge and support billion-dollar
atom-smashers, multi-billion-dollar space adventures, and million-dollar biological
laboratories. But each of us is free to seek the truth for ourselves and in our own low
budget ways.
And each of us knows that there was only one-each of Newton, Einstein, Pasteur,
Daguerre, Morse, Fleming, and so may others. They brought the rest of us one piece of
new knowledge or one set of closely related bits of knowledge and that defined their lives
and changed our lives.
None of them had credentials in the fields of their discoveries because by their
discoveries all of them invented their fields. The story of Newton and the apple may be
more metaphorical than true but there was no practical realization of gravity before
Newton.
The story of Fleming's discovery of antibiotics is a definition of the word serendipity.
There was only one Fleming and one discovery of penicillin, but Fleming was not trying
to invent antibiotics. He merely realized that what he saw could be useful. It became not
only his claim to fame, it turned out to be the one point of purpose and meaning of his
whole life.

Daguerre was an artist and a good one who made a lot of money from his art. He used
this money to fund his invention of photography. He became known as an inventor and
forgotten as an artist.
Daguerre's friend Morse (a Unitarian) was also an artist. One of his paintings hangs in the
National Gallery in Washington. But we know Morse not for his art but for inventing the
hardware and the software (Morse code) of the telegraph.
This is to say that we need neither education nor credentials to actively "seek the truth."
Edison, after all, had a fourth-grade education and piled up a horde of world-changing
inventions, some of which laid the groundwork for future university departments.
Anyone can "seek the truth." That, of course, does not necessarily mean that one will find
it. But not seeking surely means not finding. And the seeking of truth is not only a grand
purpose but it tends also to be fun.
Like air, time is everywhere around us. We note its passing but do not know what it is.
The following explores a wild amateur (from the French "lover of") seeking of truth
about time, especially what time might be. Nothing testable is found. But this text about
the seeking may lead other minds toward questions and answers.
***
Before the 17th century and experiments by scientists like Torricelli there was no notion
of air as a substance. Aspects of air had names like wind or breath as if they were
independent of it. Air itself was invisible and ubiquitous and no one even realized that it
was there, that, for instance, a moving and weighable substance called air made wind and
breath.
Could we stretch an analogy to time? Could time be a substance or "stuff" like a
blueberry muffin is a substance or "stuff"? That is to say, could time be something
tangible like mass-energy is tangible?
Let's explore. But let's whenever possible avoid scientific jargon and mathematical terms
because these have precise meanings and therefore have potentials to seduce our thought
processes back into the already known rather than to where we might be inspired to
pounce on what is not yet known and make it known.
Experience shows that time and energy are interrelated. For example, we step harder on
the gas pedal and give our car more energy and as a result we can get where we are going
in less time. But is this relationship between time and energy what we are wondering
about here?
Does the gas pedal analogy represent a flow of time that surrounds us like air surrounds
us so that we go through our lives oblivious to it? Or does it hint at a specific interaction
of the substance of time with energy-matter? Picking this apart will be tricky partly

because, as of now in our highly speculative state of mind, we do not know what a
"substance" of time might actually be like, feel like, and act like, and what it might and
might not do.
We are trying to guess at an invisible, intangible ghost. At best, any new speculation is
less than perfect and has to work itself out in comparisons with the already known. This
speculation about time as a substance will probably not end up with anything testable.
But it may spark a thought that will spark a thought that may lead to something.
Gravity appears to interact with time and vice versa. In the interest of not muddling our
mentalities in spurious directions, let's stick with gravity and time and skip that which can
be made to mimic gravity.
For instance, the "equivalence principle" shows that acceleration generated by other than
a gravity-generating mass can mimic the attracting acceleration of gravity.
But I note that the "equivalence principle" is well named. It is not the "identical
principle." To look at it from another angle, the totally different physical force of a
magnet on an iron pellet can mimic the "attractingness" of gravity. But magnetism is in
no way the same force as gravity.
I coined "attractingness" to avoid meanings so familiar that they neutralize thought. Also
in this case I coined "attractingness" to avoid introducing the ambiguity of biological
"attractiveness" of a young man for a young woman and vice versa.
Beyond the distraction of "equivalence principle," Einstein said that there is no such thing
as gravity, only distortions in space-time. So it becomes awkward to talk about a possible
substance called time interacting with space-time -- that is to say, a substance called time
interacting with time. This exploration hinges on a whim that time may be a substance
interacting with gravity.
We may need to coin another word, "Einsteinian," to free our minds. There may or may
not be something more to this than that which is locked into the dual concepts of
relativity.
The whim began with "Einsteinian" gravitational time dilation that appears, in the way
that whims do, to betray an interaction of time with gravity. What is gravitational time
dilation? It is a tested and known relationship between gravity and time. To condense
Wikipedia's explanation, clocks that are far from massive gravitational bodies run faster,
and clocks close to massive gravitational bodies run slower. In other words, gravity
makes a clock on Earth tick slower than a clock out in space halfway to the Moon.
Since it has been shown over and over again that time interacts with gravity, then it is not
too unreasonable to entertain a whim that time could be a substance or stuff like a
blueberry muffin that interacts with gravity.

There are other indications that the whim may not be completely absurd. There are the
curious twin limitations on the "speed of light" and "absolute zero" temperature. Both are
limitations on the motion of energy as if there was an "upper limit" and a "lower limit" on
the movement of energy. (The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, and absolute
zero temperature is just short of minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit.)
At absolute zero movement ceases and thus time would seem to also cease. The reverse
of this, "absolute hot," would seem to be the temperature of the universe in the first
instants of its Big Bang inflation when time was also in its infancy. Both at a temperature
of absolute zero and at Big Bang zero just before the Big Bang, matter and time could
tempt one to see similarity between the two.
Presumably before the Big Bang, light had no "speed" and thus had no time. After the
Big Bang light seems to always have had a precisely defined "speed." The best minds can
be forgiven for asking why there is a speed of light. But there is z speed of light. If
unobstructed by material or by gravity, the "speed of light" seems to be the same
throughout the universe.
Let's look at the speed of light and go back to the earlier gas-pedal analogy. We step on
the gas pedal and use more energy, and this use of more energy reduces the time it takes
to get where we are going. But what if we have a super-car that can go the speed of light
and that car is on a treadmill that is going the speed of light?
We step on the gas pedal and give the car more energy, but stepping on the gas pedal
doesn't reduce the amount of time it takes to get us where we are going. It only makes the
treadmill go faster. If we look at the engine, the pistons are going up and down faster and
faster. If the car was energy, that is to say light, the up and down light frequency, like the
up and down of the car pistons, would increase. But since the speed of light cannot
change, light with a lot more up and down motion doesn't get where it is going any faster.
So can we say that the conveyor belt might represent time? It makes an interesting
analogy, but analogies eventually fall apart. Both the super-car and the photon of light
can accept and use the increased energy, but something would seem to be absorbing the
saved time.
Could the "speed of light" and its companion "absolute zero" be yet two more indications
of an interaction with the "stuff" of time, of mass-energy with time? Could this
interaction of the substance of time with light be what creates light "waves" and then
squeezes "wavelengths" as more energy reacts with the substance of time? In addition,
what confines the speed of light?
Let's divert for a moment and look at something else that might indicate an interaction
with time outside the normal flow of time, radioactivity and equally important here, nonradioactivity. There are four known "eternal" particles: protons, electrons, photons, and
neutrinos. Left to themselves they stay and don't decay.

Neutrons may last forever inside a nucleus, but neutrons can decay. Pluck a neutron out
of the nucleus and it lasts just under 15 minutes. It decays into a proton, electron, and
(anti) neutrino. This decay appears to be a reversible process in mu mesons (using mumeson neutrinos) and apparently in making neutrons with electron neutrinos and protons
in experiments in deep mines. And apparently in the high-energy condition of the first
moments of the Big Bang, protons could become neutrons.
So free neutrons outside the nucleus relate to time with a measurable decay time of about
15 minutes. Mu mesons relate to time with a measurable decay time of about 2.2
microseconds. And for that matter, the multitude of the non-stable isotopes in the Chart
of the Nuclides each have their own characteristic decay times, which is to say their fixed
personal relationships with time.
If time is a substance, it seems to interact differently with each other substance and
property of our universe. Moreover, if time is a substance, that substance, like the rest of
the whole package of everything that surrounds us in the universe, would have been
created in the Big Bang.
Can we speculate? In some alternative universe could there have been a Big Bang that
had no substance of time? Can we imagine what that might look like?
A quick guess is that there would be an inflation from a pre-Big Bang singular point to a
whole universe in a timeless instant. Without time this universe might be motionless and
seemingly dead. But the main point is that unlike our own universe, it would not take
almost 14 billion years and counting to inflate. In one timeless instant it would have been
a point. In the next timeless blink of an eye it would have been a done universe.
Well, that scenario requires a stretch of imagination. But if time is a substance it probably
would have been born with all of the other stuff in the Big Bang of our universe.
But what about an alternative universe that was born with only half as much of the
substance of time and all the rest of the substance of time went instead into creating other
substances like our electrons, protons, mesons, neutrinos, etc.?
Or vice versa and not without a touch of levity. If an alternative Big Bang created a
universe with twice the substance of time and only half of the substance of the rest of
electrons, protons, mesons, neutrinos, etc., would we live some great length of time but
with great scarcity all of our long pitiful lives?
How might time, as a substance, exist or work in an inflating universe?
Time appears to act evenly and thus be dispersed evenly throughout the universe. Might
this indicate that time came into existence with the very earliest instants of the Big Bang,
perhaps even in the earliest instants of some yet-undiscovered proto-Big Bang and it
attached itself to everything?

10

And in what form? Might this substance of time be carried in particles, strings, or even,
since time is not light, a Michaelson-Morely-era aether? And if there might be a timeparticle, a "timeton," might it have become deeply embedded in every atom and subatomic entity that exists in our universe?
Could it be that deeply embedded "timetons" are the sole driving force of the Big Bang
inflation, "timetons" pushing light and everything else outward and striving to reach an
impossible time-eternity where there is no warping and slowing from gravity?
There may be lingering cloud chamber, bubble chamber, and spark chamber photos and
data from experiments done over the past half-century. Perhaps if one reviewed them for
"timetons" or other aspects of time as a substance that may lurk in the resulting smashed
atoms one might find something. I don't know of anything. It's just a wild guess.
Time is all around us. It governs everything in the universe. And we don't know what it
is. To seek the truth about time seems like something we all could try.

11

Volume, No 3
December 2013
Chalice magazine Page 23
"A Volcano Changes the World"
by Tom Slattery
Nothing happens out of context, and our human context began in Africa with un-evolved
proto-human creatures. A lot that changed what we are happened before we were born,
way before we were born.
And it happened far over the ocean in Africa where scientists have been scratching
around African rock and soil for ancient bones of our animal-like distant ancestors for
over a century.
Let's begin near the beginning of what we now call human. One of the striking changes
that changed all of our lives back about 4.4 million years ago was our singular capability
of walking upright, unlike other mammals.
Bones have been dug up of a 4.4-million-year-old creature that if not a direct ancestor
was similar to our direct ancestors living at that time. Our direct ancestors also would
also have walked upright or they would have lost out in the competition with other
anthropoid creatures. The earthly remains of this 4.4-million-year-old creature were
cataloged in with an imposing name, Ardipithecus ramidus.
Our animal ancestors walked around African plains, hills, and valleys for another 1.2
million years while evolving into the creature we know as Lucy or a creature similar to
the famous Lucy. The big improvement that Lucy and her cousins brought was that
Lucy's feet had arches for easier and more sustained walking. Her bones are logged in as
Australopithecus afarensis and estimated to be 3.2 million years old.
These two creatures, and the ones like them that were our direct ancestors, were less than
borderline human. We would have to call them animals. They did not use fire and clothes
would not be invented for a very long time. They lived like dogs and cats.
But they kept improving. By 2.6 million years ago our very distant ancestors were
beginning to use chipped stones as tools, and by 1.7 million years ago had mastered the
art and technique of chipping and manufacturing useful stone tools
Then something notable changed our ancient ancestors' lives. The moment celebrated in
Prometheus myths happened. About a million years ago proto-humans living in a cave in
what is now South Africa became the first known living creatures to have used fire.
Using fire was a definite improvement in itself and in addition would have nurtured
improved mental capacity. Our ancestral fire-using creatures had to do what other

12

animals are generally incapable of: resist eating food until it was cooked. Moreover, they
had to have social organization to collect and store firewood. Their community had to
have a social ordering to keep a fire burning and had to cultivate learning and
communication about culinary techniques and arts. The payoff was better nutrition and
higher energy extraction from available food to fuel all of this increased mental energy.
Great gobs of time went by. Word-of-mouth hand-me-down knowledge accumulated.
Social interactions grew more complex. Language, manipulation of verbal and visual
symbols, and communication skills improved. The brains of our ancestors had no choice
but to evolve and grow bigger or head to extinction.
Around 170,000 to 200,000 years ago, when our ancestors had been walking upright
without clothes and evolving for about 4.4 million years, there may have been a few final
finishing touches to our physical evolution. But around that time the genes of our
physical evolution became stabilized. We have not significantly changed physically since
then.
On the other hand, a mental-social evolution based on "memes" continues to this day.
Wikipedia, quoting the Mirriam Webster Dictionary, defines a meme thus: "an idea,
behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."
Around 200,000 years ago or so our ancestors had evolved into beings that looked and
probably behaved much like us modern humans. And shortly thereafter one of the bigger
and better brains among them invented clothes, and the idea, behavior, and style of
clothes caught on big.
A time frame for this invention -- this comparatively recent Adam and Eve moment in
our long evolution -- has been pinpointed by measuring rates of DNA changes in human
body lice, which in spite of the name are in actuality human clothing lice. The invention
of clothes took place about 170,000 years ago. Among other things, this invention
allowed these beings to leave Africa to live in cooler climates.
Nowadays there is hardly any scientific or popular argument against our newly clothed
ancestors coming out of Africa. But there is something interesting about it. DNA shows
that we now fully human humans walked out of Africa in two different waves, one
roughly 120,000 years ago to 100,000 years ago, the other roughly 50,000 to 60,000
years ago.
Why were there two waves? A powerful event that changed all of our ancestors' lives -and thus changed our own lives -- with repercussions to this day -- took place about
halfway between these two waves.
Here's what may have happened, and it could explain why we have our present slight
physical-appearance variations that we erroneously call "race." On the northern half of
the island of Sumatra in present-day Indonesia there is a pretty little lake named Toba. It
is a remainder a "mega-colossal category 8" explosion of a super-volcano.

13

A super-volcano eruption is thousands of times greater than that of an average volcano.

The colossal cataclysmic explosion of the Toba super-volcano occurred roughly 75,000
years ago, midway between these two waves, and created a sulfur and dust cloud that
would have blocked sunlight from the planet, possibly for years.
Global temperatures would have dropped catastrophically, but possibly unevenly and
therefore leaving scattered opportunities for plant and animal life to continue. Over most
of our planet, however, vegetation could hardly grow if it could grow at all. The result
seems to have been a massive loss of plant and animal life, including human life.
The whole human population of the planet Earth dwindled to only a few thousand
surviving individuals.
Since the first wave out of Africa had begun around 120,000 to 100,000 years ago it
would have taken place and reached completion many millennia before Toba exploded.
Among other early humans, these first-wave ancestors have been shown to have been the
ancestors the present Australian aborigines. They had to have had boats to reach
Australia, unless, of course, you want to believe they had flying saucers.
Let me offer some reasonable but unsupported conjecture. By the fact that these ancestors
of Australian aborigines were able to cross considerable water from the Asian landmass,
one must infer that they had gradually developed a whole range of adequate nautical
competence.
And prior to crossing from Asia to Australia they probably would have crossed the Red
Sea from Africa into the southern Arabian Peninsula to begin their journey as the first
wave. There were probably powerful Neanderthals threatening migrations toward the
north. A hypothesis of primitive seaworthy boats offers a possible way for the first wave
to first cross the Red Sea and then the vastly greater distance from Asia to Australia.
Large dugout canoes from gigantic rain-forest logs made by using stone tools and burnout techniques would not seem impossible. These primitive but fully evolved humans
were not unlike ourselves in body and brain and could have manufactured seaworthy
boats. Primitive outrigger setups could have been devised. Rudimentary navigation using
sun and stars and primitive sails would not seem impossible for them to have used.
The recent ancestors of modern Pacific Islanders crossed vast stretches of the Pacific
Ocean in small outrigger boats and populated virtually all of the islands of that enormous
body of water. Similar ancient minds with like motivations surely could have
accomplished similar but less adventurous feats. But the complex knowledge and
technology would have been lost in the colossal cataclysm and near extinction of humans.
Scattered desperate survivors would have been unable to organize large labor pools to
continue the work and traditions and they would have forgotten it.

14

Others in this first wave of functional humans out of Africa may have tired to walk north
into Europe and central Asia. But they would have encountered one big problem. The
physically larger and stronger Neanderthals were already there and still numerous and
powerful across Europe and the western and southern Eurasian continent. These first
wave human ancestors would have been poor match for Neanderthals in terms of combat
or numbers.
Whether traveling by sea or by land or both, this first wave of human migration out of
Africa would have hugged the coast of south Asia. Beaches make fine natural routes for
travel, both for ease of physical travel itself and for not getting lost while traveling.
Eventually by land and by sea the first wave reached all the way from Africa into
Australia.
It is not impossible to visualize small settlements growing up over hundreds of thousands
of years along the first wave's migration route. But sadly all of these settlements hugging
the waterline along the South Asian coast would have been obliterated by a giant tsunami
resulting from the Toba explosion and mega-earthquake.
Prior to the Toba cataclysm but after reaching central or eastern Asia, humans of the first
wave probably migrated north while bypassing the Neanderthals and expanded into east
Asia. Their competition in East Asia may have been Homo erectus.
Like the Neanderthals, parallel-evolving Homo erectus would probably not have been
terribly dissimilar-looking nor dissimilar thinking and self-aware beings. And they would
probably have been fearful and resentful of the new intruders. But there is a lot of land in
Asia. Newly arriving humans could literally disappear into it. Whether welcome or not,
some of the first-wave people seem to have established themselves there.
The first wave may have continued on with some amount of two-way traffic back to
Africa and growing in population and proficiency for perhaps 20,000 to 25,000 years.
That is a long time. In the modern world civilizations have come and gone in mere
hundreds of years. Moreover, just consider what we present civilized humans were only
5000 years ago at the dawn of civilization in the Middle East and Egypt.
Twenty thousand years went by after the first wave began. Then the Toba super-volcano
exploded. Very few of these first-wave humans or their stay-behind relatives in Africa
survived. There were probably patches in the uneven dispersal of volcanic material and
blocking of sunlight. This and local sources of warmth and food could have allowed
small groups of clever or lucky humans to survive. But both mitochrondrial and Ychromosome DNA tracing -- that is to say, both female and male -- indicate that only a
very small number survived.
In an article in the July 2007 Vanity Fair, former Stanford postdoctoral fellow and
Oxford research fellow Spencer Wells, now head of the Genographic Project, says DNA
studies suggest that human population may have dwindled to as few 2,000 individuals.

15

Inbreeding in extremely small and very isolated surviving clans might explain our present
so-called "racial" appearances.
The minimal population of humans that survived the Toba cataclysm survived isolated
for millennia -- some in Australia, some in China, and some in Africa, where the second
wave had already begun to migrate. But over tens of millennia population grew.
When population had rebounded, a second wave of humans migrated north, into where
the physically powerful Neanderthals once had lived in great numbers. The Neanderthals
too would have been almost annihilated by the Toba explosion, although one might
speculate less so due to their ability to survive in colder climates.
The second wave began heading up into Europe roughly 50,000 years ago. That was
maybe 25,000 years after the Toba super-explosion and a long enough time to allow
human population to grow to previous levels or more. They genetically mixed with the
Neanderthals to the extent that many of us modern humans are two to five percent
Neanderthal.
But memes had long before taken over our evolutionary changes. What early humans
learned from Neanderthals may never be known. But the second-wave of humans lived
among or in proximity with Neanderthals for thousands of years, and there surely would
have been some exchanges of knowledge, beliefs, skills, and relationships.
It would seem that from three remnant isolated clans of survivors of the Toba catastrophe
numbering as few as 2000 individuals, a whole new global human population grew into
our present overpopulation of six-and-a-half billion individuals -- with three distinct socalled "racial" appearances that keep raving radio talk-show hosts employed.
There may have been an isolated clan of a few individuals in east Asia, the present, to use
nineteenth-century racist terminology of anthropology, so-called "Mongoloid race".
There may have been an isolated clan in Australia, the present Australian aborigines who
are close to African blacks.
And there may have been a small clan of individuals isolated in central or western Asia or
Europe. And some of these may have mixed with the second wave out Africa after it had
grown from a few surviving individuals there. It should come as no surprise that we
present-day humans offer superficial appearance differences as blacks, whites, and
Asians.
And while the first or second wave into Europe and Western Asia mixed with the
Neanderthals and possibly others like the Denosvians, black people in Africa did not have
the opportunity. African black people have no Neanderthal or other non-human DNA.
Still, the cataclysmic explosion of the Toba super-volcano on the island of Sumatra seems
to have made that time 75,000 years ago a time that changed all of our lives to this day.
Among other things, now we have to deal with "racism." That may not have been the

16

case if Toba had stayed dormant. Or would our big brains just have found something
else?

17

Volume 1, No 4
January 2014
Chalice magazine Page 22
"It's All in the Mind"
by Tom Slattery
Our brains originated in the stars. The atoms in them are the stuff that stars are made of.
We are inseparable fractions of a great, majestic, and mysterious universe.
Simultaneously our minds are the stories that we make about ourselves. Our storyconjuring minds incessantly invent and reinvent what we are and what that may mean in
the fictions that we formulate and call fact.
If there may be anything more to magical moments of revelation than self-invented
fictions that delight or frighten us, it may be a crossover from the stuff of stars and what
we have evolved to in molecules of nerves that make up our minds.
That is to say, while being constructed of the stuff of stars, the molecules of our minds
and memories evolved over ages. And the often awfulness and occasional delightfulness
of eons of evolutionary progress have left us limited to knowing what the molecules of
our minds can be programmed to know.
To enhance this we have devised extensions of our primitive sense organs to reach out to
the edge of space, to understand the coldness close to absolute zero, to study the ultra-hot
temperature at the beginning of the universe, and to measure the size of the smallest subnuclear particles. We also know that this hard won scientific knowledge is seductive and
there is much more that we do not know: dark matter, dark energy, the inside of a black
hole, what is out beyond the edge of space, and what existed before the Big Bang.
We have all had multiple mountaintop moments of glints or shimmers of revelation that
seem to leap from the stuff of stars that we are to the stories that we have made out
ourselves to be. We know them ourselves, and great minds in arts and sciences have told
of experiencing them.
Small or large, insignificant or spectacular, they arrive as spiritual encounters, mysterious
coincidences, new ideas that never existed before, and experiences beyond our grasp but
convincingly real.
But wait. Have the depths of unconsciousness in our magnificent minds simply created
experiences, patterns, and fictions to satisfy our longings that there may be more to it all?
Or do we really sometimes touch on something mysterious beyond our grasp?
By sharing we may accumulate libraries of highly individual mountaintop moments to
examine, compare, and maybe decipher. And yet by sharing these highly individualized

18

moments or experiences we know that an individual may have undergone not only that
encountering but perhaps many of them, ranging from trivial to profound.
And in sharing we realize that we can share because there is nothing at all unusual in
them. Language has even created words for some well known types of them. Dj vu is
one such word. It is so common that we even joke from baseball player Yogi Berra's
contortion of the concept: "It's dj vu all over again."
Let me offer my own take on dj vu. I lived in Berkeley for a few months in late 1972
and early 1973, and every time that I walked past a certain pretty little store it gave me
that dj vu feeling. And gave me that feeling every time that I walked past it for several
months.
Then I moved away. Three years later when I again happened to live in Berkeley but on
the other side of town, I made a point of walking over to there to see if it would still give
me that same dj vu feeling. Alas, it no longer did. It was just another building. And I
even walked back there another few times. And each time it was the same: no more dj
vu.
And on my final walk to that place, a thought out of nowhere suddenly occurred to me.
The dj vu feeling was not because I had experienced being there before but because I
had been exactly where in some sublime design of time and the cosmos I had been meant
to be three years earlier.
Am I saying that this is what dj vu really means? No. I have no idea what dj vu really
means. But I offer this anecdote to show that while the feeling is real its meaning is open
to interpretation.
Another touch that many seem to feel from the mysterious beyond is coincidence.
Coincidence in itself is just coincidence. But sometimes coincidences occur in patterns or
coincidences seem to be related to other coincidences. The mathematics of probability
may be called in, but probability is about probability and coincidence is not necessarily
quantified by it.
Coincidence puzzles, astonishes, and bewilders all of us but can bedevil us for a lifetime
when associated with tragedy and death. And this leads me to share another slice of
autobiography.
It starts in 1957. Unemployed in Cincinnati and with the Selective Service hanging over
my head preventing me from getting a job because no one wanted a guy who could be
drafted any day, I had given up on normal job-finding and had begun trying unorthodox
methods.
I walked into a small hospital lab without the faintest idea of what was done in hospital
labs and asked the first person I ran into if they had any jobs. By coincidence that
someone happened to be the pathologist who ran the lab, and by an even greater

19

coincidence he had just, minutes before, fired his histology technician. In fact he was still
fuming over the confrontation.
There was a brief on-the-spot interview where, while I hastily looked around at the lab's
scientific equipment and white-coated personnel to get some grasp of where I was, I told
him that I had a high school course each in physics and chemistry.
"You look pretty bright," he told me. "I think you can do this."
Several years into the future the State of Ohio passed laws that required hospital
histology technicians to be tested and licensed, but that was not the case that day. Since
the previous histology technician had been fired on the spot, the histology lab equipment
and the medical specimens were ready to go.
The pathologist showed me what to do and how to do it, and I started work in a matter of
minutes. And over the next week or so I picked up the finer points of histology and
became, for the next year of my life, a histology technician. I was way out of my league,
but I needed the job to survive and so I winged it. During that time I picked up some of
the in those days simple general hospital lab techniques and filled in doing lab technician
work for some time more.
But that was a closer call. The State of Ohio had, several years earlier, passed laws
requiring all general lab technicians to have at least two years of college-level lab
technology courses to be certified, and that window was quickly closing. I had no way to
finance two years of college.
There was still research, though. Working with patients in hospitals required credentials,
but research technicians only had to know how to do the work. So I got a temporary job
as a research technician in a lung-function project funded by a government grant. And
that ended in late 1959.
In January 1960 I was overcome with a feeling that I should go to Chicago to find a job.
It may have partly been Carl Sandburg's Chicago poems. It may have been a perception
that I could more easily find a job in big city Chicago than in Cincinnati. But I also
remember being overcome with a really strange feeling.
I had some money saved. I packed a couple suitcases, told my dad and stepmother that I
was going to look for a job in Chicago, went to the grand old Cincinnati Union Terminal
and bought a ticket, and headed for Chicago on the all-night milk train. It may have been
a steam locomotive train, but at any rate passenger trains were still widely used.
The train pulled into the (now gone) Illinois Central terminal and I walked a block or two
and got a room at the (now converted to condos) YMCA Hotel on South Wabash. And
knowing my money was limited, I immediately began looking for a job.

20

After a week or two of looking I got two job offers. One was as a salesman for a newtype and cheaper magazine-addressing machine. The other was for a much lower paid
lab-tech trainee position at the Billings Hospital lab. Illinois certification laws were
different. I decided on the latter.
But by coincidence -- one of those suspicious coincidences, it had started snowing a
record snowfall that night. By morning there were deep drifts and it was still snowing.
Naive and not from Chicago, I elected to take the Cottage Grove bus. As I recall it was a
near-whiteout condition on top of already deep drifts of snow. Cars were abandoned at
weird angles in the middle of Cottage Grove Avenue, and even some of the other buses
were immobilized at weird angles.
Almost miraculously the bus made it to 56th Street, and I go off and trudged through
deep unshoveled drifts to the university personnel office that was handling jobs for
Billings Hospital and other satellite organization hiring. And when I got there my hat and
coat were covered with inches of snow. The waiting room was crowded. People were
drying gloves and I believe even shoes on aluminum-painted cast-iron radiators. It was
chaos. And it was not only weather-caused chaos.
I waited all morning. An businesslike older woman finally gave me some personnel
forms and tests to fill out. I skipped any kind of lunch because that meant going out into
the snowstorm and it meant possibly losing out on the lab tech trainee job.
There was nothing to do but wait. And I waited until after five PM. Finally I was ushered
into an office for an interview and was shown to a wooden chair by a utilitarian desk by a
man in a rumbled suit. We sat down. He shot a perfunctory look at my forms and tests.
And then he said, "I'm sorry, but that lab job has just been filled."
And I erupted in an uncharacteristic show of anger. I banged my hand in the desk and
told him in a considerably raised voice, "You can't treat people like this. I waited out
there all day." It clearly flustered him.
"Okay," he said. "Let me see if I can find you something. And he went to the back of the
office to an olive-drab filing cabinet, pulled out a drawer, and rummaged through it. He
ambled back, sat down, and looked over several pink forms that he held. I believe that he
was smoking a pipe.
"Here's one you might like," he said. "It's almost minimum wage but it's helping with
nuclear physics experiments at the Enrico Fermi Institute. "Okay?" I nodded and he
called. I had an interview with my prospective boss the next day.
The pipe-smoking man in the inexpensive rumpled suit and I shot the breeze for a few
more minutes. He explained that the personnel office was in chaos because the former
personnel director had abruptly quit that morning and gone to Northwestern University.
He told me that he was a professor of psychology that they had hauled over to put some
order into the chaos.

21

It was a strange occurrence and in view of other events, a manner of strange coincidence.
The personnel director's sudden resignation was as abrupt and unexpected as the
histology technician's firing and sudden departure. Moreover, a cold-hearted personnel
professional would not have troubled to look for another job for me like the kindly
psychology professor did.
The next morning I met my boss, a physics Ph.D. candidate named Manfred Pyka who
was attempting to prove the newly discovered Panofsky Ratio, a ratio of decay of two
kinds of mesons discovered by well-known nuclear physicist Wolfgang Panofsky. He
would, more than a year later, prove the Panofsky Ratio in a unique new way and thereby
making an important contribution to science.
My workspace looked out a window at the west end of Stagg Field where the football
stadium stands that hid super-secret wartime atomic bomb research once stood. It was
there on December 2, 1942, that Enrico Fermi created the first nuclear chain reaction that
led directly to making the atomic bomb. That beginning of the Atomic Age had only been
seventeen years earlier.
I worked for and with Pyka for a year, and then in January 1961 I got drafted. I saw him
once more when I visited Chicago after Army basic training. And then I was sent to Fort
Lewis, Washington. We regularly wrote to each other. He got his Ph.D., published his
dissertation, and was hired to work at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies.
For a year's Army service I accumulated a two-week leave and entertained vague notions
of going to New Jersey to visit him. But when it came down to actually planning, I had
neither the money nor the time. When I finally went on leave in January 1962 it was to
sunny California and for the sun and to flee rainy and snowy Washington as well as to
visit other old friends in San Jose, California.
In a San Jose newspaper I saw a short blurb with a small blurry photograph of Wolfgang
Panofsky breaking ground on the Stanford campus for the new Stanford Linear
Accelerator. When finished it would become the most powerful atom smasher in the
world.
It was my birthday. And for a birthday present to myself I borrowed a car and drove to
the Stanford campus for the sole purpose of seeing where the celebrated Wolfgang
Panofsky of the Panofsky Ratio had used a shovel to turn over a ceremonial shovelful of
earth for his unique new linear accelerator. I had worked on the Panofsky Ratio for
Manfred Pyka for a year and this, I thought, would top off that intoxicating exhilarating
year that had now gone on to past years and experiences past.
I drove around the Stanford campus not realizing how big it was and that the
groundbreaking ceremony had taken place in the hills above the campus. I could not find
the spot, and students that I asked did not know anything about it.

22

While I was on the Stanford University campus that birthday day and looking for the spot
that Wolfgang Panofsky had shoveled, far away across the North American continent at
the Princeton Institute for Advance Studies Manfred Pyka opened a container of lithium
hydride that did not have a label. Something ignited it. Pyka was a chain smoker, and it
was probably a cigarette.
The explosion effectively blew off Pyka's face, but he survived -- at least for a while. I, of
course, knew nothing about it and took a bus back to Army duty at Fort Lewis,
Washington.
Over the next couple months I continued to write occasional letters to Pyka but never got
one back. I thought that he had become busy on an experiment, and I knew how that
went. In the spring the Army deployed our field hospital unit to maneuvers in the desert
Yakima Firing Center. And a letter came one day from Pyka's wife Ingrid.
I opened it, and there was a partial explanation of what had happened. And there was a
small water drop that could have been a tear.
There was a pay phone about a mile away in the desert. I borrowed coins from everyone
and walked to it. I called the hospital. I got a terrible unintelligible moan-like sound. And
then immediately his wife picked up the phone. She said that she would have to talk for
him. And with her acting as his voice we exchanged trivialities. I dared not upset his
fragile condition by asking how it had happened. So that was the last that I heard from
him.
Within hours after that phone call the field hospital got orders to ship to Southeast Asia to
be part of the growing military action there. Pyka lived on in hospitals for almost a year
after the explosion. A cornea transplant finally took and he could see again out of one eye
and wrote to me in his old familiar handwriting. But he died shortly after that. Hours after
he died the field hospital got orders to immediately return to Fort Lewis.
A last coincidence in this collection of coincidences is that a year-and-a-half after I got
out of the Army I got a job at Wolfgang Panofsky's then nearly completed Stanford
Linear Accelerator. At first my work area was a few doors down the hall from
Panofsky's. I would see him every day. My boss there was Martin Perl. Years later Perl
would win a Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the Tau particle.
It may be in atoms of a brain. Or it may all be in my mind. But it seems that there was
something strange in this, a mountaintop moment that may have gone awry. I'm distanced
from it for a half-century and more now, but still wonder what it all may have meant.
And there is actually a little more to this story. But it might have a tendency to tax
credibility. And therefore it may best be another story for another day.

23

Volume 1, No 5
February 2014
Chalice magazine Page 17
"A Risk One Day Long Ago"
by Tom Slattery
Risks are a natural part of us. We risk fatal pathogens when we breathe. We risk cars out
of control, structures collapsing, and tainted food. Risk is everywhere and we suppress it.
But sometimes we take a foolish little risk for a silly whim and are left to live out life in
awe of our folly.
I once took a silly little risk and the memory has stayed a part of who I am. My tiny risk
took place long ago, and my remembering of it has eroded to hazy. I can now only dredge
up the more fondly retained rudiments.
It was in 1962, more than a half century ago. It all began in the chilly air of early spring
at the Yakima Firing Center, a vast US Army installation located in the sagebrush and
tumbleweed desert of central Washington state. I was an insignificant integer in a military
exercise that was noted in the press as the largest military training maneuvers since
World War Two.
Far away, literally on the opposite side of our tiny blue spinning planet, Southeast Asia
was well into one of its three seasons, the hot season, and a real war was beginning to
heat up in Vietnam. A large distraction claimed my mind and concentration. I had just
learned that my friend and former boss Manfred Pyka had been gravely injured -- as it
would turn out later, fatally injured -- in a laboratory explosion at Princeton Institute for
Advanced Studies a few months earlier.
Simultaneous with my finding out that horrible fact, our US Army medical group had
gotten orders to cease military maneuvers at once and pack up forthwith for deployment
in a war zone. We Army peons with no need to know and kept distant from the orders
hypothesized that we might be heading for Southeast Asia or for hotspots like West
Germany where the Berlin Wall had just gone up or Lebanon , where four years earlier
the U.S. Army had deployed a large force.
We were a Strategic Army Command (STRAC) unit and had to be ready to go anywhere
in the world within days, if not hours. We ourselves and our Army equipment were
constantly inspected and always had to be, and most importantly appear to be, "strac."
So the field hospital tents, the medical equipment, and the military hardware were packed
away and shipped off. We uniformed grunts were packed into buses and driven back to
Fort Lewis, Washington (now named Joint Base Lewis-McCord), to retrieve our personal
items and pack everything into our olive drab duffel bags. These were then stenciled with
"Priority 1-A" in black paint.

24

One thing the Army unintentionally teaches is how to read rumors. And at Fort Lewis
rumors were flying. The believable rumor was that we were going to Southeast Asia,
probably to Thailand. I somehow ferreted out that we were going to set up the field
hospital at a Thai Air Force base in central Thailand and called my Dad from the base
telephone exchange and told him what I had postulated.
After a restless last night between sheets of our comfortable Army beds at Fort Lewis we
woke up to reveille, wolfed down breakfast, and were bused to adjacent McCord Air
Force Base. There we were assigned planes.
Most of the unit was assigned to MATS transport planes -- the military version of civilian
passenger planes. But a few of us, including me, were assigned to ride in the Wisconsin
Air National Guard freight planes. The Wisconsin Air National Guard had been
"federalized" by President Kennedy a few weeks earlier. Some of its planes now carried
the field hospital tents, medical equipment, and cots.
This was 1962. World War Two had ended only seventeen years earlier, and a large
number of World War Two soldiers had remained in the Army to get their twenty-year or
thirty-year retirements and benefits. And thus I was paired off with a sergeant who had
survived World War Two, and the two of us would sit in the back of the freight plane and
escort the field hospital tents and equipment to Thailand.
As I recall, the plane itself was a redesigned World War Two B-29, the kind of plane that
had dropped atom bombs that had vaporized Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The nose of the
plane was no longer a bubble gun turret that the old B-29 had. But about half of the
transparent bubble window still remained in the new freight plane design.
With piston engines roaring the huge heavy old plane lumbered down the McCord AFB
runway, lifted off, and headed out over the Pacific Ocean. I was leaving North America. I
had never left North America before.
The only other person sitting in the back of the plane behind the packed field hospital
gear was an elderly World War Two sergeant. He had little to say and preferred to doze
off. Soon the flight out across the Pacific became an exercise in tedium. So I wandered up
to the front of the plane and for most of the flight sat up front looking out the partial
bubble and talking with the Wisconsin Air National Guard pilot, copilot, and navigator.
I was a less than enthusiastic soldier. For seven years I had legally dodged the draft with
ruses like starving myself below the minimum weight limit, getting my boss to write to
the draft board to delay my induction, and claiming that I was too far away from an
induction center to take a new physical exam.
Finally they caught me, and I decided to just get it over with, get drafted, and serve out
my two-year sentence. But from the first day on I was determined to be one reluctant
soldier. And that, combined with the grave injuries to my friend and former boss that I

25

had just a couple days earlier learned about, put me in an uncooperative mood about all
things Army.
Moreover, at that point in my mandatory two-year Army stint I only had seven months
active duty left to go. I was, in Army lingo, "getting short." And there was my personal
philosophy. From the very beginning of my draft dodging days I had resisted taking the
Cold War Army seriously. As Army grunts might say, "I could care less."
But if I was resentful about being a drafted soldier in an Army that I felt had been
rendered conceptually and materially outdated by technological and political changes, the
plane's crew was no less so. A few days earlier they had been civilians in the work-a-day
world in Wisconsin and then all of the sudden with the scrawl of a pen by President
Kennedy they had been "federalized" into full-time military personnel.
So there we were, all of us effective civilians flying, unlike modern jet planes, low over
the vast blue Pacific. The only authentic military person on board was the old sergeant
dozing in the back of the plane. So the crew and I talked and joked and exchanged stories
and anecdotes in the cockpit above the roar of the droning huge old piston engines that
kept the frame of the plane in a constant state of vibration.
And then the party would run out of steam and there would be a long lull. I would gaze at
the radar images of clouds on the round green oscilloscope screen. And then I would
alternate and sit in the nose bubble and look out at the real white fluffy clouds as the
plane plunged through them. Or I would gaze down at the white caps on the waves below
that gave hints of the direction of the wind on the blue water's surface.
And then after a long morning there was a stirring and shuffling in the cockpit. They let
me stay in the cockpit as the landmass of Hawaii came into view under us. And I could
easily make out the legendary Pearl Harbor of that not-so-long-before "day of infamy." In
fact, I told myself that this was exactly how those Japanese pilots had seen it. And then I
was sent scurrying to the back of the plane to fasten myself in with a seat belt while the
plane landed at fabled Hickam Field.
After more than a half century I have forgotten how we all disembarked. There had to
have been some kind of a stairway on wheels was rolled up to an airplane door because
all of the exits were too high off the ground to jump down. The crew, the sergeant, and I
would have clambered down the moveable steps. What I remember next is asking one of
the flight crew how long we would be there. He said that his experience was that
refueling would take at least two hours. A Hickam Field ground crew member confirmed
that.
Then there was a little bug buzzing in my brain. I had grown up relatively poor in a
suburb that was a mix of palatial shoreline mansions and modest to rundown average
houses. All through school I had to listen to bragging rich kids who went on winter
vacations to Florida, to California, and most exotically to Hawaii. And over and above

26

that, I had looked with a kid's longing at postcards and textbook photographs of Waikiki
Beach and Diamond Head looming in the background.
Hawaii had only been a state in the union for two-and-a-half years. I had grown up
regarding it as a federal territory. Now here I was in the brand new State of Hawaii
--actually in Hawaii! I was really standing on the ground in enchanting Hawaii with a
short taxi ride to Waikiki. And my mind calculated at lightning speed that I could take a
taxi to Waikiki, probably be able to rent a bathing suit, take a swim from Waikiki Beach,
and grab a taxi back to Hickam Field before the plane was refueled.
Moreover I was, at that point, less than inclined to take the high-priority military
deployment seriously and hopeful of having my own secret snub at all the pompous
militarism that had come out of the woodwork. I would wrestle a two-hour Hawaiian
vacation from my indenture in the US Army. I was defiantly going to get myself a twohour Hawaiian vacation at Waikiki Beach, bought and paid for by the U.S. Army.
Then and there I decided to risk it, partly because by my calculations there was little risk.
I could get to Waikiki and back before the plane was refueled for its flight to the next leg
of the journey, Wake Island. So I headed for a line of waiting taxis. Military bases
always have taxis waiting, especially those with airfields. I picked a cab and told the
cabby to take me to Waikiki Beach. The very sound of saying it was exotic.
And in ten or fifteen minutes -- my memory is hazy about how many -- I was at Waikiki
Beach. I had left the cold clammy overcast Puget Sound hours earlier and was now
enjoying the balmy 80 degrees Fahrenheit sunshine of Oahu. And sure enough, there was
Diamond Head looming in the distance like straight out of a post card. It was 1962.
Waikiki was touristy but not big-money cluttered.
It was a weekday and there was almost no one around. The beach and neighborhood
beckoned in a friendly middle class way to users and swimmers. A small shop in a shed
by the beach rented me a bathing suit.
I had grown up near the shore of the Great Lakes and had never experienced swimming
in salt water. It was more buoyant. I swam some short distances back and forth just to be
able to say that I once swam at Waikiki Beach. And then I went to a cold-water shower
stall and rinsed the salt water off of my skin.
I got dressed in my Army fatigues, returned my bathing suit. There was still some time. I
walked over to an outdoor hot dog stand and gobbled down one or two smothered in
mustard. It wasn't to have a sandwich on the Sandwich Islands but to have eaten
something for the long flight from Hawaii to Wake Island.
I also bought and sent a few postcards and then looked at my watch and noted that time
was running out and I had better hurry back to Hickam Field. I hailed a cab and it took
me back to where the plane should have been in the final stages of refueling.

27

Alas, the plane had been refueled in record time, possibly due to the priority status of the
deployment. The taxi pulled into Hickam Field in front of that iconic hanger that always
shows up in Pearl Harbor attack photos and films. I got out and asked where the plane
was.
Someone pointed out to the end of the runway. I looked way out across the airport. There
was my plane, engines revving-up, poised on the brink of taking off. An MP or a second
lieutenant drove up in a jeep, possibly alerted by the taxi on the tarmac. He identified
himself to me, and as quickly as the words could form I told him that I was supposed to
be on that plane. He knew. They had been looking for me all over the place.
He spoke into a walky-talky -- apparently to both the control tower and to the plane. I
once was lost but now I was found. The problem became how to get me to the plane with
the roaring engines more than a football field length out at the end of the Hickam Field
runway, and equally important, how to get me onto it. Ah, there was a way. There was an
access to the cockpit from the front landing-gear wheel well.
The MP or lieutenant ordered me into his jeep. We raced for the plane and braked to a
screeching halt right at the huge front landing gear. There was no time for discussion. He
pointed. I went.
I had to stand on the landing-gear tire, and then I could see the rungs of, as best I now
recall, the built-in steel-rod ladder. I grabbed the first rung and pulled myself up enough
to grab the second rung. After that I climbed up to the top of the wheel well.
Alas, that was not the end of it. The huge piston engines were making a deafening roar.
The co pilot or the navigator shouted to me that they were trying to unscrew the metal
floor plate that served as a trap door to the plane's cockpit. They were having trouble
because the screwdriver was merely a screwdriver blade on the pilot's penknife.
A thought crossed my mind that I could be trapped in the wheel well if the plane took off
and the front landing gear was raised. The deafening roar of the giant piston engines
added to my sense of terror. After what seemed an eternity they got the cockpit floor
plate unscrewed and opened it. And with mountains of relief I clambered up into the
cockpit, consciously trying to look as if I did that sort of thing every day.
If I had not befriended the crew they might not have gone so far out of their way to
rescue me from military justice, which surely would have been the case if the plane had
gone on to Wake Island without me.
I no doubt thanked them. But the plane was already starting to move on the runway, and I
had to hurry to the back of the plane and strap myself in with the seat belt. The old
sergeant had no doubt seen shenanigans like mine from young soldiers for two decades.
He had a sarcastic comment about my close call.

28

The plane flew out over Pearl Harbor and headed out over the vast blue Pacific toward
Wake Island, a tiny speck of coral sand in the middle of a vast ocean. When it got there I
walked literally around the whole small island. Only two decades earlier the Japanese had
captured the island from a token contingent of American defenders in a fierce battle now
hardly remembered even in history books.
There were still rusting hulks of blasted ships and war contraptions all over the island and
off shore. I stayed overnight in barracks on Wake Island, and the next day the plane flew
on to Guam. I can say with some certainty that comparatively few people in our huge
human population have ever walked around Wake Island.
As for the risk of stealing off and having a short Hawaiian vacation on Waikiki Beach, I
am glad that I took it. I never again swam in salt water. In all my many years I never
again got back to Hawaii, except a couple hour waits at Honolulu Airport when returning
from Asia. As it turned out, that had been my one and only shot at a "vacation" at
Waikiki Beach, and I had seized it.

29

Volume 1, No 6
March 2014
Chalice magazine Page 14
"Lesson and Life"
by Tom Slattery
It was, as best that I can recall now, late spring or early summer 1958. I was living in
Cincinnati. I had a good job and I had saved some money.
And one bright sunny day I spotted a robin-egg-blue 1952 Hillman Minx in a used car
lot. It was not American at a time when my struggles with the Selective Service had
turned me anti-American. It was a car of the world when I was regarding myself as a
citizen of Planet Earth.
While the Hillman Minx was a popular car in Britain, that Hillman Minx sedan (called
"saloon" in Britain) was probably the only Hillman Minx in Cincinnati in 1958.
When I was told that the Rootes Group also made Sunbeam sports cars I felt freed to buy
the Hillman because while that was probably the only Hillman in Cincinnati, there were a
few of Rootes Group's Sunbeam sports cars with crossover car parts.
But that was wishful thinking. In 1958 there was only one major foreign car dealership
and garage in Cincinnati. It was attuned to Rolls Royce and MG ownership. A foreign car
owner had to use its services.
Even more important, all of the nuts and bolts in the Hillman Minx were in a peculiar
standardized British size system called Wentworth. The Wentworth system was devised
in 1841 as the world's first standardized system for bolts, nuts, and wrenches when the
first steam engines were first being put to use to replace animal and human muscles in
ships, railroads, and factories. It was an agonizingly logical system where the bolt head
and nut sizes were mathematically related to the screw-thread size so the right torque to
tighten it could be applied by a wrench (called "spanner" in British English).
But the Wentworth system was neither metric nor in inches. It was just a peculiar British
size system all of its own and requited a set of unique Wentworth wrenches. Metric
wrenches and wrenches calibrated in fractions of inches did not fit the car's bolt heads
and nuts. Sometimes one could make a close fit, but never a good tight fit. Many times
the metric or inch-calibrated wrenches were for all practical purposes useless.
But I did not know anything about this as I stood admiring the unique little car and
daydreaming of driving it away. Wrenches and bolts were farthest from my mind as soft
summer breezes mixed with Cincinnati traffic noises, and if anyone had said
"Wentworth," I would have responded, "Wentworth what?"

30

When I finally bought the car a few weeks later I found a partial set of Wentworth
wrenches. Still not knowing about their uniqueness, I was careless with them and may
even have lost one or two. But from the start when I had bought the car, some of the
crucial wrenches and sockets were missing. Sadly, at that point in time I still did not
know what a Wentworth wrench was. The salesman had mentioned that they were
different and to be careful not to lose them. I had seldom used wrenches for anything. I
didn't know what he was talking about.
Not only was it a first car with all of the first car responsibilities that one never thought
about before owning a car -- like car insurance, car registration, car inspections, car
repairs, car maintenance, and parking tickets -- it was a peculiar little British car with
additional problems.
And over the two-plus years that I owned that car, the not knowing caused me the most
pain and trouble. Like all first cars it was an "if I had only known" car, but more so
because it was foreign and genuinely different and I was awfully naive.
Not realizing these drawbacks and not being able to see into the future, I just wanted that
little car. It fit my needs to be defiant and different and it was a cute little car. I kept
coming back to the used car lot to casually glance at it and hope that no one had already
bought it.
After the end of World War Two while war-torn Britain was struggling to get back on its
feet, I had developed an attachment for things British. I had sometimes bought Cadbury
candy bars, mostly to be a different sort of American who ate British candy bars.
When thin-tire British Hercules Renown bicycles went on sale at a downtown department
store in the late 1940s, I bought one with saved paper route money and a little help from
my parents. I would be different. Other kids had wide-tired heavy American bikes like
those made by Schwinn and Roadmaster. I had a lightweight Hercules Renown -- with a
gearshift, no less.
So with past preferences like that I wanted that Hillman Minx "saloon." It was different.
It was a modest and fuel-saving little four-cylinder car at a time when Detroit was
dumping gaudy, tail-finned, gas-guzzling behemoths onto American roads.
I would be different in it. It was, for instance, so different that instead of having flashinglight turn signals that we are now so familiar with, it has little illuminated plastic flaps
that sprang out from midway between the side windows of the four-door sedan. When
they closed back into the side of the car after the left turn or right turn was made they
made a distinctive "clack" sound that only a former Hillman Minx driver can love.
In the early nineteen fifties automatic turn signals, or direction signals as they were
called, were still evolving. Moreover, there were still cars from the 1930s on the roads,
and many of those had been manufactured with only one taillight, thus forbidding modern
turn signals. Most 1940's cars had two taillights, but very few had turn-signal systems

31

wired into them. Therefore most drivers still used standardized hand signals to indicate
upcoming turns.
That meant winding down the side window in rain, shine, sleet, or snow, sticking one's
arm out the window to make the signal, and turning the steering wheel with one hand.
Flashing light signals were optional and not standardized.
Standardized flashing-light turn signals did not become mandatory until the mid-1960s.
For two years of my life in the 1950s I drove around with an effectively experimental
turn signal system that was to become a dead-end branch on the evolutionary turn-signal
tree. Such is life.
The sales personnel at the used car lot had of course begun to notice me repeatedly
standing on the sidewalk and looking longingly at the Hillman Minx. One finally came
out. On the test drive I found out about the bizarre turn signals and that the British car did
not have three forward gears like American cars of the time, but four forward gears in
addition to a reverse gear. That car was just plain different. I loved it. The gearshift, as
with most American cars of that era, was part of the steering wheel assembly.
The salesman (an all-male occupation in the 1950s) guided me into buying it for about
$300. That year the average annual American family income was about $4000. So the
$300 that I plunked down was a nice chunk of money. I have to guess that it would have
been $3000 in today's dollars.
I talked the salesman into going with me to get my drivers license. The Bureau of Motor
Vehicles facility was nearby. With the little European car being tested in standard
American behemoth parking spaces I breezed through parallel parking. With that worst
part of the license exam over, I zipped through the rest and got my Ohio license.
Back at the used car lot I signed the papers and drove my Hillman Minx home. Over the
next few months I regularly drove my strange little car to work. I nervously took a couple
girlfriends out on dates. I went shopping. I drove it to movies that had been off of the
public transportation routes and previously had been out of reach.
Over the summer I drove it to places scenic and not so scenic places to paint oil paintings.
I drove it to one spot in Cincinnati and painted a church and its surroundings in the
Impressionist Utrillo's style. Cincinnati has a European look to it. My sister still has that
1958 painting hanging on her living room wall.
For the first several months the car caused me little or no trouble. But like all cars, as
time went on it began to have problems. At first I mostly relied on the foreign car dealer
and their Wentworth wrenches to get things fixed.
But I vaguely recall fixing a few things myself by using an owner's manual that employed
British terms. The car's hood, for instance, was a bonnet. The trunk was a boot. The
fenders were wings. But the bumpers were fenders. The car had tyres, not tires. The

32

windshield was a windscreen. And it ran on petrol. Simultaneous with all of the normal
first car learning processes, I had to become familiar with a foreign vocabulary.
Over the two years that I owned the car it was mostly just a car. I used it for all the
normal car things. But it was also a British car with those odd Wentworth nuts and bolts
holding it together.
It was expensive to use the foreign-car repair facility. One time, to save money I sent
away for a new clutch and found a small independent garage and mechanic to put it on.
He got it on through creative cleverness, but he had a rich American vocabulary of cuss
words for me when I picked it up.
When the brake shoes wore down to screaming steel and the wheel cylinders began to
leak, I sent away for brake shoes and wheel cylinders. I was broke and I jacked up the
small car and fixed it myself. When wrenches did not fit I used vice grips.
I also found out the hard way that the little British car with its four-cylinder engine was
not meant for speeds and distances of American freeways. The only time that I drove it
from Cincinnati to Cleveland to visit my mother I so badly overheated the engine that I
blew a gasket and the engine block warped. I had to have the motor head milled.
It was not expensive to do this. The small four-cylinder engine was easy to access and
repair. In the 1950s engine overheating was not an uncommon problem even with
American cars. Numerous small machine shops did engine milling and costs were not
outrageous.
But problems due to uniqueness and foreign-ness just kept coming. On a weekend drive
to Columbus to see my sister and brother-in-law, a brake hose popped. The British brake
hoses appeared to be made of natural rubber. The brake hose had rotted faster than
reinforced artificial rubber used in American brake hoses, possibly aided by salt spread so
abundantly on American roads. As I approached a stoplight on the north side of
Columbus that Sunday morning I heard a loud pop and the brake pedal went straight to
the floor.
Fortunately unhurried Sunday traffic was coming the other way had not yet begun to
move. I coasted through the red light and endured honking horns.
Doubly fortunate was an open-on-Sunday gas station on one of the corners. I seamlessly
coasted into it and pulled on the rusted and never-before-used emergency brake. It
worked minimally to slow the car to a halt in front of the car repair doors.
This was before the 1974 oil crisis that would end things for many gas stations, and
before EPA standards to stop pollution from underground gasoline storage tanks killedoff more. In the 1950s there were gas stations on every corner of main streets. And there
were multitudes of minimum-wage gas station attendants sitting around with little or
nothing to do, especially on Sunday mornings.

33

And that was the case with this gas station. A young and obviously bored uniformed gas
station attendant listlessly ambled out. It may have been to gawk at the unusual little car.
I told him what happened. His boredom evaporated.
He had me slowly and carefully drive the brake-less Hillman Minx onto a lift and then
hoisted it up. Sure enough, a front brake hose had a gaping hole. There was no saving it. I
needed a new one.
The trouble was that there were no foreign car dealers that would have a brake hose for a
1952 Hillman Minx in Columbus. Columbus in 1959 was a sleepy little college town, the
third or fourth largest city in Ohio. The nearest foreign car dealers and repair facilities
were in the big cities of Cleveland or Cincinnati.
But the mechanically inclined attendant was fighting boredom. He found a brass cap that
would warp enough to fit the Wentworth threads on the brake system's broken side and
screwed it on. Then, so the car would not pull to the side, he put a large ball bearing into
the good brake hose and tied a knot in the flexible natural rubber small-sized brake hose.
With this arrangement I had only back brakes, but at least I had minimal brakes. This
innovative impromptu brake system slowed the car to a halt more than abruptly stopping
it. I dared not drive fast.
So I picked up one of the gas station's free Ohio maps and carefully drove back to
Cincinnati on back roads and going no faster than thirty-five miles-per-hour.
This drama of gas stations staffed by mechanically competent minimum-wage attendants
would happen again two years later with my next car, a 1951 Plymouth sedan. I was in
the Army at Fort Lewis, Washington, and had just dropped off some soldier buddies.
It was three o'clock in the morning and I was zooming down the freeway connecting Fort
Lewis with the city of Tacoma when I heard a loud bang and the engine area began
emitting horrible grinding sounds. In such situations one instinctively knows that one has
to do things fast. Adrenaline kicked in. I had just passed an on-ramp and was heading
toward an off ramp. I spotted the lights of a gas station at the end of the off ramp.
I swung wrong-way onto the off ramp, going against traffic by driving partly on the lawn,
and got to the top of the ramp. Yes, there was a company-uniformed attendant on duty.
Gas was 19 cents a gallon and gas-guzzling cars needed gas at all hours.
He lifted the hood. We saw that the water pump axle had broken. When it broke the fan
had plowed into the radiator. It looked like an unfixable disaster. There was a huge gouge
tearing open the top of the radiator.
In the wee hours the attendant clearly savored a challenge. He went to the back and
returned with a rusty used water pump, an exact match for my broken one. How lucky

34

can that be? But the six-inch gouge across the top of the radiator presented another
problem.
So he stuffed steel wool into the gouge. Then he used a welding torch to heat a bar of
solid solder and, pass after pass, dribbled melted solder onto the steel wool. After about a
half-hour he managed to use up the bar of solder. But it turned out to be exactly enough
solder to seal the gouge. We filled the radiator, and the steel-wool-and-solder patch did
not leak.
It cost me some surprisingly small nominal sum, and I drove off into the early dawn and
made it back to the Army base in time for reveille. The steel-wool-and-solder patch held
water for another year until that car and I parted when I was shipped off to Southeast
Asia.
One more incident with the Hillman Minx just came to mind. While I was approaching a
Cincinnati main street from a side street the little British Hillman Minx hit one of those
legendary American potholes just as I was slamming on the brakes. The front-end U-bolt
that held the steering system to the car frame snapped. The whole front end of the car
came crashing down.
Unaware of what had happened, the car in back of me launched into a frenzy of horn
honking to get me to move. The honking alerted two muscular guys who were walking on
the sidewalk. People seem to have been more helpful then.
They immediately ran to my aid. They lifted the car by the front bumper and wheeled the
small Hillman Minx like a wheelbarrow into a curbside parking spot. As if it were an
everyday occurrence they wished me luck and went on their way talking and joking about
whatever they had been talking and joking about. The next morning I got a tow truck to
haul it to the one and only British car repair shop in town.
The Hillman Minx and I existed in that kind of world. I was young and every day held its
lessons in life. And for some of that time I drove my Hillman Minx to and from a
commission-only job selling Singer sewing machines and vacuum cleaners.
However, my short career as a sewing machine/vacuum cleaner salesman and repairman
ended when one of my demonstrator canister vacuum cleaners pulled down a wall.
It happened like this. One day I drove my Hillman Minx into an area that had recently
been flooded to demonstrate a canister vacuum cleaner. One of the sales points was to
place a five-dollar bill inside the vacuum cleaner canister, put the canister against a wall,
and turn it on.
The vacuum cleaner created an adequately powerful enough vacuum to prevent anyone
from pulling it off of a wall. As far as anyone knew, no one had ever gotten five dollars
richer from pulling a canister off of a wall.

35

Not realizing that this wall had recently experienced flood damage, I went into my sales
pitch. My customer was a large, strong working-class woman, and she was determined to
get the five dollars for herself. Five dollars then would have been worth $25 today. I
turned on the vacuum cleaner and she braced her feet against the wall, shot me a most
determined look, and gave vacuum cleaner canister a mighty yank.
Down came the whole dining room wall in a cloud of plaster dust.
Flabbergasted into stupefaction, I offered what defenses I could and with my plaster-dustcovered vacuum cleaner beat a hasty retreat to the door, down the steps, and down the
walk to my Hillman Minx. I flung it into the back seat and drove off. Claims for damages
arrived at the Singer retail shop the next day.
We temporary and on-commission employees had not been generating great sales. The
lady's wall was, of course, covered by store insurance. But for the store management it
was the last straw. We temporary on-commission employees were told to retrieve
demonstrator sewing machines, turn them in, and pick up our final paychecks.
I had several demonstrator sewing machines scattered around the city, one of them to a
poverty stricken grandmother-type in the inner city who had been stuck by some bad
circumstance with raising her granddaughter.
I had let her have a demonstrator sewing machine for months, literally months. As far as I
could see, she used it well to make and repair clothes for her growing and active
granddaughter. We had developed a kind of code. I would ask if she was ready to buy the
machine. She would say that she was still thinking about it. That meant she could have it
for a bit longer. But now, alas, I had to pick it up. She gave me a heartfelt thanks. I was
only glad to have been some small help.
Not long after that I got a job with a federally funded project researching lung disease in
the Rocky Mountain west. The Hillman Minx would not hold up for such a long drive
across the North American continent. It had, by then, been damaged by a hit-and-run
accident, nuts and bolts had been stripped from using wrong-sized wrenches, and in
general the car had become dangerous to drive, especially to drive far or fast.
So I reluctantly drove it to a junkyard. The money I got would pay my expenses for my
first week on the job. With tears in my eyes I said goodbye to my fine little friend of two
years. And when I got to the gate of the junkyard I turned and took one last look at the
Hillman Minx with tears running down my cheeks.
It was a hard lesson, but a lesson that I should not have taken so seriously.
I never again bought a foreign-brand car. I only bought American-brand cars, built for
North American roads, able to drive fast and on long trips, made of sturdy parts and
materials, and easily repaired with standard North American tools. But the realization of

36

the hard part of this lesson came as I wrote this. I should not have allowed myself to be so
easily scared away from owning another foreign car.
The world had been changing. Roads all over the world became like North American
roads. Cars all over the world became built to standards of North American cars. The
British dropped their Wentworth system. And foreign cars, foreign car parts, and foreign
car repair garages became ubiquitous.

37

INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

Chalice magazine page 19
Heather Hall's interview of Tom Slattery for Chalice magazine, a monthly publication of
the West Shore Unitarian-Universalist Church, Rocky River, Ohio USA, March 2014
issue
Tom Slattery chose his condo in Rocky River for its proximity to the grocery, the
pharmacy, the metro parks and the other stores in town. He didnt realize until he moved
in and looked out the condo's party room window overlooking the Rocky River that he
could see his childhood home on the other side of the valley in Lakewood. After a life
punctuated by a series of coincidences this seemed fitting.
Tom was born in 1936 in Cleveland to Matthew Thomas and Mary Elizabeth Slattery.
His mother was German-Hungarian and his father, Irish. He was one of four children,
two sisters and a brother. He spent most of his early childhood in Lakewood in the house
he views daily from his condo building. His parents divorced during his teen years and
he and his sister moved to Columbus with his father, but his father brought them up to
Cleveland for visits every weekend.
Tom has been a UU since he was about five years old. His parents were nothing, secular
hedonists, dropouts from Catholic church. I remember we were joking one day and I
said, were unchurch people arent we? However, they started looking for a church
sometime around World War II and ended up at the old Cleveland Unitarian Church on
Euclid Avenue. West Shore Unitarian Church split off from that church, and Tom's
parents were among the founding members. It was inevitable that we would end up
Unitarian. It was a church we could go to that wasnt really a church.
When Tom was a child his fathers cousin, Frank Siedel, known to Tom, his siblings and
cousins as Uncle Bud but known to Ohioans as Mr. Ohio because he wrote the Ohio
Story series, first for radio, then later for a weekly half-hour television program. The
Ohio Story was short sketches of Ohio history that few knew about. Siedel had a knack
for dramatizing dry history which made his shows hugely successful and his ability to
weave a good story planted the beginning seeds of becoming a writer in Tom.
Siedel was not the only famous writer in the family, Toms aunt was married to Arthur
Miller - yes, THAT Arthur Miller. Miller was a somewhat regular figure in Toms life as
a child until about his teen years when Miller left Tom's Aunt Mary to marry Marilyn
Monroe. He last saw Miller was when he was 17 in the 1950s probably around the time
Miller was writing The Crucible. Arthur Miller had built himself a large shed for an
office away from the house with no telephone in it so that he was not disturbed while
writing and he could sit in his office and write his plays. Miller wrote in the office for the
rest of his life, but Tom saw it just as it was being finished and was quite impressed.

38

So I had these two successful writers in the family, and I thought writing is the way out
for me." He did not follow a straight trajectory to becoming a writer, however, as he had
to accumulate life experiences to build up his writing repertoire. Also, he needed a way to
fund his schooling and stay out of being drafted. Ironically, though, being drafted is what
enabled him to study writing, as he was able to take advantage of the G.I. Bill after
serving two years in the Army. Also, spending seven months in Thailand as part of his
service led him to an interest in East Asia and eventually getting his undergraduate
degree in East Asian studies.
After high school he worked as a histology and biology technician, thinking that maybe
he could get some kind of a technology certificate that would keep him from being
drafted. However, it obviously didnt work out that way. But he did get to work with
some bigwigs in the nuclear physics world, landing a job at the University of Chicago
because of a complex set of coincidences revolving around a monster snowstorm and the
personnel director suddenly quitting. Because they were shorthanded, he got to help with
experiments that used Enrico Fermi's cyclotron, three or four stories under Chicago. He
lucked into working with the Bubble Chamber Group a group of physicists that used a
new type of nuclear particle detector invented by Donald Glaser called a bubble chamber.
A bubble chamber was a vessel filled with a transparent liquid (most often liquid
hydrogen) used to detect electrically charged particles moving through it. Glaser was
awarded the 1960 Nobel Price in Physics. Tom's immediate boss, Manfred Pyka, became
a sort of mentor to Tom. After serving in the Army as a result of being drafted from that
job, Tom went to California to work as a nuclear physics technician at the Stanford
Linear Accelerator, where his boss there, Martin Perl, would later win a Nobel Prize in
physics.
He wrote about this experience in a previous edition of Chalice. While working at
Stanford, he got married to a Japanese woman, then worked a series of odd jobs after
that, including Pan American Airlines, cleaning planes so that he could qualify for free
tickets. He lived in Japan for a couple of years, where he taught English conversation,
wrote some short stories and his first novel, and then he returned home, making his way
across the Pacific by working as a wiper on a C-3 freighter, known during WW II as a
liberty ship (always finding creative ways to finance and/or implement his travel plans).
Over the years he had taken classes here and there at dozens of colleges, paying out of
pocket, as college was not nearly as financially burdensome then as it is today. But after
returning to the states from Japan, he discovered he was eligible for the GI Bill and he
used it to enroll in his first writing workshop in science fiction and fantasy at Clarion
College After that he enrolled at Cuyahoga Community College and got his Associate of
Arts degree.
Sadly his marriage ended in California and he used the GI Bill to finance more classes at
the University of California Extension. But he had something else in mind that he needed
to attend to. From the time he spent in Asia, in the Army and then later living in Japan, he
knew that there were a number of children born to American G.I.s and Asian women. In
Japan there was a peculiar legal paradox that trapped half-Japanese children who had no

39

official citizenship from either country. Due to Japanese laws, because they were halfAmerican and born to legally married couples they were not recognized as Japanese
citizens, and because they werent born in recognized marriages by the U.S. they couldnt
get American citizenship, either. So they were stuck in limbo. So Tom decided to take a
trip to Japan and Korea to find out more about these kids and see what he could do. He
took some of his own money and borrowed some from his parents, got a cheap ticket
through a Stanford University student group, and flew to Japan and Korea. By some
stroke of luck I was apparently able to get 5000 half-American kids who had been born in
Japan, Japanese citizenship. It wasnt really luck, Tom did a lot research and tracked
down the right people to help him.
His work helping to get these kids, he believes, was what got him accepted to the
University of California, Berkeley, and he was able to finish his undergraduate degree
there in 1977 in East Asian studies.
His first job out of college, was back to square one: working as a histology technician at
Case Western Reserve University, where a student group published his 199 "thesis" from
Berkeley on East Asian studies in a one-time student magazine, the Timberline Press,
which may still be available in their library archives to read today.
He decided to apply to Central Washington University in Ellensburg after learning that he
could receive a Masters focused on Creative Writing there. He had his name in for a
teaching assistantship, but a year went by. Then Mount St. Helens erupted covering the
state in volcanic ash and scaring off a student who had been chosen for the t.a. and who
apparently was afraid the volcanic ash was toxic, leaving a place for Tom. Tom was
sitting in his mothers house when he received the call wondering if he would like the
teaching assistantship. So thanks to the volcano erupting, Tom was able to attend
graduate school.
It was a special program where you didnt have to attend many classes, you were
assigned a tutor and basically left to your own devices. His tutor ended up having a
nervous breakdown and so he was assigned a replacement, a traditional academic who
was not terribly focused on creative writing. In spite of all this, Tom managed to get
through the program, writing a novel for his Master of Arts thesis.
After graduate school he continued to work odd jobs and went on adventures gaining
fodder for his writing, including driving around the USA for background to write his
novel End of the Road, which was one of his two books available at the Westlake
Porter Library (but on last check "End of the Road" was no longer on their shelves,
although "The Tragic End of the Bronze Age" still is). But a copy of "End of the Road" is
still available with several of his other books in the downtown Cleveland Public Library.
In 1991, he found a comfortable chair in the Cleveland State University library and that
year researched what happened at the end the Bronze Age (which he wrote about in
Chalice). After a year of poring over books about the subject, he came up with a theory
that a smallpox epidemic ended the Bronze Age and he self-published book about it.

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Over the past 20-or-so years, Tom has spent working on writing original books,
modernizing classic novels, writing nonfiction books, screenplays, a play, many articles,
and many cover letters to try to sell his writing.
Hes spent the last decade polishing up his books to self-publish them on the print-ondemand publisher iUniverse.com site, a total of nine books were eventually published. He
also wrote a modernization of Mary Shellys novel The Last Man, which he retitled
The Last Human, and has posted it along with numerous other writings on the free-toread website Scribd.
Coincidentally or maybe not so coincidentally, Toms whole life reads like an adventure
novel. But he can always look out his window across the Rocky River Valley and
remember where it began.
END OF SIX CHALICE ARTICLES AND STORIES

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