Idea Man Page 2

  If we’d been older or known better, Bill and I might have been put off by the task in front of us. But we were young and green enough to believe that we just might pull it off.

  CHAPTER 2

  ROOTS

  In the 1940 Darkonian, two quarter-page portraits mark the top student honors at Anadarko High School in central Oklahoma. “All-Around Boy” Kenneth Allen, his blond hair slicked back, meets the camera with a square jaw and a confident smile. Edna Faye Gardner, “All-Around Girl,” has her hair curled above a heart-shaped face. Even in black and white, her eyes shine.

  I know that look well. My mother is eighty-eight now, and not what she was, but you can still feel the positive energy in those eyes.

  My parents grew up in hard times and came of age as the world went to war; they had smarts and ambition, but little was given to them. In Anadarko (population 5,579), a small county seat seventy miles southwest of Oklahoma City, they moved in different spheres. Bubbly and petite, a star student who sang in all the music groups, my mother worked nights in the local library, a job tailored to her teenage goal: to read at least one novel from every great author in the world. “Sam” Allen, the student-council president, played center on the varsity football team and excelled at track. (His nickname came from a famous high hurdler of the day, “Sailing Sam.”) He moved with the popular crowd, at least until he began showing up at the library. My father liked adventure stories and Westerns, but his interests weren’t strictly literary. One day he came to my mother’s front door, aiming to ask her to the senior prom.

  He never got the chance. As he stood there, turning his hat in his big hands, my mother chatted about the latest book she’d enjoyed. She had grown up with four older brothers and wasn’t shy around boys. It just never occurred to her to ask why my father might have come to call. Flustered and red-faced, he left and stalked home. He should have known better.

  None the wiser, my mother went to the prom with her friends, without a date. She had a wonderful time.

  Three years later, my parents were engaged.

  THE FIRST TIME I visited my relatives in Anadarko, I was startled by their accents. My parents were in their late twenties before they left Oklahoma for good, yet I’d never heard a trace of a twang or drawl from either one of them. As my mother told me, “We just decided we were going to speak good English, and that’s what we did.” When they joined the postwar exodus and made their way to California and then to Seattle, they were leaving their old lives behind. I think they wanted something more, something bigger for themselves and their children to come.

  After I was born, in 1953, my mother went back to teaching fourth grade at Ravenna School in north Seattle. Curious and friendly, with an easy laugh, Faye Allen was the kind of teacher whose former students stopped her in the street ten years later for a hug. She read aloud with perfect diction, pausing dramatically at points of maximum suspense to leave the children panting for the next day’s installment. I’d feel the same way at bedtime, when I’d beg for one more chapter of The Swiss Family Robinson. My mother stopped working after my sister, Jody, was born, five years after me, and I think it was hard for her. “I loved teaching,” she’d say. “It’s not like work. It’s like living.”

  MY FATHER BOUGHT a house on a GI loan and we moved to Wedgwood, a newly developed area north of the University of Washington. It was a typical Seattle neighborhood: hilly and green, with mature cherry trees and wood-frame homes on quarter-acre lots. There wasn’t much traffic, and fathers and sons could toss a football in the street after dinner. Our neighbors included a truck driver and a French couple who owned a restaurant. Our two-story, three-bedroom house had dark gray shingles, a peaked roof, a small front lawn, and a fair-size backyard.

  We also had a basement that said a lot about us. On one side sat the laundry machines; on another, when I got older, my chemistry lab; along a third, my dad’s workshop, with tools hung on a pegboard. My mother’s mountains of literature were stacked two volumes deep on surplus university bookshelves and spilled onto the floor alongside piles of the New Yorker. It got worse after she volunteered to price books at the Wise Penny thrift shop and came home each time with a share of the inventory.

  My mother read everything, from the classics to the latest novels: Bellow and Balzac, Jane Austen and Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer and Lin Yü-t’ang. That basement jumble was the exception to her otherwise thorough housekeeping. She kept promising to straighten it up but couldn’t bear to throw away so much as a National Geographic. My father did win one concession, however. After my mother woke him one night because she was too scared to head to the bathroom by herself, he laid down the law: no more ghost stories.

  I was reading on my own well before kindergarten. I can remember leafing through some illustrated primer when the page clicked into focus and the words suddenly made sense. Not long after that, for Christmas, I was given an oversize picture book with everything a four-year-old could want to know about steam shovels, tractors, backhoes, and fire engines. I read that book every day. Seeing my interest, my mother had a friend give me a tutorial on steam engines. It wasn’t very technical, but I got my first inkling about the gears and belts and all the other hidden things that make a machine come alive.

  That book opened a new world to me. Soon I was pleading for one on gasoline engines. Later I progressed to steam turbines and eventually to atomic power plants and rocket engines. I’d pore over each volume, not getting all the details but grasping enough to satisfy me. On some elemental level, the magical became logical. I began to understand how these things worked.

  AT AGE THREE, I went to Mrs. Perkins’s musical preschool down the hill and made her life miserable. I detested standing in line. If I found a good picture book, I would not eat my soup when it was time to eat soup. I moved on to Ravenna School as a self-taught child who was stubbornly unregimented. In kindergarten, according to my progress report, I needed “greater effort” in observing school rules and complying with the fire drills. In first grade, a few other boys and I found a big metal ring in the cloakroom. We had no idea what it was for, and we dared each other to turn it, a little further each day. One morning I said, “What the heck,” and turned it all the way.

  That was a dark day for Ravenna School. The sinks wouldn’t work; the toilets didn’t flush; drinking fountains ran dry. Dishes piled up in the cafeteria, unwashed. I had shut off the building’s main water valve, and no one could find the plan for the circa-1920 plumbing. They had to let school out early.

  The next morning the assistant principal came to my classroom and said, “Who turned off the valve in the coatroom?”

  I slowly raised my hand and said, “I did it.” I think he was surprised that anyone would confess.

  Sometimes I could get absentminded. One afternoon I set a book down before a dodgeball match and then straggled home without it. The principal summoned me the next day and asked, “Paul, why did you set your math book on fire?” It wasn’t me, of course; it was another kid who’d found the book and probably hated long division. Despite my denials, the principal insisted on calling my mother.

  She came in with a stern look and declared, “In our family we love books. My son would never burn one.” Case closed. I knew that I could always count on my mother’s support. Each morning she would send me into the world with a paraphrase of the Spartan mothers’ farewell to their sons marching off to war: “Go forth bearing your shield!” I walked out the door a little straighter when I heard that.

  MY FATHER WAS like a John Wayne character: big and strong at six foot three, a man of few words but with a huge heart and a strict code of honor. He was serious, direct, and deliberate, with a reason for everything he did. “A gentle bear of a man for all his gruffness,” I’d write in a high-school-era journal. “He believes in a good solid purpose in life.” He could surprise us, though. One Halloween, as my sister and I came home from trick-or-treating, a menacing figure in a white sheet and an African mask jumped out at us with a
terrible yell. We ran into the house shrieking, totally petrified. I was stunned two days later when my mother told me who it was.

  In a portrait in crayon, at age eight, I drew my father with a wrench in one hand and a screwdriver in his shirt pocket: a doer, not a talker. When you live with someone who doesn’t say much, you come to rely on intuition and body language. I could always tell when my father was displeased about something.

  We had dinner together at six sharp. For a while, we brought books to the table, but then they were banned because three of us would read while my father sat silently with his steak. (After growing up in the Depression, he loved having sirloin at least twice a week.) Generally soft-spoken, he’d resolve any issue in what I called his “command voice.” He wasn’t flexible or tolerant of easy excuses; if you’d agreed to be home by a certain hour, there was no grace period. He quietly held us to high standards, to treat people honorably and stand by our word.

  My father never spanked us. He motioned to take off his belt once or twice, but I’d escape with a fervent promise to do better. It could be different with my mother, a softhearted but more emotional soul. One evening I asked her to make popcorn, and she agreed on the condition that I’d clean my messy room, an oft-broken promise of mine. The next morning, the room still in disarray, she burst in with an open can of Jolly Time Pop Corn, flung the raw kernels at me, and cried, “These are your broken words!” Which made me feel terrible, though I didn’t much improve in the cleaning department.

  Another time, when I came home two hours after my curfew, she was furious. I was small enough that she could yank me up by the legs and dangle me upside down: “Don’t you ever stay out without telling us where you are!” I can still see the nickels and pennies falling from my pockets and past my head to the floor.

  My mother was a naturally gregarious woman who could strike up a ten-minute conversation with the grocery checkout lady. But she had a husband who didn’t like to socialize, and I can count on my fingers the number of times my parents had other couples to our house. I remember one party, and a second one, and then they tailed off. My mother made the best of it by inviting women friends for afternoon tea and leading a book club, when she could listen and talk to her heart’s content.

  IN 1960, my father became associate director of the University of Washington’s library complex, the number-two job in the largest system in the Northwest. When it came time to name a new director, the UW search committee passed him over for someone from the University of Texas with more degrees. When he got home at 5:30 and I’d ask about his day, his answer never varied: “Fine.”

  Then he was off to his garden; he was a great relaxer. He seemed happiest amid his bonsai pines and rhododendrons and the live Christmas tree he’d transplanted, which today stands sixty feet high. He’d begun gardening in the backyard and progressed to the front, until there was hardly a patch of lawn left to mow—a happy development for me, as I was allergic to grass pollen. Sunday mornings he’d take me to the nursery, and we’d return with yet another Japanese maple and a fresh-baked apple pie.

  Our closest connection came when we fished together. On one Pacific Coast trip, my father had to hold me on board after I hooked a twenty-five-pound king salmon. Every summer the family went for a week to Twin Lakes Resort, where my job was to clean the trout before it hit the pan on the wood-burning stove. Then we’d all play pinochle into the night.

  My father was selectively eclectic; he delved deeply into half a dozen pastimes over the course of his life, but no more. He introduced me to Stan Getz and Andrés Segovia, and to Indian art at the Burke Museum. He befriended a local modern artist, and his favorite living room chair sat under a framed Rouault print of a king holding a flower. In midlife he became a connoisseur of Japanese prints and Chinese celadon pottery. You’d see him linger in a store, turning some delicate vase over and over and murmuring, “That’s really beautiful.” He’d give it back to the proprietor and return six months later to buy it if it wasn’t too expensive.

  While my mother zipped through five books at once from four different continents, my father took months to digest The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or The Guns of August. He kept reading about World War II as though trying to puzzle it out. He’d been in the thick of it as a lieutenant with the 501st Quartermaster Railhead Company in France and Germany, and it still tore at him. He’d been a lot livelier and more talkative, my mother said, before he came back from overseas with a Bronze Star and memories of a dead friend.

  I was still young when my father first asked me what I wanted to do with my life. It was his way of imparting his laconic wisdom: “When you grow up and have a job, do something you love. Whatever you do, you should love it.” He’d repeat this to me over the years with conviction. Later I’d figure out what he meant: Do as I say, not as I’ve done. Much later, my mother told me that my father had wrestled with his career choice. He suspected he might be happier coaching football than managing libraries, but he finally chose the safe and practical route, a nine-to-five life under fluorescent lights. Lots of men from his generation did the same.

  But he wanted me to choose better.

  THE OFFICIAL GOAL of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair was to inspire young people to pursue careers in science. The unofficial goal was to show that the United States had caught up to the Soviet Union in technology and the space race. But for me, a nine-year-old who’d just discovered science fiction, the Century 21 Exposition (as it was officially titled) revolved around my favorite thing: the future. It was like waking up to find my most outlandish ideas made real, just four miles from my house.

  As I watched the fairgrounds take shape, the anticipation felt like Christmas squared. I beheld the transportation of the future, the gleaming white monorail gliding along its mile-long track. And the architecture of the future, the Space Needle, then the highest building west of the Mississippi, with a rotating restaurant on top that looked just like a flying saucer. Soon after the fair opened, my mother took Jody and me for our first visit. There’s a picture of me that day in my beloved synthetic rubber hat with earflaps, the one I wore for two years until it melted on a radiator. I look as though I’m jumping out of my skin with excitement.

  We were there from nine to nine, plenty of time for my mother and sister to roam the sprawling grounds. But I wouldn’t budge from the science pavilion. I ran around like a kid on a sugar high—what to see next? After the Spacearium took me through the Milky Way, I found NASA’s Project Mercury capsule, the one that had carried Alan Shepard, the first American in space. I watched up close as a Tesla coil threw off twenty-foot-long purple sparks. Before a crowd of thousands, a jet-belted “astronaut” took off with a loud hissing noise and flew forty feet high for what had to be a hundred yards, like a character out of Robert Heinlein. The line between present and future felt very permeable that day. It was only a matter of when.

  My mother finally came back for me and took us to the World of Tomorrow and the Bubbleator, a transparent, spherical elevator. (I loved the Bubbleator, just the idea of the Bubbleator.) At the Food Circus, I tried tempura prawns, basically shrimp on a stick with a tangy sauce, plus my first Belgian waffle, which seemed like the most exotic and delicious thing I’d ever eaten. You can catch a close-up of that waffle in an Elvis Presley movie called It Happened at the World’s Fair: an oversize, crispy square slathered with whipped cream and topped with sliced strawberries and powdered sugar. I’ve been to Belgium more than once since then, but I’ve never again had one so good.

  On our way out that night, with me wide-awake and starry-eyed, we had more excitement in the parking lot. A Volkswagen had parked behind our Buick, hemming us in. My mother was getting flustered when two hulking lumberjacks materialized to come to her aid with some nineteenth-century manpower. They picked up the little Bug and slid it aside, and we drove home.

  LOOKING BACK, I had remarkable exposure to science when I was young. I could go to weekend open houses at the university’s labs, where p
rofessors and students showed off their latest experiments. On a family visit to UCLA, where my aunt worked, I learned how they made synthetic diamonds and how seismometers recorded earthquakes. Willard Libby, the inventor of carbon dating, poured liquid nitrogen over my hand. I didn’t get frost-burned, Libby explained, because a thin layer of vaporized gas cushioned each drop on my skin.

  For a time, around fourth grade, chemistry became my number-one hobby. At St. Vincent de Paul, a thrift-shop gold mine, I picked up secondhand sets for fifty cents apiece. Soon the shelves of my basement lab were chockablock with beakers and test tubes and containers of brightly colored chemicals. It was all good, educational fun. Until, that is, I nearly killed the family pet.

  Jett Black Allen was a frisky Manchester terrier, a prince of dogs: intelligent, sensitive, eager to please. My father couldn’t resist sharing dinner from the table, carefully cutting steak into bitesize pieces. Bred as rat catchers back in England, Manchesters are highly athletic; once my father stopped feeding him, Jett would leap into the air to beg for more. At first it was funny to see his head bobbing up above the tabletop, but after a while it got tiresome, and Jett was exiled to the basement at mealtimes.

  One day I’d been working on a chlorine gas generator, using Clorox bleach, when I got called up to dinner. Midway through the meal, we heard a strange noise, somewhere between a wheeze and a choking rasp. What was that? Back to our food and talk, we heard it again, louder this time, clearly coming from downstairs. I trailed behind Dad, who pushed open the basement door. There was Jett, quivering at the top of the stairs. At the bottom it looked like a foggy morning on the Okefenokee, with two feet of yellow-green chlorine gas blanketing the floor. Jett had made the smart move to get as far as possible from the toxic fumes.