My Sundays are usually devoted to something spiritual, and sometimes personal. About the latter topic, in May of 2014 I began a 15-part series on my life transitions. Part 1 dealt with an overview and my early youth, while Part 15E a couple months later was on the afterlife.
Transitions 6 and 7 caught my attention, so today, I'll focus on one of them. After graduating from high school in 1958, off I flew to Los Angeles. This was the first time I had left Hawaii, and this was perhaps my most monumental transition:
I was fortunate that my older brother was a structural engineer with the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory (NCEL) at Port Hueneme, California. He got me a slot as a draftsman there and I also stayed with he and his family the whole summer (and repeated this two more times, with the summer between my junior and senior years in Hilo, Hawaii with C. Brewer--where the little league baseball team playing next to my apartment made it to the 1961 Williamsport World Series as an international representative). This was the first time I had ever left Hawaii, so this transition might have been the most monumental of all.
Then at the end of the summer in September of 1958, my brother drove to the Stanford Campus.
Silicon Valley had not yet formed, for the name was invented in 1971. Thousands of high tech firms began here, many linked to Stanford professors and their graduates...Google, Apple, eBay, Intel, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.
David Packard, Jr., was on my floor in the next building, and he gave all of us an opportunity to invest in Hewlett-Packard, which was not quite yet known. If I did, I would be very rich today, for they did not start selling their stock until about the time we graduated.
I noted that in 2014, Silicon Valley grew up, and the average salary of a technical level person was $144,800, with more female than male employees. A decade later, this article says that this average is now closer to $150,000. Not much of an increase.
Three songs were important to me in my freshman year. The first two related to mostly unsuccessful dating adventures, Tommy Edward's It's All in the Game and The Teddy Bears To Know Him is to Love Him. I did not know anything much about him in those days, but the guy playing the guitar is Phil Spector, who became famous soon thereafter with his Wall of Sound productions, then later went nuts.
The third song was Tom Dooley by the Kingston Trio. My freshman roommate, Jim, one day indicated that this group was playing in the evening, so let's go. I was not aware that two of the three members were from Hawaii. They were classmates at Punahou High School, and in 1952 Dave Guard went to Stanford, with Bob Shane matriculating at nearby Menlo College. At Menlo, they met Nick Reynolds. However, they did not become the Kingston Trio until 1957 and called themselves by that name because they were into calypso music, and they associated this genre to Kingston, Jamaica.
I probably took and audited more art than chemical engineering courses, here with some of my charcoal etchings to the left. Best as I can remember, there were, maybe 75 of us in ChE at the beginning, and I found myself scoring around the midpoint in exams. Over the next few years the bottom kept changing majors into economics, psychology, sociology and the like.
Stanford has a philosophy that everyone they accept has some role in society. Very few flunk out. However, I recall early in our second quarter, a friend who was doing poorly stopping by to shake hands, relating to us that he was called in and told that the admissions committee made a mistake and shouldn't have admitted him. He was asked to drop out. Wow, can you imagine going home under those conditions? There were rumors of suicide attempts and I just saw an article from Stanford about a crisis with this problem today, and specifically at Wilbur Hall (left), where I lived in my freshman year. Each floor had a resident assistant, a super nice guy, plus a faculty family for each wing of the dormitory, also really pleasant, who are there to prevent these incidents.
Went back to the Nostalgia Machine to see if any songs meant anything. in my sophomore year. I remembered a New York classmate mentioning he knew the Bell Notes, who had a hit song, I've Had It. Nicely, jogged my mind. I had joined an eating club, El Capitan, and for some reason, Chris Barber's Petite Fleur seemed familiar. Then, from our junior year, a group of us drove across the Dumbarton Bridge to the Garden of Allah on the other side of the Bay, a large barn-like structure for dancing, featuring the latest stars. I vividly recall Johnny Preston performing Running Bear and Marty Robbins singing A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation).
In our junior year, David Mason, chairman of this department, barged into our classroom and proudly announced that we were just accredited. None of us knew we were until then not accredited. However, in ten years, the Stanford Chemical Engineering Department was ranked #1 in the nation. Today, it is #3 to MIT and CalTech. Back to 1962, there were only around ten of the original 75 who actually graduated in four years, and I was still in the middle.
In 1961, my junior year, during the Spring Break, someone almost talked all of us into driving to Florida, first stopping in Fort Lauderdale, which was then the spot for college students to congregate in the spring, epitomized by Connie Francis' Where the Boys Are, also a film by that name. Then, we were convinced to join what became known as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. We actually could have gotten killed. Good thing I chickened out, for then no one went.
If I had gone to the University of Hawaii in engineering, I most probably would have ended up spending all of my life in Hawaii and comfortably retired in Honolulu. While my actual ending is similar, Stanford no doubt affected my life choice, and well prepared me for success. I can note that something on the order of 1% of my classmates were non-white, and my subsequent jobs involved a similar disparity: sugar industry (administration), NASA Ames Research Center, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, University of Hawaii faculty and U.S. Senate. Stanford taught me how to relate and compete in this environment. One especially important trait I acquired was confidence, as mentioned in the next paragraph.
The Stanford Class of '62 had a 50th year reunion two years ago. They actually published a thick classbook on our doings, and I responded to the question:
MOST VALUABLE THINGS I LEARNED AT STANFORD:
Upon graduation I observed tht my high school classmates were better engineers from their education at the University of Hawaii. However, I was able to communicate at a higher level--better appreciated music, art and culture in general--had a more worldly view of things--and, most important of all, had the confidence to be innovative and enterprising.
Many of my classmates were inspired by President John F. Kennedy's creation of the Peace Corps, but I just could not see myself being sent to some impoverished developing nation for $99/month. My arts interest had me leaning towards attending Sophia University in Tokyo to study art, for the classes were taught in English.
However, partially to also sacrifice for humanity (Hawaii qualified) like my classmates, but mostly for reasons of security, I decided to accept an offer by C. Brewer to work in the sugar industry for something like $500/month. My next transition took me to the southernmost community in the USA, Naalehu, where there was no radio in the daytime, and within a year I got married, went through six months of basic training in the U.S. Army and found myself working at Kilauea Sugar Company, where I made an initial link with my roots.
I might perhaps continue this transition next week, for these were my most difficult years of my life. How can working in a safe environment, where tourists spend large amounts of money to visit, with opportunities for abundant fishing and like, be so tough? Well, you'll see. I'll close this transition with a song that somehow is the most meaningful about my life in Naalehu, Johnny Get Angry, by Joanie Sommers.
Yesterday I indicated that the 9 seasons of Suits, available on Netflix, was worthy of your time, and mentioned that the new Suits LA (they moved from New York to Los Angeles with new actors/actresses) will show their first episode on NBC TONIGHT. Well, Rotten Tomato reviewers did not like it with a 36% score. Time magazine also disparaged the series. I'll watch this initial effort anyway and determine myself to continue or not. I'm still on season 1 of the original Suits, and looking forward to the 100% ratings of S4-7.
About that transitional goldfish jumping from one tank to another above, I used it because I'm in the process of finishing a similar aquaria system.
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