Giving Up the Ship

My 40 Year High School Reunion apparently produced much in the way of fellowship and reminiscence, to the extent that one incorrigible troublemaker volunteered to compile a set of "High School Memories," noting that the class after ours has done so, but it was lame. This, of course, sends me back to the memory bin, trying to locate some non-lame memories, but I find the pickings pretty slender.

Partly this is due to my multiple lives during high school. I have lifeguard memories that occurred at that time, but those were from the Downtown Nashville YMCA. There were girls I dated, primarily from distant high schools, possibly owing to a fear of gossip, or the instinct of self-preservation that realizes that breaking up with someone who is in your English class is Very Rough on the System. There are a number of Forensic Club memories, but I can categorically attest to the basic lameness thereof.

Besides, the best memories are about mischief made, and I was such a sweet kid, really I was.

Still, I believe that I held some sort of record for being tossed out of Mr. R's 8th Grade class, which was either technically in High School because it was in the same building, or technically not, since it was still Jr. High School. Whatever. Mr. R was an ignorant twit, and 40+ years has not dimmed that assessment.

I will leave aside the times when he said foolish things like "Rock and Roll is a Communist Plot." I seldom bothered to call him on things that everyone knew were stupid. But when he told the class that Earth satellites stay in orbit by balancing between the gravitational attraction of the Earth and Moon, my calm demeanor vanished and I said something like, "That's idiotic." That got me a quick trip to the library (Oh, throw me in the briar patch, Mr. Detention).

Then there was the pop quiz on the Revolutionary War, where one of the questions was, "This man said, 'Don't give up the ship!'" Sadly, I knew that it was a dying quote from Captain James Lawrence during the War of 1812, and that said ship, in fact, was given up shortly thereafter (though the words became a slogan used in the Battle of Lake Eerie). R had, as so many before him, confused that saying with "I have not yet begun to fight," which was from John Paul Jones, the correct answer to the wrong question. I said, "I don't think you have the correct quote," and R said, "How do you know who I'm talking about?" So I levelly answered, "All I know is that John Paul Jones never said, 'Don't give up the ship.'" My fellow students' pencils scratched the answer that R had been looking for, and I, once again, was ejected from a class that was trying very hard to make me know less than I already knew.

Everyone Knows This is Now Here

Back when the Genie SF Roundtable was in operation, there was a fellow who proclaimed that Iraq had a higher literacy rate than the U.S. I thought this a very dubious proposition and told him so. Then I went and checked the statistics given by various sources (including the ones mentioned by my fellow Genian), and the stats said I was right. Iraq has a literacy rate of around 80% and the U.S. comes in at over 99%.

Not that the person in question was convinced, or changed what he said in public; I’ve heard him since say exactly the same thing as he said then, citing exactly the same sources. But I don’t really get into these Culture War arguments expecting to change the minds of antagonists. What I’m interested in is where these talking points come from and to what purpose.

I tracked what I believe was the source of this particular idea to a Clinton-era Dept. of Education study of “functional literacy.” This was a classic “ain’t it awful” document that has been used in advocacy of greater education spending by the left and in advocacy of drastic changes to public education by the right. No surprise there. When I managed to strip away all the obfuscatory verbiage, as nearly as I can tell, it said that 40% of students’ reading comprehension was in the bottom two quintiles of reading performance.

Yes, and it’s a damn shame that half of our children are below average, too.

Now “Why Johnny Can’t Read” has been a teapot tempest for a long while. It’s not hard to find those who think that public schools are teaching the wrong things in the wrong way to the wrong people, and not fulfilling their job of properly indoctrinating children in what someone thinks they should be indoctrinated. And then of course there are those who think that schools should teach “critical thinking,” which I’ve never been able to translate to something other than “teach them to think like me.” That may be a fine thing, (especially if the template is to be me) but I won’t pretend that it isn’t self-serving.

It should come as no surprise that the Conservative Movement has a doctrine, talking points, faux statistics, and ways of making money off of this. In particular, I don’t think that the last point is surprising, since the CM also thinks that free enterprise is an intrinsically moral enterprise. Of course they would create businesses to supply the things they think schools should have, and of course they would work at the local, state, and federal politics of advancing those business interests. That is how they believe the system should work.

Nevertheless, there are certain points of doctrine that can cause real suffering when adamantly asserted and applied to the world. Of those, I think the two most pernicious are the denial that there is such a thing as “dyslexia,” and the assertion that phonics is the only proper way to teach reading.

At RPI, I came to be on good terms with Arthur Burr (now deceased), then the Dean of the School of Engineering. He once confided to me that his son was dyslexic; he had some glitch in his visual perception that made reading difficult. He could and did learn to read, but reading was always an effort for him, and if prolonged, would cause headaches and other maladies. So he read those things that he found essential, but reading for recreation was simply impossible. The result was a gap in shared experience between father and son that could never be bridged.

Still, Art’s son had fashioned a good life as a house carpenter and father, and Art could, and did, treasure their outings and times together. But imagine if he was committed to the belief that dyslexia wasn’t real, but rather a subterfuge to avoid having to read. What sort of alienation between father and son would that produce? For that matter, if I had expressed that opinion, how much of a betrayal of my friendship with Art would that have been?

When I was in the fourth grade, one of my classmates, whom I’ll call Ken, was called upon to read aloud during English class. He was not a good reader; he read slowly and frequently stumbled. The rest of the class listened politely, until Ken hit the word “nowhere,” which he pronounced “now here.” And there was laughter.

With the luxury of decades of hindsight, I can notice that, in fact, Ken was doing the correct thing according to the doctrine of Phonics. He broke the word apart into syllables, sounded them out, then pronounced them. He was betrayed by the nature of English and its spelling, which requires that a lot of words be simply memorized and taken at a glance, rather like the “look-see” method that Phonics advocates deride.

Being doctrinally correct gave no assistance to Ken, of course. I wish that I could say that I was not one of the ones who laughed at him, but I have no memory either way. I do strongly suspect that I did laugh, however. I was young and that’s what young people do. I’d like to think I didn’t laugh, but I’m left only with the wish that I hadn’t, and the probability that I did.

Playing the Changes

In the late ‘50s into the ‘60s, my Dad operated a small radio/TV repair business. Sometimes it was on the side, occasionally it was his main occupation. He eventually gave it up, as color television and general transistorization shrank the ecological niche. The capital expense of color television repair equipment was too high, and transistor circuit board electronics were too hard to repair and cheap enough to just replace.

During this time he wound up in possession of all sorts of odds and ends. It happens pretty often once people know that you repair things; they just give you stuff, hoping that you can repair it easily enough to make it worth your while, and they’re just glad to get rid of it. You should see my workshop.

One thing that wound up in my Dad’s basement workshop was an old jukebox, designed to play 78s. It no longer worked and Dad gave it to me to take apart, because I liked taking things apart to see how they worked. I still do; it’s just getting harder and harder to figure out how they work, which is the source of my own reply to Clarke’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from something that has no business working in the first place.

The old jukebox had an electromechanical system that selected the record to be played: a bunch of push buttons that activated a servo that pushed the selected record out of a rack. Beneath the record was a spindle and turntable that pushed up to move the record off its carrier, up to the needle arm, which stayed at the one height.

Later 45 rpm record jukeboxes had a turntable that stayed at a constant height and the records were selected from a set of 45s that were in a sort of torus that rotated to bring the selection to the top. A mechanical arm then grabbed the correct record, pulled it from its position, then swung around to place the record on the turntable.

In both cases, the jukeboxes had a sort of mechanized ritual aspect to them: put in your coin, then watch the robotic sequence of actions that culminated in music. In some ways, the ritual is as much a part of the nostalgia as the music itself. Also, because of the delay, different songs never encroached upon one another.

The AM radio experience of the 1950s had a similar feel to the jukeboxs, with the added feature of the Disk Jockey persona, a hyperkinetic voice introducing records, selling product, and generally trying to generate a party atmosphere while sequestered into a tiny room with artificial lights. Often they’d talk right through the intro to the song, stopping only when the lyrics began. Memory tells me that it was a rare event to play songs back to back. That was usually reserved for phone-in “contests” of “Choose your Favorite Song and Win a Free Pen and Pencil Set,” or whatever.

When I got to RPI in the fall of 1968, WRPI-FM had just switched over to the “Progressive Rock” format, following the lead of some ground-breaking stations in NY, Boston, and Philadelphia. The next spring they boosted their power and coverage and became the most popular FM station in the Albany/Schenectady/Troy area.

I didn’t join WRPI until the spring of my Senior year, and I also staying in Troy during the summer between my undergraduate and graduate years at RPI. But I’d converted to the WRPI way of hearing music much earlier, and part of that was appreciating the segues.

A good deal of the joy of Progressive Radio was the mix, not just the music that was being played, but how it fit into the context of the other music that was being played. You can trace it back to the “party stack,” a set of 45s that people would bring to parties for dance music, and hit compilation records, often for a similar purpose. Then you had “Mood Music” which is to say, Music to Seduce Your Girlfriend By. That often had a lot of strings or Johnny Mathis, or Frank Sinatra.

Progressive Radio expanded the vision of the mix, and the segue, the seamless connection of one song to the other was the unit element. The typical radio setup was twin turntables and a mixing board, making it easy to do a cross-fade. We also had various additional sources like cassettes for station breaks, EBS and PSAs, and, for commercial stations, the commercials themselves. At WRPI, we used an eight-track player for pre-records, though there was also a couple of giant reel-to-reel tape decks that were also good for echo effects, or for playing practical jokes by getting a half second delay into the announcers headphones that is absolutely guaranteed to make it impossible to speak coherently.

There was a more-or-less standard evolution of DJ experience at WRPI. Someone would join the station with a particular set of musical tastes, maybe they liked folk, or jazz, or acid rock, and they’d lean toward that set of tastes initially. For that reason, there was a list of “format songs” categorized according to type, with a set sequence of types. You could choose any song from a group during the sequence, but you couldn’t vary the sequence much, though once each sequence you could play whatever you liked. I pushed the envelop on that pretty quickly by playing entire album sides (hey, “The Land of Grey and Pink” by Caravan is a single cut, even if it’s over 20 minutes long), and almost got into trouble for it.

By the time I got there, the “WRPI format” list was something like an inch thick of computer printout. You could literally go for days following the format and never play the same song twice. Some guys did play the same songs every show they had, but it was rare for someone to be on more than once a week, and the next guy would not have the same favorites. In fact, it was considered a gaffe to play something that the previous announcer had played. In many ways, it was the anti-thesis of the radio jukebox.

That, of course, polarized the audience (and our student listeners). Some were very happy with WRPI, and some just wanted a big campus jukebox, maybe one filled with Progressive Rock, but a jukebox catering to student tastes (and requests) nonetheless.

Requests was one of the real issues, in fact. One of the most popular WRPI shows for many years was “Request Line Oldies” on Sunday night (Sunday was block programmed with special shows, the only day in the week departing from the Progressive format). But at other times, the DJs didn’t want to hear from requests.

They had a point. Nobody was getting paid; it was a student volunteer organization. So what did we announcers get out of it? Fame? We were faceless, and many of us used “on-air” pseudonyms (I just used my initials). Groupies? Yeah, right. Something swell to put on our resumes? Maybe for a few guys, mostly the techies. The sound of our own voices? Sometimes there were shows where the music was non-stop for an entire hour, right up to the station break, followed by a quick recitation of the playlist of the past hour, then back to another hour of solid music. It was public speaking for shy introverts.

No, most of us were there because we loved music, and loved to program the shows. Substituting someone else’s tastes turned it into just another unpaid job. Besides, if you’ve spent an entire week thinking about what you’re going to play, setting up a flow and a mood, you’re absolutely not going to suddenly break that flow by inserting Lighthouse, no matter how much you like Lighthouse.

Still, I did play a request from time to time, usually refraining from mentioning that it was a request, because all you had to do was say the word “request” and you’d spend the rest of the show on the phone dealing with the flood. WRPI had a lot of listeners.

I should also mention that there was one guy, John Robinson, (coincidentally a member of the Albany Science Fiction Club that I was part of at the time), who had an uncanny knack for calling me to request a cut that I had on my list for the night, often only one or two down. John had my number, I guess, in more ways than one.

Anyway, getting back to the DJ evolution. After first getting their “fave raves” out of their systems, getting tired of playing the same things over and over, the next step was to branch out or go deeper. The guys who started on Dylan would get to Van Ronk, or Buffy St. Marie, then whoops! Folkways and Rounder were filling their stack. The jazz guys would go from Brubeck to Miles, then to Coltrane and Coleman. And so forth. Even so, the format was there to keep them in line, more or less.

In the evenings and nighttime, though, the announcers were no longer subject to the format. Those were “prime time” (which extended to 2 A.M.), where the most experienced announcers were slotted. And during the “Great Music Drought” of the early 1970s, when rock hit a dry spell, some of the evening guys went over entirely to something else, most often jazz, to the further exasperation of the audience.

But after the overt musical glitches worked themselves through a DJs tastes, most of us began to work the flow itself, playing music that blended into a particular mood or theme. Then came the sort of one-upsmanship that enjoyed putting two things together in a way that both surprised and satisfied, like rubbing Neal Diamond up against Firesign Theater, or “Let It All Hang Out” into Frazier and Debolt. Sometimes the idea was to jolt the listener a bit, which could be as simple as hard following soft, or loud following quiet. I never did manage to find a place for the most jarring segue I ever heard, though. That was an accidental juxtaposition that came on a Sunday, between Barnett’s and my Indian Music block, and the following blues show. Soft Carnatic flute music flows into John Lee Hooker with all the grace of The Titanic into the iceberg.

The group dynamic that developed was competitive, with a little taste of messianic snobbery thrown it. “Here’s the good stuff,” we’d say, “And by the way, didn’t I just do a really good show?” The goal was to get people to call in, not to ask for you to play something they already liked, but to find out what the hell it was that you just played. Or to call and tell you how much they enjoyed what you were doing. Even better if it was your peers, though we know what happens when the comic starts getting laughs only from the band. In any case, the general consensus was that I was very good at whatever it was that we were doing.

Over the years, I’ve made mix tapes and more recently CDs. I’ve also listened to other people’s mix tapes, and some are good, but most are just ordinary, because that’s what ordinary is, isn’t it?

More recently, we have the phenomenon of the iPod and related devices, but I think the real advance there is the “shuffle,” which lets the machine surprise you. Most recently, I’ve loaded mine with albums by T-Bone Burnett, Mark Knopfler, Blossom Dearie, The Clash, African folk, African pop, The Low Millions, Cyndi Lauper, Jack Teagarden, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, The Cranberries, Elvis Costello, Javanese Gamelan, INXS, Diana Krall, Kaki King, The Crystal Method, Chris Issak, Suzanne Vega, The Don Redman Orchestra, and Artie Shaw. I’m paying particular attention to the segues that the shuffle provides.

I do wish it had a cross-fade function though. Sometimes the wait between songs just drives me crazy.

A Little Bit Like Affirmative Action

[From my archives]

It would have been sometime in 1967, as nearly as I can recall. I was in high school in Tennessee, and I got a call to go down to the Guidance Office to see somebody. I may have gotten out of a class for it, or maybe it was during a study period. That doesn't matter at this distance, though it probably did at the time. Often you don't remember all that much about the events that change your life.

The man who wanted to see me was from a college I'd never heard of: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was head of the RPI Admissions Office. Years later I learned that he had a habit of doing what he did that day. Whenever he was away from RPI on business, he made a point of making a recruiting call or two at several high schools in the area he visited. He'd call up the local guidance councilors and ask if they had any bright, scientifically- and mathematically-minded, students that might consider attending RPI. I fit the bill, so I was it for that afternoon. We talked a while about RPI, what it was, why it would be a good school to attend, and he left a catalogue that I read carefully over the next few months. Ultimately, RPI was one of the schools I applied to, and it was the one that I attended, as both an undergraduate and a graduate student.

The man's name was David Heacock. I met him several years later, at a student/faculty/administration party, and during a conversation, we realized that he was probably responsible for my attending Rensselaer. Neither of us had recognized the other, of course. We spoke for a while about his intentions on his recruiting trips. What did he have in mind?

Rensselaer is an old school, the oldest engineering college in the nation, in fact, or it has a claim to the title. Located in Troy, New York (a goodly distance from Tennessee, which was one of my criteria for a college), it is quite well-known in some places, places like New York State, especially New York City and Long Island. It is also well-known in some circles, like among engineers generally, or within General Electric. GE has research laboratories just across the Hudson from RPI in Schenectady.

But it wasn't unusual that I hadn't heard of it, because RPI is generally unknown outside of its own cultural niche, and its own geographical area. Most often, people in most parts of the nation, if they've heard of it at all, remember it as having a good hockey team. That isn't really quite what the RPI administration would like to be the school's main claim to fame, and some of the admissions people took steps to try to expand its reach. Steps like making a special effort to recruit students from Tennessee, when the opportunity arose.

During our conversation, Heacock may have used the word "diversity." Maybe not. It was long ago, and the word did not have had as much baggage loaded onto it as it does these days. Besides, I'm white, and the word isn't often applied to different groups of whites.

Still and all, I understood early on that I had a bit of an edge. RPI wanted me to attend. They recruited me. They accepted my admission. They gave me scholarship money. Was I at the top of my high school class? No, I was 11th. SAT scores? They were pretty good, but there were guys from Long Island with higher scores (especially in math) who didn't get in. But I was on the forensics team, a lifeguard at the downtown YMCA; I'd won a local short story contest, placed second in a swim meet once -- all things that added to the notion that I'd be more than an average RPI student. Which, of course, I turned out to be. Average students didn't wind up at those student/faculty/administration parties.

But all the things that gave me that edge over the generic New York student, all of them still come under the heading of difficult-to-quantify—judgment calls in other words. I say, “difficult-to-quantify,” but they did attempt to quantify it, with formulae for admission and financial aid, formulae that took all the extras into account. That moves the judgment call to the realm of deciding whether lifeguarding quantifies to the same thing as playing in the band, or being in the forensics club is as good as those last 10 points on the SATs. When all is said and done, what happened was that the admissions people looked at me and decided they wanted me to help change the mix of students at RPI, to make the place something more than a regional engineering school.

And if that Long Island student had wanted to make the argument that he was being discriminated against, he'd get no counter-argument from me. It was discrimination, and it was to my benefit.

Over the years, I've seen a lot of discrimination both against and in favor of various people, and various types of people. When I got to RPI, I spent the first couple of months getting rid of the last vestiges of my southern accent (I still remember my date who teased me because my speech rhymed "pen" with "tin."). People with southern accents, white or black, are assumed to be stupid, you see. On the other hand, being tall, blonde, and Anglo has often worked in my favor, and I'd be an idiot not to know it.

When a kid gets into college because he's the son of an alumnus, that certainly discriminates in his favor; and how many black high school students can have that sort of edge? Not as many as whites, of course. Likewise, whites have an edge when it comes to just plain buying their way into schools. Several hundred years of economic discrimination leave effects that wouldn't disappear overnight, even if racial discrimination were to vanish, which, of course, it hasn't. People of African descent are still at a disadvantage, still discriminated against. There are people who think otherwise, or say they do. I hope that they are merely wrong, and not lying, but I know that many of them are, at best, deluding themselves.

I've been writing mostly about discrimination in white and black, because that's what I grew up with. But the same arguments hold true for broad numbers of college-yearning boys and girls, children of immigrants, the racially or culturally disadvantaged, even (as was my case) the geographically disadvantaged. Most of these discriminatory disadvantages can be addressed without much comment. I was geographically disadvantaged when it came to the college I eventually attended: I'd never heard of it. A guy came by my school to try to change that.

All perfectly legal, and not worthy of much comment, apparently. But if someone wishes to try to address the ongoing advantages that white people enjoy, and the disadvantages that African-Americans suffer, there comes a gnashing of teeth and a wailing that this is horrible, that racial discrimination is so odious that it must never, ever, occur. So the lackluster sort of racial discrimination that is called Affirmative Action comes under harsh attack. This attack, it seems to me, primarily comes from those who have all their lives been beneficiaries of exactly the sort of discriminatory edge that got me into college. A discriminatory edge that would apparently have been illegal if it had been because of my skin color, but was just fine since it came from where I lived. Indeed, such is the nature of racism that people often do not even notice the sorts of discrimination that don’t involve race, except possibly in the extreme cases, like opposing partisans noting that G. W. Bush did not get admitted to the Ivy League on the basis of his high SAT scores.

Then there is this aspect: None of the advantage would have amounted to anything if Mr. Heacock hadn’t specifically recruited me. Universities like to recruit wholesale, because it’s cheaper, but I was recruited at retail. That is where so many Affirmative Action programs turn out to be just lip-service: the gatekeepers give the little extra edge in an admission formula, but there isn’t really any active recruiting to back it up; everyone prefers wholesale to retail. The minority individuals who do manage to work the system (which has been every American’s God-given right since the nation was founded), are then told that their achievements are suspect because of all the unfair advantage that they’ve been given. Odd that no one ever told Babe Ruth that his honors were suspect because he never competed against anyone who wasn’t white, but there you go.

All and all, I have to say that I think diversity is something to applaud. It's done right well by me. And I'm under no illusions that it had to be that way. I know how lucky I was, and how lucky I continue to be.